complexity management

Why IoT is changing Enterprise Architecture

The Learning CTO, , , , , , , 4 Comments

[tl;dr The discipline of enterprise architecture as an aid to business strategy execution has failed for most organizations, but is finding a new lease of life in the Internet of Things.]

The strategic benefits of having an enterprise-architecture based approach to organizational change – at least in terms of business models and shared capabilities needed to support those models – have been the subject of much discussion in recent years.

However, enterprise architecture as a practice (as espoused by The Open Group and others) has never managed to break beyond it’s role as an IT-focused endeavor.

In the meantime, less technology-minded folks are beginning to discuss business strategy using terms like ‘modularity’, which is a first step towards bridging the gap between the business folks and the technology folks. And technology-minded folks are looking at disruptive business strategy through the lens of the ‘Internet of Things‘.

Business Model Capability Decomposition

Just like manufacturing-based industries decomposed their supply-chains over the past 30+ years (driving an increasingly modular view of manufacturing), knowledge-based industries are going through a similar transformation.

Fundamentally, knowledge based industries are based on the transfer and management of human knowledge or understanding. So, for example, you pay for something, there is an understanding on both sides that that payment has happened. Technology allows such information to be captured and managed at scale.

But the ‘units’ of knowledge have only slowly been standardized, and knowledge-based organizations are incentivized to ensure they are the only ones to be able to act on the information they have gathered – to often disastrous social and economic consequences (e.g., the financial crisis of 2008).

Hence, regulators are stepping into to ensure that at least some of this ‘knowledge’ is available in a form that allows governments to ensure such situations do not arise again.

In the FinTech world, every service provided by big banks is being attacked by nimble competitors able to take advantage of new, more meaningful technology-enabled means of engaging with customers, and who are willing to make at least some of this information more accessible so that they can participate in a more flexible, dynamic ecosystem.

For these upstart FinTech firms, they often have a stark choice to make in order to succeed. Assuming they have cleared the first hurdle of actually having a product people want, at some point, they must decide whether they are competing directly with the big banks, or if they are providing a key part of the electronic financial knowledge ecosystem that big banks must (eventually) be part of.

In the end, what matters is their approach to data: how they capture it (i.e., ‘UX’), what they do with it, how they manage it, and how it is leveraged for competitive and commercial advantage (without falling foul of privacy laws etc). Much of the rest is noise from businesses trying to get attention in an increasingly crowded space.

Historically, many ‘enterprise architecture’ or strategy departments fail to have impact because firms do not treat data (or information, or knowledge) as an asset, but rather as something to be freely and easily created and shunted around, leaving a trail of complexity and lost opportunity cost wherever it goes. So this attitude must change before ‘enterprise architecture’ as a concept will have a role in boardroom discussions, and firms change how they position IT in their business strategy. (Regulators are certainly driving this for certain sectors like finance and health.)

Internet of Things

Why does the Internet Of Things (IoT) matter, and where does IoT fit into all this?

At one level, IoT presents a large opportunity for firms which see the potential implied by the technologies underpinning IoT; the technology can provide a significant level of convenience and safety to many aspects of a modern, digitally enabled life.

But fundamentally, IoT is about having a large number of autonomous actors collaborating in some way to deliver a particular service, which is of value to some set of interested stakeholders.

But this sounds a lot like what a ‘company’ is. So IoT is, in effect, a company where the actors are technology actors rather than human actors. They need some level of orchestration. They need a common language for communication. And they need laws/protocols that govern what’s permitted and what is not.

If enterprise architecture is all about establishing the functional, data and protocol boundaries between discrete capabilities within an organization, then EA for IoT is the same thing but for technical components, such as sensors or driverless cars, etc.

So IoT seems a much more natural fit for EA thinking than traditional organizations, especially as, unlike departments in traditional ‘human’ companies, technical components like standards: they like fixed protocols, fixed functional boundaries and well-defined data sets. And while the ‘things’ themselves may not be organic, their behavior in such an environment could exhibit ‘organic’ characteristics.

