Are 'accidental architectures' finally getting manageable?

Enterprise architects work hard at planning and painting a roadmap for enterprises to follow and make the right IT decisions and purchases. Unfortunately, not every enterprise has enterprise architects.

Eric Kavanagh, writing in Inside Analysis, observes that much of the development that has taken place in recent years, between and inside enterprises, is more "accidental architecture" than anything else. "More often than not, a company’s information architecture has grown and evolved organically, like a sort of digital mycelium, spreading underground for years, ultimately providing the infrastructure for all manner of analytical insights to blossom somewhere down the line."

There have been many efforts to introduce architectural frameworks, and those more organization, to the problem. And the case is very obvious, as Kavanagh put it: "You wouldn’t want an accidental architecture for your three-story home, would you? No one in their right mind would want any such thing."

Service oriented architecture has had some success in defining how enterprise services should be broken off of existing applications, built, deployed and governed.

On the data side of the house, data warehouses were built with enterprise infrastructure in mind.

In both cases, organizational politics often proved to be a formidable roadblock. Getting these efforts funded and functioning often required resources and wherewithal often beyond the capabilities of IT departments alone.

Kavanagh observes that many approaches and solutions are now evolving toward support for real-time architectural approaches. They employ REST-based interfaces that support any and all mixes of IT, unhampered by the legacy spaghetti underneath.

There is no right answer or solution, just a need to keep pressing on with efforts to better abstract existing enterprise applications into digestable, standardized services or APIs. As EnterpriseWeb's Dave Duggal observed in a response to Kavanagh's points:

"We never have the luxury working on greenfields. We always integrate with LDAP/Active Directory and other Security protocols, connect with ERP and legacy systems, existing service libraries and APIs. While we defer to ERP as ‘systems of record’ we find that they are often not authoritative, that there is more than one source of truth.  Today, we’ve got great horizontal abstractions – Web and Cloud, but we’re using 20-30year old 3-tier application model to re-create ‘same ol’ vertically integrated stacks in the Cloud. Fat VMs, Bloated Images with long-running stateful thread – this is a disaster… an ‘accidental architecture’. It’s time for something new!"