Enterprising Architects
I've just come back from an Enterprise Architecture conference in London, where I was struck by how defensive a lot of the discussions were around the value of architecture. I could sense the frustration of architects who felt either undervalued or ignored by the IT and business colleagues - it reminded me of a bunch of physicists trying to explain how cool superstring theory is.
I know that for many Enterprise Architects it is blindingly obvious why everyone needs a Zachman or a TOGAF, but they are struggling to articulate this value in terms that normal folk (and other IT brethren) can buy into.
The consequence of this lack of buy-in is that most lovingly crafted architectural diktats (sorry, guidelines) are either ditched as being too cumbersome, or blamed for causing cost & time overruns. Commonly both.
On the surface it is difficult to find fault with the key perceived benefits of EA, typically around standardisation and integration. However, there are two main challenges I have found with EA: the Theory and the Practice.
The issue at the theory level is that most EA frameworks promote standardisation as their mantra. However, for quite a few business challenges this can lead to poorer performance due to the inevitable compromises that come with standardisation. When a business need is time critical (measured by time to market or transactional performance) standardisation can slow down the delivery.
Aha! say the architects. If the standards had been there in the first place, the business would have already been working well. And this is where the practice falls down. The sad fact is that most businesses exist in a chaotic state not because they are badly run (not always, anyway), but because of external factors; as Harold MacMillan said, 'Events, dear boy. Events.'
Therefore, there is little chance of coherent standards being put in place initially because the business was almost certainly reacting to events rather than languorously designing and implementing an elegant and logical architecture. Trying to persuade the business to retrofit a revised architecture for no obvious business benefit is easy if you have the sales talent, but then you would probably have been better pitching to Alan Sugar to win the Apprentice.
What seems to be working in the more successful organisations I have visited recently is a tighter engagement by the Enterprise Architecture team both with the business (understanding the specific challenges faced by different business units) and with IT (embedding architects full time into the major projects, having them incentivised to deliver the project successfully AND meet corporate architecture standards). By engaging with all the stakeholders and communicating the merits of EA effectively, architects can deliver more than an ivory tower.
"Architecture is Politics." Mitchell Kapor, Founder of Lotus and Mozilla.
John Moe
