Mike Rollings

My father was a barber but he was a specialist focused on grooming.  Back in medieval days you could go to a barber for just about anything.  You could receive a haircut, a shave, a blood letting, a tooth extraction, surgery… the barber could do it all.

I’m sure there was confusion about the various types of barbering one could receive. I can hear the comments medieval people made as they discussed the various types of barbers:

• “Don’t go to Vlad he only does blood letting”
• “Our barber does haircuts, shaves and tooth extraction – how about yours?”
• “We don’t call our guy that operates on wounds a barber, we call ours a surgeon”
• We had a bad experience with our barber so we put him on the rack. We don’t do barbering anymore.”, “But how do you remove teeth?”, “We do dentistry.”

I’m sure barbers fought for a long time to keep surgery, and tooth extraction as part of the trade.  Factions must have formed around surgery and barbering. Barbering methodologies each proclaiming they were the true practice.  It is similar to conversations about enterprise architecture and how the IT industry discusses the role of an enterprise architect.

We now have many different types of hairstylists, surgeons, and dentists… I wonder how many others think history will repeat itself and distribute various aspects of the EA discipline across many business roles and professions?

Related posts:

• Marginalizing Enterprise Architecture
• EA is not the Center of the Universe

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Category: Management Strategic Planning Uncategorized     Tags: IT Delivery, Transformation

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