So, IoT and and the benefits of an enterprise architecture-oriented approach to business strategy do seem like a match made in heaven.

The Converged Enterprise

For information-based industries in particular, there appears to be an inevitable convergence: as IoT and the standards, protocols and governance underpinning it mature, so too will the ‘modular’ aspects of existing firms operating models, and the eco-system of technology-enabled platforms will mature along with it. Firms will be challenged to deliver value by picking the most capable components in the eco-system around which to deliver unique service propositions – and the most successful of those solutions will themselves become the basis for future eco-systems (a Darwinian view of software evolution, if you will).

The converged enterprise will consist of a combination of human and technical capabilities collaborating in well-defined ways. Some capabilities will be highly human, others highly technical, some will be in-house, some will be part of a wider platform eco-system.

In such an organization, enterprise architects will find a natural home. In the meantime, enterprise architects must choose their starting point, behavioral or structural: focusing first on decomposed business capabilities and finishing with IoT (behavioral->structural), or focusing first on IoT and finishing with business capabilities (structural->behavioral).

Technical Footnote

I am somewhat intrigued at how the OSGi Alliance has over the years shifted its focus from basic Java applications, to discrete embedded systems, to enterprise systems and now to IoT. OSGi, (disappointingly, IMO), has had a patchy record changing how firms build enterprise software – much of this is to do with a culture of undisciplined dependency management in the software industry which is very, very hard to break.

IoT raises the bar on dependency management: you simply cannot comprehensively test software updates to potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of components running that software. The ability to reliably change modules without forcing a test of all dependent instantiated components is a necessity. As enterprises get more complex and digitally interdependent, standards such as OSGi will become more critical to the plumbing of enabling technologies. But as evidenced above, for folks who have tried and failed to change how enterprises treat their technology-enabled business strategy, it’s a case of FIETIOT – Failed in Enterprise, Trying IoT. And this, indeed, seems a far more rational use of an enterprise architect’s time, as things currently stand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why IoT is changing Enterprise Architecture

Scaled Agile needs Slack

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[tl;dr In order to effectively scale agile, organisations need to ensure that a portion of team capacity is explicitly set aside for enterprise priorities. A re-imagined enterprise architecture capability is a key factor in enabling scaled agile success.]

What’s the problem?

From an architectural perspective, Agile methodologies are heavily dependent on business- (or function-) aligned product owners, which tend to be very focused on *their* priorities – and not the enterprise’s priorities (i.e., other functions or businesses that may benefit from the work the team is doing).

This results in very inward-focused development, and where dependencies on other parts of the organisation are identified, these (in the absence of formal architecture governance) tend to be minimised where possible, if necessary through duplicative development. And other teams requiring access to the team’s resources (e.g., databases, applications, etc) are served on a best-effort basis – often causing those teams to seek other solutions instead, or work without formal support from the team they depend on.

This, of course, leads to architectural complexity, leading to reduced agility all round.

The Solution?

If we accept the premise that, from an architectural perspective, teams are the main consideration (it is where domain and technical knowledge resides), then the question is how to get the right demand to the right teams, in as scalable, agile manner as possible?

In agile teams, the product backlog determines their work schedule. The backlog usually has a long list of items awaiting prioritisation, and part of the Agile processes is to be constantly prioritising this backlog to ensure high-value tasks are done first.

Well known management research such as The Mythical Man Month has influenced Agile’s goal to keep team sizes small (e.g., 5-9 people for scrum). So when new work comes, adding people is generally not a scalable option.

So, how to reconcile the enterprise’s needs with the Agile team’s needs?

One approach would be to ensure that every team pays an ‘enterprise’ tax – i.e., in prioritising backlog items, at least, say, 20% of work-in-progress items must be for the benefit of other teams. (Needless to say, such work should be done in such a way as to preserve product architectural integrity.)

