The line between a consultant and an architect is a blurry one, with more senior consultants being able to deliver architect work and architects with deeper knowledge being able to do implementation work as well. All too often, however, I’ve seen people being promoted to the title of architect based on their elevated level of technical prowess, but lacking key business know-how that architects need to possess.
Like with a traditional architect (you know, the kind of people that design buildings), IT architects are supposed to produce the blueprints for an IT solution: a holistic, big-picture, 30,000ft view of the solution and its components which, as a functional system, are supposed to facilitate specific organizational objectives. However, the architect should produce a solution that supports such objectives at the lowest possible cost per user. Lacking essential financial acumen or business insights, it is the second part of the previous sentence that is too often neglected.
Companies are not paying top dollar to get golden engineering solutions. Companies are paying top dollar to get even more dollars back, in the form of return on investment (ROI). Architects and senior consultants over-engineering their solutions towards technical perfection are doing their clients a disfavor by delivering solutions that are typically unnecessarily complex and expensive to maintain. Note that “at the lowest possible cost per user” does not mean that the solution needs to be cheap. All it means is that, if your organizational needs would be perfectly served by a Toyota, there is no need to build (and pay for) a Lexus.
People delivering architectural work must be trained into the essential principles of financial investment. They should also be comfortable in estimating cost and revenue/savings across time, calculate a project’s Net Present Value, ROI, IRR and optimize the solution design to maximize those financial indicators. Clients must also be willing to share their cost structures with their advisers, otherwise estimating these financials is close to impossible.
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