I’d like to give a shout-out to my son’s second-grade teacher this week, for posting this quote on the class page on the school’s website:

“In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years."
- Jacques Barzun

I found it interesting that this should come to my attention just now, as I’d recently been thinking about how enterprise architects probably spend a lot of time in a state of delayed gratification. Maybe not 20 years, but enterprise architects’ work often has more of a cumulative effect than a big-bang blast. That's unlike functions where the impact to the business is more immediate, such as when a new app developed by the software team goes live and leads to a quick rise in productivity.

That’s not to say that the final results won’t have a dramatic impact on the business, just that there are a lot of incremental steps on that road to creating a flexible infrastructure and adaptive business processes and services. And often, there are a lot of what may seem to be meandering discussions along the way.

It takes a certain outlook to gain satisfaction under these circumstances, and I’ve begun to wonder whether that’s a mentality that will be in shorter supply as we prepare the next generation of enterprise architects.

It’s not that I think today’s young adults don’t have the discipline or the talent to succeed in demanding and tech-influenced fields such as enterprise architecture. They’re probably better prepared as a result of growing up with the power of technology infusing every aspect of their lives. But they’re also very accustomed to a culture of positive reinforcement and encouraging feedback in the service of a strong self-image, which wasn’t necessarily the norm when we, um, more mature folks were growing up — at least not to the same extent. (There was a time when not everyone on the Little League team was Most Valuable Player, right?)

Perhaps it’s not enough reward to just know that their work counts toward unifying the IT environment and linking it with the business. These future enterprise architects may have to challenge themselves to find more concrete reinforcement from the fact that their work is making a tangible and ongoing difference — which isn’t necessarily a bad exercise to undertake, even for more seasoned pros who may sometimes feel a little underappreciated.

How? For starters, how about sharing in those software-development triumphs? For example, consider how laboring over an enterprise architecture repository means that it takes your company 10 percent less time to bring a new app to market — a time that will accelerate as the repository is enriched.

Or how about every time you read about another devastating data breach, you do a high-five for the data architecture governance steps taken to ensure appropriate access to information and its security, too (and then just go back and double-check things, lest you tempt the fates).

I won’t pretend I’ve got a full suite of answers here, but I would love to know what your thoughts are about the little reward moments that enterprise architects should take time to appreciate. What keeps you going, and what would you advise those younger architects to think about to keep them driven toward bigger-picture goals?

Jennifer Zaino is executive editor of Smart Architect.