Yesterday, I had a long discussion with Stephen Heffner the creator of XTRAN (and president of XTRAN, LLC). XTRAN is a meta transformation tool that excels at automating software work – sorry that is the best description I could come up for a tool that can create solutions to analyze and translate between software languages, data structures and even project work products. When you first read about its capabilities it sounds like magic. There are numerous working examples available of its capabilities so you can see its usefulness for yourself.
He and I were talking about the issues and merits of Enterprise Architecture. He wrote piece titled, What is Enterprise Architecture?, where he describes his views on the EA function. Stephen identifies three major impediments to effective EA:
- Conflating EA with IT
- Aligning EA with just transformation
- Thinking the EA is responsible for strategy
We definitely agreed that today’s perspective in most businesses that the EA function is embedded within IT does not align well with the strategic needs of the business. The role is much broader than IT and needs to embrace the broader business issues that IT should support.
I had a bit of problem with the EA alignment with transformation but that may just be a difference in context. One of the real killers of EA for me is the focus on work products and not outcomes. The EA should always have a focus on greater flexibility for the business, addressing rigor but not increasing rigidity. Rigidity is aligned with death – hence the term rigor mortis. To me, the EA function always has a transformational element.
The final point was that the EA supports strategy and the business needs to have a strategy. The EA is not the CEO and the CEO is probably not an EA. The EA does need to understand the current state of the business environment though. I was talking with an analyst one day who told me that an EA needs to focus on the vision and they shouldn’t worry about a current situational assessment. My response was that “If you don’t know where you are, you’ll not be able to define a journey to where you need to be.” Stephen agreed with that perspective.
My view is that there are 4 main elements of an effective architecture:
- People – Architecture lives at the intersection of business and technology. People live at the focus of that intersection, not technology. Architectural efforts should focus on the effect upon the people involved. What needs to happen? How will it be measured? These factors can be used to make course corrections along the way, once you realize: an architecture is never finished. If it doesn’t deliver as expected, change it. Make the whole activity transparent, so that people can buy in, instead of throw stones. My view is that if I am talking with someone about architecture and they don’t see its value, it is my fault.
- Continuous change – When you begin to think of the business as dynamic and not static, the relationship with the real world becomes clear. In nature, those species that are flexible and adjust to meet the needs of the environment can thrive – those that can’t adjust die off.
Architectures need to have standards, but it also needs to understand where compromises can be made. For example, Shadow IT It is better to understand and facilitate its effective use (through architecture), rather than try and stand in the way and get run over.
In a similar way, the link between the agile projects and the overall architecture need to be recursive, building upon the understanding that develops. The architecture does not stand alone.
Architecture development can also have short sprints of understanding, documenting and standardizing the technical innovations that take place, while minimizing technical debt. - Focus on business-goal based deliverables – Over the years, I’ve seen too many architectural efforts end up as shelf-ware. In the case of architecture, just-in-time is probably the most effective and accurate approach since the technology and business are changing continuously. Most organizations would just laugh at a 5 year technology strategy today, after all many of the technical trends are predictable. So I don’t mean you shouldn’t frame out a high-level one – just ‘don’t believe your own press’.
If the architecture work products can be automated or at least integrated with the tooling used in the enterprise, it will be more accurate and useful. This was actually a concept that Stephen and I discussed in depth. The concept of machine and human readable work products should be part of any agile architecture approach.
From a goal-based perspective, the architecture needs to understand at a fundamental level what is scarce for the organization and what is abundant and then maximize the value generated from what is scarce – or at least unique to the organization. - Good enough – Don’t let the perfect architecture stand in the way of one that is ‘good enough’ for today. All too often I’ve seen architecture analysis go down to 2 or 3 levels of detail. Then people say “if 2 is good, let’s go to 5 levels of depth.” Unfortunately, with each level of detail the cost to develop and maintain goes up by an order of magnitude – know when to stop. I’ve never seen a single instance of where these highly detailed architecture definitions where maintained more than 2 or 3 years, since they may actually cost as much to maintain as it took to create them. Few organizations have that level of intestinal fortitude to keep that up for long.
The goal should be functional use, not a focus on perfection. Architecting the simplest solution what works today is generally best. If you architect the solution for something that will be needed 5 years out, either the underlying business need or the technical capabilities will change before it will actually be used.
None of this is really revolutionary. Good architects have been taking an approach like this for years. It is just easy to interpret some of the architecture process materials from an ivory tower (or IT only) perspective.
Beyond the intersection of technology and life 