Infrastructure Architecture … A tenuous bridge

Infrastructure Architecture … A tenuous bridge over a chasm of theory to the practical.

Infrastructure Architecture can become a chasm bridging Strategy and the Practical if concepts of Function, Fit and Form ~ from my perch ~ are not adhered to. Architecture is about: The harmony of function, form, sustainability and experience, and how any thoughtful solution fits within its intended environment to meet a need and provide value. Imagine trying to grow an English Tea Rose in the Amazon; it maybe possible … but how much time and effort would be required to create a microcosm for that tea rose to grow. It is the same for technology; if you have to create an isolated environment for solutions/products to work then that is where you will be spending your time … on supporting that isolated environment and the custom interfaces to the other systems that surround it.

Theory is great, it opens the mind to new questions and new channels of thoughts around problems that face us daily. At some point however that thinking needs to turn into practicality and as an Infrastructure Architect this practicality is required daily. There are many tools that bound us, such as TOGAF, Zachman, to our days of investigating solutions to our problems and requirements. These tools are very useful however I have found for some of my individual work the following three words to help immensely: Function, Fit and Form which can be expanded to Requirements, Integration and Solutions, and here I will also add Knowledge.

As basic as it is, I look at the requirements (Function) to determine the questions that need to be answered, and the teams of people that need to be involved and the information they need that any solution needs to satisfy. Once I know my requirements are known I need to investigate the environment, the ecosystem, that the requirements need to work within. How will these requirements, the ‘functions’, work and integrate with existing or new systems, people or processes to form a dialogue of data and information? What is required to ensure sustainability into the fuzzy days of the future?

To support any business requirement or enable the use of information the function that needs to execute needs to do so in an ecosystem that is an integration of technology, standards, people, and process. There capabilities will need to ‘fit’ together to interact and form a ‘flow of information’ amongst the using communities. To ensure the stability and supportability of this ecosystem a secondary parallel flow of information, apart from the information to satisfy the functional requirements, will need to be determined as another set of requirements to be shared across formal and informal relationships.

From the perspective of the third element in this triad of architectural harmony, Form (the solution) will use the results of the Function and Fit to bring into view the information and the capabilities framed within the business processes to support a customer’s purchasing or management’s operational decision. The solution will takes its form from the interlacing of the needed Information Technology products into a supported ecosystem that enable the acts of gathering, accessing, storing and securing the information for continued and successful use by the business processes in support of decisions at the intersect of activity.

Out of this requirements (Function) gathering, out of the capacities that emerge that are needed to integrate (Fit) into a new or existing ecosystem enough maybe known to select an appropriate solution (Form). A solution may not be a perfect fit but can provide the basis to evolve to how and what processes are executed and what information is used during these processes to fulfill the initial requirement, question, or decision.

Knowledge is the last part of this puzzle and is the biggest part of an Infrastructure Architect’s armament, and of the daily activities to continually add to this knowledge of many things.