Mr. Ed posted up about a potential anti-pattern in the enterprise space around creating “Architecture Groups”. He’s got a point, I’ve been a lot of organisations that have dedicated architecture groups get into real strife when it comes to application and system design at the coal face.
Successful architecture groups in the enterprise are almost invisible and comprise of experienced developers and business decision makers who aren’t unified by a common tag line of their business card but instead by open and high bandwidth communications backbone that spans the entire business.
The experienced developers are embedded into development teams and provide an uplink into the communications backbone. The most interesting characteristic is that anything that travels across the backbone was actually harvested from a team in the first instance – the archtiecture group just acts as a repeater for the information.
Notice that I haven’t mentioned a particular approach or technology? Sadly – there aren’t that many successful architecture teams.