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Vanguard EA is a service of Vanguard Strategies, Inc, a Seattle-based consulting firm. While the company is young, the principal consultant and founder, Nick Malik, is well known to the Enterprise Architecture community. After years of leading in social media, with a popular blog on Enterprise Architecture, Nick served many roles in helping to develop the profession.
Vanguard EA was founded out of necessity. After spending 11 years at Microsoft, Nick Malik was frustrated by the inability of the legendary software maker to clearly
communicate, to it’s customers and partners, the value that Enterprise Architecture brings to an enterprise. To be fair, it’s a tough challenge for any software vendor to communicate the value of EA, primarily because software is sold to people who don’t care about EA, and EA has to be nurtured with people who largely don’t care about software.
Feeling that he could do more good outside of Microsoft than in, Nick left the behemoth and formed Vanguard EA. The name of the company is important in some ways, because a Vanguard EA is not a traditional Enterprise IT Architect. While a traditional IT architect is focused on technology standards and integration challenges, a Vanguard EA takes the tools of engineering and a strong understanding of business, and applies novel methods to address business challenges that are often invisible or difficult to address.
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Vanguard EA is still small, and as such, we are focused in two specific ways. First, we address Enterprise Architecture and Business Architecture challenges as the cornerstone of our work. Other challenges, whether IT or business, will not get addressed through Vanguard EA. So if your company needs help assessing security of their “Internet of Things” initiative, or if you want to decide between cloud IT providers, Vanguard EA will defer to others. On the other hand, if your EA team is struggling to “climb the ladder” and be relevant to your business, or if your company needs help to leverage your capability model to illustrate key value to decision makers, Vanguard EA provides unique services unmatched elsewhere.
Our second area of narrow focus in geographical. While the needs of Enterprise Architecture are world wide, we are focused primarily on a single time zone: Pacific Time (Western United States). While we are amenable to performing work in other areas, we are actively seeking engagements in and around Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Vanguard EA is in the process of developing partnerships with system integrators, training partners, and software vendors to be able to provide a complete package of services to customers. We believe that through our partnerships, we can increase our reach and impact, while keeping quality high. If you believe that your company would be a good partner for Vanguard EA, please reach out via our contact form. We’d love to hear more.
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