Blog 04: Part 01 – Getting Stuck in the Weeds

I want to remind everyone that my background is from IT, specifically the infrastructure (boring!) side of IT, so in the Gartner reading (Robertson, G00160635) in this section on the importance of not concentrating solely on enterprise technology architecture I can’t help but agree this is a pretty common mistake of EA teams.  Part of it isn’t our fault.  In every professional organization that I’ve been a part of, the EA team is part of the IT organization.  The architects are usually highly technical people with education in IT disciplines.  As such, while acknowledging that they are creating a holistic architecture, there is a tendency to overly focus on the “lower abstraction” levels of the design.  Arguing over an ISP circuit verses an MPLS circuit, for example.  Yeah, they’re different, cost different, and have implications for the rest of the design…but at the end of the day it only represents a communications channel.  Choosing one or the other is a stupid hill to die on, in the grand scheme of things, especially if you are going to need that political capital later on.

This is all exacerbated by overly technical conversations driving away stakeholders from the business side.  Literally.  I have been on calls where over a few sessions the non-IT folks simply stopped coming due to nothing within their scope being discussed.  Even if there is a highly technical facet of the architecture that MUST be discussed in a cross functional meeting, you have to put the technology in terms that your business partners can understand, which usually time and money.

Any “moratorium on ETA” approach will make people angry. Get used to it. EA isn’t about taking the path of least resistance. Persevere. But also challenge yourself and others to do things differently than before.

I had this situation happen to me just this morning.  I’ve been just assigned a new project, to assist in migrating several applications from infrastructure that is owned by a business unit that has been divested.  The TSA clock is ticking.  On the call were a few IT project managers, solutions architects, enterprise architects, and all of the executive sponsors from the business side for the ~15 applications that have to move.  The conversation very quickly got into the topic on how Chef scripts can be written to move some of these apps over to AWS…and you could just tell that 75% of the people on the call were mentally checking out.  Fact is, those folks DO NOT CARE about how their applications work and what needs to happen to migrate them, so long as they are moved without disruption or incident without breaking the bank.

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