“The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that’s why it’s so essential to preserving individual freedom.“ -Milton Friedman
In Making Technology Stacks Work (James, 2006), the author addresses how enterprise architects often report that the technology standards they put in place are ignored, often relegating the architecture viewpoints to focus only on the technology architecture. The article provides some best practices to bridging this business-technology divide and helping to communicate the value-proportion to business stakeholders. Some of these best practices include: drawing an ’architecture scare diagram’, opportunistically selecting projects, make friends in the business, including key stakeholders in the development of technical standards, proactively working with projects, make technical standards easy for projects to find and use. All of these are fine, practical examples of how to work collaboratively with EA stakeholders. However, business people don’t want standards, they want solutions, and author Hussein Badakhchani suggests, perhaps the market is a better mechanism for achieving Business-IT alignment.
But first, a problem well understood is a problem half solved. The advice provided by James makes sense, but the problem is a matter of goals. EA programs will continue to ignored and relegated to IT only as long as they are trying to control rather than collaborate. “The reason that this occurs is a matter of perspective. Projects (and the people working on them) mostly have tunnel vision — and rightly so. They are focused on delivering on budget, on schedule, and with minimal risk. Because of this, it should not be a surprise that projects resist — and even resent — these design constraints. To support their position of ignoring architecture standards, project managers can usually demonstrate tangible business benefits emanating from their proposed design. On the other hand, architects struggle to justify their position. At best, they claim IT cost reductions, but these are mostly trumped by the project’s arguments” (James, 2006). Enterprise architects who focus on business outcomes will get the attention of the business.
In Applying KnowIT: Software Defined Everything, Everything as a Service and the Market, offers a completely different way of looking at standards that draw from what he calls the “KnowIT” principles, that is, “NoDev”, “NoOps”, “NoIT”. Badakhchani argues that these principles “can inform the decisions that are made realize the outcomes we desire in order to meet and exceed the expectations of our stakeholders when considering the ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of delivering Everything as a Service (XaaS), [and] that a marketplace of services should be our ultimate aim in endeavoring to generate value for the enterprise.” (Badakhchani, 2015). The ‘why’ is fairly straightforward, that is, he makes the case for the benefits of the XaaS, which have been widely touted. The ‘how” is a bit more interesting.
Badakhchani continues that after a standard set of IT services should comprise the foundation of the XaaS platform, that is, Logging as a Service (LaaS), Monitoring as a Service (MaaS), Security as a Service (SECaaS), and Regulation and Compliance as a Service (RACaaS). However, the interesting part is beyond providing for those basic services should be, IT should focus on the efficiency of the market. “As IT decision makers we have it in our power to build platforms upon which application teams can deploy their services, whatever they may be. We can’t and shouldn’t try to imagine what they will deploy nor which services will be demanded by their customers and which ones will fail. Beyond providing a range of fundamental services that maximize the number market participants (adoption of our platform) and the efficiency and security of their operations we would do well to let the market decide what is innovative and successful while we focus on enhancing the market itself” (Badakhchani, 2015).
References:
Badakhchani, H. (2015, September 28). Applying KnowIT: Software Defined Everything, Everything as a Service and the Market. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/applying-knowit-software-defined-everything-service-badakhchani/?trk=mp-author-card
James, G. (2006, February 14). Making Technology Standards Work. Retrieved from Gartner database https://www.gartner.com/document/code/137199?ref=grbody&refval=911513