This book is about insights based on decades of interactions with customers and developing and teaching courses to help architects understand a key concept:
It’s not just about building the thing right;
it’s about building the right thing!
However, “the right thing” keeps changing! What we need to build is a capability that is—and remains—fit for the changing, often disruptive, context.
We both began our careers writing computer programs, developing code that met the specifications as accurately as we could. Unfortunately, these specifications were often based on deficient requirements, documents that were typically incomplete, sometimes incorrect, and usually contained generic information (called “boilerplate”) that obscured what was important. And the context was rarely, if ever, mentioned.
Architecture offered the opportunity to articulate more general characteristics and constraints beyond just the detailed specifications. A good architecture could ensure that systems would not simply operate without errors, but also interoperate with other systems to achieve an overall capability having well-defined system qualities such as reliability, usability, security, and so forth.
Decades of experience as architects taught us that to build the right thing, the architecture has to:
These ideas apply to non-profits and government enterprises as well as for-profit businesses.
While developing and teaching courses to architects about these enterprise concerns beyond the traditional scope of IT—and involving customers in the teaching process—we gained a number of insights, which were gradually added to classes taught at Digital, Compaq, HP, Alcatel-Lucent, and others. We communicated a number of these insights in journal articles (Laverdure & Conn, 2012), a book chapter (Laverdure & Conn, 2013), and seminars, and have organized and extended these ideas in this book.