You Want IT When?

Achieving Agile goals of delivering faster and responding to change quickly is best achieved by designing an architecture that leverages those goals, I reasoned in an essay titled “Agile Isn’t a Process“.  Being agile is about leveraging the entire organization and business partners to deliver solutions to your customers. Agility is best achieved when solutions require less IT involvement, not more. 

While having a good development process is important and necessary, the Agile process is not well suited to developing agile architectures; an emergent, iterative approach does not offer much when the requirements for solving the problem require an investment in up-front analysis and design. Some would call the investment big, but I would call it proper.  In this essay, I’d like to offer a real world example to support that original thesis.

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I’m reminded of an interview I had with a young company for a Software Director role.  They were at point where they were ready to begin rapidly acquiring new customers.  When a new customer signed, there was customization required to have the system operate according to the customer’s demanding requirements.   The turnaround time from signing the new customer and having them productively using the system was approximately four weeks - at least that was the goal. 

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