Industry Architectures? Why Should I Care?

During my TOGAF course in Sydney last week, I was reminded that many highly experienced senior professionals — who are responsible for programs, projects, and the design and delivery of high-value business technology solutions — are not familiar with the concept of industry architectures.

They don’t understand what they are. They cannot name a single industry architecture— even in their own industry. They don’t understand why they’re valuable, or how they’re used. Even enterprise architects often don’t seem to know — or care — about industry architectures.

I find this odd, because when you’re doing enterprise architecture, industry architectures can save you a lot of time, and they have enduring value in making interoperability decisions.

I like to say:

“A good architect is a lazy architect — with a short attention span.”

What does this mean? It means a good architect doesn’t like having to do the same thing over and over again. A good architect likes to get things done quickly, and get it right the first time, so they don’t like to have to come back and do re-work. Which they hate having to do. Because re-work is always messy. Messy, messy, messy.

This is why good architects love architecture patterns. And an industry architecture is an architecture pattern.

In TOGAF, we hit the topic of “industry architectures” when we talk about the “Enterprise Continuum”. As part of that discussion, I always ask people in TOGAF classes the following question:

“What industry architectures are you aware of, that relate to the organisation in which you work?”

Almost without exception — I get blank expressions.

Yet there are thousands of industry architectures. And consultants use them. And if consultants are using them, there must be a reason. Guess what that is. And — you can build these things out to create more detailed architecture patterns for your own organisation (reference architectures). You get the picture.

Examples? Here’s just one: the Airline Industry Data Model (AIDM). Created by IATA. The detailed version of AIDM requires membership in IATA, but the following high level presentation is in the public domain:

I could go on, but I’ll stop there. I’ve been collecting these things for years.