Whenever I work for a business, and meet with the customers or staff wanting technology, I want to help them – my mind explodes with ideas and possibilities. I can see a path through the technology options to deliver something quickly. However, over the years, I have been constantly frustrated by the lack of ways to turn the ideas into solutions quickly.

Despite the desire for quick solutions, Architecture is not intended for competing in sprint races. It would be nice to be the “Usain Bolt” of the Architect world, but our role is more about laying foundations for a business or organisation to then sprint past their competitors.

Some examples of frustration:

• We could do this, but should we do this?
• Delivery being be blocked by a bad processes           
• Teams adds functions based on over optimistic estimates – “if we just had x, we could do y”, which “only adds 1 sprint of development”… 10 extra weeks later… the project gets canned…
• No time or budget for architects to work on potential solutions that could make the business better
• Functional areas that never get a green light because the requirements get too nuanced
• We are unable to get a balanced security or compliance agreement

If you’ve had enough coffee, you will notice that none of those points above are directly related to the business in anyway… It is not the business holding up the delivery, it’s the tech & compliance community!!!

I’ve characterised three core areas hampering progress:

• Technology still isn’t mature
• Business
• Techies