Though many of the architects and architectural frameworks believe that an Enterprise Architecture must closely align with business goals, I tend to see things in its most fundamental derivative. It is important to have an Architecture vision to achieve a business strategy, but equally important it is to understand the importance of the chapter anyone would study in engineering, much before they may study business, that is “The Strength of Materials”. Evolving upon the same underpinning, one must believe in equally acknowledging “The Relevance and Application of Materials” as one of the drivers for Technology, and hence an Enterprise Architecture.
The realization of the concept came to me while watching a Discovery Channel documentary on building Dubai’s luxury hotel Burj Al Arab right off the coast of an artificial beach. Where conventional architects would have chosen the age old way, the project’s lead architect Tom Wright devised an ingenious idea for securing the hotel’s foundation, where the builders drove 230 40-meter long concrete piles into the sand. Thus the foundation is held in place not by bedrock, but by the friction of the sand and silt along the length of the piles, something that was so abundantly available and inexpensive.
Understanding the environment works way more advantageous than applying the stereotypical methodologies. It lets you harness the right potential of your IT infrastructure, and build upon it in a more efficient way to realize the business vision, not only by reducing costs, but also cutting the most important factor today – the Time to Market, letting your business gain that competitive lead over others.
Not every IT material, hardware or software is best designed for all conditions. While some may prove more beneficial to one organization, others have to comprehend the resemblance and dissimilarities in the way their business operate, their market distribution and most importantly, their actual return on investment. They say money saved is money earned, and following this approach can start making (by saving) money even before a project starts simply by investing in the right building blocks.
In my experience, I have often seen architects and decision makers having a holistic view on technology as a business driver while neglecting the environment and the materials that build it. And it all looks so perfect until they stumble upon the limitation of the product and/or the technology to achieve this goal. And so begins a classic battle between the business and the vendor, mightier of which causes either the product to transform or otherwise and in more often cases, change the scope of the project all together. Whichever may be the case, it always works against the business in terms of wastage time and resource.
Thus it becomes very crucial for an architect not to get rapt following a sales evangelist’s idea of latest and greatest, but consider the material’s actual application in context of his enterprise business and realize that:
It’s always better to think twice before than regretting it later
