Introduction
Digital Architect is a fulfilling career, no matter what kind of project you work in. Because the number of dimensions you need to be aware of is way too many. The foundation of an Architect’s success is the level of awareness as an Architect for these dimensions and your ability to pick up the right solution option for the problem scenario.
If you build your awareness and knowledge in these areas, people will consider you as an expert in your field, your value will continue to rise. So will your impact and recognition.
Developing a comprehensive skillset as an Architect in this era of Digital age is time-consuming and needs to take into account so many functional, technical and specialized domains.
Whether you’re working as an Architect for a customer experience solution, beginning to integrate an existing legacy solution with your new solution or you are exploring a solution to gather data from multiple systems and you want to aggregate and apply machine learning models at scale to improve the operational effectiveness of an enterprise, you are always crossing multiple boundaries and integrating several ecosystems.
However, if you can build your knowledge of the multiple ecosystems, and hard-wire the application of your knowledge with experience, the payoff is huge.
The impact of an outstanding Architect over an average Architect is 10X. And his gets reflected in the level of recognition, impact and rewards of an outstanding Architect.
As an example, you can grow your awareness of the impact created by you as a Digital Solution Architect, in following manners:
- Have the big picture
- Improve the topline & bottom line of the organization
- Help in selling solutions
- Build high-performance customer centric modern applications
- Sharing thought leadership, mentoring technology team members
1 – Have The Big Picture
While working as an architect, it is very easy to be lost in the jungle of details. Problems of legacy. Ever-increasing demands of customer. Need to fight for the customer in the fight with the tech startups. Need to help the customer CIO to reduce the operating cost.
We focus too much on the individual initiatives. Just like the blisters and wounds of individual organs. And we forget to gauge the holistic well-being of the enterprise. Where is the enterprise in the industry value chain? Is the digital front end expected to move too fast as compared to legacy backend?
Step back. Don’t be daunted by the immediate priorities too much. Take a balanced approach. Look at the industry landscape. The history of the organization. The investments, top performers, influencers and the old timers. Before you make sense of the problems on the ground, try to make sense of the big picture.
If you spend efforts in understanding the big picture consciously, people will start taking you seriously. An immediate win. Your recommendations will be spot on. If you continue to look at the bigger picture, customers will start considering you as a partner, a trusted advisor.
2 – Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
For the last 20 years we are hearing that banks are going to get rid of their mainframe footprint.
Mainframe is like a white elephant. The running cost for mainframe is extremely high.
And it poses several problems for the enterprise:
- Mainframes manages transactions in a robust way but to make it useful customer engagement needs workaround and integration of mainframe data with digital channels.
- Many times the modernization efforts for mainframes end up solving one problem and introduce other problems. For example – there has been a trend to automatically transform mainframe code to .Net functions and objects but that led to .net application that is several times harder to maintain by usual .Net developers and has usually been associated with significant number of bugs.
- Mainframe application development takes longer cycle time in terms of development, deployment, testing and it is not easy to adopt DevOps practices for mainframes.2 –
And the changes to mainframes are hard to make. Many Mainframe developers have reskilled themselves to new technologies and have moved on.
The availability of developers for mainframe systems is as low as any other end-of-life technology. So now that’s a problem.
Do we get rid of Mainframes, or we do keep them?
Getting rid of Mainframes is expensive. Keeping and supporting them is also riddled with lot of challenges.
What do you do? Whatever you want to do, keep the legacy footprint as a part of your overall architectural landscape. Do invest time in understanding the challenges of legacy systems of the enterprise, how you can deal with them.
It’s not about having a perfect solution; it’s about being practical and not trying to boil the ocean in the enterprise.
Since legacies will stay with traditional enterprises (large banks, telecom companies, Insurance customers), invest in learning how to integrate with these legacy systems so that data from these core systems flow to the digital ecosystem when required.
And CIO’s will love an Architect who leverages the decade old investment.
3 – More Integrations, More Opportunities for Value
Digital is all about venturing into new opportunities and unlocking values. From as many sources as possible. As digital is blurring the boundaries of physical and digital, getting information of physical world through sensors and distribution of information through multiple digital channels are becoming more and more ubiquitous.
