Must Be Charismatic, Extroverted, Technologically Sophisticated and Business—Savvy.

In 1975, Baldev Singh was at the pinnacle of his profession: rally racing. He was sponsored by Volvo and Fiat. But in the middle of his fourth East African Safari Rally—a three—day, 3,000—mile dash across Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, a race that only about 15 of the 300 or so cars that enter ever finish—his life changed.

Singh was barreling up a hill, pedal to the metal. As he reached the top, he saw a child selling peanuts in the middle of the road. Singh jerked the wheel and went careening off the road.

Roads in East Africa aren't like those in the United States. "Once you go off the pavement, you can't control the car," Singh explains. He rolled several times. The car was totaled. Fortunately, Singh was able to walk away. But he decided it was time for a new career.

Twenty—nine years later, he walked into Toby Redshaw's office, where Motorola's corporate vice president of IT strategy, architecture and e—business immediately realized that Singh was just what he was looking for in an enterprise architect.

Redshaw needed someone who had both a deep technical background and a good understanding of the business, skills that Singh, who had earned engineering and computer science degrees and an MBA since he quit racing, had in spades. But that wasn't what clinched it for Redshaw.

"An enterprise architect is going to get a lot of pushback," he says. Changing the way a company thinks about IT and the way IT thinks about the business is not easy. "You need someone," says Redshaw, "who has done something like drive across Africa at breakneck speeds. Someone with persistence. Someone tough."

The enterprise architect: A job description
An enterprise architect is the person who conceives, designs and oversees the implementation of a company's systems development. While the concept of enterprise architecture is old, the position of enterprise architect is new, and has become relevant recently with the emergence of Web services and the move toward service—oriented architectures that enable IT components to be used in multiple applications. (For more on the new enterprise architecture, see "A New Blueprint for the Enterprise," Page 38.) GM, Procter & Gamble, Wells Fargo and agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration have all hired enterprise architects, and experts say that having one to oversee the building of a company's overall computing environment is critical to both business and IT success. "Architecture works only if you have the right people staffing it," says Dow Jones CIO Bill Godfrey.