Month: January 2018

In Post 1, I discussed how application architecture needs to become more urgent and agile, and build for more emergent strategies. In this post, I revisit that. One article from this week’s reading which interested me was Gartner’s report on “Unready for the Future: Discarding Outdated Application Architecture Assumptions”.  In this piece, the Gartner authors make the point that much of existing application architecture in large organizations has been built on long-standing assumptions which may be valid, but are preventing organizations from being more urgent, agile and emergent. They also provide practical advice and best practices for how to make change happen.

• Develop systems that are dynamic, flexible, movable, and distributable.
• Assume there is no locality.
• Don’t assume that environmental services will enforce integrity.
• Don’t assume that all information to be processed by the application is text and numbers.
• Don’t assume that applications exist to process input.

In other words, we exist in a world driven by mobile, social, and cloud services. This means that Application Architects must change their mindset and ways of working, and build systems that can respond accordingly.

Sources:

Sholler, D. (2012). Unready for the Future: Discarding Outdated Application Architecture Assumptions. Gartner. September

I was fascinated by a slide from Dr. Fusco’s class presentation the other evening. The slide represented the various application architecture approaches from the 1960’s to today. According to the slide, application architecture was originally focused on the organization, and in support of mainframe systems where the data was used internally. Later during the 1990’s, the focus went from the organization to the process. Technology was client-server based (meaning a client application on the workstation would make a call to a server to retrieve data, then update it and send it back, over a wired network). By the 2010’s, application architecture was about distributed functions – meaning those same workstations now pass messages back and forth to each other, and the messages are data-centric, and communicated in real-time.

Fusco, D. (n.d.). EA 874 – Class 2 [PPT].

Having worked in technology for much of the last 20 years, I’ve seen many of these changes happen, or in the case of my current industry, not happen.  Application Architecture is used to collect Big Data, which has opened up a whole new word of Analytics. This ability to interpret the data, and drive organizational change based on it will I’m sure drive us forward to the next level. It will be interesting to see what that next level is and where we go from here.

(On a side note, according to the slide, client-server technology is perfect for EDI file transfers, which are still heavily used in the Health Insurance industry, and is much of what I support in my current role. So much for change.)

 

Something I continue to be puzzled by with EA, and will likely keep writing about, is how to deliver strategic value in an increasingly fast and agile business world, when the EA tasks are so time-intensive and dependent on corporate hierarchy. An article I recently read from McKinsey, on “Organizing for the Age of Urgency” talks about how organizing for urgency calls for organizing differently. The image below displays McKinsey’s recommendations for how this can happen.

You may be asking right now what this all has to do with Application Architecture and System Development. First, adopting a culture of urgency, focused on emergent strategies, gets practitioners thinking how they can promote this culture through their architecture planning. Second, it encourages new and different approaches and a more agile mindset.

This approach is born out by the research Gartner did on Amazon and Netflix. According to the research, both organizations encouraged cultures of flexibility and agility, which led to creative and timely solutions. For example, Amazon pursued extreme scale, through web services and cloud computing, both of which were new to the industry, and differentiated them from other retailers. And Netflix used a similar approach to increase its streaming capabilities and rely less on its video rental business. Netflix also used the mantra of “act fast, and react fast”, anticipating that failures would occur, but would be resolved quickly and learned from.

As has been seen by both organizations, and confirmed by McKinsey, urgency, agility, and emergent strategies will be at the forefront of ensuring EA can provide the value needed.

Sources:

Aaron De Smet and Chris Gagnon. (n.d.). Organizing for the age of urgency. Retrieved January 27, 2018, from https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/organizing-for-the-age-of-urgency?cid=soc-web

Altman, R. and Robertson, B. (2013). Learn a Few Lessons on Application Architecture From Netflix. Gartner. June

Robertson, B. and Altman, R. (2012). Application Architecture Next Practices: Lessons Learned From Amazon. Gartner. November