Are Enterprise Architects Control Freaks?

Most Enterprise Architects, almost by reflex, recommend that infrastructure, data, applications and everything else be consolidated and centralized. In other words, Enterprise Architects often act like control freaks, who demand that all diversity and local control must be suppressed, in the name of Architecture purity.

There is one overwhelming reason that architects do this, it is to reduce complexity. In most corporations, IT has gotten out of control and there are way too many systems doing very similar things. So, of course, the first thing most architects do is recommend that systems be pruned and consolidated as much as possible.

But there is something that is often forgotten by these architects. It is the tension that exists in every business between those who want to centralize business operations to realize efficiency and economies of scale and those who want to decentralize to allow local autonomy and local accountability.

Centralization of infrastructure, data and services, although it often leads to greater efficiency, often results in loss of service and loss of control to individual Business Units. You see, fragmented systems often happen, because a BU sees an opportunity and commissions a system to fill that opportunity. This is not an ideal way to build systems, but at least systems get built and they deliver business value. Now, if the architect's control tendencies are successful, new systems will have to go through some sort of central authority, or coordinate with other projects which use the same resources. This almost always means that systems are harder to build because much more coordination is required and more approval steps have to be passed. The BUs are now in many respects worse off. Perhaps the total cost of systems has fallen, but so has their ability to get service.

Local autonomy is essential in most businesses. Architects who forget this, are not serving their business, they are creating an over centralized structure which cannot deliver services to the front line units.