Something to consider for architectural governance
Here at MWD we believe that IT-business alignment, at its heart, is an approach which enables IT organisations to collaborate with business decision-makers to ensure that IT investment and IT service delivery reflect business priorities; and where business and IT change are informed by the capabilities and limitations of each other. Central to this approach is a broad but well-defined IT governance framework, which strives to maximise quality and minimise risk, as well as ensure that scare IT investment is focussed appropriately.With so much hype and choice surrounding different architectural approaches – SOA, EDA, ESB (approach or product? – that’s for another day!), AJAX and so forth – it is critical that the governance is applied to architectural decisions. The Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (of CMMI fame) has defined ATAM (Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method), a highly rigorous and formal methodology for evaluating architectural decisions. I came across ATAM thanks to Jeromy Carriere at Microsoft who was a contributor to ATAM and is now working on a ‘lightweight’ (his words not mine) alternative to ATAM. Jeromy’s LAAAM uses a similar approach to ATAM but applies it to high-level architectural decisions rather than to any architectural decision. The objective of LAAAM is not to come up with hard-and-fast recommendations amongst different architectural approaches. Rather, it provides a tool that identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the different alternatives. The strengths and weaknesses are assessed in terms of fit (viability of the approach, organisational IT impact, risk and alignment with business objectives), implementation cost and operational cost, and maps well to our IT-business alignment perspective, although I am less clear how it deals with the change aspects. The approach advocated in LAAAM (and by implication ATAM), particularly because one of its objectives is to promote dialogue amongst the relevant stakeholders, is certainly worth considering as part of a broader IT governance framework.
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