By now you've probably heard the phrase "enterprise architect." People in the know are hard-pressed to describe exactly what an enterprise architect is, but they say one thing is clear: the relatively new job title represents a growing and lucrative field for IT pros.

An enterprise architect is sort of like a city planner, says Allen Brown, president and CEO of the Open Group, a standards organization. Rather than tinkering with individual pieces of hardware and software, the architect attempts to ensure proper integration of all the infrastructure and applications throughout an organization, Brown says. A global bank is likely to have 400 architects, but the profession is still in its infancy, he says.

That’s why late last year the Open Group created the Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects, which seeks to give members a forum for collaboration and promote certification standards such as ITAC (IT Architect Certification Program) and TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework).

Although frameworks have been in development since the early 1990s, Brown says enterprise architecture hasn’t yet reached the level of respect that comes with having recognized standards for operations and ethics.

“It’s a new area and a new profession,” Brown says. “We’re looking at how we can actually address enterprise architects as we would a profession like legal, accounting, or building architects. We’re taking baby steps at the moment.”

Efforts to train, certify and professionalize IT architects are underway not only at the Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects (AOGEA), but within the U.S. Department of Defense, Federated Enterprise Architecture Certification Institute, the International Association of Software Architects, and the Microsoft Certified Architect program, writes Open Group vice president Len Fehskens in a recent article.

The vagueness of the term “enterprise architect” has led cynics to suggest that it’s just a phrase to put on a business card to justify a higher billing rate, Fehskens writes.

“Given that enterprise architecture promises to be such an important concept and is generating such a frenzy of activity, I’m surprised, and a bit dismayed, by how blithely we assume not only that we all know what it is, but that we all know it as the same thing,” he writes.

Jon Brodkin is senior writer at Network World.