Architect Soft Skills: Part IV, Strategic Thinking

As mentioned in the previous post on the architect's soft skills, strategic thinking is the second soft skill essential to understanding where the solution/system should be going. While system thinking takes care of the system (in its environment), strategic thinking is about understanding where the organization is heading and its long term goals so that the solution being developed is in sync. (I guess it is easy to see why this is important for internal projects but I think it is also important for product/solution companies.)

Strategic thinking involves the techniques and thinking processes essential to setting and achieving the business's long term priorities and goals. Strategic thinking (understanding the problems) is the preamble to strategic planning -- but we'll leave planning to management and focus on the understanding which is important for the architects.

Ruth Malan and Dana Bredemeyer define the Strategic Thinking soft skill (which they call "Strategic Perspective"):

[An architect who has strategic perspective (ARGO)] understands the industry, market, customers, competitors, suppliers, partners and capabilities of the business. Identifies opportunities and threats, and actively identifies trends and future scenarios.

This is a good definition because it really explains why this skill is so important for architects. One of the architect's core roles is to understand what the different stakeholders need, then balance these needs to create a usable, robust solution. Their needs expressed as quality attributes are the driving force of the architecture.

Furthermore. if you think about all this "align business and IT" stuff we constantly hear about these days (especially in regard to SOA) -- it is evident that all the careful planning of how technology and software can help in getting that alignment is useless unless we really have a good understanding of where we are going and what this alignment really is. Thus, the way to do this is for the architect to first understand what the business is about and where it is going, then take these insights and translate them to technological and architectural decisions that ensure the solution suites the business needs.

Posted by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz at 03:04 AM  Permalink