1. Awareness that Mental models influence Architecture – The person in charge of the architecture will bring his patterns into play.
- Green is in big play now. IT Data Center Consolidation, virtualization, Cloud Computing, SOA. Operating Models and Organizations structures have evolved over the last two decades.
- You cannot come up with anything original unless you are willing to make mistakes.
2. Invest in Perpetual learning – Architectural History should be big on every practitioners list. The big example that I have constantly used is the building of Aswan Dam in Egypt.
- Keeping the historic context in mind – do you know what influenced the current architecture? Do you know the impact of change to upstream and downstream outcomes
- Seeing what this is next – is very hard for the Enterprise Architect practitioner.
3. Awareness that consequences of your architecture will be unknown in long term
- Price of responsibility is loneliness – Testing an idea before completely implementing it, and having enough data to make factual decisions in most cases is possible. However, when you are innovating sometimes you have to take risks. Enterprise Architect should be willing to make a decision based on instinct, and price of responsibility (success or failure) is loneliness.
- Dependence on quality of data – Generations of Analysts, Data “People”, and Decision Makers have grown up with the principle of GIGO – Garbage in, garbage out. It made a lot of sense for a very long time. The web unfortunately threw a big spanner into the works because now we have too much data. It seems absolutely dumb to argue that while the quality of data used to make decisions is important, it is actually not that important to have the highest data quality.
- Consequences of Architecture – The evolution of the architecture will depend on how the solution will be adopted by the organization. The importance factor is not just the scalability of the solution but the impact of this solution overall running of the business. The solution becomes mission critical if the solution is revenue generating. The government regulations, taxation policies on the top line revenue, the capabilities of the organization, evolution of the workforce again will drive the architecture into unknown areas not factored into the mental models of the Architect practitioner. The solutions built in each of the eras – Mainframe Era, PC Era, Client Server Era, and Web Era have continued to exist in one form or the other. The complete Rip & Replace is non-existent.
