Trust me, I’m an Architect

31 March

Isn’t it time we took a moment to consider not what we do as architects, but how we do it?  There is plenty of discussion about the various practices of architecture, but often we put others (and the development teams in particular) off the architecture by our own practices or character.  In the next few posts, I want to propose a world view for IT architects – an architecture manifesto.

Any world view should start with values, identifying what we regard as important.  It is the values we hold that determine our thinking, our behaviour, and our decision making.  Here are five values that I believe should drive us as architects.

We value the people whose lives are impacted by the architectures we produce.  Architecture exists to meet the needs of its customers, so those customers and their needs should be of paramount importance.  Who are the customers?  Firstly, there are the development teams who want us to help them deliver quality solutions for their customers – the business users and stakeholders – typically by providing structure, principles and guidelines for design.  Secondly, there is the business itself, in particular, the users and stakeholders whose lives will be impacted by the solution.  They want to be sure that IT is meeting their needs, and they want to be able to verify that we have understood those needs and our architecture is appropriate.

We value the big picture.  Understanding and communicating the big picture allows us to make better decisions – better for the wider solution, and better for the longer term.  It is easier to get “buy-in” from those who can see the big picture, and such people are typically more motivated.  In the decades since he first wrote his book “The Mythical Man-Month”, Fred Brooks has only become more certain than ever of the need for the big picture of architecture.

We value humility.  Architects are technical leaders – practitioners who have a good range of experience behind them.  This can lead to inflated egos and arrogance, which is unfortunate because much of the success or failure of a leader is determined by their attitude.  In his book “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership”, John Maxwell points out that leadership is about inspiring, not controlling.  Architects need to enable and inspire the development team to provide a quality solution using architecture.  We should be practising servant leadership.

We value teamwork.  Each of us has different experience and skills.  None of us individually have the complete set of skills, but all of us together have a more rounded set of skills.  We can learn and get ideas from each other.  None of us is as smart as all of us.  Working as a team will typically yield better results than a single person working on their own.  We need to accept and even actively solicit input from others.

We value integrity.  As architects, we need to enable the IT development teams to meet the needs of their customers, and we do this by providing the big picture.  But if we don’t prove ourselves trustworthy in the small things, who will trust us with the big picture that is architecture?  As a key component of leadership, we need to demonstrate integrity in everything we do, whether big or small.

These values are cultural in nature – as Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.  Strategy achieves the desired result in the short term, but in the long term culture inevitably wins.  Taking the above values on board should yield a culture with positive results.

While the values drive our behaviour, they are somewhat abstract, making it a challenge to apply to real-world scenarios.  In the next post, I will identify some principles that build on the values and provide practical guidelines for applying them.



Post by Colin Garlick

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