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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.