If you’re responsible for IT in a big company, you’ll have an architecture team. There will be architects of every flavour – Enterprise, Technical, Solutions, Cloud, Network, Data, and everything else. These highly skilled professionals will give you design thinking, organisational and technological expertise. They’ll advise you, giving you the knowledge and confidence to make the right decisions as you lead your organisation through the rapidly changing technology world.
In smaller organisations, you’re unlikely to have that. You’ll probably be more hands on yourself, and you’ll rely on the people you do have – partners, suppliers, and senior members of your own team.
Hiring and keeping architects in small organisations is difficult. As permanent staff, they are expensive. Their value needs to be maintained through varied and challenging work, which a small organisation will struggle to provide. If they are contractors, you need a strong architectural practice to get them up to speed quickly and keep the value of their work after they have left.
Cultural fit is vital, with you, your team, and the wider organisation. They need to be able to adjust to scale, understanding that managers in small organisations are more involved in the day to day work than those in big ones, that budgets are smaller and that functions available in a big company won’t be there in an SME. They need to work well with your developers, and earn their respect.
Setting up an architectural practice, with good tooling and practices, so that you are able to bring specific expertise in when you need it but retain its value after its gone is very hard at a small scale. It tends to mean that what architecture there is, is done by people for who are working across discipline – senior developers, analysts and even the occasional senior manager. We all do our best with what we’ve got.
This is why I’ve decided to sign up with Café Associates, a community of people who are interested in seeing that organisations are well designed and make good use of technology. Most are architects. Some, like me, have travelled a different path. We are all pragmatic and experienced. Many of us are interested in forging portfolio careers, working across different organisations and projects. Many have very specialised experience in open banking, big data, security and just about everything else. Across the community, we can tackle most problems and deliver.
The model is simple. Sign up as a client, and get a Head of Practice, who will work with you to understand your business and your needs, and help you set up your in-house practice. When you have a specific requirement, they will propose members of the community to fulfil that requirement. Over time, they will become your trusted adviser and an important member of your team.
It’s a new way of working, and still a work in progress. If you think it could help you, please get in touch.
Author
Cathryn Symons has over twenty years experience as an IT director and programme / project manager, working in not-for-profit and other small/medium sized organisations. She values well-designed technology which benefits people and planet.