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  • Mike Walker
    • May 31, 2009
    • 2 min read

Do Architecture Principles Matter?

Jeff Scott from Forrester doesn't think so. In his post entitled Principles Don’t Matter, he discussed the challenges with principles. Some of his assertions are:

  1. Principles are not really principles... Instead they are mostly good intentions.

  2. Principles are passive. A principle sits there until something comes along to test it.

I have to say I agree with Jeff on his assessment. Coming from large organizations that have implemented Enterprise Architecture I have seen this quite a bit. For example, I have seen very large EA organizations create the master set of principles that took them a better part of 3 months worth of very senior talents time to then proceed to frame them on a wall and never to be followed again. This is obviously an extreme but I have seen this behavior at more than a handful of organizations.

My opinion on issues with principles are:

  1. They are subject to interpretation by the architect. Meaning that since principles are very high level there is a lot of room to make an interpretation.

  2. Effectiveness hinges on the competencies of the architect.

  3. Is an all or nothing implementation. Meaning, if only a select few architect follow them and the rest don't this breaks down.

  4. What is a principle any ways? Jeff Scott eludes to this when he makes reference to: “buy before build” principle? Isn’t it really a strategy?".

  5. The problem is that the term principle is too generic and means different things to different people.

  6. There are issues of abstraction and scope.

While there are issues, there are positives about principles as well. I would caution folks looking at building a robust set of principles from scratch in today's economic climate and pressure on IT. I definitely wouldn't recommend a multi-month organizational soul searching exercise on what are my company's principles. What I would recommend is similar to Jeff's assessment. Build out a set of pragmatic principles that are actionable and relatable to your IT strategies. Make the higher order bit the strategies rather the principles themselves.

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