Link: http://www.etc-architect.com/?p=92
From ETC-Architect » Architect Global | Security Architect, Global | , Global
Once you move past your junior positions in our trade you quickly encounter the strange being of the senior business sponsor/owner/executive. He is usually only interested in two things. The one thing are options to move ahead (usually prefers clean cut ones that are easy but not too easy to understand) and story boards. This is usually also the point where the young architect is getting in a serious crisis and understands that the more senior people are not really interested in all the nice roadmaps and other documents he has been sweating so far. The senior alpha business owner wants everything to be presented as a story as this way he thinks that he can understand it and relate it to other alphas. Usually it is important that that story is told on behalf of the client or customer or who ever is centric to the mission statement of your organisation. The story should also contain some of the fashionable words.
Usually the first few stories are rejected and the final ones are so heavily edited by senior non technical managers that most of the content is exchangeable. This is why some people I know always use the same story and just exchange the fashionable words and continue on the architecture as something unrelated. The same people then wonder why the rest of the organisation is moving in an another direction and not following their architecture. Others prefer to communicate the right messages among the lower echelons and keep the higher management in ignorance, which however has the main downside that senior stakeholders will often just buy a new super system, like an expensive but wrong ERP suite that will destroy all their efforts.
The madness is that you will not be able to break this system, as senior managers need to look for a bigger picture and as such the message will loose its details.
I usually try still to present a story around the real challenges through a classic 5 stage tragedy, where the architecture is first mentioned at stage 4 as the turning point. As strange as this sounds I believe that every architect should be good in fiction. I am still so far not a point where I want to be, but slowly getting better. Storytelling is often the only way that you will be able to communicate as everyone likes a good story and no one really enjoys PowerPoints. The real problem behind is that most people will be left ignorant of the real work and the real issues, but then that is just the way our system is set up or is there another route? if so I love to hear about it.