20% may seem like a lot – especially when there is so much work to be done for immediate priorities – but it cuts both ways. If *every* team allows 20% of their backlog to be for other teams, then every team has the possibility of using capacity from other teams – in effect, increasing their capacity by much more than they could do on their own. And by doing so they are helping achieve enterprise goals, reducing overall complexity and maximising reuse – resulting in a reduction in project schedule over-runs, higher quality resulting architecture, and overall reduced cost of change.

Slack does not mean Under-utilisation

The concept of ‘Slack’ is well described in the book ‘Slack: Getting Past Burn-out, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency‘. In effect, in an Agile sense, we are talking about organisational slack, and not team slack. Teams, in fact, will continue to be 100% utilised, as long as their backlog consists of more high-value items then they can deliver. The backlog owner – e.g., scrum master – can obviously embed local team slack into how a particular team’s backlog is managed.

Implications for Project & Financial Management

Project managers are used to getting funding to deliver a project, and then to be able to bring all those resources to bear to deliver that project. The problem is, that is neither agile, nor does it scale – in an enterprise environment, it leads to increasingly complex architectures, resulting in projects getting increasingly more expensive, increasingly late, or delivering increasingly poor quality.

It is difficult for a project manager to accept that 20% of their budget may actually be supporting other (as yet unknown) projects. So perhaps the solution here is to have Enterprise Architecture account for the effective allocation of that spending in an agile way? (i.e., based on how teams are prioritising and delivering those enterprise items on their backlog). An idea worth considering..

Note that the situation is a little different for planned cross-business initiatives, where product owners must actively prioritise the needs of those initiatives alongside their local needs. Such planned work does not count in the 20% enterprise allowance, but rather counts as part of how the team’s cost to the enterprise is formally funded. It may result in a temporary increase in resources on the team, but in this case discipline around ‘staff liquidity’ is required to ensure the team can still function optimally after the temporary resource boost has gone.

The challenge regarding project-oriented financial planning is that, once a project’s goals have been achieved, what’s left is the team and underlying architecture – both of which need to be managed over time. So some dissociation between transitory project goals and longer term team and architecture goals is necessary to manage complexity.

For smaller, non-strategic projects – i.e., no incoming enterprise dependencies – the technology can be maintained on a lights-on basis.

Enterprise architecture can be seen as a means to asses the relevance of a team’s work to the enterprise – i.e., managing both incoming and outgoing team dependencies.  The higher the enterprise relevance of the team, the more critical the team must be managed well over time – i.e., team structure changes must be carefully managed, and not left entirely to the discretion of individual managers.

Conclusion

By ensuring that every project that purports to be Agile has a mandatory allowance for enterprise resource requirements, teams can have confidence that there is a route for them to get their dependencies addressed through other agile teams, in a manner that is independent of annual budget planning processes or short-term individual business priorities.

The effectiveness of this approach can be governed and evaluated by Enterprise Architecture, which would then allow enterprise complexity goals to be addressed without concentrating such spending within the central EA function.

In summary, to effectively scale agile, an effective (and possibly rethought) enterprise architecture capability is needed.

Scaled Agile needs Slack

Achieving modularity: functional vs volatility decomposition

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Enterprise architecture is all about managing complexity. Many EA initiatives tend to focus on managing IT complexity, but there is only so much that can be done there before it becomes obvious that IT complexity is, for the most part, a direct consequence of enterprise complexity. To recap, complexity needs to be managed in order to maintain agility – the ability for an organisation to respond (relatively) quickly and efficiently to changes in markets, regulations or innovation, and to continue to do this over time.

Enterprise complexity can be considered to be the activities performed and resources consumed by the organisation in order to deliver ‘value’, a metric usually measured through the ability to maintain (financial) income in excess of expenses over time.

Breaking down these activities and resources into appropriate partitions that allow holistic thinking and planning to occur is one of the key challenges of enterprise architecture, and there are various techniques to do this.

