Matthew Oskowis

The primary benefits of Architecture are:

• Become a dominant player in your industry/market
• Deal with organizational or product complexity
• Enable something that is not possible/feasible today
• Establish a shared technology foundation for a product line
• Be in business in 5 years
• Want a product, system or family of applications to have qualities or system characteristics such as a high level of integration, evolvability, understandability, etc.

Good architecture enhances productivity by:

• Allows components to be developed in parallel, by outside contractors (i.e. outsourcing), etc.
• Ensures the components fit together (through standard interfaces and common mechanisms)
• Is flexible, evolvable, adaptable (with replaceable components, localized changes, etc.)
• Provides mechanisms for consistency, interoperability (through common services and infrastructure)

These features enhance productivity and allow the organization to focus on
differentiation.

Reality Check – The architecture(s) that are being discussed are those of significance. The simple application architecture created by a small team for it’s own use in development makes a contribution to that team, but tends to not to be highly strategic to the company. The architecture mentioned are those intended to be strategic, and which by their nature are more complex, both technically and organizationally.

These may be:

• Architectures for a product family/line
• Architectures that span multiple organizations ( divisions, groups, functions, etc.)
• Architectures that have a lot of uncertainty

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