Software Architects and Enterprise Architects Group
How would you describe a well-architected system?
How would you describe a well-architected system?
Investment to me means time and resources, from all parties: architects, developers, administrators, end users, and those whom the end users provide the service to.
Return means not only the successful service, but the core innovation in the system, and the more complex understanding of the tasks personally.
Translate them to money to me means throwing away the real (and yes, quite complex) lesson for cash - even though I know that I need salary today, and that comes from selling my work. This is why I say: I don't want to make decision(!), and accept financial reasons(!) - but I don't let them poison my analysis either.
As analogy, I am a true geek, so I prefer reading Asimov instead of watching any new sci-fi "blockbuster" trash. By the way, my vision is quite precisely written in the Foundation stories.
You talk about the financial sustainability of a company with successful _products_. I talk about _technology_and_innovation_, and I see that our world badly misses that, because all our smart people dig for profit instead of looking forward.
Today we praise "startups", and seek for innovation from them. Why? Big companies do have smart people, give them lot of money, but... yepp, they work for monetary profit, financial ROI. Startups have vision, not ROI plan (listen to Guy Kawasaki), they are allowed to fail 20 times per one success. Sorry, at the edge of technology, this is how it goes, and new things only come from here. This is my place, this is how I classify a system well-architected.
The success of "innovative companies" like Google comes from that they host both approach under the same hood. They have strict business plan and work for monetary ROI in their _products_, but let their employees run their own "startups" in fixed percentage of their times forgetting even the smell of ROI, to work on technology and innovation. The company harvests the 1 percent innovation that pays back, and another 9 goes to patent stock, I presume. This seems to be the winner so far, not to mention the fame for any creative people that they are praised and payed very well for their pet projects. Smart mind farming... :-/
I do this model as a one-man show. I have worked on various fields, at several companies and in many languages, environments in the past 20 years. You can explain the lifecycle of a product to me, but the same is true for my story: I applied and refined my concepts behind all jobs that I have done (data mining, spam monitoring, national data management system, log analyzer, home automation, public touch screen terminals, ...). I can tell the motivations behind the languages, toolkits, etc. by just playing with them for some days. I have thrown away tons of code that better salesmen would make fortune on, because they were not "well-architected" enough, and he errors started poisoning dependent codes. I have lots of failures in small companies and short projects, and some success, all in longer term projects, where I had space to run my way.
This really worth 20 years, gave me joy - and yes, pays back to my companies more and more, because today I am really fast. For example, I could type in a configuration-based web GUI framework literally in weeks (because I have the underlying management framework that took another some months now). It was 1.5 years to invent the last time at another company, but that also has run fine in the past 10 years, so I think that also has fine ROI. :-)
... and no, I don't sell it to Google, because I bet they would pay me NOT to do it. I have more important vision: leave a habitable planet behind us for the human civilization in the next centuries. This is what we blow up while concentrating on ROI, despite of the best effort of our famous world-savers (rich, smart but shallow-minded businessmen or dreamers). Sorry, I went too far again.
