The Winchester House
Have you heard about the Winchester House? It is a Queen Anne style?mansion, in?San Jose, California. It was built at the turn of the 20th century by?Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearms magnate?William Winchester.?
This mansion has an impressive amount of rooms, kitchens, fireplaces and staircases …
950 doors
160 rooms
47 fireplaces
40 staircases
40 bedrooms
6 kitchens
2 ballrooms
It has also an impressive amount of skylights, doors leading to nowhere and abandoned stairs…
52 skylights …
65 trap doors …
13 abandoned stairs …
Construction lasted 38 years … had 147 different builders … and 0 architects!
This house is a living testimony that you can build without a master plan, at the expense of time, money, and usability.
And the same happens with software. You could skip the IT architect and a master plan, but at the expense of cost, time and usability.
To give an example, some time ago I was asked to do an IT assessment at an organization in the critical infrastructure sector.
The application diagram looked like this: there were 41 coloured boxes, representing software applications, 10 dashed lines and 3 continuous lines which represented future and actual interfaces, respectively. And there were 15 isolated applications, the so called information islands.
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Information should flow along processes, so I was curious to know how it was happening there with all those information islands. I chose a fairy intuitive and core process, the network infrastructure process, which consists on planning, designing, building, operating and maintaining the infrastructure.
What I found is that every step of the process is disconnected from the adjacent ones, meaning that data needs to be manually reintroduced in every step of the process. All the other processes had similar issues. Or worse, some processes had steps without any software application.
There are 3 lessons we can learn from this:
#1 Always walk-through
To see if a house meets your needs, you walk through it as if you were living there.
When you are designing or selecting a software application, you need to walk through it.
You don’t buy a house only by seeing the photos and in the same way you shouldn’t buy a software application only by watching a vendor presentation.
#2 Consider the boundaries
When you select a house, you should consider what you need to be at the boundaries: public transportation, supermarkets, schools, green areas.
In the same way, when you select a software application, you should think about which interfaces you need to other software applications.
Either selecting a house or a software application, boundaries are something you should always consider.
#3 Experts take you faster and further
If you're looking for your dream home, a real estate professional can help you finding it.
And similarly, if you want to build a robust IT architecture or select the applications that best fit your organization's needs, a specialist company like Newbridge Digital can help you with that.
Either designing a house or a software solution, you will need the help of an expert with an architect mindset.