The Software Architect Elevator

Part III. Communication

Architects don’t live in isolation. It’s their job to gather information from disparate departments, articulate a cohesive strategy, communicate decisions, and win supporters at all levels of the organization. Communication skills are therefore paramount for architects. Conveying technical content to a diverse audience is challenging, though, because many classical presentation or writing techniques don’t work well for highly technical subjects. For example, slides with single words superimposed on dramatic photographs may draw the audience’s attention, but they aren’t going to convey the intricacies of your cloud computing platform strategy. Instead, architects need to focus on a communication style that emphasizes content, but in an engaging and approachable manner.

You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Understand

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is a common management slogan. However, for the measurements to be meaningful, you have to understand the dynamics of the system you are managing. Otherwise, you can’t tell which levers you should pull to influence the system behavior (Chapter 10).

Understanding what you are managing becomes an enormous challenge for decision makers in a world in which technology invades all parts of personal and professional lives. Even though business executives aren’t expected to code a solution themselves, ignoring technological evolution and capabilities invariably leads to missed business opportunities or missed expectations ...