I had given my car for a service recently and it so happened that I was driving it around the city for couple of days post the service. Was getting a wobbling feeling on the left front wheel of the vehicle  it then occurred to me that there could be something that could be a problem on that side of the wheel.Took the vehicle back to the car clinic only to find that the wheel post service as fixed back in place using only two nuts out of the four . It was lucky to have noticed it at least at that point of time. Did advice the floor manager to put back the wheel tightening part in the vehicle checklist before commissioning the vehicle that it is fit for the roads. It was an eye opener for the importance of having set rules and checklist for anything in your life , be it planning a trip with friends and family , checking items off your to do list or even it that means delivering software or architecture the right way.  A checklist’s value is immense and is only known when you have missed something in the case of the car the crucial wheel nuts itself . As we could see that the lynch pin if it goes missing then it can be life threatening. Similar is the case with creating a product or a service , it can be mission critical if you miss that important nut or bolt that shall latch the end product.

Let’s us look at the above process which is detailed as a part of the Open Group Togaf which talks about creating an architecture compliance review process . As you can see the whole process starts off by having an architecture lead who leads the process and continues the whole chain of activities in between looks at a checklist to see all the nuts and bolts are in place and tight.

So What can be few of the checklist

1. Hardware and Operating System Checklist

• How does the system design impact or involve end-user devices?
• What is the quantity and distribution (regional and global) of usage, data storage, and processing?
• What applications are affinitized with your project by similarities in data, application services, etc.? To what degree is data affinitized with your project?

1. Software Services and Middleware Checklist
2. Applications Checklist
3. Security Scrutiny Checklist
4. System Engineering Methods and Tools Checklist.
5. Application Integration Checklist….etc 

So what is your story around checklist . We all agree that they are the must have in an software professional’s toolkit.

]]> https://sairam.eturnti.com/what-does-car-service-and-architecture-compliance-reviews-have-in-common/feed/ 0 https://sairam.eturnti.com/tprofile-as-a-skillset-for-an-architect/ https://sairam.eturnti.com/tprofile-as-a-skillset-for-an-architect/#respond Fri, 31 Mar 2017 15:56:21 +0000 https://sairam.eturnti.com/?p=1468

This week here is sending you some thoughts on whether an architect needs to be a specialist or a generalist as one progress along the career path.

Specialists increase the depth of small ideas. Generalists connect small ideas into bigger ideas. We need them both to advance as a species. – Kenneth @leadershipABC

We need to know that an architect is support to have a lot of skills under his belt . An with the onslaught of technology changes every passing day. It is like changing the tires when the vehicle itself is going through an overall. An architect is supposed to be good at one or more skills and tech stacks . He needs to have full stack experience and should have handled at two end to end project in his lifetime meaning he saw the product or the solution go from concept to cash . This means that he was involved in every aspect of the delivery from start to finish and involved in all areas of the design , development and test and finally solutioning. All of this is still ok but what about the changing nature of the tech landscape and how does one keep pace with changing parts of the puzzle. The ancient greek definition of Architect meant that he was a man of words , arts , literature , interested in music and a tinkerer of sorts. All that we can think of someone who would fit that profile would a Da Vinci. Given the work pressures we all know how difficult it is to be someone of that level. It takes effort and years of practice to reach or play at that level.

But what is expected of an architect as he progress in his career path is that he should have broad experience in many areas of work and deep dive experience in one or two of them . This does not need us to be Da Vinci and looks like an within reach target.  What are the skills that you felt inadequate to turn into a Senior IT professional ?

Most often get to hear where does a Solution Architect fit into the overall hierarchy of an enterprise.People often confuse this with the role of an Enterprise Architect and some of them want to be better at Solution Architecture and move up being an Enterprise Architecture.

In an organization context when you are going from Strategy to Execution then it becomes imperative to understand what are the layers in this process,

Typically it shall be going from
Contextual —-> Conceptual —–> Logical ——> Physical.

As can be seen in the picture attached the Solution Architect is pegged at a layer between the conceptual and logical layers of the strategy to execution process. And the Enterprise Architect is mostly at the contextual layer where business problems are present at a particular context.

