Reference Architecture

I would like to extrapolate on the idea of Reference Architecture as part of any strategic roadmap.  In a meeting today with some people on the business side, they were having real trouble understanding or being able to create incremental change on some of their larger business issues.

In our conversation we ultimately started talking about how to take a large multi-year project and start delivering value sooner in the process. 

Though it may be obvious let’s start with the question why?

  • acts as a an implementation roadmap
    • can  be implemented in steps
    • seamless integration between components
  • ability for the business to see progress early
  • start achieving business value sooner
  • limit exposure on changing business environment
  • prove out early assumptions (as we start to go into the weeds of an issue, technology and process may prove to be unanticipated hinderance)

So that is a start, so what is it?

  1. It is a well planned realization of your Business Intelligence or Decision Support environment from front to back
  2. A diagram that can be veiwed by anyone (yes that includes the business) to understand the overall architecture.

I am going to follow this post up this week with four different reference architectures to give some different context.

  1. Jim Reply

    I think part of this reference architecture would be what I call my Cloud Theory. I will write a Blog on this.

Leave a Reply

captcha *