Business Goals Change — So Do Architectures
This month’s issue of IEEE Computer has an article “How Business Goals Drive Architectural Design”. While the authors seem to have something useful to say about how one might align a business goal with architectural design, they fail to address what I consider to be (arguably) the most important aspect of a business or an architecture: evolution over time.
Business goals are an evolving concept, because a successful businesses changes over time. In the article, the authors suggest that the business goal of “opening new sales channels in the form of VARs” must be explicitly supported in the architecture. That may be true, but what happens when the company decides that its business goal is to disintermediate the VAR channel because it has too much power of their customers?
The authors also imply that the business goals of a company can apply uniformly to all of the companies products and services. As organizations become more complex, the business goals become more abstract. Divisional goals set in. And these must be further re-interpreted to the needs of specific markets.
The strategic roadmapping process that I described in Beyond Software Architecture provides a systematic approach for adressing these problems. By making time explicit, the product manager and his/her technical counterparts can create a shared understanding and direction on the evolution of business goals, market needs, corporate strategies, and technical capabilities.
April 9th, 2010 at 19:31
It seems to me the balance is building in flexibility at a cost or taking a dedicated architecture approach at a risk. I think it is wise to also have parallel development of new and innovative products. It is better to make your own product obsolete than to have your competition to do it for you.