Zang Jing Ge: The Way of the Architect

Architects are Strange

The job of IT architect is a strange one.

Many people don’t really know what IT architects do (I’m pretty sure that I have never given a convincing account of my job to my non-technical friends and family).

Even fewer people understand what makes one architect better than another.

But every team knows when they’ve got a good one: problems seem to get solved quicker, decisions seem to get made faster, and the team has someone to turn to when they have questions like ‘How in the world does that work?’ or ‘How on Earth are we going to get it to do that?’

In the HSBC Technology team we believe three things about architects.

First, we believe that, whatever architects do, and whatever makes them great, we need more of them.

Second, we believe that we have figured out at least some of the features of great architects.

And third, we believe that these features can be learned.

There are many things which make a great architect (including 13 advanced leadership behaviours which I will share in a later blog post), but we have condensed them into three important dimensions: technical excellence; communication mastery; and leadership power.

Technical Excellence

Since we first dreamt up the idea of an IT architect, and since the earliest days of enterprise architecture people have worried (and introspected, and blogged, and argued) about whether architecture in enterprises is a business discipline or a technical discipline.

As a result, for a good few years, it was possible to get away with calling yourself an architect with no greater technical skills than PowerPoint and Excel.

It’s very clear to us that this way of thinking is over. The modern world is built from technology, there is serious work to do to figure out how put this technology together to solve problems, build businesses and serve customers, and it is the job of architects to do that work. This job has only become more urgent (and more fun) as the range of technologies available to us has proliferated.

We expect every architect in the organisation (up to and including me in my role as Chief Architect) to seek and demonstrate technical excellence.

Communication Mastery

Paradoxically, the stereotype of the PowerPoint architect has long co-existed with the stereotype of the architect as a deep-thinking technical expert whose advice would surely be invaluable if only we could understand it.

We believe that this type of architect is not doing the job properly. There is no point in having the greatest ideas in the world if no-one else knows about them: the job of the architect is to get their ideas out of their own heads and into the heads of other people.

Communication is essential in all companies, but at HSBC it is especially important. We have over 220,000 people working across 66 countries, and our architects need to get their ideas to every corner of the organisation. This is a never ending job which needs energy and attention.

We expect every architect to develop and practice their written and spoken communication skills, and to communicate continuously and habitually.

Leadership Power

It might seem odd to talk about leadership in the context of architecture. One of the good things about being an architect is that you can normally get your job done without directly managing large numbers of people. (I run one of the smallest functions in Technology - less than 150 people - and even my architecture practice, comprising all the architects across the Technology organisation, is less than 1,000 people. Some of peers run teams of eight to ten thousand people.)

However, leadership doesn’t mean managing huge teams of people: leadership (especially for architects) means getting people to follow you, regardless of organisational hierarchy.

It’s not strange to emphasise leadership for architects: architecture is a leadership discipline.

Architects need to translate ambiguous, open-ended problems into solutions which people can follow, they need to take decisions and convince people to stick to those decisions, and they need to encourage people to keep going when the going turns out to be harder than expected.

In many organisations, architects fall back on governance and controls to force people to do what they want, but if they rely exclusively on these methods they are failing to lead.

We expect every architect to be a leader, and to derive leadership power from their skills and behaviour, not from their position in the hierarchy or governance authority.

Giving it a Name

So, we believe that great architects have technical excellence (the ability to take good design decisions), communication mastery (the ability to get other people to understand them) and leadership power (the ability to get people to follow them).

That’s a bit of a mouthful, though, so we decided to come up with a name that embodied these attributes. We ran a competition across the Architecture Practice, and Ming Jin, our Chief Architect for Risk came up with a name and concept that fit the bill: Zang Jing Ge, the name for the inner sanctum of a Chinese temple, where the scrolls of power are kept. In Kung Fu films and literature, Zang Jing Ge is the place the hero goes to learn new skills and level up.

For us, an architect reaches Zang Jing Ge by achieving technical excellence, communication mastery and leadership power.

We recognise that achieving Zang Jing Ge is hard, if not impossible. Every architect (including me) needs to work continuously to improve their technical, leadership and communication skills. We use our Technology Academy to help, with a training programme ranging from basic technical skills and introductory design thinking, through our Unicorn programme for people starting out as Solution Architects, to advanced training and coaching, such as the Leaders for Teachers course provided by HSBC University.

We think we know what architects do, we think we know what makes a great architect, and we’re working really hard to help people become architects, and to help our architects become great.