Call it a gardener

In response to James Urquhart's post on the 'Enterprise Architect as an Enterprise Ecologist' and the following discussions on whether this is an Ecosystem ecologist or Enterprise ecologist, I'll repost a part of my January 2013 post on Ecosystems.

In essence the supplier encourages others to innovate, leverages the ecosystem to spot diffusion of successful changes and then commoditizes rapidly to component services. The cycle of Innovation – Leverage – Commoditise (ILC) is then repeated for subsequent higher order systems.

The component services are in effect your “platform” (though I prefer the term “garden”) around which you carefully nurture and grow an ecosystem. Like any gardener you’d have to balance this eating (or harvesting) of the ecosystem with the benefits that new components bring in growing it and the overall health of the garden (i.e. level of disquiet over the occasional munching session). 

If you're going to call the role something ... call it Gardener.