Fundamentals of Enterprise Architecture

Chapter 6. Proactive and Reactive

You’ve now learned the three main objectives of an effective enterprise architecture strategy in considerable depth. You know more about creating shared alignment across all stakeholders and making architecture information embedded and accessible to all roles that need it to make a decision. And you’ve seen the importance of both enabling and enforcing architecture standards. Putting that all together, you have a foundation for defining objectives that result in architecture decisions that will have alignment and be well informed, and architecture standards that will be thoughtful and well adopted.

You can do all that, though, and discover that it’s still not enough. You may learn that those architecture decisions weren’t quite the right kind of decisions. Maybe they weren’t proactive or aspirational enough, or they didn’t lead the way enough. The decisions were solving the problems of today, perhaps, which is good and necessary, but that’s not where architecture shines, and it’s not where architecture is uniquely positioned to add value.

Architecture shines in making great decisions where, if the decision is changed, the change causes a significant amount of rework. I’ve heard these called one-way door decisions, because there’s a finality about them. You only want to go one way. Whereas two-way door decisions have more flexibility. You still want to put in a good effort, but there is not as much of a consequence in getting it wrong or having ...