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.