Michael Blechar

I always enjoy meeting with customers. Not only to be able to share the expertise of myself and peers to help make them more successful in their jobs, but also to talk with them about their thoughts and concerns and hear what future types of research we can best deliver to help them.

So, I was happy to return to Canada last week to meet with Gartner customers there. The fact that I also got to take in a professional hockey game while there (the NY Rangers against the Montreal Canadians) was a plus, given I happen to be a huge hockey fan. And, that the Rangers won 4-3 in overtime was a bonus for me – and unfortunately a negative for my Canadian friends. But, nonetheless, a good time was had by all and the close friendship between our two countries remains intact!

What was on the minds of the customers I met? There seemed to be three related questions; 1)How do enterprise, technology, data and application architects demonstrate value to the organization?, 2)How do IT personnel, and especially architects and developers, get the business to collaborate with them in an effective manner?, and 3)How do developers become more agile/responsive and productive, especially in the development of new service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications?

While each organization I met with had some unique issues facing them, I recommended they focus on two major things – the solution architecture and agile component-based development methods with a focus on reuse.

One of the problems facing enterprise architects is that after working with executive management on high level strategies, policies, vision, etc, converting that knowledge into actions which add business value can be difficult without a buy-in from others. It is at the upper ends of the “Solution Architecture” where the collaboration of enterprise architects with others doing architecture work (i.e. technology, data, application and business architects) needs to happen. This includes documenting the current architectures and deciding on the appropriate coordinated directions for the future solution architecture. It is also one of the most important areas to improve collaboration between business and IT and to get projects funded which effectively address business opportunities and threats.

It is really the enablement of the solution and application architecture from an IT perspective and business architecture from a business process improvement perspective which addresses the first two questions I was getting. See the following research notes for more detail on these architecture-related topics – Building the Enterprise Architecture Team*, Enterprise Solution Architecture: An Overview*, Defining the Discipline of Application Architecture*, and Key Issues in Application Architecture, 2009*.

The third question around SOA development responsiveness/agility and productivity can best be answered in terms of using component-based development with agile methods and maximizing the reuse of technical artifacts (patterns, frameworks and components) and, if they exist, business and IT models – see The Role of Software Components and Building Blocks in Application Development* and Use Component-Based Development Methods to Maximize SOA Success*. It is a related question, because the role of solution and application architects are key to enabling this reuse.

Therefore, the success of both architects and developers lies in better coordination of architectural efforts across IT and business roles and improved levels of collaboration between solution and application architects and developers.

Gartner clients can expect to see more on the topics of solution and application architecture and opportunistic reuse in support of SOA in upcoming research.

*Available to Gartner clients or for a fee

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