If you are wanting to better at Architecture and being Agile at the same time and such resources shall help you keep updated with resources for architects. Do send a mail to maileturnti@sairam.eturnti.com with subject Subscribe.

Togaf Trainings and Consulting : http://eturnti.us7.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=171856f3ca74842f465089b2b&id=67c266dd99&e=3d9b3ab567

Solution Architect Training :    http://eturnti.us7.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=171856f3ca74842f465089b2b&id=600fe9d5d3&e=3d9b3ab567

Agile Architecture Trainings : Mixing Agility with Architecture   http://eturnti.us7.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=171856f3ca74842f465089b2b&id=600fe9d5d3&e=3d9b3ab567

IT Transformation , Digital Transformation , Keeping Your Lights ON while you make changes to your bread winner applications in the Enterprise, move certain others to the cloud, rework on your SMAC strategy, going digital, change your tires while your speeding Enterprise needs to overhaul itself at the same time needs to keep moving and least not loose time at a pit stop.While all of these sound easy to write about but when faced with the challenge of turning your enterprise around , you need a mindset, culture , appropriate tools, talented people who understand the nuances of the change , tools required and how to go about it.

Firstly Mindset : You need to know that people need to change the way they think about the they are standing on a burning bridge with water beneath if you were to borrow a line from the Nokia chief’s mail to its employees. Unless people perceive it this way change is difficult to force it down their throats. Fluidity in all process and people boundaries such that people can reach out and interact with folks across their immediate process lines. This needs a mindset change which can happen when their is strong management support towards moving away from silos and encouraging decentralization.

Be Proactive ALWAYS – Look at the windscreen and not often at the rear view mirror

Usual mindset is look at time, money , resources and progress once you have finished your product or solution. Instead create a pro active process measurement and improvement dashboard where you are measuring everything while moving instead of reflecting when it is all over. This is process independent and no matter which agile methodology you use or which project / process framework you are currently executing. The idea to embed metrics in your journey can be right from the beginning where you look at

1. Review all internal process.

2. Requirements stability

3. Change Management processes

4. Your speed of execution , ability to close projects / activities within time and budget.

5. What market forces are currently influencing your product / solution.

Once you start improving these factors then your outcomes or business results follow on account of these steps or measures.

Tools at the Pitstop

One of the ways to capture these would be to implement a balanced scorecard.

Digital flexibility: 

This key skill would mean how often are you ready to change gears midway and skill / re-skill yourselves when you hit transformation roadblocks.

Integrated Operations data : Ability to respond to complex process data and act on them in real time when transformation is underway.

Experimentation and POC hotbeds : Ability to rapidly experiment test beds where simultaneous low cost fail fast experiments and proof of concepts can be carried out and more importantly reduce the cost of failure.

Data driven decision making : Put check and capture data of all kinds which can be useful to driving change and arrive at decision based on those.

Eliminate , Eliminate all kinds of communication barriers across teams. How do you stop one . Meet review and action on the points that are found as causing delays. Delays can be anything from waiting for snacks in queue in the evening to not getting appropriate sign-offs in time. Teams working on agile communicating with non agile or semi agile waterfall teams can slow things down. Use your own process tailoring to get across these barriers.

Promote quicker decision making using the following concept decentralize implementation and centralize interoperability

Wiping the dust off the screen , spare tires and everything in between.Re work on your strategy when there is a downtime .

What to do when others are racing as hard as you as well.

1. Remember what you are transforming is not only a technology issue and see it is as a business problem and technology is a leverage. Most often companies do not learn

2.  Always eat a part of the pie instead of full fledged transformation on all cylinders. It is nice to say we are changing the whole machinery while the vehicle is moving instead it is better to change the parts one at a time. It is not easy in a large transformation program but things become much easy to test waters when strategy is broken down to segment and then to the solution level. Let’s say 5 competing product lines are ready for transformation and then out of them only 3 are handpicked for transformation , then out of these 3 pick 10 % functionality and iterate and continue this till you can increase your velocity.

3. Get people to meet the change agents often instead of hanging organization change mandates across the hallway, coffee stations , places where your resources spend most time. Else they end up being fodder for light banter during coffee breaks. Strategy should be de-centralized and no one person’s or team’s prerogative to succeed. And communicate , live them day in and day out instead of them being poster board material.

