Are you like me, following how the IT architecture currently passing through a sort of maturation phase? With the focus on technology strategy to enable and ensure business capability. Fragility, responding to change is coming up to scene, as well as define and deal with complexity. Good. I am glad to see that the traditional focus on endless titles and roles is set little aside, to advance problems the architect and architecture is about to solve.

I am not sure if you agree, but sometimes I am hit by that the referencing IT architecture for organizations, these are unique singular constructions. So another organization obviously have something else. Organizations might talk, internally, about reference architectures, but usually are cherry picked areas of technology or process design. A part of organization technology architecture. Let’s quick dive to the world of programming. At OOP, the Gang Of 4 produced for two decades ago approx 20 patterns, that has been a leading star since then. For Software, we often recognize i.e. space architecture, n-tier architecture, micro-services architecture, event driven architecture, rest based, plugins based etc.

When it comes to architecture strategy for organizations, there is usually less buzz around types and patterns. Except for “We work agile!”, which indeed is an answer, but it’s just a choice within an organizations technology strategy. The strategy's are simply there by accident, such as existent by inherited awareness and continuous improvements. To over-simplify, architecture strategy in this way is non-persistence, like steer and measure a cloud of gas. Low degree of re-usability over organizations. Maybe this perspective can allow to be a bit rude, and sound like there is no clear target.

A organization that have a successful technology strategy, should absolutely be able to template guidelines and regulations and implement into another organization that fits. So — how does it fit in, if each organization perform a self-organizing monolith (gas cloud) of architecture strategy?

When the target is unclear

I want to give a break and share a IT anecdote which have similarities unclear purposes. I have been around for a while, also when the roles “PC Technician” and “Webmaster” was the thing that any company needed, badly. As long as the company got those, IT demands was secured. This was mid -90 and the Dot-Com bubble didn’t exist. Those were fancy tech roles, but in reality often shadowed behind “we need someone that fix the web / tech stuff for us”. Which job descriptions was not that clear.

A small firm or i.e. municipally at that time might had no experience to the subject. Therefore needed a guru to write web content as well as coding the web, deploying infrastructure and maintain the product. Similarly, a PC tech as a guru helping accounting, sales etc with rebooting computers, cleaned mouse wheels, upgrading printers as well as purchase and install a new Exchange servers for the office and mounted CAT5 network racks.

Those roles disappeared over time. Dot-Com swiped most of the IT, but also people that stayed for a while, was impossible to replace when they quit. But something much more important also come - Awareness of the intent.

The mainstream come to understand things like “ah, we need someone that make up a web solution so that our experts can publish their content”, “ah, we need someone that make up a collaboration platform, so that we can hire support and technicians to help out in larger scale”, “we need someone that can decide what infrastructure we need, and maintain it so that our applications always is running”, “we need someone that knows how to build physical network so that we have fast and reliable zones for servers and work stations”. This can go on.

As with OOP patterns, the job role monoliths started to divorce into several more specific roles. Patterns of specific job descriptions was made, carved from the monolith descriptions, complementary to some points.

Face the architecture divorce

Organization strategies has been around for ‘eternity’. So they naturally already divorced as a part of it’s maturity. Below is four operation models, sampled from IASAGlobals SA course.

Samples of organization strategies

By just a shallow look, one can get a feeling of what suits one model and not the other. Even when it come to IT architecture. Would a single site on-premise DataCenter fit equally into any of the four models? When such references are formed, we are able to move, to control.

I happen to had a lunch date recently where we chat about the benefits and objectives to cloudify a whole organisation technology farm, decommissioning the on-premise solution. The target of the discussion was a +50.000 employees firm, so this comes with quite a bit of change. Chances that this kind of decision end up in a success? Takes a bit of luck. My point is not cutting their strategy, though. But to architecture strategy that make movements in relation to reference points.

