Not Enough Enterprise Architects, and Not Enough Budget

Are you a stressed-out IT leader trying to navigate the latest wave of AI-driven technology change? You are not alone — your peers are feeling it too. Unfortunately, the advisors that IT leaders typically lean on in moments like this, their enterprise architects, are in high demand and short supply. The good news is that the same technology giving you grief is also handing you a solution: AI-augmented enterprise architecture.

This is exactly the kind of problem The Value Shift was written to address. The instinct under pressure is to ask how to get more people, or how to make the people you have move faster. The better question is how the work itself should be re-imagined so that more of it can be carried by AI — freeing your architects to spend their hours where they create unique value. The measure of success isn’t hours logged; it’s outcomes delivered.

Not enough enterprise architects

Enterprise architects (EAs) are among the highest-paid disciplines in IT, and for good reason. Their depth of knowledge and experience, combined with a rare ability to understand and explain complex environments, makes them invaluable advisors to both business and IT leadership. Yet most IT organizations struggle to build and sustain an architecture practice that meets their needs. There is a genuine shortage of qualified architects in the market — the result of an aging resource pool and the deep experience the role demands. You can’t simply post a req and hire your way out of it.

Budget pressures

At the same time, most IT organizations are facing budget cuts. They cannot afford to bring on expensive new resources that may take the better part of a year to acclimate and become productive. The realistic path is to learn to work more efficiently with the people you already have. And there is real room to do so: a large share of the work EAs do today — roughly 70 to 80 percent — can be made more efficient or eliminated through intelligent automation. For organizations that need to do more and move faster with shrinking budgets, that is a timely opportunity rather than a threat.

Focus on value

Two principles should anchor your thinking on the EA challenge. First, this is not about replacing people; it is about enabling them to do more. Second, whenever you work with AI, keep a human in the loop and in control. AI takes the busywork; people keep the judgment, the creativity, and the accountability.

Now is the time to invest in your enterprise architects. Unless you are genuinely understaffed, don’t make hiring the priority. Instead, focus on upskilling and augmenting the resources you already have so they can deliver greater value to the organization. That is the value shift in practice — doing more with fewer human hours by letting AI absorb the work that doesn’t need a person, and pointing your architects at the work that does.

Make the first move

The hardest part is starting, so make a small, deliberate first move. Pick one part of the architecture workflow where your team loses time to repetitive effort — documentation, impact analysis, keeping the model current — and ask how AI could carry the bulk of it while a human stays in control of the outcome. Prove the value there, then expand.

If you want help thinking it through, NovoCircle is a consultancy built around AI-augmented enterprise architecture, with decades of experience as EAs working alongside industry-leading businesses. Learn more about how we approach AI-augmented enterprise architecture, or pick up a copy of The Value Shift for the full case behind measuring work in outcomes rather than hours.