4. Setup innovation and design thinking workshops across the length and breadth of the organization for people to go about doing there jobs with more fun and independence at what they are doing. Do this when during happy days and not so happy days in the company. Make this part of your core routines then it becomes easy to flex think and act nimble.

This is not the full list of course would love to hear from you on what points went to your refueling enterprise journeys.

Image credit : pixabay

Joint introductory webinar with KnowledgeHut on 23 Jan 2015.

Like all presentations mostly end up starting with a glitch , this one also started with one . Please watch it from 3:51 onwards.

Overview:

Business is always in a constant state of flux- more so these days, with disruption happening all around. How do you move from your AS IS state to TO BE architecture in your enterprise transformational journey? What mix and match of people, processes and technology will you blend together, and in what proportion, to drive enterprise value to deliver transformational results? TOGAF® framwork has a suite of tools that can help architects to chalk out the architectural roadmap for enterprise success. This talk will also focus on how agility is an underlying thread in this framework, and how value is delivered incrementally, making the process robust and bankable.

This webinar is an introductory session to walk one through how TOGAF® as an enterprise architecture framework has proven best practices that can be used to drive results.

Key Takeaways:

Exposes the audience to the features of TOGAF® framework which help plug business technology gaps.
– How TOGAF® Standard has agility at its core to drive transformational results.
– Why it is a good skill and knowledge for a seasoned IT professional to have in their kitty.

References / Acknowledgements

1. www.opengroup.com/togaf
2. http://forums.juniper.net/t5/Industry-Solutions-and-Trends/Meatballs-and-Spaghetti-how-to-untangle-the-cloud/ba-p/121808
3. Roger Sessions — http:/msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479371.aspx/

All enterprise architecture frameworks talk about this. TOGAF also has prescriptions for moving from strategy to execution. Here is a short snippet explaining the process and involves addressing various concerns generally such as domain , data , application and technology without going into all the details. Togaf calls going through this famously as BDAT. ( Business , Data , Application and Technology). More details here.

Most often get asked this question by experienced, very experienced and people with little experience folks on what happens to my career if you are certified in TOGAF 9.x ( version immaterial) . For that matter lets look at what is the value add from get that additional degree or title against your name that you get out of any certification or a degree.Most often you still need real world experience with it to make sense of any learning be it certifications or degrees.Some thoughts on what motivates people to look at acquiring these ….

1. Your resume looks impressive.                                                                                                           2. Potential job offers may flow for you in that direction                                                                           3. May get me a pay hike or increase or a lateral or job move.                                                             4. Gain knowledge and become a trusted authority or person and look like a seasoned IT professional who can now talk the same mumbo/jumbo and gain professional respect.                   5.Currently do not have the title of an architect / Want to move along the career as an architect and may be the certification can help                                                                                                   6.Have been entrenched deep down with a specific technology and domain and look forward to see the whole picture.

While the above are some common concerns. Lets look at the value proposition of TOGAF though not covering all aspects in its entirety.

TOGAF Elevator Pitch

TOGAF value explained in an elevator pitch can be stated as it is a methodology to manage your architecture while moving from AS IS to TO BE state. Mind you , your AS IS can be anything from that reflects your current IT landscape. You can be in anywhere on your journey towards accomplishing your mission and how do you go towards getting there all the while caring about agility and not keeping an eye on cost and accountability on your IT spend.

TOGAF helps one understand the nuances of IT transformations(digital is more cool now) and what is involved.

What does getting certified in TOGAF mean ? Industry values experience when it comes to solve complex problems out there at that the customer has. You as an architect has to step in and do the magic of having the right mix of people, process and technology to deliver what is needed to ease the end user pain point. Companies in the least value a person who has such certifications with the idea that such an exposure will help a person at least think in that direction instead of being raw with no experience except for some deep dive experience in say one particular area. It helps you have a T profile for an architect. Helps one scale from a solution architect to an enterprise architect. It helps you to look at the problem from a broader perspective of how it impacts the stakeholders in the company , outside , skills , technology and process to have them all work towards your mission /vision as a company.

