Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Evolving Architecture Formulization Process in Enterprise 2.0 way


Software architecture in currently in practice across the organizations is rapidly adapting itself, either in organic or in-organic way in response to dynamic organizational environment today with massive social media presence.  Many organizations have recognized the presence of Social Media Platforms by embracing formal enterprise 2.0 platforms whereas others have at least started recognizing the importance of the same. Software architecture practice is also positively evolved & reached into a new era where way of interaction, presentation & feedback for architecture are changing day by day.

Entire architecture development process has revolutionized with Enterprise 2.0 in place and in my opinion, its impact on architecture can be outlined as below at abstract level:

 Social Networking
  Social Networking Software specially targeted for architect’s community can help share relevant experience informally in unstructured way without any boundaries. It can span within organization, across organizations & across the globe. Social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn are great example of people talking informally about architectural & design decision informally.

 Social Collaboration & Feedback
 Social Collaboration is the most happening & useful resource in the field of architecting within an enterprise. Internal wikis, blogs, collaborative office & virtual worlds are key features in this space. One of the greatest examples I have observed developing best practices guide for architecting eCommerce application from experts across the enterprise collaborating through Social Collaboration platform built using Jive.
Social feedback inside enterprise about architectural decisions & best practices are becoming common practice on day-to-day basis for enterprise adopting Enterprise 2.0. This elevates quality of artifacts & also helps in diminishing boundaries between developers, architects & other senior management professionals giving feedback on the same platform.

 Social Media
Sharing architectural artifacts have never been easy with tools in social media categories like social tagging, bookmarking & content posting like Flickr, Digg. This aides to further communication in promoting links, bookmarks, etc, such as enterprise architecture goals, objectives & vision, which are important for architect’s community in the enterprise.

In summary, software architecture needs to keep adapting itself to ever changing environment and adequate support is needed at enterprise level by management to support the same to evolve with social media in place. Recognizing its presence will not only increase productivity of architecture development but also will develop culture of immediate feedback & open culture.

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