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ARCHITECT BY BOB RHUBART

Architect: The Next

Generation

The need for agility, adaptation, and transformation also

applies to arbiters of change.

echnological evolution is the business

of architects at the enterprise, solution,
and application levels. People in those roles
bear responsibility for getting their organizations from their current technological state
to some predetermined yet always moving
target state in order to meet ever-changing
business demands. Failure to hit that
targetor to recognize that the target even
existscan have dire consequences. Just ask
anyone who used to run a video rental store.
Or a mall. Or the music business.
Cloud computing, mobility, the Internet
of Things, and other disruptions present new
challenges and portend changes not just for
the what, why, and how of IT, but also for the
whoincluding architects. This reality raises
important questions: What skills will be critical to the success of the next generation of
architects? How will those skills differ from
the skills that have served the current generation of architects? I put those questions
to members of the architect community.
Architects are often focused on principles and rules to keep IT in line with
policies, says Oracle ACE Director Lonneke
Dikmans, managing partner at eProseed.
But for the next generation to succeed in a
fast-moving world, Dikmans says, being
able to innovate and come up with new
solutions will be more and more important.
Openness and the ability to learn and
adapt are essential to architects responsible for helping to move their businesses
forward, according to Oracle ACE Director
Lucas Jellema, CTO at AMIS Services.
Architects themselves have to become
agile, says Jellema. Rules that were absolutely sensible five years ago may have to be
revised or even completely rewritten.
Oracle ACE Director and Veriton LTD
Founder Simon Haslam adds that the move
CONNECT:

The ability to
explain ideas and
the consequences
of choices is key.
Lonneke Dikmans, Oracle ACE Director

toward cloud-delivered applications will

place even greater importance on the ability
to quickly absorb new concepts. Cloud
service provisioning will shorten procurement time, driving architects to deliver
production-ready, innovative solutions
much more quickly than today, in weeks
rather than months, he says.
Cloud computing will drive a change in
mind-set, according to Haslam. Future
architects will have to think much more
laterally about failure modes and potential
performance bottlenecks, since many of
those things will be out of their control.
They will also have to understand how their
operations teams will monitor complex
interdependent SLAs [service-level agreements] and mitigate risk, he says.
Oracle Enterprise Architect Eric Stephens
asserts that basic problem-solving skills
and business fundamentals, while always
important, will be even more so in the
future. The next generation of architects
will do well to spend more time consuming
business literature and emphasizing the
business planning aspect of architecture,
he says.
Those all-important soft skills, too, will
take on even greater significance for the
next generation of architects. The ability
to explain ideas and the consequences of
choices is key, says Dikmans.
Toward that end, Jellema recommends
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taking advantage of conferences, wikis, and

other community-style platforms where
architects from various organizations meet
and exchange experiences and ideas. Get
out of the ivory tower to get more in touch
with the rest of the world, he advises.
There is a payoff to that kind of outreach.
As more and more reference architectures
and best practices become available, the
focus will shift from thinking about the theoretical solution to executing architecture
in a controlled manner, says Dikmans. That
should make it easier for the next generation of architects to avoid entering the ivory
tower in the first place.
For the architects to come, perhaps
images of sleek, nimble starshipsrather
than ivory towerswill inform the technological and organizational sensibilities they
will bring to the task of steering the companies they work for toward that alwayselusive to-be state.

Bob Rhubart
(bob.rhubart@oracle.com)
is manager of the
architect community
on Oracle Technology
Network, the host of the
Oracle Technology Network ArchBeat podcast
series, and the author of the ArchBeat blog
(blogs.oracle.com/archbeat).

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