How To Align Architecture With Organizational Goals: A Process for Technical Architects Pt 1
With Nigel Kerr
Nigel Kerr is Chief Architect at ITHAKA, an edtech nonprofit organization that aims to make higher education materials more accessible to the broader public and prioritize inclusion in educational opportunities. His job is to align the technical architecture for a product that digitizes and makes available scholarly journals, art collections, and other educational materials to ITHAKA’s organizational goals in a way that enables the people of ITHAKA to keep making an impact. How can similar software development professionals align architecture and business outcomes? What process or considerations go into this important role? Nigel sat down to to share his approach and perspective.
Technical Architecture at the Macro Level
Q: You are ITHAKA’s Chief Architect. How do you sum up what you are responsible for? What’s the most important outcome of your work?
A: As the chief architect at ITHAKA, my goal is to help the engineering teams align their outcomes to ITHAKA’s goals. That goal includes connecting with the people, navigating and guiding our technology, and understanding and using our strategy.
Q: What does architecture look like when interfacing with other teams?
A: I work with many people in a few different ways. I strive to regularly be with every engineering team at a meeting they are already holding. I strive to be available for discussion outside of those times along with the other architects at ITHAKA. I am directly involved in our incident response processes as an incident manager and separately as an incident review facilitator. I meet with resource managers and leads, leaders and colleagues outside engineering, and I get further perspective and insight on teams and how they are doing. Even the documentation I write or the drawings I produce are for others to use or critique, apply or push back on.
The goal of all these different contacts and connections is to be a regular, reliable presence to listen and advise. The trust I work to earn through all this outreach and listening enables me to do the rest of my job.
Q: What business goals are you aligning to in doing this work?
A: ITHAKA’s mission is stable: we are a non-profit working to improve access to knowledge and education for people around the world. Our exact goals for how to achieve that mission change over time, influenced by our history, our environment, the opportunities we detect. JSTOR, our digital platform to support research and teaching, began with a specific approach to relieving library costs associated with holding full-runs of journals over time by digitizing them and preserving them electronically, but also with the broader goal of transforming the infrastructure of institutions of learning. 25+ years later, operating in a changed socio-politico-economic context, we are still pursuing this broad goal by working to make educational materials more universally accessible and useful, leveraging the latest technologies to do so.
How To Align Technical Architecture and Business Goals
Q: Tell us more about how you use these strategies to help move ITHAKA forward as an organization with a vision for the future of education.
A: We use technology to pursue our mission: we believe that digitalization will only increase, and that the needs of learners and educational institutions will increasingly need to be online. We want enterprise and segment architectures and implementations that allow us to move quickly and efficiently in delivering services that align to these goals.
We have to have big pictures that align: Do the pillars of our systems allow us to move quickly to bring services to our end-users and customer institutions? We have to have smaller pictures that also align across or on teams: Does the design, implementation and operation of this application get us the outcome we want at the best speed and cost?
How we work together with our technologies also comes into play, still with the organizational goals in view: Are we designing and building effectively? Are we automating where it helps us the most? Are we prioritizing the right testing and maintenance?
Q: If someone is in your position at an organization, what are some questions they can ask themself that might help define their strategy for architecture?
A: There are some big questions I keep asking myself, the answers are always evolving:
- What business are we in?
- What are we trying to accomplish on the organizational level?
- What pressures are we under?
We have been trying to steer this process by using adaptive technology strategy. In a very small nutshell, our adaptive strategy is a prompt to help us to diagnose our situation as we go, to execute as soon as we can, to change plans or approach when we get new information, and to continually question our assumptions and expectations. At ITHAKA we have our mission to make access to education easier and more affordable, and are pursuing that with a number of organizational initiatives that range from growing existing content programs, to launching new library infrastructure services, to JSTOR Access in Prison, and beyond. We, the technologists, need to drive towards the best solutions that accommodate our many different needs. The adaptive strategy gives us tools to align and execute.
Q: What three practices do you believe drive success in your role and why?
A: It comes down to:
- Being present with the teams allows me to listen, ask questions, give feedback, learn more about how we’re all working, and be available to talk about choosing how to best align to and support our goals. It’s important to build this level of trust to communicate and influence effectively.
- Understanding our mission, business and product goals, and how the goals are designed to support the mission, allow me to shape and recommend technology goals and approaches. To give good advice and make fit-for-purpose designs, you must understand mission and business goals.
- Our adaptive strategy reminds me what we’re doing, and gives me a set of strategies and tactics to make progress. It is a kind of Oblique Strategies deck, if you will: a set of questions and prompts I can use to help our teams and myself keep moving forward. I recommend adaptive strategy to help guide your process.
Nigel’s Architecture Influences
Up next, we’ll have part two of this article, which dives a bit deeper into the details to help you build a similar process for aligning architecture with business goals in your organization. If you would like to read further on architecture, here are some places to start recommended by Nigel:
- Systems Theory generally, and very particularly the ideas and models of Dr. Nancy Leveson as presented in her Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety. Systems Theory finally clicked loudly and firmly for me in what Dr. Leveson has to say, a model of messages and feedbacks between different controllers and controlled processes. This model can apply to any socio-technical system, it is natural to model how technology choices impact our ability to succeed at goals.
- Also Sidney Dekker’s works: Drift into Failure, The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’: our socio-technical systems continue to change after we’re “done” building them, even after we’ve attained an outcome.
- I use the basic reference interview all the time when talking to stakeholders and colleagues: what’s the need, what do you need to accomplish, what are the motivations, what are the range of possible solutions or helps? My library degree gave me this tool a million years ago, and I still use it all the time. Yes, I’m not a reference librarian interviewing a patron, but the point is similar: what do we need to understand and do to increase the chances we’ll get the outcome we need?
- I am influenced by the Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters, byRichard Rumelt., most by the focus on diagnosis. Even a little diagnosis focuses our attention on more specific problem spaces, and what our scope of strategy and tactics could be.
Continued in Part 2…
Interested in exploring careers and Ann Arbor jobs or New York jobs with ITHAKA? Check out our ITHAKA jobs page to learn more and speak with recruiting.
