Architecture: Everything for everyone

Standing in the assembly line, you`re holding the car door you`ve just built, waiting to attach it to the vehicle on the belt. Based on plans and estimates put together by your team, you`ve created four doors. As you look up the assembly line, you see a car shell approaching that in no way matches the door you`ve built - the colour is wrong, the size is completely different and, worst of all, there are 200 shells coming down the line, all wanting doors attached.

To solve the issue of architecture, we must first define it.

Craig Martin, MD, SiloFx Enterprise Architecture Solutions.

This seems an unlikely scenario in today`s manufacturing world, yet this happens every year within the business and IT world. Plans become lost, standards greyed and procedures clouded. Each department operates according to its own agenda, not understanding the big picture. The departments build solutions they think will solve their problems but, in reality, they`re creating duplication, redundancy and runaway projects.

The result is the dreaded silo or stovepipe effect, and companies spend millions each year on integration (making the door fit the car) and even more on infrastructure (building more of the same wrong doors to match the demand). If manufacturing and other areas have got this principle right, why has the IT and business world neglected it? Lack of enterprise-wide architecture and, more importantly, the lack of understanding of enterprise architecture is often the answer to this key question.

To solve the issue of architecture, we must first define it. According to Dr Steven Spewak, author of "Enterprise Architecture Planning, Developing Blueprints for Your Business", enterprise architecture is "a method to define blueprints for the use of information in support of the business and the plan for implementing them". Enterprise architecture guru, John Zachman, put forward a slightly higher-level definition: "The method to take your strategy forward according to a single master plan."

One can see that even the experts have varying definitions. This variance in understanding and defining architecture also occurs across business and the marketplace. Often, this variance is not necessarily a bad thing, since one of the primary areas that architecture is meant to support is the variety of different views and viewpoints of various stakeholders.

One could therefore use well-known software architect Martin Fowler`s definition. He defines architecture as a "shared understanding of the technologies, information and processes that are used to enable the business". Architecture can therefore be defined simply as: "The shared understanding of what is important."

Experience has taught me that architecture is actually "everything for everyone". With that in mind, businesses should seek to embrace the different stakeholders within their respective domains, and represent the architecture based on the views that these stakeholders have of the business.

This does imply a certain level of complexity, and therefore in order to box the thinking around architecture to support the viewpoints of stakeholders, various architectural styles have been developed. Termed boxologies, these styles are the classification of a set of rules that identify the kinds of components and relationships that may be used to compose a business unit or system, together with local or global constraints on the way the composition is done.

Although architectural styles come in a variety of flavours, the choice of architectural style is often a one-to-one relationship with the type of person the architect is. These architect types can be classified as:

* The scientist, who sees the organisation as an organism to which the laws of physics and mathematics can be applied;

* The engineer, who desires a structured and logical methodology and framework for deconstructing problems and reconstructing them according to frameworks and patterns; and

* The artist, who sees the business as a canvas and takes complex colours and perspectives and converts them into a single overall theme.

Architecture nowadays is seeking to bring more of an artistic flare into the field. This is because the artist`s mind is more resistant to structured analytical thinking and seeks to apply new and different thought patterns to solving common problems. Artists are often more able to convert complexity and chaos into a canvas scene of separate yet ordered elements that convey a picture as a whole.

However, the engineer`s structured view of methodology and logical problem resolution using layering, patterns and techniques is currently the standard. Physics and science now also offer a view of the business organism and its action-reaction to a world in flux. Architects can learn how current laws of nature and science can help them de-construct and solve business problems.

This ethereal domain of architecture is therefore a multi-dimensional one, where multiple views, viewpoints, skills and styles meet to produce the solutions that all businesses seek in order to develop their own blueprints for success. Throughout this coming year, I will deal with each of the facets of the architecture domain, and bring to light some of the advances within this growing field.

SiloFX sponsors ITWeb`s enterprise architecture industry portal, which takes an in-depth look at this still often misunderstood discipline. Enterprise architecture provides the blueprint to ensure the best IT value contribution possible. It`s becoming increasingly important in a business environment characterised by mergers, acquisitions and consolidations, where the ability to quickly integrate business and IT plans is paramount.