Seven deadly wastes of Enterprise Architects

The ivory tower dweller has become out of touch with reality by only communicating with other architects. This Architect preaches the architecture gospel from an ivory tower to the populace down below. Most of what is produced from this position will turn into waste because nobody is listening.

Uses architecture only to tell other people what not to do instead of supporting and guiding them. This architect will eventually be avoided and bypassed as much as possible. “How can we do this project without involving our architect?”

Creates idealistic, long-term plans with no reality check. This Architect keeps away from being involved with the projects and initiatives that have to realize these plans. In Agile circles, this is referred to as ‘big design up-front.’

Creates abstract, overly simplified pictures that are always true and provide no real insight beyond the obvious. Often these pictures are created in response to managers complaining about the complexity of architecture, but they don’t really help the organization.

Documents architectures in the form of presentations, resulting in terrible maintenance problems. And have you ever tried to check such an architecture for consistency?

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Creates huge and complicated spider webs with lots of interconnections. These webs may look impressive but are, in fact, unreadable and unusable. Recognizable by his or her trademark catchphrase: “It’s all very complicated…”

They only want to communicate an architecture when it is finished. However, this will never be the case in a changing world. Projects have deadlines and won’t wait for you, so they move on anyway, and your architecture is already outdated and irrelevant from the start. Perfectionism is a trait of many architects…