
A Community of Like Minds
Next-Practice Architecture?

I'm excited to join the not-for-profit Architectural Thinking community this week following a great Zoom session with Milan Guenther and Philip Hellyer.
Here are the community principles so far:
We act sustainable and as ONE enterprise
Solutions are built with a company wide focus rather than in business unit silos.
Inter-divisional functionalities are implemented in company wide platforms, not in several isolated applications.
Business goals and value streams drive our application landscape
We implement the ‘right’ projects - those with business values we believe in.
We use structured business analysis, business architecture and innovation methods early in the ideation process.
We focus on simplicity
We implement solutions that are as simple as possible.
Our applications focus on the essence.
We do not reinvent the wheel
We check if existing applications can be reused before implementing new ones.
We look for standard solutions before implementing on our own.
We work permanently on making business & IT more flexible to change
We reduce technical debt by a ‘managed evolution’ approach.
We turn off applications with a bad business value / cost ratio.
We modularize our application landscape to keep it agile.
We permanently optimize our product/service portfolio for simplicity.
We foster our digital platform
Our digital platform is the blood circuit of our enterprise.
We enhance it permanently in a way that keeps it agile and easy to extend by new technology innovations.
We reduce technology components that are out-dated or redundant step by step.
Applications and technology components that are available in the cloud must run in the cloud.
We permanently improve information quality
Information is the blood in the blood circuit of our digital platform.
We define clear information ownership.
We consolidate applications that hold essential information redundantly.
We involve the end users in the ideation of our solutions closely
We use innovation and business analysis methods to elicit requirements.
We use agile methods and simple diagrams in solution engineering.
We work with a limited number of strategic solution vendors
We look for strategic, long-term vendor partnerships.
We reduce the number of vendors to less than ten.
We try to minimize vendor lock-in.
I'm not sure how to interpret all the above, but there is significant overlap with what we're doing at Adaptive Change Design:

A long last there seems to be traction behind Next-Practice architecture thinking.
The Architectural Thinking Association is a new non-profit, registered association according to Austrian law.
Its goal is to spread information about the values and new ideas of Architectural Thinking. It does this by:
– permanent improvement of our framework driven by open participation; – publications in journals, speeches at conferences of various communities; – creation of training material for public use.