It seems like every day we find ourselves making important decisions with regard to technology, that can easily bounce back on us years from now. Coupled with the need for speed, thorough systemic planning can often get pushed down the priority list in favor of a fast timeline. A new approach is emerging.
Using Enterprise Thinking in software architecture is a very important way of ensuring adequate growth, scalability, and stability over the long-term life of a product or other type of system. However, not everyone fully understands what enterprise thinking is or how to apply it to information technology and software development.
What it is
Enterprise Thinking is a way of looking at the long-term health and development of the company as a whole rather than focusing on short-term gains and what is happening in the present. This is similar to systems thinking, as the architect looks at the overall construction of the enterprise, rather than individual pieces.
When applied to software architecture at the beginning of a project, enterprise thinking can help set up the basic design of a project for more organized growth and help lead to fewer issues with scaling later down the line. In contrast, when a project does not make use of enterprise thinking when designing systems and architecture from the beginning, there could be issues in the future with stability, and the codebase may be much harder to maintain. In this context, it is often referred to as “Enterprise Architecture.”
All good forms of Enterprise Architecture should have a big focus on simplicity and flexibility, as these two things will help ensure that the system is easier to maintain as it grows and is scaled upward.
Further, some companies use Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which is a method of designing software so that individual services are self-contained and are provided to the other components in the system through a communication protocol over a network. This keeps the project modular and helps with the simplifying of codebase.
How to Implement it
Implementing enterprise thinking in any kind of IT project should ideally be performed at the very beginning stages of planning and design. This will help to ensure that fewer mistakes are made down the line and that the project can be better maintained without any surprise issues. However, implementing it correctly may be difficult, especially when there are so many different types of enterprise architecture in the world of IT.
Consulting experienced software engineers in the early stages goes a long way towards helping implement good, scalable software design for the enterprise. They can offer a strategic plan to help with both the design and implementation of enterprise architecture, as well as make sure that it is capable of meeting your company’s current and future demands.
Conclusion
A lot goes into good enterprise architecture, and it is easy to not implement it well enough to see all the possible benefits of it. This is why it is so important to make sure that you have a strong focus on using enterprise thinking and putting it into effect in the early stages of architecture design, in order to see your projects grow and have more success.