Movements in relation to reference strategies

I would like to place this company of +50k employees into a strategy model, imaginary for this article. Similarly to the four organizational strategies above, lets splice IT architecture into three types of an strategy model. I could have spliced as Snow’s Topology, but now did it arbitrary.

Three samples of architecture strategies for a organization

Pioneers Architecture strategy — This kind need to respond to change utterly fast, adopt and turn. Better fast and failing, forward. Organization might operate and compete a volatile market with high stakes in market response. Fits very likely startups, but might also fit organizations with very complex system map, but that really need to respond.

Transformation Architecture strategy — Organizations that happen to solve the business demands with a highly dynamic technology stack, relative to what the organization need the technology for. The services and products generally share baselines and is made up by new instances of standardized and heavily configurable components. Easy to generate by just add a instance another customer.

Grounded Architecture Strategy — The market and business demands is very reliable and static. Though, the demands on reliability, quality, margins and precision might be extremely tough. For instance, people can die if there happen to be unexpected deviations in the product or services. Maybe lots of large organizations with complex system maps usually are here, because of inability to transform into agile mindset.

If we put Emergency Centre 911 or software for controlling Boeing air craft flights into a strategy, in which would chances be highest that we survive?

To limit the following declaration I chose to focus on Operational aspect, SDLC aspect and the infrastructure hosting aspect.

The strategy that can act references for Pioneers, would likely contain Agile Manifesto approach. A cloud technology stack or similar that highly adopts emerging technology to, make more sense. As well as using DevOps and CI/CD pipelines to simplify quick and smooth deployments in small chunks. With this, frameworks such as SAFe and DAD might be relevant. Oppositely, a strong IT architecture culture with big design upfront — Waterfall or V-Shape — would be waste.

Comes to Transformers (or ‘dynamic’), the reference would be a technology stack being a huge footprint of the organization. Or the opposite, technology is relatively simple. Either way a robust and well established operational and maintenance capability is required, as the income loss is high on operational outage. Hosting is less important other than a cost- and operability perspective. The moving targets is mainly in the process and delivery layers to allow for customer customizations. Such style might prefer operationally- or process oriented frameworks. A strong architecture technology here might make sense but more on the operational aspect and business process mapping, as the technology stack and systems map is not complex.

Finally the Grounded, would be referenced as the strategy where everything is by intention. It’s more likely that each organization is self-hosted and self-living. Duplicates of processes and routines. Eventually parallel processes. Long lead-times, clear requirements, time to market, need of materials etc is expected and integrated in any plan. Slowly changing systems is naturally more robust to operations. Reactive on technology changes and might fit well with Waterfall based delivery. A stronger IT architecture discipline with traceability from request to enablement, is likely preferred.

Conclusion

Modelling references, benify by being easier to implement standardized packages. Easier to predict future needs and wants and hooks. As well as what not get into — things not fit into the actual strategy reference. For instance establishing full Agilist manifesto in Grounders strategy. Which is much easier to decide, backed up with the references

The references can be baselines for initiate transitions and measuring performance of transition. For instance, an inspection on an organization can clearly state it resides in the Grounder-strategy. The inspection might also conclude that the organization would perform very well in the Pioneers strategy. So it supports a transition process. As there is a reference strategy, a baseline target is already available. As with other transitions, it might success in first go, as well as fail. It might fail also second, due to tough break out from unsyncronized mesosphere. But in the third iteration, it might start provide value.

To end where we start. Without the strategy references, organization architecture strategy is unframed content prone to take unexpected targets. Resulting in fragility and complicated to decide, with awareness, how to deal with. Target on technology transitions, is often making the trend as an enabler. Means “a lucky guess” to chances of success. Means it start over again at the next trend, even if the last one happen to be successful (and should be retained).

Instead aim the organization technology strategy into a conscious and managed target, means that it implements with higher chance of success. It might contain the trend and people ask to get hired, it might not and people quit. That’s life and the organization lives on.