A fool with a tool is still a fool – TOGAF No Exception

It is akin to a person clearing PMP need not necessarily be a good manager. As any framework it does expose people to a good set of principles while dealing with people , process and technology and the inherent value in applying them in practice. At the outset it is too general but with applying the organization context to it , it becomes meaningful. Which augurs with the sentiment that a fool with the tool is still a fool. Mere knowing the framework without knowing how it can be tailored for an organization is what makes it abstract for people not having the relevant experience in business and IT transformations. The other reason also being the maturity of the organization who tend to relate the pieces of the framework by the book in a prescriptive fashion without checking on what suits their organization context. Same with agile prescriptions where have heard people say scrum says so we do it. Not really checking on how much of it is really relevant in their particular context. Scrum purists may dismiss this as SCRUM BUT , reality is different and not necessarily by the book. Togaf does not inherently project itself as having a strong agile backdrop to it. But the principles are very much there and it is for the practitioners to present that flavor to the end audience with agility at its core.

Customer Sentiment – What do you know about my problem and context ?

As can be known from experience there can be no single silver bullet to IT transformations , each customer is a case study in itself. The larger the portfolio , the more difficult it is to straight jacket it into a group. Experience comes by walking alongside the customer apart from the knowledge at hand.They call this as Management by Walking Around ( MBWA) instead of an MBA alone.  TOGAF exposes architects to a methodology which mature organizations have used as best practice and earned value. Many of the companies in the fortune list have used it extensively and have tailored them to suit their stack and solve their individual issues. 

All the frameworks invariably touch upon the need for an architect to go from high level strategy to execution. How seamlessly you move from one to an other determines your maturity as an architect.

It is always better to keep a separate rack for storing your office or household items. Separation of concerns as it is referred to in architecture ensures that each layer in the architecture owns up what it is meant to and works towards making it happen. This is needed as you go along from strategy to execution although the lines blur as you make this layered transition.Ability to talk business to the end users and technology to your internal teams is a vital asset.This needs constant zoom in and zoom out of the details involved.

As you grow up as an architect you need the ability to see the forest from the trees. You need to understand the details involved in lets say moving a data center in the cloud at a very high level where you see only the building blocks ( arranging the logistics involved , assessing the impact of the solution, deciding which cloud hosting provider ) involved and also down below where you can get to see the actual pieces ( actual cloud provider , data migration / backup / restore , day to day running of the cloud setup , load balancers, network providers,security solutions co-hosted) of the solution. As you move from vision to execution the details start emerging which perhaps may have been a one point on your check list. This gets full blown as you move towards the bottom of the pyramid and all your skills arsenal will be put to good use.

Want to take something from idea to hit the ground It all starts with a context in which you want to solve the problem. All start ups may go through this this process but who cares about a framework when you need to hit the ground with your product. Nevertheless the thought process is pretty useful and serves you well when you move towards rolling out other products and solutions in the length / breadth of your career.

1. Contextual Vision of where you want to go ( mission/vision)

This the domain or the context in which your problem exists or manifests and you want to solve it. Mostly it is the 20,000 foot level.

Let’s say you are designing Facebook The high level mission statement is connecting people.

2. Conceptual level  (flesh out the context into concepts ) : This level of detail is more detailed than the earlier one where now you are moving one level below. The context is set and now the concepts get hashed out as to what aspects of the context you need to flesh out the details. Having defined the need for people to connect lets say over social media is out high level goal. What aspects of them same do you want to take it to the next level of details which will include how they will interact , what privileges do they share among each other and what kind of business process or data interchange happens between them and so on. Once these details are etched out , it becomes clear as to what building blocks are required to make this happen. List all the business processes , the actors involved in the process and all the other surrounding pieces that are needed to complete the interactions between the entities involved.

3. Logical ( Group them under a bucket/functionality etc)

Now the the problem having been defined at the conceptual level we need to see how to arrange them at a logical level. This generally would mean how to organize the pieces such that they are devoid of the underlying intricacies, technology stack that they run on. This also assumes that it excludes the implementation details as long as the blocks can be grouped into logical blocks for which a particular functionality be assigned or grouped. All the blocks that constitute the business , data , application and technology areas would be grouped together. Under each bucket we could have relevant sub buckets say under business all blocks dealing with people interaction, relationship manager,profile updater and so on will fall under this.

