Social factors drive your technology muscle and software architecture. Don't underestimate them.
This post is the summary of several key points from my conversations with the speakers and attendees at O’Reilly Architecture conference. As always, it was great to catchup with my peers from around the industry.
Technology Muscle
How does one measure technology muscle of the business?
Its an important question, specially now, then technology became the strategic part of most successful companies.
In many cases technology muscle strength is measured by the the cost of change at technology level and the speed at which technology can reliably accommodate the new business requirements.
One could also argue that if company doesn’t have the ability to control its core technology — this company doesn't have the technology muscle at all.
The Role of Technology Architecture
The goal of your technology architecture should be to build and strengthen the technical muscle mentioned above.
Choosing the suitable technology strategy, allocating the measured amount of effort and guiding it in the right direction are the foundational decisions made by technology architects.
Creating continuous feedback loop between the beneficiaries of the strategic technology changes (business owners) and technology teams is another key element.
But what factors are the most frequent influencers of strategic technology decisions?
Interestingly, many of them are social factors.
Lets look at few of them.
Sunk cost fallacy
We tend to base our decisions on the emotional investment.
Sunk cost fallacy is the term describing our perception of the time spent on previous projects or endeavours.
Too often it acts as the guiding factor for what we will do in the future.
Most times people feel that they have reached the point of no return if the investment of time & effort was relatively large.
In software architecture, sunk cost fallacy factor is stopping us (technology teams) from considering and adopting new approaches. Specially if they challenge the existing ones (with years of built in effort).
Organisations require great leaders and sometimes bold actions to break the spell of sunk cost fallacy.
Communication structures between teams
The famous quote related to this social factor is Conway’s law.
It states that every organization will design the system (technology included) which will be the copy of organisations communication structure.
Even after 50 years, this quote proves to be still relevant.
There is nothing wrong with organisations designing and building technology based on the existing team structures. The challenge starts once organisations underestimate the amount of effort and investment required to adjust existing technology systems to the new org structures.
This can significantly increase the future cost of change for underlying technology, or even make this change impossible.
In other words, by underestimating Conway’s law and without appropriate investments while changing business structures — organisations are risking to eliminate their own technology muscle.
Writing code without product mindset
In technology industry we are exposed to a lot of creativity.
Programmers can just open up their text editors and start typing the code.
The best programmers can write working programs within days.
The challenge with this — we often start to write code and apply technology solutions without fully understanding the purpose of what we are aiming to achieve.
To reduce this risk, organisations should share the clear vision of what products are they building (or planning to build) with the technology teams.
With the clear vision its possible to start investing in the specific technology muscles to support the business vision. And architecture teams should contribute in this space as facilitators.
Extensive coding should come after the above foundations are set.
There is another great effect from culture of building products and not just writing code.
In most cases this understanding helps to resolve the endless discussions about which programming languages, operating systems or software deployment tools are technically superior.
Discussion becomes: Which technology pieces can deliver us the products we currently want. With the best efficiency. And with manageable cost of ownership.
Culture & mindset for building products and not just writing code requires smooth communication flow between business & tech, strong business leaders who appreciate the technology lifecycle, cross functional delivery teams among other factors.
Summary
I have seen the above social factors playing a significant role (sometimes make or break role) in various technology organisations.
It was great to see that this subject got lots of attention during O’Reilly Architecture conference this year.
And it was good to learn that many of my peer technology leaders are recognizing and addressing these factors while planning strategic technology investments for their businesses.
What about your organization?
