ABSTRACT
When I wrote the title to this chapter, I wondered if a chapter on architecture was even necessary. Surely every IT department has an enterprise architecture? But only today, as I worked in a large finance company helping them implement a Decision Support project, I had my assumption dashed. Not only do they not have an enterprise architecture, but they also seem to miss the point of having one. They can't see that their current IT projects which are worth some $20 million will be sub-optimised at best, and discarded as unworkable at worst. Finally, they do not even calculate the ongoing costs of having their staff leave one system in order to get to another system and live much of their working lives ‘between systems.’ They have some four systems, each with their own data-mart and each with their own GUI, and each with their own reporting tools. Yes the systems talk to each other through some fervent interface design, which had they had an architecture, would be largely unnecessary. Not having an architecture is a little like presenting your business with one of those ‘connect the dots’ puzzles. However, in this case each dot costs a fortune and more dots are going to be added. (Some of these expensive dots won't actually fit the bigger picture.) Now you expect either your technical staff, or worse the business users, to draw the lines between these dots. It is just not acceptable business practice anymore.