4. Physical ( Leave it to Implementation)

This is generally the last layer below the logical layer where you can decide to have a logically grouped solution being implemented using any of the technology choices on the table or leave it to implementation. The layer post this will be actually code or executables. Here.if the logical solution has grouped the architecture into entities based on functionality , at the physical layer they could be implemented on a java stack or C# stack or ROR stack. The ability to abstract the high level details from the implementation is a key asset for an architect. Ideally one should architect something which can sit on any stack and should be technology agnostic.One such thought process is as long as the database interfaces are logically well defined. It would not matter which underlying database adapter (MySQL,Oracle,MS SQL etc) fulfils the needs for achieving the same. This helps the architect to help think of the solution independently without being constrained by one single solution.

Finally remember strategy formulation is just one step on your path to doing something. Anyone can steal your ideas , strategy and not your execution. Understanding this and walking the talk using architecture best practices help you gain value from all the combined understanding of frameworks.

What is involved in getting things right for your organization ? People , process and technology dimensions. How do you orchestrate your turn around and what is the role of an Enterprise Architect ?

For the sake of discussion  relating to rural governance in India let’s say Aadhaar ID being on similar lines to SSID in the US. Although there is still a lot of hue and cry on loopholes in the system on account of Aadhaar ID and the debate that it is not functional in the practical sense on many aspects. All said and done let’s put those issues behind us and say it is approved in full measure. As per the Aadhaar mandate there needs to be a case where savings account of people for whom government would roll out subsidies so rolling out such a feature would require the below steps.

These features are central to every functional features and cut across domains. So they would generally be horizontal features.

1. Linking all savings accounts of people in need of subsidies .

2. Releasing the actual subsidy to the accounts of the account holders.

3. Let’s we want bio metric authentication for accessing all functional modules that have integrated with Aadhaar ID and since this concerns across all modules it can also become a part of horizontal partitioning.

Togaf Architecture Partitioning

 Courtesy :  www.opengroup.org/togaf9.1

As seen in the picture above from the open group Togaf 9.1 website, it shows how architecture can be partitioned right from strategy architecture to segment architecture to capability or solution architecture. You can compartmentalize your architecture concerns into one of the following partitions. This would be the length wise partitioning . You can partition your architecture based on architecture domains(business,data,application and technical) of your architecture and that would be the breadth aspect to architecture. You can plan your architecture work based on time based iterations and that would the architecture time based iterations.

Issues with moving directly to Solution Architecture 

Some companies directly get into the solution architecture phase without much investment in the enterprise architecture phase based on their needs. A mature organization is able to move seamlessly from strategy to the solution architecture without issues. The issue is if you move directly to solution architecture then you have a tendency not to abstract common pieces of work that can be useful across other engagements and you can lose out on a reference model for your architecture. It would be more like you may have to specifically tailor a solution every time there is a need for one instead of driving the changes from strategy in which case your drivers , goal and objectives are well defined for your architecture. Ideally a mature organization is one where strategy and grounds up work are in tandem and gel well. In disconnected scenarios they would in silos where strategy is not well understood by the ground force and so such organizations do not invest in strategy due to pressures of quicker delivery. As an organization you will be judged by how well you can move from strategy to solution and vice versa in the long run. There are no doubts that a strategy well executed and understood by one and all in the organization is better than having no strategy at all. This would lead to chaotic processes and finally no accountability on overall architectural pieces and their execution.

These are recommendations from standard frameworks such as Togaf use what suits your context to enable you to better manage your architecture iterations.

Architectural Partitioning on the Server Side used in many deployment scenarios.

In a typical web deployment architecture the server side components can be partitioned based on server side functionality offered. This can be factored in the design across all tiers starting from the browser end till the database. Having a modular design of course helps in big monolithic architecture , big ball of mud. So breaking up the modules on the server side helps avoid big ball of mud scenarios and also helps server side dependencies well. Instead of creating one executable or war file on the server side it can be deployed as many different war , ear files if you are coming from the J2EE side of things. Similar logic applies for .NET and other technology stacks. How do you design for modular architecture end to end is in itself needs a detailed treatment. But this is to drive home the point that architecture partitioning as a term can also be looked at for creating modular architectures among other things discussed above.