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.

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.

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.

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.

• Lightweight Architecture Decision Records
• Spotify Engineering Culture
• Team Work Made Simple with Guilds
• 2017 Strategic Roadmap for Adopting Communities of Practice to Support Digital Transformation
• Use the Application Architecture Maturity Model to Assess and Improve Your Architecture Competency
• Communities of Practice: Learning as a Social System
• Communities of Practice: The Missing Piece of Your Agile Organization
• The first rule of API Center of Excellence is: Don't call it an API Center of Excellence