Top-Down Decomposition

The natural approach to decomposition is to first understand what an organisation does – i.e., what are the (business) functions that it performs. Simply put, a function is a collection of data and decision points that are closely related (e.g., ‘Payments ‘is a function). Functions typically add little value in and of themselves – rather they form part of an end-to-end process that delivers value for a person or legal entity in some context. For example, a payment on its own means nothing: it is usually performed in the context of a specific exchange of value or service.

So a first course of action is to create a taxonomy (or, more accurately, an ontology) to describe the functions performed consistently across an enterprise. Then, various processes, products or services can be described as a composition of those functions.

If we accept (and this is far from accepted everywhere) that EA is focused on information systems complexity, then EA is not responsible for the complexity relating to the existence of processes, products or services. The creation or destruction of these are usually a direct consequence of business decisions. However, EA should be responsible for cataloging these, and ensuring these are incorporated into other enterprise processes (such as, for example, disaster recovery or business continuity processes). And EA should relate these to the functional taxonomy and the information systems architecture.

This can get very complex very quickly due to the sheer number of processes, products and services – including their various variations – most organisations have. So it is important to partition or decompose the complexity into manageable chunks to facilitate meaningful conversations.

Enterprise Equivalence Relations

One way to do this at enterprise level is to group functions into partitions (aka domains) according to synergy or autonomy (as described by Roger Sessions), for all products/services supporting a particular business. This approach is based on the mathematical concept of equivalence. Because different functions in different contexts may have differing equivalence relationships, functions may appear in multiple partitions. One role of EA is to assess and validate if those functions are actually autonomous or if there is the potential to group apparently duplicate functions into a new partition.

Once partitions are identified, it is possible to apply ‘traditional’ EA thinking to a particular partition, because that partition is of a manageable size. By ‘traditional’ EA, I mean applying Zachman, TOGAF, PEAF, or any of the myriad methodologies/frameworks that are out there. More specifically, at that level, it is possible to establish a meaningful information systems strategy or goal for a particular partition that is directly supporting business agility objectives.

The Fallacy of Functional Decomposition

Once you get down to the level of partition, the utility of functional decomposition when it comes to architecting solutions becomes less useful. The natural tendency for architects would be to build reusable components or services that realise the various functions that comprise the partition. In fact, this may be the wrong thing to do. As Jüval Lowy demonstrates in his excellent webinar, this may result in more complexity, not less (and hence less agility).

When it comes to software architecture, the real reason to modularise your architecture is to manage volatility or uncertainty – and to ensure that volatility in one part of the architecture does not unnecessarily negatively impact another part of the architecture over time. Doing this allows agility to be maintained, so volatile parts of the application can, in fact, change frequently, at low impact to other parts of the application.

When looking at a software architecture through this lens, a quite different set of components/modules/services may become evident than those which may otherwise be obvious when using functional decomposition – the example in the webinar demonstrates this very well. A key argument used by Jüval in his presentation is that (to paraphrase him somewhat) functions are, in general, highly dependent on the context in which they are used, so to split them out into separate services may require making often impossible assumptions about all possible contexts the functions could be invoked in.

In this sense, identified components, modules or services can be considered to be providing options in terms of what is done, or how it is done, within the context of a larger system with parts of variable volatility. (See my earlier post on real options in the context of agility to understand more about options in this context.)

Partitions as Enterprise Architecture

When each partition is considered with respect to its relationship with other partitions, there is a lot of uncertainty around how different partitions will evolve. To allow for maximum flexibility, every partition should assume each other partition is a volatile part of their architecture, and design accordingly for this. This allows each partition to evolve (reasonably) independently with minimum fixed co-ordination points, without compromising the enterprise architecture by having different partitions replicate the behaviours of partitions they depend on.

This then allows:

  • Investment to be expressed in terms of impact to one or more partitions
  • Partitions to establish their own implementation strategies
  • Agile principles to be agreed on a per partition basis
  • Architectural standards to be agreed on a per partition basis
  • Partitions to define internally reusable components relevant to that partition only
  • Partitions to expose partition behaviour to other partitions in an enterprise-consistent way

In generative organisation cultures, partitions do not need to be organisationally aligned. However, in other organisation cultures (pathological or bureaucratic), alignment of enterprise infrastructure functions such as IT or operations (at least) with partitions (domains) may help accelerate the architectural and cultural changes needed – especially if coupled with broader transformations around investment planning, agile adoption and enterprise architecture.

