Since the corporate CIO selected and introduced the technology platform, it was expected that there would be no problems with use. But my team was still learning about the technology and business needs. At best, there was a conceptual architecture to refine and improve through an agile development process.
The architecture was approved, but some creativity was needed for enterprise architects to adapt to a more agile approach to evolving the architecture.
Outdated Architectural Review Board
To this day, I cringe when corporate managers talk about architecture review committees and their presentation processes. To be clear, boards of directors are important. But today’s faster, more agile development processes require missions, processes, and tools to be modernized. Additionally, there are many opportunities for ARBs and enterprise architects to enhance digital transformation by examining portability trade-offs and establishing non-functional requirements essential to specific initiatives.
“In the past, the role of architecture review boards was much more autocratic and led by smaller groups who made decisions on behalf of the larger organization based on a one-size-fits-all philosophy,” said Darlan Winbush, CIO at Quickbase. In particular, the democratization of software through no-code/low-code, agile, and AI technologies is changing the role of ARB. Architectural review boards are expected to become more collaborative and responsive, Winbush said, and the ARB’s role “must be more broadly driven toward larger business goals, taking into account governance, security, compliance, data management, connectivity and collaboration.” “I do it,” he said. “It is also ARB’s responsibility to ensure the integrity of the application development process, data, and overall IT infrastructure.”
Version 9.2 of the Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), released in 2018, describes the role of the cross-organizational architecture committee as overseeing strategy execution. It lists more than 20 responsibilities, including setting component reuse goals, providing advice, and resolving conflicts. However, some of the responsibilities listed, such as “Providing the basis for all architecture-related decisions,” will make DevOps leaders cringe.
A modernized approach to architecture review boards must begin with building partnerships, building trust, and seeking collaboration between business leaders, development teams, and compliance departments. Everyone in the organization uses technology, and many leverage platforms that push the boundaries of architecture.
Winbush suggested that development teams should expand their collaboration to include enterprise architects and review boards. “Don’t view ARB as an obstacle, but as a trusted team that provides the insights you need to protect your team and business,” he advised.
Architectural review boards are especially useful for setting milestones that help teams and organizations navigate these competing agendas.
- Faster Innovation vs. Secure Compliance
- experiment vs. Best Practices
- Self-Organization vs. A standard you can trust
Let’s look at three scenarios that highlight the role and potential of architectural review committees.
Architectural Innovation and Minimizing Technical Debt
How are standards created to ensure usability, stability, and ongoing support for organizations developing microservices? How can organizations avoid creating point solution services, undocumented solutions, and APIs without robust automated testing? Giving too much autonomy can lead to technical debt and difficult-to-support microservices.
Another area of complexity is when an enterprise supports multiple CI/CD tools and empowers development teams to create, customize, and support their own CI/CID pipelines. Over time, the benefits of self-organization will diminish and cost, complexity, and technical debt will slow development.
“Applications today are more complex than they were 20 years ago,” said Rob Reid, technology evangelist at Cockroach Labs. Compare the complexity of managing a microservices architecture to a client-server architecture and you can see why sub-hour restores are becoming more and more difficult. You can tell if the story is more like a dream.
“Deployment pipelines are becoming increasingly non-standardized, and every team is carefully creating their own custom pipeline using the latest tools,” Reid said. “As teams and technologies evolve, knowledge of these pipelines and technologies disappears along with the dreams.”
ARBs can play a role in helping organizations avoid complexity by defining technical debt metrics, promoting their own organizational standards, and guiding development teams on best practices.
Prioritize and streamline risk resolution
IT teams capture risk logs in spreadsheets and score risks based on their likelihood of occurrence and business impact. This score is then used to prioritize solutions. Today, identifying, prioritizing and managing risks can be included in agile development and IT management services using tools such as Jirana or Confluence’s Risk Register and ServiceNow Risk Management.
However, integrated tools do not solve the problem of evaluating priorities and identifying solutions that minimize resolution costs. The ARB plays an important role, sometimes acting as a product manager for the risk backlog and sometimes as a delivery leader overseeing implementation.
“If appropriately empowered, the board of directors should serve as an important arbiter of specific actions taken by technology teams in broader conversations about compliance, best practices, and constantly evolving emerging technologies,” advises SADA CTO Myles Ward. “It is easy to look back on a security breach or cost overrun and offer broad guidance on how to prevent it, but it is much more difficult to predict, prioritize and drive implementation that actually prevents negative outcomes. companies are better than those that do not “It will pay off.”
AI, Automation and Integrated Visibility Enhancements
DevOps teams reduce effort by automating scaffolding processes, including CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and Kubernetes orchestration. Coding Co-Pilot allows development teams to request code, while automation and AI agents help IT service managers deliver a better employee experience when responding to incidents and requests.
As DevOps uses automation and AI to significantly increase productivity, how can ARBs continue to use presentations, spreadsheets, and hand-crafted architecture diagrams as their primary communication tools?
“Architecture review boards remain important in agile environments, but they must evolve beyond manual processes such as interviewing practitioners and legacy tools that slow down engineering,” advises Morty Raphaelin, CEO of vFunction. “Improve development and innovation.” To support this, ARBs must adopt AI-based tools to visualize, document, and analyze architecture in real time and streamline routine tasks to manage app development to reduce complexity.”
The opportunity for ARB is to introduce unified visibility standards and site reliability engineering tools. These two areas connect developer teams with standards, governance, and operational responsibilities where the platform delivers long-term business value.
“Integrated architecture visibility and governance represents a paradigm shift that enables proactive management of architectures and allows developers to set guardrails to prevent the proliferation of microservices and the resulting complexity,” Lapalin said. added.
Architectural Review Board needs to be rebranded at the time
We encourage IT organizations with ARB to rebrand to a more attractive, open, and inclusive name that symbolizes collaboration and trust. Words like forum, hub, team, and even council sound more familiar than the word board of directors. The word review suggests a reactive and judgmental process, while words like support, excellence, and growth imply enhanced collaboration with the business, development teams, and data science teams.
As a result of an unofficial vote, the rebranding ‘Collaborative Architecture Hub’ received the most votes. Enterprise architects who participate in the Hub will be able to reach wider audiences and improve results by modernizing their tools, practices, and mindsets.
editor@itworld.co.kr
Source: www.itworld.co.kr