For all these to happen, in addition to traditional business application integration, new integration requirements are emerging – IoT integration, big data integration, 3rd party API integration, geospatial API integration to create rich context for digital interactions.
With the advent of Cloud PaaS services, composing modern applications by integration of PaaS components has become very popular for faster to market proposition. There too, integration plays a significant role in bringing impact.
Reactive architecture, Event driven architecture, API – there are many ways of integration between subsystems. If you aspire to be a high value architect, you must be a Master of Digital integration patterns.
4 – Microservice is at the epicentre of Innovation
Over the years, we have all learnt about the benefits of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Modular, plug and play building blocks accessed through defined service interfaces.
Modern applications have given a spin to the traditional service orientation. Other than modular, service oriented, the need to be domain driven, have bounded context and should be developed, deployed, managed, re-deployed, scaled, supported independently.
With the advent of Cloud Native computing capabilities, packaging these ‘micro’ services as containerized deployment package and deploying them in container orchestration environment (e.g. – Kubernetes cluster) has made modern applications resilient, and scalable. Two attributed of high-performance applications.
For building channel applications and modernization of traditional applications (called Monoliths in Microservice world) – Microservices are gradually becoming the default construct. And it is not an exaggeration to say that Microservices is at the epicenter of modern applications.
So, to make an impact as a Digital Architect, we need to learn Microservices – domain driven design, deployment patterns. You will be indispensable in any discussion for digital transformation.
5 – Ability to use different Patterns of Architecture
What is the difference between a Designer and an Architect. I had this question in mind. And years ago, I read this in a book – “Designer designs the functional feature of a system. Architecture is concerned about the non-functional feature of the solution. Designer thinks what should happen if a user clicks on a button. Architect thinks what could happen if thousands of users click on the button simultaneously.”
It’s quite daunting to think what really would happen when thousands of users are there on your website and they click on a link or a button. Just imagine, people click on Google’s search button 3.5 billion times in a day. Facebook has 1.7 billion daily active users clicking on the like button.
Don’t worry, just like NLP (neuro linguistic programming) models, you can model your architecture following established patterns, reference architectures, blueprints and best practices. For real-time streaming, look at how Spotify does it; for guidance on real-time calculation and optimization look up to Uber, for API patterns look at Stripe. The list is as long as your experience. Every cloud platform (Google, AWS, Azure) provides reference architectures for specific solution scenario’s (IoT, Analytics etc) and a “well-architect” framework.
Just a word of caution. Every architecture is unique in terms of business intent, legacy footprint, integration ecosystem and stakeholder expectations.
Best Architects fuse the patterns judiciously with the business context to create a unique Architecture that is grounded on proven principles, patterns and ready to work in the specific business context.
6 – Explore the power of API
If you look at the industries today, the boundaries of the organizations are blurring. Did you predict Uber to deliver food, Facebook to launch business loans (grants).
As organization boundaries are blurring, external ecosystem of an organization is becoming as important as organization’s internal ecosystem and partner ecosystem.
The glue in all these ecosystems is API. The dictionary meaning of API – Application Programming Interface – is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other.
The business meaning of API is much broader in Digital economy. Digital means connected ecosystem for flow of information seamlessly across the ecosystems.
If you look at all the disruptions, actual dilemma of the innovators have been – how to make use of API’s to create ecosystems and use the power of ecosystem to dislodge the incumbents. Apple did it, Google did, Amazon is doing it in every industry.
If you want to learn the dynamics of digital disruption, understand the business architecture of API’s and how it helps in creating business ecosystems & scale of economy.
If we look around, we see the implementations of API programs like PSD2, open Banking – which externalizes Bank’s biggest asset (customer information) through regulated mechanism. And it has the potential to disrupt hundred-year-old earliest banks sitting on trillion-dollar assets by a Fintech starting today.
API is a big democratizer in Digital world. Digital Architects spend time in identifying API catalog of the enterprise, implement API management solution exposing the API’s and creating a trail of monetization. Right API’s and business potential makes API Architecture a hot commodity and Digital Architects valuable.
7 – Learn from Customers, their Behaviours and Journeys
A good Architect knows the business process, but a great Architect can feel the pain of the customer. It’s not 30,000 feet view of a business; it’s about thinking as customer and helping to reduce his pain. How to provide contextual knowledge, how to help to take the next best action. From the perspective of the customer.
Customer journey starts long before the customer reaches the website or downloads the mobile app. The invisible customer reads about products in an affiliate blog site or in a social media post.
When they come to the website, they already know of the product or services. They want to find the information as fast as they can. It is about the ontology, knowledge graph. And the Information Architecture.
They start it means integration with back-end for information, it means creating APIs, it means tracking customer behavior, it means experimenting with journeys – A/B testing – which helps customer move towards improving the journey as natural as what customer thinks.
8 – Find if Automation can solve Problem
There was a time when automation used to mean converting a manual task into code & running the code to reduce manual labor. It increased productivity overnight.
After 20 years, automation has reached to such a sophistication that it threatens to take away the livelihood of people today. Orchestration of processes, low-code/no-code platform – developer doesn’t need to code to put up a solution anymore. We just use off-the shelf solution components to compose applications just like the recipe of cake.
If you are an Architect, you need to constantly find opportunities and contexts of such automation.
With the advent of Artificial intelligence, automation is becoming intelligent, self-adjusting, self-healing. The neural network of human mind is mirrored in algorithms.
Till the automation becomes self-aware and deploys automation, Architects have a role to enable the automation ecosystem in enterprises and MSME, consumer applications. Don’t miss the opportunity.
9 – Find ways to manage Application Performance
21st century customer has low attention span. Millennials have multi-tasking as the second habit. If the application is taking more than a second to load, we are running the risk of losing the customer. What do you do?
To manage the performance of an application, An Architect lays out options to exchange messages asynchronous, use reactive principles and use solution constructs (e.g. – containerized application) to scale application to insanely large number of consumers.
If for any reason, managing the performance of application within a threshold is not possible (or is not worth given the business case), at least the Architect manages the perception of users & consumers so that the equality of experience is not dropped. This is very similar to employing mirrors in slow hoist car (lift) so that passengers’ attention is drifted from the performance of the lift to the ‘relative’ performance of it.
From managing the performance of application to managing the perception of performance, an Architect can create big impact. Because performance is experience, experience is money.
10 – Find ways to build Internet scale Applications
As today’s online stores are never closed. There are endless events – Cyber Monday, Black Friday, Christmas sale, Big summer sale, March sale, April sale…
Applications are no more designed for a number of total users and hence a number of concurrent users. It’s about a billion potential people visiting the catalogs on a special day (if the products are known to 1/7th of the world population J), and available at special discounts.
It is about dynamic scaling of website for traffic increase by order of magnitude, isolating the catalog traffic from shopping cart traffic and ordering traffic.
As an Architect, if you can ensure the eCommerce site up and running during the flash sale, you have made it for the business of your company, your customer.
11 – Think Resilience – Think like Facebook & Google
Do you use Facebook? Google? All of us use these apps because they are useful, and they are always available. Now think, 3-5 B people use these two apps regularly. But did you find Facebook down or Google not responding in last few months? Very unlikely. These are resilient applications.
All applications can be resilient. In fact, Google has come up with a philosophy of software reliability engineering. They approach operations just like development. Treat ops like dev. How we can we provision infrastructure, application programmatically. How can maintain SLA programmatically.
Architects working with mission critical systems at a global scale know the fundamentals of reliability engineering and the observable nature of Cloud native modern applications. If you want to be a world class Architect, you need know the fundamentals of resilient application, reliability engineering.
From collecting logs, metrics, uptime status to aggregating the captured operational information and visualization of key metrics have become a common phenomenon. Application
Building a modern application good, great is the way to run a successful application at internet scale and growing 40-50% year on year. If you can crack the code of reliable operations, you are a respected Architect. Well paid too J. Just like Facebook and Google!
12 – Find how can you improve top-line and bottom-line
Digital solutions, especially the consumer facing applications reach out to the customer in a number of ways (read- channels) so that they can customize the experience of the consumers at a micro level. Without breaking the experience journey spread across a number of channels.
When a customer gets information at his/her finger-tip wherever he/she is and whenever needed, and there is a consistency and continuity of the experience across channels, something magical happens between the consumer and the org. That is called ‘Trust’. It is capitalized, I really mean it. Because we trust Google more than Government, Facebook more than our Bank and we trust Uber more than public transport.
An omni-channel modern application is a matrix of information. A Digital Architect takes the red pill and makes all the components stitched together through data, analytics, hybrid integration, real-time responsive behavior. When this works in unison to get customer trust, guess what happens. We get lifetime customers.
Lifetime customers not just increase the top lines, they improve the bottom line as well.
The pro Digital Architects use the power of cloud, PaaS services to compose modern applications purely on a consumption-based model and further reduce the cost of ownership. They also don’t reinvent the wheel and aim for the perfect greenfield solution; they apply their knowledge (especially integration architecture) to leverage investments in existing solutions and
Top-line and bottom-line are the lifeline of Organizations. Digital Architects can be the real partners in this game.
13 – Data is the new Oil, Find Data, more & more Data
Data is the new oil. All applications generate data. Modern applications don’t generate just transactional data. Those applications create behavioral data – data about user’s (customer or prospect) behavior in the application.
Modern applications also conduct experiments in live applications (A/B testing, multi-variate testing) to generate more behavioral data. To validate and establish relationship amongst behavioral data and business events (e.g.- a purchase or a return of a product).
In addition to application data, enterprises are using data from other sources (social media, weather, traffic, news) to find new patterns of relationship with events of their business interest.
Architects today play a big role in creating platforms to harness data in multiple mode, managing the data in optimal storage, provisioning data securely for analysis, externalizing the data as well as insights for consumption by business applications.
The data oil flows from the drilling rig to a distribution center and then is distributed as the lifeblood of business. Architect creates the plumbing for this flow.
14 – Know of the relevant Regulatory compliances applicable for your customer
As tech giants are becoming gigantic and their market caps are higher than GDP’s of countries, government bodies want to control them. Market regulators want to have fair play in the marketplace. Recent regulations reflect the rise of technological superpowers and their socio-political impact.
HIPAA, PCI compliances have been there for years. SOx (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) regulation has also been around for two decades. GDPR is the most stringent personal data protection regulation. Within the scope of these regulations, These regulations have significant bearing for a solution we build.
One of the recent regulations in Banking industry is PSD2 in EU and Open Banking in UK. Both of them mandate opening up customer information for electronic payment services. This provides more opportunities for the Banking and Fintech industry.
A Digital Architect needs to work around these regulations and make sure that compliances are met. Also, leverage the opportunities presented by the new regulations are.
15 – Design for Security by Default
As modern applications are deployed on the cloud, distributed across clouds, integrated with multiple external and subsystems, the surface area of attack of modern apps is increasing.
Because of the breadth of the application, security attacks can happen at any layer of the application – network, integration end points, application access, data at rest and in motion, and regulatory compliance – especially with regards to storage & handling of data.
Digital Architects are aware of all types of security hacks and attacks – man in the middle attack, DoS attack, SQL injection, DNS Tunneling, Phishing etc. and are able to put security controls for identity & access management, perimeter firewall, sophisticated web application firewall, firewall, network isolation, network rules, peering, Secured channel (SSL) for data transmission, encrypted data in storage.
Security by Design reduces the vulnerability of the application and sustainability of business. For the ability to ensure this, Architects are respected more than ever.
16 – Manage the risk of Application Downtime
Today applications and audiences are global. Barring the regulatory constraints of eCommerce and banking, global applications run for global audiences 24×7.
There has been controls to provide application redundancy and high availability over the years. Using load balancers to distribute application load across multiple instances or setting up clustered environment of applications are as old as internet.
Because of the sophisticated nature of modern applications, the routing, load balancing are not sufficient to provide redundancy to applications. For the 24×7 availability of web applications and services over internet, there are resilient deployment patterns like employment of containers and applications bounded by business context (microservices).
To embed the resiliency and availability of application, modern application deployments are also automated. There are practices like blue-green deployment where a new version (green) of an application/service is deployed and co-exist with earlier version (blue) in production. Also practices like canary deployment helps in split testing new (green) deployments with incremental volume and finally shut down earlier (blue) deployment.
17 – Think like Amazon
Amazon has started as an online book-seller in 1997. They quickly allowed others to sell used items, books, and music discs on the same item page as new inventory. Thus, Amazon scaled online store in the value Chain of eCommerce.
Later, Amazon moved to allow third-party sellers creating new items on their platform to sell. And multiple sellers of the same item through the Marketplace platform helped Amazon to scale online store to online marketplace.
From Online Store to Marketplace to inventing new categories, creating private label, Fulfilled by Amazon service – Amazon has mastered the craft of value chain disruption by scaling the business through technology innovation.
If you want be a successful, most valued Architect in the organization, you need to think like Amazon while you create Architecture. As customer, traffic, data, transaction is magnified, how will the solution scale? Will it sustain itself? By generated data & insights? Can the operations be offered as a service?
Questions like these help in expanding the horizon of a Digital Architect. Many times, architecture of a solution is constrained by prior decisions or legacy; but many times, it is constrained by mindset. The role of the most valuable Architect is to unshackle the mindset and be a coach.
18 – Help Win new Business
Today, ideas don’t chase money, money chases ideas & business pursue thought leaders. Solution Architecture is the mental creation of an Architect (or a Team of Architects) and a good architect knows the importance of the value proposition of a solution architecture.
As an Architect what I have loved the most over the years is working on presales assignments. It is like working for 2-4 weeks in a mini consulting assignment – understand requirements, meet customers, clarify things with them, discuss/brainstorm with Teams, construct solution, take design choices, relate to your experience and then face the world with your solution.
Winning a deal on merit of the solution is the best boost in confidence as Architect gets. Just like the capitalism drives better products, presales hones up the skills of an architect.
We win some deals, lose few others but an Architect never loses. He/she keeps on learning about people, architecture, value proposition and most importantly about business.
19 – Mentor & Coach other Architects
An Architect loves reading articles, attending conferences, discussing endlessly about the pros and cons of solution approaches.
More often than not, they love to document past work, case studies, sample approaches, potential flows, market trends, emerging technology and a host of things from the world of technology and business they live in.
Good Architects learn from unusual sources as much as documented manuals and instructions. The best Architects share this knowledge for posterity. Sometimes to establish a point of view. Other times, just to shutter established norms and practices like an opinionated contrarian.
Architects are headstrong and giving them headroom to express their thoughts help to grow them as much as to elevate the learning of the Team.
Expressive & articulate Architecture thought leaders help shaping the career and impact of next level of Architects and create a body of work for themselves and their communities.
The Architect himself is his biggest deliverable. For a range of high impact things – conceptualize solutions, selling solutions, learning technologies, leaving their legacies.
Conclusion
Have you watched the movie Cast Away? It is the movie of Tom Hanks from the year 2000. Tom Hanks character – Chuck Noland – works with FedEx. He resolves productivity problems.
In one instance, he sends a courier package with a stopwatch from Tennessee to Head office and then from Head office to back to Tennessee. Just to check how much time it takes for the package to be delivered.
In another instance – to solve a productivity problem he travels to Malaysia by a private jet and encounters with an accident.
Chuck Noland never ceases to remind me about the importance of making an impact. Just like FedEx places on delivering a package to customers at any cost.
Every time, I think about making impacts, Chuck Noland’s visuals rush in my mind – the quintessential impact chaser who does quirky things like sending stopwatch over a courier package to ending up stretching his life in a desolate island one day at a time.
Digital Architects are the Chuck Noland’s of IT who does quirky things to create impacts. Sometimes too frenziedly. But, when it demands, they can stretch the solution of complex systems one block at a time.
Digital Architects never be cast away from making impacts!