An interesting article from IEEE's IT Professional journal entitled ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE - Transitional Architectures for Enterprise Evolution by Murat Erder and Pierre Pureur.
The article describes transitional architectures, and introduces the idea of change in architecture avoiding the sometimes difficult direct from current to the "to be" architecture leap. They propose what they call a prescriptive approach using a series of achievable application plateaus and architecture waves that help to ensure the achievement of business value with each transition towards the to be architecture, and avoiding being in a constant state of transition.
Basically, a series of architectural rest stops on the path to the final destination.
In this article, we offer our version of the prescriptive approach: Why not briefly document the current state of the architecture, define the desired state at the conceptual level,and finally define transitional architectures on the way to reaching that goal? In other words, we introduce the idea of change within the architecture process.By following this approach,you will quickly learn which areas you need to focus on before moving forward with the architecture models and blueprints. Our method also yields several important benefits,including a focus on delivering architecture features that matter most to the business; effective risk mitigation, expectation management, and requirements traceability; and lower costs.
The article is very readable, and may be of interest to developers, designers and business analysts as well.
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