Guiding Principles for Enterprise Architects

Minimalist Architecture Principle

Essentially, the Minimalist Architecture Principle says “if a decision can reasonably be made by someone with a more narrow scope of responsibility, defer the decision to that person or group.” This means that architects only make decisions that require the overall perspective and authority that the architect has. If a decision has local impact, then the architect has no need to mess with it. If the decision has broad impact, and the impact has highly strategic consequences, then the decision fits the minimalist architecture criterion.

Minimalist Architecture Principle: Make only those decisions that have to be made at this level of scope to achieve the business strategy and meet the architecture objectives and vision.

Decisions With Teeth Principle

Another way of pruning the Enterprise Architecture decision set is to apply the Decisions with Teeth Principle. Decisions that have teeth are those that are both enforceable and enforced. They can and will be adhered to, and if not, there will be consequences. This means that the decisions must be well-formed. They have to be unambiguous and have a clear scope of applicability. And there must be a governance process that allows for discovery of breaches and determines consequences, rather than simply granting exceptions.
Too often, architects and their deployment communities treat enterprise architecture decisions as statements of “general good.” These decisions are treated like guidelines or suggestions, which other architects, designers or implementers choose whether or not to follow. Such decisions have no teeth.
This may highlight a need to improve your governance process, but even with a strong governance process in place, objections raised in the name of customer advocacy have a powerful shield. That is, arguments in favor of the “general good” are susceptible to counter-arguments made in the name of a customer or immediate concern.

The reason to avoid making decisions that are likely to be dismissed is simple: you do not want the whole Enterprise Architecture to be tarred with the failure brush for the sake decisions that will be ignored and/or cannot be enforced. Further, it is a waste of time for the architect to make, and for others to think about and then ignore, such decisions.

Decisions With Teeth Principle: Only include decisions in your Enterprise Architecture that you, and the governance organization, are willing and able to enforce.

Connect-the-Dots Principle

This presents a conundrum which is resolved by applying another principle, which we call Connect-the-Dots. According to this principle, each architecture decision must be rationalized in terms of business goals, architecture requirements, or higher-level architecture decisions. You see, the only voice that stands any chance of holding its own against the voice of the customer is the voice of the business. Business strategy represents the voice of the business, and connect-the-dots creates a compelling chain that links business strategy to architecture goals to architecture decisions.
At its best, business strategy is well grounded in the voice of the customer and it is grounded in the voice of the business telling the story of competitive differentiation. It takes into account the competitive environment, the value network, internal capabilities and financial goals. Enterprise Architecture that takes business strategy as its starting point, and shows how each architecture decision is necessary to achieve the business strategy, expresses the voice of the business, and follows the connect-the-dots principle.

When the case has been made that the enterprise architecture decisions satisfy these three principles, then that set of decisions can be described as the technical expression of the business strategy. When such a decision, clearly driven by the business strategy, is ignored, we need to realize that it is not the architecture that is being brought into question, but the strategy itself. This focuses discussion where it belongs. The overall business strategy, like the enterprise architecture, optimizes across the organization. We need to not get distracted by debate about technology questions when the real issue is clarifying and enforcing what is strategic to the business.

Connect-the-Dots Principle: There must be a traceable connection from business strategy to each enterprise architecture decision

via bredemeyer.com

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