Achieving modularity: functional vs volatility decomposition

Achieving Agile at Scale

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[tl;dr Scaling agile at the enterprise level will need rethinking how portfolio management and enterprise architecture are done to ensure success.]

Agility,as a concept, is gaining increasing attention within large organisations. The idea that business functions – and in particular IT – can respond quickly and iteratively to business needs is an appealing one.

The reasons why agility is getting attention are easy to spot: larger firms are getting more and more obviously unagile – i.e., the ability of business functions to respond to business needs in a timely and sustainable manner is getting progressively worse, even as a rapidly evolving competitive and technology-led commercial environment is demanding more agility.

Couple that with the heavy cost of failing to meet ever increasing regulatory compliance obligations, and ‘agile’ seems a very good idea indeed.

Agile is a great idea, but when implemented at scale (in large enterprise organisations), it can actually reduce enterprise agility, rather than increase it, unless great care is taken.

This is partly because Agile’s origins come from developing web applications: in these scenarios, there is usually a clear customer, a clear goal (to the extent that the team exists in the first place), and relatively tight timelines that favour short or non-existent analysis/design phases. Agile is perfect for these scenarios.

Let’s call this scenario ‘local agile’. It is quite easy to see a situation where every team, in response to the question, ‘are you doing agile?’, for teams to say ‘Yes, we do!’. So if every team is doing ‘local agile’, does that mean your organisation is now ‘agile’?

The answer is No. Getting every team to adopt agile practices is a necessary but insufficient step towards achieving enterprise agility. In particular, two key factors needs to be addressed before true a firm can be said to be ‘agile’ at the enterprise level. These are:

  1. The process by which teams are created and funded, and
  2. Enterprise awareness

Creating & Funding (Agile) Teams

Historically, teams are usually created as a result of projects being initiated: the project passes investment justification criteria, the project is initiated and a team is put in place, led by the project manager. Also, this process was owned entirely by the IT organisation, irrespective of which other organisations were stakeholders in the project.

At this point, IT’s main consideration is, will the project be delivered on time and on budget? The business sponsor’s main consideration is, will it give us what we need when we need it? And the enterprise’s consideration (which is often ignored) is who is accountable for ensuring that the IT implementation delivers value to the enterprise. (In this sense, the ‘enterprise’ could be either a major business line with full P&L responsibility for all activities performed in support of their business, or the whole organisation, including shared enterprise functions).

Delivering ‘value’ is principally about ensuring that  on-going or operational processes, roles and responsibilities are adjusted to maximise the benefits of a new technology implementation – which could include organisational change, marketing, customer engagement, etc.

However, delivering ‘value’ is not always correlated to one IT implementation; value can be derived from leveraging multiple IT capabilities in concert. Given the complexity of large organisations, it is often neither desirable or feasible to have a single IT partner be responsible for all the IT elements that collectively deliver business value.

On this basis, it is evident that how businesses plan and structure their portfolio of IT investments needs to change dramatically. In particular,

  1. The business value agenda is outcome focused and explicit about which IT capabilities are required to enable it, and
  2. IT investment is focused around the capability investment lifecycle that IT is responsible for stewarding.

In particular ‘capabilities’ (or IT products or services) have a lifecycle: this affects the investment and expectations around those capabilities. And some capabilities need to be more ‘agile’ than others – some must be agile to be useful, whereas for others, stability may be the over-riding priority, and therefore their lack of agility must be made explicit – so agile teams can plan around that.

Enterprise Awareness

‘Locally’ agile teams are a step in the right direction – particularly if the business stakeholders all agree they are seeing the value from that agility. But often this comes at the expense of enterprise awareness. In short, agility in the strict business sense can often only deliver results by ignoring some stakeholders interests. So ‘locally’ agile teams may feel they must minimise their interactions with other teams – particularly if those teams are not themselves agile.

