Architecture principles constitute a basic reference for every IT project and initiative and are used as drivers for architecture governance. Each new project will be expected to explain how they will conform to the principles and justify any exceptions.
Business principles
- Innovation – Innovate for competitive advantage through differentiation and productivity
- Rationale: Helps realize competitive advantage and drives improvements in efficiency and productivity
- Priority – Prioritize satisfying business needs over all other considerations
- Rationale: Architecture gives most benefit when closely aligned with business strategy and goals
- Agility – Promote business agility and adaptability
- Rationale: Empowers the business to adapt to changing business environment.
- Values – Maximize the value of information assets and optimize their return on investment (ROI).
- Rationale: Organizing and managing the key information assets drives the business processes needed to run the enterprise
Information principles
- Accountability – Ensure that all information assets have an identified business owner who is accountable and track and record all actions and events that lead to access or changes in information.
- Rationale: Those with the most knowledge of the data are best placed to make rational and coherent decisions. It is imperative to track all changes and access in order to enforce non-repudiation of actions
- Availability – Deliver information where and when needed, via multiple channels, to maximize its value as an asset, while ensuring that Confidentiality is enforced.
- Rationale: Company business should not be limited or constrained by lack of available information wherever and whenever needed.
- Confidentiality – Prevent unwanted access to information, limiting Availability to those with legitimate rights. Protect it in transit, at rest and in storage
- Rationale: The comapny must respect the law, fulfill contractual obligations and protect the value of its information assets.
- Dependability – Ensure consistency and predictability using appropriate constraints and controls.
- Rationale: Consistency and predictability reduce risks, lower costs and help increase the value of information assets.
- Information Life Cycle – Take full account of the time dimension of information based on the standard Information Management Life Cycle
- Rationale: Information must be actively managed throughout its life cycle and securely and efficiently disposed of at end of life
- Integrity – Prevent or detect and repair unwanted changes to information
- Rationale: Data quality is a major factor in preserving and enhancing the business value of information assets.
Application principles
- Coherence – Ensure services are coherent and comprehensible in their own right. Restrict the scope of a service to a distinct and well-defined function or problem
- Rationale: Easy to understand services are easy to combine, use and get value from.
- Hiding – Hide the internal details of services from consumers to avoid creating dependencies on internal structures and logic that may change. Handle errors and exceptions where they occur to prevent ‘cascading errors syndrome’.
- Rationale: Keeping the internal structures and logic of services private from consumers of the services frees them to use and combined services in the way that best suits the business
- Interoperability – Maximize interoperability by using common standards and mechanisms for the exposure and use of services
- Rationale: Enables systems and services to communicate and work together for greater synergy and efficiency.
- Plug and Play – Implement new services by assembling available services, components and resources in preference to writing new code
- Rationale: Next generation application development is based on assembling building block components and services rather than bespoke software development. This increases speed of delivery, flexibility and reliability
- System Life Cycle – Plan and manage application services throughout their entire life-cycle, including the ‘end of life’ phase.
- Rationale: Applications and services should be actively managed throughout their life cycle to extract maximum benefit for lowest cost
- Reuse – Maximize reuse by designing services that are useful to the largest possible number of consumers
- Rationale: Reusing existing services and systems reduces the work required to implement new ones.
Technology principles
- Capacity Planning – Use capacity planning to optimize the sizing of infrastructure and ensure there is enough headroom for planned growth.
- Rationale: Oversized infrastructure wastes money and increases energy consumption
- Green – Reduce power consumption, heat and carbon footprint where possible. Get carbon accounts from suppliers and work to reduce
- Rationale: Reduces immediate and consequential costs.
- Monitor – Deploy automatic monitoring tools that cover application and data services as well as the underlying infrastructure
- Rationale: Real-time monitoring allows immediate action to resolve failures and incidents with minimal cost and disruption to the business.
- Rationalize – Minimize redundancy and reduce duplication
- Rationale: Helps reduce complexity and promotes greater efficiency
- Simplify – Reduce complexity for greater flexibility and lower cost
- Rationale: Lowers costs through economies of scale and reduces overhead of managing complexity
- Standardize – Adopt and enforce standards to improve operability and achieve economies of scale
- Rationale: Standardization helps achieve economies of scale, reduces complexity and improves flexibility
- Tiering – Adopt a tiered infrastructure for greater security, resilience and efficiency
- Rationale: Separation of concerns between infrastructure tiers improves security and allows greater efficiency and flexibility.
- Virtualize – Reduce dependency on hardware and promote flexibility, agility and sharing of resources through virtualization.
- Rationale: Virtualization promotes flexibility,allows more efficient use of hardware resources and reduces energy consumption
IT Strategy Drivers
Some of the following statements can be included as strategy drivers:
- Advancing – Deliver game-changing advances in technology support the company growth
- Effective Information Stewardship – Focus on capturing, storing and providing effective and secure access to a wide range
of information sets - IT Complexity Reduction – Reduce complexity across business, application and technology layers
- IT Functional Excellence – Strive for excellence in all IT capabilities including service management, staff skills base, development and networking, effective IT procurement, diverse funding sourcing, and selective introduction of internal charging
- Operational Excellence – Improve how departments and functions operate across the company, including as facilitators to Sustainable Excellence improvements. This driver focuses on underlying step-change enhancements, carbon reduction initiatives and staff skills developments
Goals
- Business Agility – Maximise business agility including the ability to work from almost anywhere and have information and functionality delivered where and when needed
- Competitive Advantage – Achieve competitive advantage through optimal application services implemented using optimal technology investment.
- Maximum Business Value of Information – Seek to maximise the business value of the information
- Maximum Return on IT Investment – Achieve the highest possible ROI on investment in information assets subject to security and good information management constraints
- Minimum Information Risk – Minimum information risk consistent with achieving the company’s objectives
- Operational Efficiency – High operational efficiency and productivity through optimal automation with services perfectly suited to business needs
- Reduce Carbon Footprint – Reduce the carbon account
- User Engagement – Engage the users through interations and social media