The Software Architect Elevator

Part IV. Organizations

Architects in the enterprise live at the intersection of the technical and business worlds. In fact, getting these two pieces to work together seamlessly is one of an architect’s key contributions (Chapter 4). Therefore, a good architect needs to not only understand the interplay between system components, but also the interplay in a large and dynamic system that is known as organization.

Organizational Architecture: The Static View

The most common depiction of an organization’s architecture is the organizational chart (“org chart”). These charts depict who reports to whom, and one can measure people’s importance by how far they are from the CEO. Assuming you count from zero in good computer-science tradition, I am often at level two or three below a group CEO, a divisional CEO, and perhaps a COO in between. For an architect in a large organization, this isn’t bad at all—many people find themselves at level 6 or 7.

Luckily, org charts have lines and thus pass our test for architecture diagrams (Chapter 23). Computer-science-educated folks may recognize an org chart as a tree, a noncyclical, connected directed graph with a single root (math folks consider trees to be undirected, but that’s fine also). Alas, it’s only showing part of the picture: depicting the static structure tells us little about how people interact to make the business work.

Organizational Architecture: The Dynamic View

An org chart depicts engineering, manufacturing, marketing, and ...