Is architecture holding back your digital factory?

In many organizations architecture is seen as the moderating force that keeps all the myriad technology players moving in the same direction. I've seen this take the form of heavy top-down governance where all technology decisions must go through architecture to ensure adherence to a central plan. I've also seen central architecture as a side-topic where every area decides fully autonomously what the best solution is. Digital factories are used to rapidly and repeatedly produce high-value digital products for internal and external customers. Digital factories need to take a middle road where architectural decisions are taken by teams and aligned between teams to ensure reuse an interoperability.

architectural decisions are taken by teams and aligned between teams

 Digital factories often use the latest technologies to deliver high-end solutions. However, since the mandate is to rapidly and repeatedly deliver, digital factories usually should not be using bleeding-edge or unproven technologies. This lesson was born out for me when leading a digital bank build in the mid-2010s. We were mandated by a central architecture decision to use a specific vendor SDK for a communication platform that was standard in the organization. The trick was that the vendor had never externally published this API previously and it needed to be carved out of a set of vendor internal libraries that were never intended for public consumption. This meant a huge investment of time and effort working with the vendor to define the solution and subsequently find and fix all the issues to get the API working. While this kind of work can be intellectually engaging, it can also be a drag on a team. In our case, it was a herculean effort that almost caused the product to be unshippable.

digital factories usually should not be using bleeding-edge or unproven technologies

 Since the digital factory is responsible for delivering rapidly and repeatedly, it should be the digital factory taking the decisions about what technologies to use and when to invest in running experiments. Does this mean that architecture is not needed in digital factories? No, architecture is absolutely required in every technology solution that is created, including in digital factories, especially in digital factories. Architects must be embedded in the digital factory, and they must be empowered to work with teams to make decisions that are the best for the products being created by the digital factory. Of course, since those products largely need to interface with legacy systems, those decisions will have to link-up with the overall architecture of the organization, but they should not be constrained by pre-conceived notions of what good looks like in the legacy world.

 embedded, hands-on architects are crafting an aligned way forward

The role of architecture in the digital factory is therefore one where embedded, hands-on architects are crafting an aligned way forward for the products being developed while ensuring that those products can interface with the legacy systems. These architects together with the teams in the digital factory must be fully empowered to make the decisions necessary to fulfill their mission in forging a new path for the organization. In the digital factory, empowerment of the teams doing the work is essential and this is only possible with locally aligned decision making.

What are your views of architecture in digital factories?

Have you seen any models that were particularly successful or problematic?

Please share in the comments