Going Even Higher Than the 30,000' View

Architects will often talk about looking at a solution from the "30,000' view."  As much as I have been traveling lately, this could be taken to refer to looking at solution diagrams while on my US Airways flight.  What it really means, of course, is that an architect's job is to step back from simple functional requirements and see the "bigger picture."  A developer may write a single tiered system because it performs well and is straightforward and simple to code.  An architect may look at that system from a larger perspective and see that it is tightly coupled and difficult to reuse.  I believe that this larger perspective is at the core of what solution architects do.  It is our role to understand how design decisions impact the IT ecosystem as a whole, but the more time I spend in this role, the more I discover that there is more to be done. 

Like Brue Lee said in "Enter the Dragon", when you drop a rock into a pond, it makes ripples that reach across the entire body of water.  Similarly, every technology decision an organization makes has an impact on every part of the organization.  Here is a purely fictional example:

• Company A selects a best-of-breed CRM package to meet their business CRM requirements, but their operational staff and data center have no expertise in managing this solution.  The cost of either acquiring these skills in-house, or outsourcing them, becomes significant.  In addition, the solution is highly proprietary and efforts to share CRM data with other systems is costly and time consuming.  Also, the best-of-breed solution is not flexible enough to keep pace with emerging technology trends and so is no longer best-of-breed in 5 years. 

In this example, Comany A clearly made a poor decision.  Why?  Because they did not look at the bigger picture.  They met their business requirements, but failed to adequatly consider technology trends, their IT ecosystem, and business impacts.  The National Architecture Team at Microsoft is developing a framework for analyzing and evaluating the quality of IT decisions. Systemic Quality Impact Analysis (SQIA) is an evolving framework for performing qualitative analysis of IT decisions.  More importantly, it enables architects to begin collecting "Impact Patterns" that are industry specific.  The promise of this approach is that we will develop a deep and rich library of industry specific patterns that inform IT decision makers and give them a view of the impacts that is well above the 30,000' level.  As solution architects, whose job it is to have the large view, making our scope of vision even larger can only be a good thing.