InBrief: The Role of Architecture

What It Is: Architecture provides the structure, standards, and framework for how technology strategy should be manifested and governed, including its alignment to business strategy, capabilities, and priorities.  It should ideally be aligned at every level, from the enterprise to individual delivery projects

Why It Matters: Technology is a significant enabler and competitive differentiator in most organizations.  Architecture provides a mental model and structure to ensure that technology delivery is aligned to overall strategies that create value.  Having a lack of architecture discipline is like building a house without a blueprint… it will cost more to build, not be structurally sound, and expensive to maintain

Key Dimensions

• Operating Model – How you organize around and enable the capability
• Enable Innovation – How you allow for rapid experimentation and introduction of capabilities
• Accelerating Outcomes – How you promote speed-to-market through structured delivery
• Optimizing Value/Cost – How you manage complexity, minimize waste, and modernize
• Inspiring Practitioners – How you identify skills, motivate, enable, and retain a diverse workforce
• Performing in Production – How you promote ongoing reliability, performance, and security

Operating Model

• Design the model to provide both enterprise oversight and integrated support with delivery
• Ensure there is two-way collaboration, so delivery informs strategy and standards and vice versa
• Foster a “healthy” tension between doing things “rapidly” and doing things “right”

Innovate

• Identify and thoughtfully evaluate emerging technologies that can provide new capabilities that promote competitive advantage
• Engage in experimentation to ensure new capabilities can be productionized and scaled

Accelerate

• Develop standards, promote reuse, avoid silos, and reduce complexity to enable rapid delivery
• Ensure governance processes promote engagement while not gating or limiting delivery efficacy

Optimize

• Identify approaches to enable simplification and modernization to promote cost efficiency
• Support benchmarking where appropriate to ensure cost and quality of service is competitive

Inspire

• Inform talent strategy ensuring the right skills to support ongoing innovation and modernization
• Provide growth paths to enable fair and thoughtful movement across roles in the organization

Perform

• Integrate cyber security throughout delivery processes and ensure integrated monitoring for reliability and performance in production, across hosted and cloud-based environments

For Additional Information: Enterprise Architecture in an Adaptive World, InBrief: The Intelligent Enterprise 2.0, The Future of IT

Excellence doesn’t happen by accident.  Courageous leadership is essential.

Put value creation first, be disciplined, but nimble.

Want to discuss more?  Please send me a message.  I’m happy to explore with you.

-CJG 02/12/2026