Is Architecture the Enemy of Innovation?

asks @EnterprisingA . Well, obviously architecture is not the avowed enemy of innovation. As Jon points out, they ought to be on the same side, because there are some strong shared values.

But surely the real question is not whether they ought to be helping each other, but whether (good intentions notwithstanding) they actually do support each other's efforts more than they (inadvertently) hinder and interfere with each other.

I think there is some evidence for the proposition that Architecture and Innovation don't actually collaborate as well in practice as they ought to in theory. This does not necessarily mean a critique of Architecture as such, but a critique of current "best practices".

Jon talks about the TO-BE architecture, but I am also interested in the TO-BE practice of architecture.

Economics of agility 2

In my previous post on the Economics of Agility, I noted how little material has been published on this topic.

As Nicholas Whittall and Philip Boxer point out in their contribution to the recent debate on The Meaning of Value-for-Money in Defence Acquisition (RUSI, February 2009), there is an important link between agility and alignment. See also their earlier piece on Agility and Innovation in Acquisition (RUSI, February 2008).

The first observation is that defence acquisition - just like systems acquisition most anywhere - operates on a much slower tempo than the requirements of the business. The "business" of a military organization is running military campaigns; thus when writing for the defence community, Whittall and Boxer refer to the Campaign Tempo and the Acquisition Tempo.

The second observation is that there is a complex set of activities (such as orchestration, customization, and improvisation) involved in bridging between Demand (the demands of the campaign or business) and Supply (the procurement of specific systems and devices). These activities operate on an intermediate tempo, which Whittall and Boxer call the Alignment Tempo.

"Meeting the campaign tempo then depends on the alignment tempo possible, which in turn depends on the acquisition tempo at which gaps can be filled. Any slowness in acquisition tempo leads to increased bricolage and process short cuts to enable the alignment tempo to keep up with the campaign tempo. Thus, ‘agility’ finds its richest expression in the ability of the alignment tempo to meet the required campaign tempo at the lowest cost – i.e. to maximise the value-for-defence."

The challenge is then to produce just enough variety within the acquisition to optimize the economics of alignment. Boxer has developed a technique of Cohesion-Based Costing (not yet published), which "offers a means to attach a value to the cost of introducing flexibility". This kind of technique will clearly be of enormous benefit within the SOA world.

 

Related post Enterprise Tempo (October 2010)

SOA as Multi-Sided Platform

One of the ways to think about the complexity of SOA is as a multi-sided platform.

Some of the pioneering work on multi-sided platforms has been published by Andrei Hagiu at the Harvard Business School.  (Follow links from his homepage to some of his recent papers.)

In November 2006, I posted a brief commentary on Two-Sided Markets, referencing his work, and indicating its relevance to a service-oriented business strategy.

As yet, relatively few people have made the connection between multi-sided markets and SOA. In June 2007, Richard Friedman posted something useful on Multi-sided Platforms for Business or Software, and I found a paper entitled Optimizing the Supplier Selection and Service Portfolio of a SOA Service Integrator presented to a 2008 conference by a group of German researchers.

One of the attractions of SOA is that it should allow people and organizations to collaborate more effectively and cost-effectively. From the supply-side perspective, this means collaboration between the users of your platform. Your platform may or may not support a rich and open variety of collaborations, including mashups and other third-party initiatives, and this richness and openness significantly affects the demand-side value of your SOA platform.

The critical economic question here is not the economics of scale on the supply-side but the economics of scope and agility on the demand-side. Thus the critical question for platform design is how open/closed these platforms are, and the extent to which they constrain (overdetermine) or enable (underdetermine) demand-side activity.