April 22, 2016

The Preface

There is always the first time for everything. Enterprise Architecture is a discipline in IT, which is empowered to think and visualize the future of IT in an organization. There is no science for Architecture, there is a science to document architecture, but what is documented is totally up to the Architect’s visualization. This vision comes from experiences with “what can go wrong?” than “what can work?”. There is not always a process to come up with the right architecture, then it depends on developers to make it exactly how it is documented. Just in time then, the requirements change, and developers make it slightly different than how it was visualized by the Architect. Most of the time, the architects don’t bother with lower-level details of work product. The teams are responsible for the Minimum Viable Product. Questions are what Architects are responsible for? Maximum Viable Product? If that is true, what would that be? The systems they designed used to be designed as a robust, sustainable, and long life. Architects are supposed to define a minimum of a system that supports business needs, but the product needs to provide maximum value over time.  In this newer world, when all fortune 500 companies struggle to keep their place. Technical Revolution of IT has started to redefine how all businesses worked over the last 50-100 years. Now is the time of Agile Enterprise Architecture. The architecture that can adapt and respond to changing markets at a faster pace. Architects must now create systems that are flexible, malleable but secure. They need to be able to expose and consume services from all around their business model. Strategize with Pilot systems and change architecture with market feedback. Due to reduced time between disruptive cycles to business, EA needs to look at “Lean and specialized technologies” to meet business outcomes at speed. That provides specific challenges where “Average lifespan of Systems is reducing” which means “System ROI needs to be quicker”, how does this affect how EA strategizes? The EA strategies will need to impact enterprise within months if not weeks. This changes everything, the average age of an Enterprise Architect is bound to decrease, the experience in business is as important as awareness of changing technical landscape. Enterprise Architect is no more the most experienced person in the team, he is the visionary. This site is to put Vision back into Architecture, this time the vision is short term and adaptable. This is the era of throwaway architectures, lets find together how to create them. Enterprise Architect is no longer a technologist. The profession is more of a short term strategist. The profession will require more business acumen than technology keep up. The skillset is vastly different than what is prescribed today. That also means, the EA profession will become industry-specific, they will need to describe architectures in a specialized bounded context that cannot be reused outside the industry or for that matter it will be very organization-specific.    

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