What does it take to turn your enterprise around ? There are umpteen number of things being discussed on this topic and books/blog written on this topic. While Enterprises and Architecture are fascinating enough for real think tanks to spend their lifetime producing stuff while the challenges remain the same and mostly at large. There is no single methodology or framework which helps plug this need for enterprises to have a mechanism in place to tune themselves excepting for architects , technical members of the team , people assigned to worry on things that matter to the company (managers/decision makers and various members of staff meant for different things).
As said there are enough practices around but it would be good to have some to practice it at all and earn the rewards of them. Even if some of the of the practices are practiced then it would create an organisation where merits of software best practices and architecture are realized Most often these are buried in process and organisation debris and need to be lifted by a few good men who care about the organisation. Call them whatever you want them as everyone is expected to be an architect in the team to make this change happen. Otherwise you will simply have the following questions without answers for them in the minds of people in the organisation.
Questions for All
Business :
- What is our mission/vision ?
- Are where we wanted to be ?
- Are we targeting the right kind of customer profiles and is our offering right?
- Are we having all the regulations / compliance for entering the newer markets.
Product Strategy/Management :
- How do we ensure that the company is counted upon by its transformation partners ?
- Do we have the strategy right ?
- Are we compliant to regulations in the markets that we operate in ?
- As we head towards newer markets do we posses what they are looking for ?
Sales : How do we target customers across geographies ?
- How do we target customers in the same geography?
- Selling the same piece of software to two clients in the same region is met with turning around existing software which did not cater to customization provision.
Project Management
- There are so many releases happening in parallel what do we do ?
- The machine having Sun Sparc II with our code compiled with version X of the compiler is available only on one machine and there is a committed release for the customer and we cannot run parallel certifications as the QA team is booked till end of next month.
Release Delivery
- We are ready to deliver the CD cut but as the software is not modular it is across modules and not very incremental and we would like to have continuous build and integration to take us to the next level of excellence. We have become so monolithic that one patch delivery takes quite a while to figure out what all pieces to compile and send across. Of course we are improving by the day but we still need time…
Architecture Board of Decision Makers
- How do I get buy in for the projects ?
- How do we get our CXO level people to believe in what works quick and fast and we could showcase the same.
- How do we keep the management happy and be seen as churning out software that works in the near run and in the long run.
Enterprise/Software Architect: This would be to intertwine all the stakeholders and help get the organisation going with coherence and single pointed strategy.
- Do we have the steps to correct security flaws ?
- Do we have enough of bandwidth on hardware / software to host the number of concurrent users.
- Are our test rigs automated ? Do we get the same issues back again release on release ?
- Are organisation metrics correct or are they skewed ?
- Do we detect bugs before they become potential showstoppers or are we having to always fire fight ?
There would be many more queries based on your context but what is needed is a mechanism to plug the queries with relevant organisation strategies and mechanisms to help best practices work for you. Even fixing one issue has a potential of good amount of revenue saving and potential in transforming your current progress and growth.