If we assume that teams have been created through a process as described in the previous section, it becomes more obvious where the team sits in relation to its obligations to other teams. Teams can then make appropriate compromises to their architecture, planning and agile SDLC to allow for those obligations.

If the team was created through ‘traditional’ planning processes, then it becomes a lot harder to figure out what ‘enterprise awareness’ is appropriate (except perhaps or IT-imposed standards or gates, which only contributes indirectly to business value).

Most public agile success stories describe very well how they achieved success up to  – but not including – the point at which architecture becomes an issue. Architecture, in this sense, refers to either parts of the solution architecture which can no longer be delivered via one or two members of an agile team, or those parts of the business value chain that cannot be entirely delivered via the agile team on its own.

However, there are success stores (e.g., Spotify) that show how ‘enterprise awareness’ can be achieved without limiting agility. For many organisations, transitioning from existing organisation structures to new ‘agile-ready’ structures will be a major challenge, and far harder than simply having teams ‘adopt agile’.

Conclusions

With the increased attention on Agile, there is fortunately increased attention on scaling agile. Methodologies like Disciplined Agile Development (DaD) and LargE Scale Scrum (LeSS), coupled with portfolio concepts like Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) propose ways in which Agile can scale beyond the team and up to enterprise level, without losing the key benefits of the agile approach.

All scaled agile methodologies call for changes in how Portfolio Management and Enterprise Architecture are typically done within an organisation, as doing these activities right are key to the success of adopting Agile at scale.

Achieving Agile at Scale

The Importance of Principles in Managing Complexity

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[tl;dr The first step to managing complexity is to define what is important. Principles are a great way to reach consensus on what is important, and establishing governance around adherence to those principles are the first step to getting on top of change-related complexity.]

Managing complexity is not easy, whether you are in a large organisation, or in a relatively green-field environment where growth is rapid and complexity is a far-off problem you hope to have some day…

The fact is, if your organisation suffers from a complexity problem (in technology, and implicitly, processes and data), and you are still in (a profitable) business, then it is that complexity which, for better or for worse, has been the instrument of that organisation’s success. As a consequence, it is quite hard to convince people to implement complexity management (read ‘enterprise architecture’) before complexity actually becomes a problem.

Sometimes, however, unmanaged complexity brings an organisation’s growth to a grinding halt, in the worst cases leading to eventual shutdown. (In this context, an organisation can be an independent business or a business unit within a larger company.)

Historically, investment in IT incurred large capital costs, so usually there was a large focus on realising value from that investment – i.e. to exploit it to the maximum. Exploiting technology usually means adding on more and more functionality to existing systems in ways that meet business imperatives.  But business imperatives tend to be fairly short-term in nature. Without guiding principles, the act of exploiting technology leads to ever more expensive change-related costs.

For any self-respecting IT organisation, a core set of principles, actively governed, is an absolute necessity. Principles transcend solution architectures and technologies, and enable project autonomy as decisions can be made locally without requiring ‘central’ approval, provided principles are being adhered to.

Such principles, call them ‘implementation principles’ should guide how IT organisations do their work and manage change.

But many principles that stay only within the IT organisation may break in the face of over-whelming business imperatives: on the basis that the (immediate) business needs comes first, IT often takes it on the chin and accumulates technical debt.

So it is important to agree principles that business stakeholders agree to and supports, and for which they are willing to have an open discussion about in the context of delaying projects, increasing costs, prioritising change, or driving organisational change.

Let’s call these principles ‘value principles’ – they are focused on how the business can realise value from its investments, particularly in IT.

In order to understand what this means in practice, it may be worth returning to the ‘Zero CapEx IT’ concept introduced in my last post. What if all IT was sourced through (virtual or actual) 3rd parties, so that all of IT was delivered as software-as-a-service?

