Improving your IT Architecture Culture

First of all, thank you to everybody who took the time to leave comments on my earlier post, I think we all agree that the closer our relationship is with the business then the better the alignment is with Enterprise Architecture. Which would be great and something we would all welcome with open arms!

My post clearly focused on IT architecture and so the title was misleading for well-established Enterprise Architects, especially for those of you in the financial world. My trigger for the post came from my recent experience of being interviewed and the problems that I have been hearing about, which have mainly been within IT and not the business! If you can’t get success internally how would you ever establish successful relationships in the business!

With this in mind the title of my previous article should maybe have read ‘Is your IT architecture, chipped, cracked or broken. Probably’. That would have been more accurate and might have ensured that we stayed off the topics of where EA should report and whether it should be a business or IT capability.

So, this article is about improving your IT Architecture delivery within IT, it is inspired in a depressing way from the following familiar soundbites about architecture.

“That’s not a roadmap…”

“I’d love to see them manage a major incident”

“Can you believe Chrome isn’t supported in the new sales platform”

“We don’t have any skills in that technology”

“The project is delayed because of the architecture review board”

“They have no idea about costs”

“Busy doing what? That’s what I would like to know!”

“Not enough detail in this High-Level Design”

“Too much detail in this High-Level Design”

The primary challenge in architecture isn’t about technology but people. It is a facilitation role that needs to create environments for challenge and discussion. IT Architecture teams need to create a strong ‘Why’ and be able to articulate it to their stakeholders, peers and colleagues.

In my experience you need to be connecting IT architecture to those business capabilities that your organisation needs to be successful when you communicate within IT. That is how you get alignment and traction. I know that may seem very obvious but how well is it really being done?

I still see very generic IT architecture roadmaps, which detail generic IT technologies. Data Lake, Machine Learning, Chatbots, AI, Big Data, Neural Network, Cloud, [insert next big trend here]. This is a roadmap but it’s definitely not your businesses IT architecture roadmap!

The outside-in approach is great when you are looking to disrupt your own business and you should definitely spend time researching and understanding technology trends. No point of planning your next Storage Area Network and not knowing about hyper converged platforms!

Anyway, before I get lost in this article, please find below some key areas that I hope will improve your IT architecture. They might seem like small steps but they are important in establishing a successful IT architecture culture and removing the Ivory Tower once and for all!

Expectations and Engagement

It is important to do a stakeholder analysis, you need to get a deep understanding of who is interested in what you are doing and probably more importantly their power to help or hinder!  This is your baseline audience, have this reviewed regularly in today’s businesses your stakeholders are on the move every 1-2 years! It important you are not missing critical Promoters and Latents. In my experience your IT colleagues will fall into two important categories, your Promoters and Defenders.

It is so important to align on the expectations of IT architecture with your stakeholders and understand their needs and concerns. Sit down with your Operations Director and listen to their concerns and needs. What does success look like to them? Spend time with your PMO and Project Mangers, when would be the best time for an ARB in their opinion? I guarantee it won’t be in the go-live week! Share your documents and formats, they might be easy for your team to read but are they clear to everyone else?

IT Architecture is exciting and your IT team will want to know the direction and what technology is coming in the pipeline. If you are holding roadmap sessions with only your architecture function present then you will disengage your colleagues. It is important that your stakeholders are represented and that your key Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are invited to help shape the future. Jointly creating your roadmaps will improve the buy-in to the direction.

Crowd sourcing your architecture roadmaps will make them robust and realistic. Co-authoring your documents with peer review from outside of architecture will ensure they are understood, supported, promoted and implemented. IT architecture is a team sport!

Transparency

It is important that you make your roadmaps and supporting documents accessible and they need to be up to date! Your Architecture Principles need to be readily available to everyone within IT. A portal, not a file share, a place where collaboration can occur and comments can be made. You need to create a self-service IT architecture platform to build a community and move away from your static bi-annual PowerPoint deck that nobody can find!

Create a communication plan for your stakeholders and stick to it! Never miss an opportunity to communicate a win, crisis avoided or a mistake. I have famously said VMware wouldn’t go anywhere and I don’t see the point in an iPhone! Your team isn’t impervious to failure, your team’s credibility and performance will improve with vulnerability.

Pace and Urgency

Most of your colleagues believe that a bad day for an IT architect is a queue for their morning coffee!

Remember your peers are delivering under significant pressure to deadlines and resolving incidents and problems 24/7. Make an effort to get out of your helicopter now and again to run around on the floor. In order to make architecture feel real for your colleagues (and yourself…) take an active role in major incident reviews. There will be valuable lessons for architecture in those meetings and it will strengthen your IT architecture community.

Finally

You have a job in planning and shaping the future but you should also be concerned about what is happening in the present. The problems IT faces today may well be your organisations previous architecture decisions. Take time to reflect on IT problems to identify any learnings to improve your IT architecture process. Create feedback loops back into architecture for cost, security, performance and availability to form some basic KPIs to measure your success and the teams value!