What do you think about IT architecture? To stakeholders, architecture may seem like a costly exercise that yields blueprints and little else. And yet, architecture is essential if you wish to maximise the value of your IT investments. I’ll explain a little about why this is the case in the following post. In fact, I can understand the queries made about IT architecture by stakeholders- they want results fast, wish to maximise ROI, and their concerns lay in the tangible IT assets that provide value. Questions as to the value of architecture lie in its invisible nature. The converse to architecture is known as technical debt which is also unseen. To make this distinction clear, we can look at their visible counterparts – bugs and features. Bugs are those issues that we can see or experience: everyone is familiar with programme features and bugs – features add value and bugs detract from value. So it is with architecture and technical debt – architecture is enabling, it adds value, whereas technical debt is crippling, it detracts from value – only these aspects are not immediately visible- often hidden in code, configurations, system interdependencies, misaligned designs or designs that do not promote business outcomes.
Having established the value of architecture to IT endeavours, its relevance to innovation becomes the next question. Since doesn’t additional lead time hamper overall timeframes and doesn’t formal pre-planning preclude creativity? In fact, architecture can both aid or hamper innovation efforts. Since it defines the possibilities or constraints of endeavours, establishing innovation as an agenda item for architects becomes key if this is a requirement. For formal Business Intelligence, innovation is closely linked to insight and potentially value- and so as not to reinvent the wheel – or incur technical debt, a flexible architecture is required.
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