Shots. Solution Architecture in Essence.
There are a lot of topics on the Internet that highlight what Solution Architecture is. You can read about components, their relations, and how they should interact with each other. Discover different views that describe the architecture from any angle of concern and rules on how to document the main of them.
I’ve read hundreds of such topics over the past few years and realized that most of them describe best practices, approaches, and recommendations without an attempt to explain what lies behind them. This situation motivates me to write a series of short articles to fill this gap.
The Main Challenge
Change is a constant in the modern world. We need to accept this statement, or we will never be successful in the IT sector:
- New ideas appear every moment
- New services/technologies/platforms are published on the market
- New startups promise us a bright future
Moreover, the business stays under pressure:
- Competitors offer new services or products
- New players on the market dump the prices
- Customers seek an extension of a value proposition
The reasons for a change can be different in each particular case, but we can agree on the statement that anyone can dictate them. In such a way, the business should respond to a change or die.
Business Capabilities
There are a lot of strategies to respond to change. However, all of them aim at creating or modifying the business capabilities. To ensure we are on the same page, I want to explain what business capability is for me.
A business capability is what the organization can do.
For example, if you have a hammer, you may have the capability to hammer a nail. Another way to think about business capability is to unite people, processes, and technology in a package to provide value. This way of thinking can be beneficial because if you have a hammer but don’t have enough strength to lift it or don’t know how to use it, you definitely can’t hammer the nail.
If we continue the analogy and apply it to a case when the business should deal with the change dictated by new technology, namely, a pneumatic hammer came to the market. We can say that the organization should buy new hammers, adapt its processes, and educate people, i.e., change the capability to hammer the nail.
Solution Architecture in Essence
If we summarize everything above, we can state that a change initiates the process of an organization's strategy adoption. As a result, a set of business capabilities of the organization should be reconsidered.
At that time, the gap between the current state of the capability and the future state of the capability arises, and Business Architecture, Enterprise Architecture, and Solution Architecture step in. In the case of Solution Architecture, it helps to understand how to fill this gap from a technical point of view. In other words:
Solution Architecture is a way to align business capabilities with the organization’s strategy through technical solutions.
This statement is crucial to understand the different aspects of Solution Architecture highlighted in a wide range of topics, and I will explain why it is so in my following publications.
Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this article. Sincerely yours, Alex.
