Sexily Oriented Architecture

It's been bugging me for a while: How many orientations can one architecture have? There seem to be so many to choose from, though some of these are not yet recognised as mainstream they actually hold the real promise. Unfortunately they both begin with "C"!.

Lets start with the obvious ones:
Technology Oriented Architecture: The orientation that most organisations were starting to use in the late 70's and most still use to this day as their primary oreination despite wishing to deny the fact.

Data Oriented Architecture: The orientation that some organisations started to use in the late 80's and some use today, many organisations aspire to being data or information oriented but few have achieved a high level of Information Orientation. Simple test: Has your organisation identified and classified all of its sensitive Information Asset Types?

Process Oriented Architecture: An orientation made famous by Michael Hammer of "Re-engineering" Fame, some trepidatious Enterprises were trying to use in the early 90's and few use today despite some of the huge value that Re-engineering Processes appeared to promise.

Now moving from the mainstream, and I am sure there will be some that will tell me that EOA and SOA are both mainstream, but I have to put the bar somewhere, and I have chosen solid signs of implementation as being my bar.

Enterprise Oriented Architecture: The orientation that most Architects are now talking about, though very few have delivered in practise. Perhaps I should be kind and refer to it as Mainstream! Nah!!!

Service Oriented Architecture: The morph of Technology orientation that is changing our focus from the technology to services. Some of you will remember the great renaming exercise that shifted IT departments to become IS departments, During the "noughties" Service Oriented Architecute started to gain sway, though few organisations have created one at the Enterprise Level. A few are achieving some degree of SOA at much lower levels.

Now onto the truly non Mainstream Architecture Orientation it is the
Collaboration Oriented Architecture, developed by the Jericho Forum as the answer the Life the Universe and everything....oops I clearly meant the answer to the De-Perimiterisation issue/opportunity. This Architecture Orientation is still not accepted by Architects, at least not those developing TOGAF. I think, that they think that we must all be on something!!

The fast approaching Semantically Oriented Architecture will certainly make a dent when it arrives, though I have a hunch it will first do a belly flop, for as far as I can tell the Semantic purists have not built into the core of their models and standards the rights and wishes of the individuals who are the principal or own the resources. Seems to me that the Web 3.1 will be better when it includes Security at its core. My attempts to find someone in Boston to explain this crucial notion to was a flop. So in fact you can blame me.

It all revolves around this thing called Entitlement, but that's another Blog Post.

So we finally get to the last orientation or to avoid future confusion I will call it a "Centricity"..... drum roll .... thus we have the Customer Centric Architecture!

So what is a Customer Centric Architecture, simply it is one that places the Customer at the heart of all Architecture Decisions and NOT the Product or Service that a company is selling. This is or at least should be the core or heart of all Architecture models, it's just that few of of us have truly understood this, and still fewer have implemented a Customer Centric Architecture.

As a quite aside Apple understood this in the way they designed their technology, they produce User Centric Technology, rather different to the Disk based Operating System of their rivals which is more technology out, than user in... but I digress

Then at 4am this morning it hit me.... We need all the orientations to make a Customer Centric Architecture Work!!! Then it was much easier for me to see them not as Orientations, but rather Layers.

Thus we now have:
Customer Centric Architecture CCA
Collaboration Architecture Layer CAL
Enterprise Architecture Layer EAL
SEmantic Architecture Layer SEAL
Process Architecture Layer PAL
Service Architecture Layer SAL
Technology Architecture Layer TAL
Data Architecture Layer
Architecture

From Enterprise Architecture, through Collaboration Oriented Architectures, to Customer Centric Architecture!

Many IT Enterprise Architects, are still struggling to achieve their ultimate peak, which they have determined to be the optimisation and complete integration of the Enterprise. Historically they have determined that their primary focus is optimising the benefit of usng IT to their total Enterprise (represented by the Green shape), the integration and productivity benefits accruing from connecting a few organisations within an Enterprise as the second priority (the orange colour). Leaving the optimisation of single organisations as the third priority (Light Blue). This is often hard as each internal organisation sets more store by the value that IT can bring to their own organisation, than considering the optimal usage of IT across the Enterprise. This results in a large amount of wasted effort as each internal function battles for the resources to maximise the benefits of IT for themselves.

Even more unfortunate is the fact that this internally focussed and selfish optimisation approach results in barriers to collaboration between Enterprises. The recently published Collaboration Oriented Architecture framework from the Open Group highlights key steps to take reduce the friction between Enterprises, while minimising the risks to the Enterprises and their Customers.

However, even this refined collaboration oriented approach still does not resolve the key issues and opportunities for the most important constituents of all Enterprises: their Customers! Customers are impacted most badly by architectural approaches that do not hold them at the centre.



The new Yellow layer in the diagram above signifies a new Customer Centric layer. Architects who understand the importance of this new layer will be scrambling to drop their Enterprise or Collaboration titles and adopt the attitudes and title of a Customer Centric Architect. Now we have to start thinking about what exactly that means, we could do well by starting to think about how Identity and Access Management systems optimised to meet the needs of individual Enterprises might be architected with the Customer in the forefront of all our minds.

There is a lot to do to change our architecture mindsets. We need to stop thinking internally of our own Enterprises and change to think FIRST of our Customers. It was hard enough trying to achieve Enterprise Architecture, one can only imagine the difficulties that will be encountered on this journey. However the benefits are even more legion than those which drove us to strive for Enterprise Architecture. Now all we have to do is to persuade the internal functions why this makes more sense than focussing on their special needs. Perhaps it will be easier to persuade them to give up their own gains, if it is the Customer that wins rather than a colleague in another department/organisation!?

However it won't be that easy to accomplish as the legacy systems are all facing the wrong way, akin to each organisation or function in an Enterprise having its clothes on inside out! Perhaps the challenge of changing this state of affairs should not be imagined, as the resulting vision of Enterprises in varying states of undress will not be not pretty. But imagine it we must, happily we have pointers and emerging tools and services. The tenets are similar to those espoused in the Jericho Forum COA, the benefits will however be more profound. Additionaly, SOA, the Cloud, Mobilisation, Web 2.0 (The Social Web) and in the future Web 3.0 (The Semantic Web) are all emerging at the right time. With these tools Enterprises will be at least able to consider the transformation, assuming of course they have Customer Centric Architects that get it, and internal functions that are willing to take their "clothes" off! Perhaps that is the real result of Consumerisation, not just of the devices and services, but of whole Enterprises! Now that is a nice thing to imagine!