Link: https://www.adaptivechangedesign.com/post/a-community-of-like-minds
Next-Practice Architecture?
I’m excited to join the not-for-profit Architectural Thinking community this week following a great Zoom session with Milan Guenther and Philip Hellyer.
Here are the community principles so far:
We act sustainable and as ONE enterprise
- Solutions are built with a company wide focus rather than in business unit silos.
- Inter-divisional functionalities are implemented in company wide platforms, not in several isolated applications.
Business goals and value streams drive our application landscape
- We implement the ‘right’ projects – those with business values we believe in.
- We use structured business analysis, business architecture and innovation methods early in the ideation process.
We focus on simplicity
- We implement solutions that are as simple as possible.
- Our applications focus on the essence.
We do not reinvent the wheel
- We check if existing applications can be reused before implementing new ones.
- We look for standard solutions before implementing on our own.
We work permanently on making business & IT more flexible to change
- We reduce technical debt by a ‘managed evolution’ approach.
- We turn off applications with a bad business value / cost ratio.
- We modularize our application landscape to keep it agile.
- We permanently optimize our product/service portfolio for simplicity.
We foster our digital platform
- Our digital platform is the blood circuit of our enterprise.
- We enhance it permanently in a way that keeps it agile and easy to extend by new technology innovations.
- We reduce technology components that are out-dated or redundant step by step.
- Applications and technology components that are available in the cloud must run in the cloud.
We permanently improve information quality
- Information is the blood in the blood circuit of our digital platform.
- We define clear information ownership.
- We consolidate applications that hold essential information redundantly.
We involve the end users in the ideation of our solutions closely
- We use innovation and business analysis methods to elicit requirements.
- We use agile methods and simple diagrams in solution engineering.
We work with a limited number of strategic solution vendors
- We look for strategic, long-term vendor partnerships.
- We reduce the number of vendors to less than ten.
- We try to minimize vendor lock-in.
I’m not sure how to interpret all the above, but there is significant overlap with what we’re doing at Adaptive Change Design:
A long last there seems to be traction behind Next-Practice architecture thinking.
The Architectural Thinking Association is a new non-profit, registered association according to Austrian law.
Its goal is to spread information about the values and new ideas of Architectural Thinking. It does this by:
– permanent improvement of our framework driven by open participation;
– publications in journals, speeches at conferences of various communities;
– creation of training material for public use.
