Abstract
Enterprise architects are key stakeholders in major societal trends, including economic trends, business trends, and in-particular, information technology (IT) industry trends. 2006 is a turning point in the globalization of IT, with the industry’s largest firm, IBM, hosting its first Wall Street analysts’ conference in India, and several major IT firms announcing plans to rapidly expand their offshore workforces. This paper introduces significant trends in IT global outsourcing, and explains why enterprise architects are impacted by ongoing globalization processes. We review existing practices for offshore development, best practices for EA with distributed development, and propose a future EA-driven method for global systems development, while ensuring an enduring role for enterprise architects in an era of globalized IT services.
Journal of Enterprise Architecture