5 Common Current State Architectural Blueprint Mistakes
posted by Anna Mar, May 07, 2018A current state architectural blueprint is essential to your success as an IT organization. After all, you can't effectively manage a complex architecture that's not documented.
Despite the importance of the current state architecture — many organizations get it wrong. Common mistakes include:
1. Stale Architecture
Stale architecture is not only useless shelfware — it can be misleading.Updating the current state architecture should be a requirement of Enterprise Architecture Governance.
If you don't have a EA governance program — a control process needs to be put in place to ensure that no changes happen without being reflected in your blueprints.
2. Centralized Architecture
No one team should be responsible for creating and maintaining your blueprints.When third parties (detached from the project) such as the Enterprise Architecture team create or update blueprints — quality is often questionable.
The architects closest to the project should update the blueprints. This is usually the solution architect assigned to the project or the Line of Business (LOB) architect.
Your Enterprise Architecture team should be accountable for updates.
3. Duplication of Effort
When blueprints become burdensome — someone will find a way to derail your blueprint program.Current state blueprints should never duplicate project documentation — they should be the project documentation (or a view of project documentation).
4. Too Detailed
Blueprint templates should be high level and flexible.There's a tendency for organizations to add to templates with time until they become too complex to maintain.
5. Architecture Tools
Enterprise Architecture Software vastly simplifies maintenance of current state blueprints. It allows views of the architecture to be generated — so that changes only need to be entered once.EA software also allows you to extract more value from your blueprints — imagine being able to query the downstream impacts of a data change.
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