Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as Strategy

by Eben Hewitt

In it, Vitruvius expands on the three requirements that any architecture must demonstrate: Firmitas It must be solid, firm. Utilitas It must be useful, have utility. Venustas It must be beautiful, like Venus, inspiring love. This is sometimes translated as “delightful.”

As we mature, we realize that picking one tool or framework or language or platform is not a matter of personal taste, but rather a choice with broad ramifications for future flexibility, mergers and acquisitions, training, our ability to hire future supporting teams, and our future ability to directly support — or subvert — the business strategy.

In collaboration with product management, and with colleagues in strategy, business development, finance, and HR, the architect works to ensure that there is alignment between the systems, yes, but also between those systems and the organization, and between the organization and its stated aims.

In short, for far too long we architects have thought we were in the business of making software. But we’re in the business of building a business.

One cannot be successful as an architect without thinking of not only what to do, but how to get it done within an organization, which requires knowing why it should matter to someone who isn’t a technologist.

Knowing that you’re in the business of building a business, and that technology is just an avenue by which you enable that, is a critical first step to being not only useful but powerful as an architect and strategist.

Keeping the design “simple” often defers the interests of flexibility until later, where it becomes very expensive.

“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck…Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress”