Improving Architecture Competency via CoP

January 28, 2019

I recently attended the Application Strategies and Solutions Summit by Gartner, a leading information technology research and advisory company. One of the analysts shared with us that more than 50% of the organizations face application scalability, agility, resilience and other performance issues due to poor application architecture competency. Some of these organizations describe their architecture — a mess.

Architecture Competency

A competent architecture has three main characteristics:

  • The architecture aligns with the business.
  • Everyone uses architectural principles, paradigms, and patterns effectively to achieve business objectives.
  • There is widespread use of lightweight architecture decision records with a clear framework in place to maximize collaboration and sharing of deliverables. No decision-making process and deliverables occur in silos. Decisions come with traceability and accountability.

How do you improve the architecture competency? Some organizations have tried to improve it, but with little success. The problem lies in the absence of a holistic approach that connects their people to a clear purpose and involves them in defining the practices that work for them.

Communities of Practice

The Communities of Practice (CoP) is an emerging approach for connecting people, sharing knowledge, and fostering individual as well as group learning and development. A successful Architecture CoP:

  • Facilitates collaboration and effective networking among the developers and architects
  • Provides opportunities to contribute to business and architectural decisions
  • Cross-fertilizes ideas and increases opportunities for innovation
  • Develops technical skills to solve problems quickly
  • Builds institutional knowledge and diffuses principles and best practices

An Architecture CoP is a group of developers and architects who share a concern or a passion in Architecture and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

You may form CoPs across a variety of disparate areas within Architecture: application development, data management, integration, or infrastructure. Below is an example of API Communities of Practice for most organizations.

Example

API Communities of Practice


Source: Gartner

Purpose:

  • Be "API-First"
  • Use APIs to enable agility for business change and disruption
  • Unlock data
  • Evangelize your APIs inside and outside the organization

People:

  • API consumers who are creating solutions using outer APIs
  • API producers who are creating inner APIs
  • API Product Manager

Practice:

  • Define best practices in harvesting internal APIs to be delivered as outer APIs
  • Create an internal API marketplace
  • Establish an API style guide
  • Measure the success of API adoption

More companies are adopting the CoP approach today because it shares and diffuses architectural knowledge by connecting purpose, people, and practice altogether. I encourage you to introduce it to your Architecture organization, so that it creates better business alignment and decision-making, enables faster delivery of cost-effective projects, and improves productivity.

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