One of the biggest problems for EAs is their lack of connection to real business decision makers. Sure, architects frequently interact with business project managers in the context of an ongoing project, but they rarely work at the business strategy level discussing business models, capabilities, or market strategy. Ask yourself this question: “How much time do I spend directly interacting with someone in the business on a topic not related to an ongoing project?”  DOUBLE IT!

Read business books to increase your business IQ.

Architects have deep technical skills and expend most of their discretionary time and money enhancing their already significant technical knowledge rather than branching out into developing their leadership and business acumen. Successful architects in the future must be business savvy. Don’t have the time? Think again. The average business book is less than 300 pages. Ten pages a day (about 20 minutes for most) will net 12 books a year. A quick search on Amazon.com returns just short of two million business books, see our reading list for business architects to get you started.

What will you learn? Here are just a few of things I got from reading business books:

Good to Great by Jim Collins – I learned about the hedgehog concept. Finding that one thing the organization is passionate about, can be the best in their industry at, and drives their value creation engine. This led me to change my strategy from selling EA to offering innovative EA services that my consumers really wanted. 

By R "Ray" Wang

Oracle announces a $7.4B deal for SUN just a few weeks after the IBM deal fell through.  Oracle now controls a significant major open source alternative and a nice piece of the high end computing business.  These open source components have been viewed as the alternative to the dominance of the Big 4 or MISO (Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle).   Oracle also gains an innovation engine with the assets of Sun's Labs groups which pioneers a series of innovations that include potential enterprise solutions for the virtual world.  The deal puts Oracle on a continued path to acquiring deeper components of the enterprise computing stack.  Here's how the stack looks:

• Middleware - While Java and Solaris may appear to be the crown jewels in the deal, Oracle has managed to slowly buy out other stack competitors (i.e.
  

Oracle announces a $7.4B deal for SUN just a few weeks after the IBM
deal fell through.  Oracle now controls a significant major open source
alternative and a nice piece of the high end computing business.  These
open source components have been viewed as the alternative to the
dominance of the Big 4 or MISO (Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle).  
Oracle also gains an innovation engine with the assets of Sun's Labs
groups which pioneers a series of innovations that include potential
enterprise solutions for the virtual world.  The deal puts Oracle on a
continued path to acquiring deeper components of the enterprise
computing stack.  Here's how the stack looks:

By James Kobielus

Last fall, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced that his company was getting into the hardware business, but I think he misspoke. At that time, he was referring to the new HP Oracle Database Machine with Exadata Storage, a high-end data warehousing (DW) appliance that incorporated hardware from his partner, as well as intelligent storage software technology from that partner--and even had the partner’s name first in the product name. If that was the criterion for “getting into the hardware business”--i.e., running on someone else’s hardware--then every software vendor on earth is in the hardware business, by my reckoning.