Reflections

Image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay

The following reflections provide some ideas and key lessons I learned while developing ideas of Grounded Architecture in practice:

• Architects as Superglue: I promote a view that architects in IT organizations should develop as “superglue,” people who hold architecture, technical details, business needs, and people together across a large organization or complex projects.
• Architects’ Behavioral Traits: Netflix’s overview of their valued behaviors is a good inspiration for coaching and developing architects. Borrowing from Netflix’s original values and reorganizing them from an architectural perspective, I consider the following behavioral traits to be crucial for architects: communication, judgment, impact, inclusion, selflessness, courage, integrity, curiosity, innovation, and passion.
• Culture Map: Architects’ Culture Mindfield Compass: In multinational organizations, architects will need to work with many different cultures. I have found the work of Erin Meyer, The Culture Map, to be a very helpful tool for architects to work harmoniously with people from a broad array of different cultures and backgrounds.
• Six Simple Rules: Six Simple Rules emphasis that in today’s complicated business environment, you need to setup organisational structures based on cooperation. To deal with complexity, organizations should depend on the judgment of their people and on these people cooperating to utilize the organization’s capabilities to cope with complex problems. This view is well aligned with the ideas of Grounded Architecture.
• In the Eye of the Storm: I want architecture always to address one of the most challenging problems our organization faces: a tension between technology, product, organization, and business functions.
• Flexible Governance: I promote a technology governance model as a well-balanced hybrid of three different styles of governing: mandates and bans, taxes, and leading by context (nudge).
• Economic Modeling: I sketch two answers to the question of the economic value of technology investments and architecture: the return on investment metaphor, and the financial options metaphor.
• Curisity, Doubt, Vision, Scepticism: Architect’s Personal Compass: Architecture work can be being driven by four main motivators: Curiosity, where we follow our strong interests and desires to learn new things; Doubt, where we want to obtain deeper and more certain understanding; Belief and vision, where we set or follow vision and ideals; and Skepticism, where we question the possibility of reaching some goals.
• Rising the Bar: Architets’ Career Paths: Architects’ career paths ideally stem from a strong engineering background. Hiring architects requires constantly raising the bar to ensure a strong and diverse team structure.

Structure ← Value of Grounded Architecture

Reflections Architects as Superglue →