My first career out of college was as a nonprofit lobbyist in Washington, DC. It was an education in many core principles of politics, including the famous saying from former House Speaker Tip O'Neill, "all politics is local."
Speaker O'Neill coined this phrase to describe the lesson he learned from his first and only electoral defeat (running for Cambridge City Council as a senior at Boston College) "that a politician's success is directly tied to his ability to understand and influence the issues of his constituents. Politicians must appeal to the simple, mundane and everyday concerns of those who elect them into office. Those personal issues, rather than big and intangible ideas, are often what voters care most about."
In this respect, architecture is much the same. We have big and intangible ideas that are about driving value broadly yet many customers are focused primarily on their local concerns. For some, this means changing the language that we use to describe architecture – essentially taking lofty ideas and concepts and translating it into more tangible concepts that our stakeholders can digest.
For example, I don't use the word "artifact" to describe architecture work products – I use the term that's less arcane and more familiar – "deliverables." Tony Scott, MSIT's CIO, an former chief architect at General Motors says that he didn''t even use the word "architecture" with his clients because he was concerned that it would conjure up images of ivory towers instead of tangible business value.
I think Tip O'Neill's advice, however, goes beyond simply spinning a big or national idea into something more palatable at the local level. It's about making the interests of local constituents the focal point of the effort and using that lens to look at the big ideas. Most Members of Congress spend a considerable amount of their time in their home districts, listening to their constituents. They have district staff, whose job it is to help constituents with problems that they bring to their representative. The call or letter from a local constituent has far more weight in a Congressional office than non-constituents. Walk into the DC office of your Representative and see how the staff treats you when they find that you're a constituent. It matters a great deal to their success and so every good politician invests in their local constituency.
I've seen plenty of architecture practices lose sight of this as they pursue lofty, enterprise-scale solutions such as master data management, enterprise integration platforms, SOA, and data warehouses, to name a few. I'm probably not alone in having sat through too many Inmon versus Kimball debates.
I've worked on a number of platform projects where we looked at scenarios that ran across a gamut of organizations and tried to design a solution that would fit across a myriad of needs. While these projects succeeded, they were often challenged by lack of clear ownership/sponsorship, clients that were disengaged because we weren't focused on trying to solve just their problems, long delivery times,
At the end of the day, all architecture is local. Architects need credibility if they are to succeed. If the architecture doesn't address the tangible need of a line of business with a problem, what use is it?
