A Case for Change

Abstract

The final chapter of this book is devoted to understanding how architectural initiatives can fail and approaches to mitigate such risks. It is a fact of life in many organizations that enterprise technical architecture initiatives are seen to be ineffective. Criticisms often leveled at architectural projects include their lack of success in meeting stated strategic requirements, that they are difficult to control and maintain, that they do not represent the “real world” of IT, and that they are expensive and have no relevance in the Internet-enabled world. Many of these criticisms are well-founded in experience. The problem is that the architecture is not a project and is not an operational activity. These IT processes are well-understood by both the organization and those who work in the IT group. Architecture, on the other hand, as a discipline must be pervasive throughout the organization. It is not an individual project, a single well-understood process, a policy or guideline, a culture aspect, or a strategic intent; it is all of these and more. It exhibits the same characteristics as quality in an IT sense—a noble objective, but difficult to define, implement, and measure.