Architectural Thinking
I just had the pleasure of attending a 3 day "crash course" architectural thinking class. This was sponsored by my company and facilitated by architects from a large and successful consulting company.
It was very interesting to see the perspective of the consultants who taught the class. The material was very relevant and the discussions with my peers in our organization where good. By the middle of day two I really began to question the point of the class. Much of what was discussed was very necessary for a consulting organization and I would argue has value in any IT department, but I'm not sure it was solving problems we need solved.
In discussion after the class, one major problem we need to address is what I call the "road to nowhere" problem. We're furiously building solutions, setting standards, generally doing a bang-up job getting things done; but we're not sure where we're going or worse yet, if anyone else is going to want to go there also. Adding to the problem, we are not sharing our findings with our peers (or are doing it inconsistently) so we're solving the same problems over and over again.
I've started making noise about getting serious about our document management and information organization. We cannot be successful without this and it is much more fundamental than "architectural thinking".
It was very interesting to see the perspective of the consultants who taught the class. The material was very relevant and the discussions with my peers in our organization where good. By the middle of day two I really began to question the point of the class. Much of what was discussed was very necessary for a consulting organization and I would argue has value in any IT department, but I'm not sure it was solving problems we need solved.
In discussion after the class, one major problem we need to address is what I call the "road to nowhere" problem. We're furiously building solutions, setting standards, generally doing a bang-up job getting things done; but we're not sure where we're going or worse yet, if anyone else is going to want to go there also. Adding to the problem, we are not sharing our findings with our peers (or are doing it inconsistently) so we're solving the same problems over and over again.
I've started making noise about getting serious about our document management and information organization. We cannot be successful without this and it is much more fundamental than "architectural thinking".
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