Solutions Architecture as a Practice

Overview

Solutions Architecture as a practice is what makes arriving at comprehensive, well-documented answers to problems repeatable rather than accidental. Practicing it — sometimes called solutioning — means determining, vetting, presenting, deciding on, and realizing a Solution Set for a specific problem, following a consistent methodology rather than improvising a new approach for every engagement.

Solutions Architecture is deliberately not detailed design or engineering. Like all forms of architecture, it goes as deep as it needs to into areas of engineering and implementation without actually completing that work. The Solution Set it produces serves as detailed guidance that constrains the Engineers and Developers who build against it on the key decisions they must follow — it is not an exhaustive final specification. It is not uncommon for engineering and development to surface issues with a Solutions Architecture that need resolving at design or implementation time: Solutions Architecture is meant to harden the viability of a solution, not finalize every one of its details.

Because Solutions Architecture engages directly with real initiatives and is measured by whether its decisions hold up in practice, it tends to operate at a more accountable, embedded level than architecture practices that remain purely advisory — a positioning developed further later in this document, in the context of Solutions Architecture’s relationship to Enterprise Architecture.

Best Practice: Practice Solutions Architecture as a Discipline, Not an Improvised Skill

Follow a repeatable framework — the Solutions Architecture Framework, presented later in this document — rather than improvising a new approach for each engagement, and document the work consistently using the Solutions Architecture Reference Book. Consistency in both the process followed and the documentation produced is what separates a professional practice from an individual architect’s personal working style.

Benefit(s)

A consistent, well-documented practice avoids dependency on any single architect’s individual judgment or memory, and it is what makes the Architecture Flywheel Effect possible: a practice that reliably produces comprehensive, well-documented Solution Sets is a practice whose accumulated knowledge compounds in value over time, covered in depth later in this document. An improvised, undocumented approach to Solutions Architecture produces neither benefit.