In this case, the ‘implementation principles’ would be whatever guidelines or standards were used by the SaaS provider to ensure they could deliver change reliably, and maintain service according to agreed levels. The SaaS provider has a vested interest in the client getting value out of their service, but the only levers they have to ensure that is their ability to react in a timely manner to change requests.

From the business’ perspective, adopting an IT (SaaS) service requires structural change to ensure the business can take advantage of the technology. This may mean assigning roles and responsibilities, defining new activities, maybe creating whole new departments, etc. The business may be paying for the service, but unless it pro-actively maximises what the service can offer in terms of what the business needs, it may not get the value. The SaaS (i.e., IT) can do little to address this situation, and may end up losing the client if the client does not take action.

On the other hand, if a client is pro-actively engaged, then they will likely want regular changes so they can continually optimise the value of the service to their operations. This puts the onus on the provider to remain agile.

In a corporate environment, where the accountability between value and implementation is often blurred, there is usually little optionality with respect to who your provider is – or, from a provider perspective, who your client is. In fact, the client/provider perspective in a corporate environment can be damaging, as it can reinforce an us-vs-them culture, leading to mistrust and an ‘order-taking’ mentality developing between the client and the provider.

In this environment, complexity will thrive because, after all, the client is tied and therefore has to keep paying for their service. There is little incentive to be agile..if the client wants more quicker, they have to pay for it.

If, on the other hand, the client retains an active, supportive interest in how their IT is delivered, as well as what is delivered, then they will get the IT they want.

If the client is not willing to agree certain base-line principles with their (IT) provider, and to put in place structures to enforce them (including a formal waiver process), then one can expect little to improve.

On the other hand, if the client or business partner will willingly participate in establishing principles and related governance forums, this will set the tone for how the business/IT relationship will evolve going forward.

At the very least, ‘value principles’ (such as, for example, “The business will commit to implementing the necessary structural changes to maximise IT investment”) should be agreed, and the consequence/implications of these to project planning should be understood.

Note that value principles are increasingly including concepts around data governance, which historically have been an ‘implementation’ principle – for example, the principle that ‘information is an asset’.

‘Implementation principles’  are principles which determine how (IT) change is decided and implemented, and how complexity is managed, by the provider. Where the business and technology are inter-twined (i.e., the business value proposition *is* the technology), these would simply form part of the business ‘value principles’. But where the business is agnostic as to the technology, and are only focused on value, then the ‘implementation principles’ are solely for the provider to define and enforce. An example of an ‘implementation’ principle may be ‘Control of technical diversity’, with consequent implications for solution architectures.

Adopting principles means that an organisation has some sense of what it wants to be, even if only aspirationally. It allows individuals or teams to feel comfortable making decisions on their own without feeling they have to get approval, which is key for agile cultures. Establishing formal business+IT forums to review principle waivers helps provide transparency with respect to project risk and platform risk. And it allows Technical Debt to be managed, as every waiver is a recognition of technical debt incurred.

In conclusion, managing complexity is hard. But Principles can make it manageable.

The Importance of Principles in Managing Complexity

The role of microservices in Enterprise Architectural planning

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Microservices as an architectural construct is gaining a lot of popularity, and the term is slowly but surely finding its place among the lexicon of developers and software architects. The precise definition of ‘microservices’ varies (it is not a formal concept in computer science, as to my knowledge it is not grounded in any formal mathematical abstraction) but the basic concept of a microservice being a reusable lightweight architectural component doing one thing and doing it extremely well is a reasonable baseline.

What do ‘Microservices’ mean to organisations used to understanding their world in terms of Applications? What about all the money some organisations have already spent on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)? Have all the Services now been supplanted by Microservices? And does all this stuff need to be managed in a traditional command-and-control way, or is it possible they could self-manage?

The answers to these questions are far from reaching a consensus, but here folllows an approach that may help begin to help architects and planners rationalise all these concepts, taken from a pragmatic enterprise perspective.

Note that the definitions below do not focus on technologies so much as scenarios.

