Thoughts on the World

My good friend and sometime manager, Mike Rawlins, has just started a new blog ruminating on leadership. In his first post, he discusses the question of how to decide what to do, to “do the right thing”.

Now I’m not sure whether his guidance on decision making process is generic, or whether that process depends on your organisational position and role in determining “the right thing”.  I don’t know whether the key difference in our perspectives is between leadership as a manager versus leadership as an influencer, or the difference between managerial and technical leadership, or the difference between synthesising solutions and deciding which to adopt, but Mike’s article portrays a very different perspective to mine.

Mike portrays as key the ability to focus on key issues, and exclude those which are “not relevant”.

In my experience as an architect and technical leader, I spend a lot of time understanding and analysing the different forces on a problem. These design forces may be technical, or human: financial, commercial or political. The challenge is to find a solution which best balances all the design forces, which if possible satisfies the requirements of all stakeholders. It is usually wrong and ultimately counter-productive to simply ignore some of the stakeholders or requirements as “less important” – any stakeholder (and by stakeholders I mean all those involved, not just senior managers) can derail a project if not happy.

Where design forces are either aligned or orthogonal, there is usually a “sweet spot” which strikes an acceptable balance. The problem effectively becomes one of performing a multi-dimensional linear analysis, and then articulating the solution.

However, sometimes the forces act in direct opposition. A good example, currently personally relevant, is system security, where requirements for broad, easy access directly conflict with those for high security. In these cases the architect has to invest heavily in his skills in diplomacy – to invest a lot of time understanding stakeholder positions. One common problem is “requirements” expressed as solutions, which usually hide an underlying concern which can be met many ways, once understood.

In cases of diametrically opposed requirements, there are usually three options:

1. Compromise – find an intermediate position acceptable to both. This may work, but it may be unacceptable to both, or it may fatally compromise the architecture.
2. Allow one requirement to dominate. This has to be a senior level business decision. As an architect, you then have to be sensitive to whether the outcome is genuinely accepted and viable, or whether suppressing the other requirements will cause the solution to fail.
3. Reformulate the problem to remove or reduce the conflict. In the security example the architect may come up with a cunning partitioning of the system which allows access to different elements under different security rules.

Of course, you can’t resolve all the problems at once – that way lies madness. An architect uses techniques like layered or modular structures, and multiple views of the architecture to “separate concerns”. These are powerful tools to manage the problem’s complexity.

It’s also important to remember that the architecture, and its resolution of the various design forces (i.e. how it meets various stakeholder needs) have to be communicated to many who are not technical experts. The technical leader must take much of this responsibility. I have had great success with single-topic briefing papers, which describe aspects like security in business terms, and which are short and focused enough to encourage the readers to also consider their concerns separately.

One area where I do agree with Mike is the need to listen to the voice inside, and carry decisions through with integrity. For an architect, the question is whether the architecture is elegant, and will deliver an adequately efficient, reliable and flexible solution. If your internal answer to this is not an honest “yes”, you need to understand why not, and decide whether you and your users can live with the compromises.

And finally, the architect must protect the integrity of the solution against the slings and arrows of outrageous projects. Monitor in particular those design aspects which reflect compromises between design forces, because they will inevitably come under renewed pressure over time. You have to not only do the right thing, but ensure it is done right.

Non-Sequiteur

About the weird title: Mike is attempting to create his blog based largely on 1970s Prog Rock references. As a tribute to such an excellent idea, I feel compelled to join in (at least on this occasion)!

I’ve just spent two days at the 2008 Enterprise Architecture Conference in London. It was a very high quality event, with a range of speakers covering topics from pragmatic analysis techniques to how to manage knowledge through the life of NASA’s Mars programme, more than any single working lifetime.

Overall there was much less focus on technology (read SOA and modelling tools) this year, and a vigorous and renewed focus on business alignment and business architecture, which, if we can deliver, potentially places architecture where it should be, as the business’s agent.

But there’s a problem. Good business analysis is fundamental to this, yet several delegates bemoaned the current lack of good business analysts. User organisations often struggle to articulate and abstract their needs, and this feeds into all downstream processes. Modelled requirements are an increasing rarity, poorly substituted by imprecise verbal statements in Word or PowerPoint.

The problem is, of course, not unique to analysts, and may have common cause with the equal lack of architects. Senior architects and analysts both tend to have several big birthdays under the belt, and many learned their trade as developers, gaining both practical method skills and the experience of turning ideas into working code. (The majority of exceptions have other “making it work” experience, such as building networks or running data centres.)

But in the current world of ERP packages and large-scale outsourcing, many organisations no longer build anything themselves. The live classroom has been thrown away.

I have worked with a number of good, keen young analysts, but most work for large supplier companies who still have both well-funded training programmes and the breadth of work to build experience and a broad skill set. These guys and girls can do a good job, but at the risk of higher costs and potential conflicts of interest.

We already know that this may reduce organisations’ ability to ensure the right solution to their needs, or assure its quality. Recent observations suggest that organisations who forgoe getting their hands dirty in IT will also suffer an increasing difficulty in creating a clear, concise and structured statement of those needs themselves.

I’ve been musing lately on why we in IT insist on forgetting so much valuable knowledge. I don’t know whether it’s because of our youth-obsessed culture and our focus on the newest and best, because of our tendency to prioritise on-the-job over traditional learning, or whether there’s simply too much in the “architect’s book of knowledge” (ABOK), and we all have to focus on the new to
keep up.

I explore two very different examples: the value of understanding RS232 in this 3G+ world, and some recent discussions on service
reliability, both of which can be resolved using some quite old
knowledge…. (Read More…)