Project architecture governance - introduction
October 8th, 2007 by Jiri
Architecture leadership is important to move the project forward against the series of challenges and setbacks, but for projects, especially the large ones, also need some more formal structures to ensure the project follows the right technical direction.
The key word, especially for large undertaking is accountability. Clear roles and responsibilities are the key for achieving this goal where a project involves a large numbers of people.
TOGAF captures this in the concept of architecture governance: “Architecture governance is the practice and orientation by which enterprise architectures and other architectures are managed and controlled at an enterprise-wide level. It includes the following:
- Implementing a system of controls over the creation and monitoring of all architectural components and activities, to ensure the effective introduction, implementation, and evolution of architectures within the organization
- Implementing a system to ensure compliance with internal and external standards and regulatory obligations
- Establishing processes that support effective management of the above processes within agreed parameters
- Developing practices that ensure accountability to a clearly identified stakeholder community, both inside and outside the organization “.
In this definition, Open Group makes a point that you can see as trivial, but which is in fact very important: Effective architecture is implemented architecture. Or in other words, there is no point having a fantastic enterprise architecture that is just a pile of boxes and process definitions whilst projects continue going their own way.
Project architecture governance is about formal mechanisms that can help to make the enterprise architecture become alive in real world projects.
I agree, This is why of the 9 phased of TOGAF, only 4 are directly related to actually making architectures, and the rest are about governance and implementing architectures using projects.
More info:
http://www.sjaaklaan.com/pivot/entry.php?id=5
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