Fundamentals of Enterprise Architecture (Category Architecture)
I read it on vacation. book Tanu McCabe, which was dedicated to corporate architecture and was released a quarter ago, or rather in September. 2024 years. My view is that corporate architecture is the domain of corporations that first started devops transformation, then digital transformation, and now everyone is chasing AI. In general, if you do not have a technology company, then enterprise architecture can be useful for you. In this book, Tanu McCabe takes an approach to the projectile to give the corporate architecture a modern look and theoretically it works well, but it is unclear how this should be implemented in practice, although each chapter is accompanied by almost anecdotes, which give examples of poor implementation of corporate architecture and good options that correspond to modern trends. And she's pretty good at it.
If we talk about the main ideas of the book, they are set out in the first chapter, which touches on the following points:
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Why do we need corporate architecture? And the author says that it is necessary for Avoid isolation of individual parts of the organization (avoiding silos) Avoiding chaos is about dealing with complexity through standards. Avoiding technical debt that hinders innovation and business flexibility All three of the above are signs of an inefficient corporate architecture, but an effective one helps formulate a technology strategy at every level of the corporation and helps deliver the right solutions.
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The author describes vision, mission, what should be in the corps architecture and gives generic examples.
The vision: Define technology strategy that transcends organizational differences to connect different aims into common business goals. The mission: Enable great architecture decisions to deliver great solutions as one team. Readers can take these or make them up for themselves.
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The author describes the functions of corporate architecture, which includes strategy, oversight, enablement, the intersection of which provides cool architectural solutions. Strategy helps to achieve the business goals of the organization - it is important to know about them Enablement reminds me of how companies build platforms to support their companies. Oversight includes governance, risk, compliance
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The author talks about the role of architects: enterprise, solution, software. It's about the same thing I told you. 4 years ago in the report "Architecture at scale or how we at Tinkoff make architectural decisions" However, we didn’t have corporate architects, and their role lies with the technical directors.) These guys make decisions of different volume and scope.
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In making architectural decisions, specialized functions help, which include security, network, cloud, SRE, data, compliance and so on. In general, it's like bringing in expertise centers to make important decisions.
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There are different organizational models: centralized, federated and hybrid In a centralized model, the role of corporate architecture is centralized and is at the level of other top-level units. In the federal model, the role is distributed by individual domains. In the hybrid there is a small central part, and the main part is federated.
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The author describes typical architectural deliverables that include: Architecture decision deliverable - more details can be read here Architecture pattern deliverable is a pattern for solving a typical problem within an organization, preferably with an explanation of logic and code examples. Capability target architecture deliverable is a target description of a group of capabilities that can be called an architectural domain. It is interesting to talk about this in a separate post. Application target architecture deliverable is a targeted description of the application architecture
In general, the book is definitely interesting to read, it is well and logically written, a lot sounds good, but it is not clear how it should work in practice:)
#Architecture #Management #Leadership #Software