Architecture Governance

 

Architecture Governance

Many companies that I talk to are trying to up-level their architecture governance. It seems to be a new trend to prioritize architecture governance and it’s great to see!

I get a lot of questions about architecture governance such as:

  • what are best practices
  • what approaches have we put in place in Salesforce IT
  • what should be avoided
  • how do you measure success of governance

First let me start with WHY you want to create a level of architecture governance in all companies.

In a nutshell, good architecture governance helps increase business agility.

Yes, I know it seems counter-intuitive but governance done well can actually speed things up. If you know how to easily find architecture standards, principles, reference and implementation architectures, you can move more quickly to create solution architectures that are fast, efficient, secure and manageable. The opposite is true — if you need to hunt around to find architecture information, you can waste a lot of time, get frustrated and worst of all, create poor solution architectures.

So what should architecture governance look like? I recommend the following architecture governance components:

  1. Architecture Principles — “When you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there” — James Carroll. Step one in architecture governance is to define your principles. You can find our Salesforce IT principles and a process to define your own principles in this blog: https://brettcolbert.medium.com/architecture-principles-eb2bd4101924
  2. Enterprise Architecture Review Board (EARB) — Step two in architecture governance is a regularly scheduled forum for people to propose or request changes or additions to your company’s architecture. This forum typically consists of architects, enterprise architects, lead developers and security architects. The EARB reviews requests and gauges alignment to architecture principles as well as future state architecture.
  3. Architecture Community of Practice (ACoP) — Step three in architecture governance is having a regularly scheduled meeting of your architects in which they cover specific architecture topics (eg — mobility, security, micro-services) and ultimately ratify those architectures. This provides architects and developers with the approved reference and implementation architectures.
  4. Architecture Knowledge Base — Step four in architecture governance is having a central architecture knowledge base. In Salesforce IT, we use a tool called LeanIX https://www.leanix.net/en/ . There are a number of options so make sure to do your own investigation as to the best tool for your company. A good architecture knowledge base provides fast access to current state, future state, roadmaps, data/integration architecture, etc.
  5. Architecture Decision Making Frameworks — Step five in architecture governance is enabling your engineers and architects to select the correct pattern or architecture for their specific situation. As an example, in Salesforce IT, one of our decision making frameworks is for Integration Patterns. Our developers can leverage this simple framework to make the correct decision about integration patterns. We also have a Customization Elimination Framework which helps developers follow a consistent process in order to remove customization from our IT systems. These decision making frameworks not only accelerate the work of your developers but help ensure the correct architectural decisions are being made.
  6. Planning — Step six in architecture governance is embedding architecture at the beginning of your business planning process. The earlier architecture is engaged, the more accurate your planning process will be and the less re-work will be needed later. In addition, ensure that architecture is embedded in your Quarterly Business Review process — you want discipline around tracking your on-going project alignment to your architecture principles and standards. Finding deviations early means less re-work and therefore less project expense variances.

As you can see, there are multiple components to a well-run architecture governance process. Focus governance on the business values of 1) faster decision making 2) better decision making (eg security, -ilities,). As a by-product you will also be reducing costs associated with unsuccessful programs and re-work associated with poorly designed architectures.

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