I’ve worked as a solutions and then enterprise architect for ten years. I’ve communicated successfully what I do as an architect through out that time. This weekend through I had to come at it from a different perspective to explain it to my mother.
My mum is in her eighties and lives in a care home. On my most recent visit she told me about a conversation she was having with one of the other residents which included the question “what does your son do?”. My mother knows I’m an architect and that I work in IT, but has no notion of what that means.
To my mother a computer system is a PC or a laptop. She knows about applications like Word and the web, but that is as far as her knowledge stretches. The first hurdle then was to explain that IT solutions use many servers. Here I could show her photos of data centres, thanks to Google and my Android phone. How though could I describe the complexity of the architecture stack and the enterprise architecture dimensions?
Solutions architecture is often described by using parallels to real architects designing buildings. It’s a good analogy. I think it’s a good analogy because it’s written about and talked about in the IT literature. Outside of what I have learned from IT literature I know about as much about architecture as my mum knows about IT. It sounds good and is plausible and therefore must be right.
I’ve also listened to speakers, such as Zackman, talk about engineering parallels to aerospace design. Such designs breaking down from the large systems into subsystems and right down to the rivet and washer. Great parallel though this is I’ve never actually seen an aerospace blue print, or seen their process. Neither has my mum.
I’m starting to feel that my mum and I have lived rather sheltered lives having not been involved in any building work with architects or major engineering projects with engineers (of the non IT variety). My mum though is an artist, painter and embroider, having studied under Constance Howard and etc at Goldsmiths College in 1940s. She understands the processes involved in producing reference sketches, composition, scaling up, pouncing and painting. What parallel is there here for IT architecture.
Looking for parallels in the world of art masters I picked Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) the 16th century Italian painter and architect to draw parallels with IT architecture. I pick Raphael deliberately due to the way that he worked in his studio in Florence. Raphael produced a great many paintings in his short life. He achieved this by running an unusually large workshop and using an “architectural process” in the production of his works.
Raphael took responsibility for understanding his client’s requirements. From these he produced sketches and designs based on his own reference material, research and possibly references produced by his assistance or other artists. Once the client and Raphael where both happy with the design he would hand it over to his workshop to be scaled up and painted. He may of done some fragments of detailed painting where it required his special attention, but largely he over saw the production of the works quality.
Raphael’s approach feels just like a solution architecture approach to an IT system. I’ve worked with the client to understand their requirements. From these requirements, reference architectures and occupationally some original thought I’ve produced a solution architecture. Once happy with this I’ve handed it off to other teams to work the detail and deliver the system while I retain an over seeing role to maintain the integrity of the architecture and it’s quality. Occasionally I might even get my hands dirty! I won’t go as far as to say I have produced any masterpieces.
Solution architecture is nothing new, even painters used the process in the 16th century. Part two is to extend this to the enterprise architecture domain. That is going to take some more thinking.
