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The Value of Architecture

Architecture is quite the hot topic lately. Many IT professionals call themselves architects of one flavor or another. Vice Presidents like to say their technical organizations are architecture-driven. Why is architecture so interesting and important? What is the value to the company?

Business Value

As asserted before: architecture is a kind of design that can be applied to more than one system. Architectural design as a type of planning is a good thing. Planned and managed activities often go better than unplanned and unmanaged activities, especially when we're spending millions of dollars to meet the core needs of a company. So even a single system in isolation is worth planning, and worth architecting carefully.

The value of architecture is multiplied when architectural patterns and details are applied to more than one system. An architecture represents a large set of problems solved and a set of skills needed to construct applications. If we start new development by leveraging proven solutions and skills we can carve away big chunks of time, money and risk, even if we never share one line of code.

Finally, systems with similar architectures or appropriately open architectures can be combined. In the world of mergers, acquisitions, rapid business change and emerging technologies it is critical to be able to integrate systems. It seems we often need to build a new system out of parts of existing systems, or make new processes flow into existing processes.

Architectural Benefits

Well-architected systems realize some or all of these benefits:

• Developers can build and maintain loosely coupled components more independently, and even completely replace old components with new technologies without breaking clients that depend upon them for services.
• Clear definitions of responsibilities often answer questions like "where should I put this functionality" before they are even asked, simplifying life for those who build components or try to understand them later.
• Common design patterns, tools, hardware and software platforms allow developers to move from one system to another and apply their current skills effectively.
• Applications built to a consistent architecture are more easily integrated with each other to share data and functionality.
• Standards-based technologies are more easily integrated with external business partners and commercial "off the shelf" products.
• Careful design of the application and the infrastructure yield high availability and performance.
• The long-elusive goal of reusable components is achievable.
• Robust systems that can survive partial failure.
• Robust designs that can survive extension, adaptation, requirements changes, platform changes, etc.

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