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CHAPTER 3 : IT ARCHITECTURE - Coggle Diagram
CHAPTER 3 : IT ARCHITECTURE
Architecture as a Universal Translator
It translates between business-speak and technology-speak to foster a shared purpose.
By transforming strategy-driven business priorities into matching IT assets, it provides a blueprint for executing business strategy.
Architecture serves an identical purpose for IT projects as it does for homeowners. it translates between users and builders to get them on the same page.
On the right side
Operational strategy drives line functions’ business needs and priorities that shape the IT architecture.
While IT team contribute insight into cost constraints and suggest possiblities.
The IT Architecture reconciles the business and IT perspectives to harmonise between them.
On the left side
To build a home, it begins with a vision of what owner want it to look like and his needs.
A builder knows
costs, constraints, materials, and even possibilities unknown to the owner.
An ideal architecture reconciles the two perspectives into a design that comes close to what the owner want at a cost that he can afford.
Architecture as DNA
Architecture is the DNA of IT system
it is irreversible, imprints their traits, and influences how they can and cannot evolve.
Although in theory it can be changed, the prohibitive costs in practice make it almost impossible to change.
However, IT architecture lurks in the blind spot of non-IT managers because they perceive it as a technical decision best left to IT specialists, who are unschooled in its strategic consequences.
The resulting choices can constrain strategic flexibility tomorrow.
Its strategic consequences manifest long after its immediate operational consequences.
A good Architecture balances economical performance today and economical changeability later.
It fulfils today’s requirements but plans for tomorrow’s expectations.
It explains why some firms’ IT is more adaptable archrivals’ and some can harness new innovations faster.
Non-IT managers can help preserve enough of both.
Imprints
traits of IT systems
Largely
irreversible
Influences how they can and cannot evolve
Enterprise IT Architecture’s Three Layers
1. IT Infrastructure Architecture
IT infrastructure is your firm’s digital plumbing—its firm-wide foundation of shared IT assets and IT services used by all line functions.
It includes the networks through which data travels and apps are linked and the hardware on which apps run and store data (e.g., computers, tablets, servers, and storage devices).
IT infrastructure architecture is their firm-wide arrangement.
2. App Architecture
Apps are software programs that undergird the functionality of a hardware device such as a PC, smartphone, tablet, cash register, or other Internet-connected devices (e.g., a thermostat, camera, or car systems).
Such devices (called clients) are used to access a resource or service placed on a more powerful central computer (called a server).
One server machine can serve many user devices, which connect to it through the Internet.
choosing
where to locate the three pieces
Like arranging pieces on a chessboard
Has
irreversible operational and strategic consequences
3. Data Architecture
Data architecture answers one question: Where is your firm’s data stored? Integrated firm-wide data is the foundation of IT-enabled automation of business processes and large-scale business analytics.
However, the prevalent problem in firms is proliferation of duplicated and inconsistent data.
This problem is caused by the dispersion of a firm’s data
(a) across apps and
(b) across geographic locations. They require different fixes.
Inside the Corporate IT Architecture Blackbox
IT architecture is a blueprint of the IT assets in a firm’s IT portfolio that describes what they do, how they interact, and how they fit together.
A firm’s IT portfolio is a federated system of infrastructure, apps, and data.
IT architecture
(a) decomposes a firm’s IT portfolio into relatively autonomous IT assets
(b) facilitates integrating them so they behave as a cohesive whole.
Without non-IT involvement, architecture is strategically blind and this disengagement causes the wrong tradeoffs.
Disengagement causes the wrong tradeoffs