Applications

Applications are designed to meet the needs of a specific set of users for a specific set of related tasks or activities. Applications should not be shared in an enterprise sense. This means applications must not expose any re-usable services.

However, application functionality may depend on services exposed by many domains, and applications should use enterprise services to the fullest extent possible. To that extent, applications must focus on orchestrating rather than implementing services and microservices, even though it is generally through the act of building applications that services and microservices are identified and created.

Within a given domain, an Application should make extensive use of the microservices available in that domain.

Applications require a high degree of governance: i.e., for a given user base, the intent to build and maintain an application for a given purpose needs to be explicitly funded – and the domain that that application belongs to must be unambiguous. (But noting that the functionality provided by an application may leverage the capabilities of multiple domains.)

Services

Services represent the exposed interfaces (in a technical sense) of organizational units or functional domains. Services represent how that domain wants information or services to be consumed and/or published with respect to other domains.

Services represent a contract between that domain and other domains, and reflect the commitment the domain has to the efficient operation of the enterprise as a whole. Services may orchestrate other services (cross-domain) or microservices (intra-domain). The relationship between applications and services is asymmetric: if a service has a dependency on an application, then the architecture needs reviewing.

Services require a high degree of governance: i.e., the commitments/obligations that a domain has on other domains (and vice-versa) needs to be formalised and not left to individual projects to work out. It means some form of Service Design methodology, including data governance, is required – most likely in parallel with application development.

Microservices

Within a domain, many microservices may be created to support how that domain builds or deploys functionality. Microservices are optimised for the domain’s performance, and not necessarily for the enterprise, and do not depend upon microservices in other domains.

Applications that are local to a domain may use local microservices directly, but microservices should be invisible to applications or services in other domains.

However, some microservices may be exposed as Services by the domain where there is seen to be value in doing so. This imposes an external obligation on a domain, which are enforced through planning and resourcing.

Microservices require a low degree of governance: the architectural strategy for a domain will define the extent to which microservices form part of the solution architecture for a domain. Microservices developers choose to make their services available and discoverable in ways appropriate to their solution architecture.

In fact, evidence of a successful microservices based approach to application development is an indicator of a healthy technical strategy. Rather than require microservices to be formally planned, the existence of microservices in a given domain should be a hint as to what services could or should be formally exposed by the domain to support cross-divisional goals.

It is quite unlikely that meaningful (resilient, robust, scaleable) Services can be identified and deployed without an underlying microservices strategy. Therefore, the role of a domain architect should be to enable a culture of microservice development, knowing that such a culture will directly support strategic enterprise goals.

Domains

A domain consists of a collection of applications, services and microservices, underpinning a business capability. It is an architectural partition of the organisation, which can be reflected in the firm’s organisational structure. It encapsulates processes, data and technology.

In particular, domains represent business capabilities and are clusters of business and technology – or, equivalently, business function and technology.

The organisational structure as it relates to domains must reflect the strategy of the firm; without this, any attempt at developing a technology strategy will likely fail to achieve the intended outcome.

So, the organisational structure is key, as without appropriate accountability and a forward-looking vision, the above concepts will not usefully survive ad-hoc organisational changes.

While organisational hierarchies may change, what a business actually does will not change very often (except as part of major transformation efforts). And while different individuals may take different responsibilities for different domains (or sets of domains), if an organisation change materially impacts the architecture, then architectural boundaries and roadmaps need to change accordingly so that they re-align with the new organisational goals.

Summary

Partitioning an organisation’s capabilities is a necessary prerequisite to developing a technology strategy. A technology strategy can be expressed in terms of domains, applications, services and (the presence of) microservices.

The key is to not be overly prescriptive, and to allow innovation and creativity within and across domains, but providing sufficient constraints to encourage innovation while simultaneously keeping a lid on complexity. The presence of microservices and a viable microservice strategy within a domain can be used as a good proxy for enterprise technology strategy alignment.

The role of microservices in Enterprise Architectural planning