When it comes to the design and architecture of enterprise level software solutions, what comes to mind?
What is Solution Design & Architecture:
Solution, Design and Architecture (SD&A) is an in-depth IT scoping and review process that bridges the gap between your current IT environments, technologies, and the customer and business needs in order to deliver maximum return-on-investment. A proper design and architecture document also documents the approach, methodology and required steps to deliver the solution.
SD&A are actually two distinct disciplines. Solution Architect’s, with a balanced mixed of technical and business skills, write up the technical design of an environment and work out how to achieve a solution from a technical perspective. Solution Designers put the solution together and price it up based from assistance from the architect.
A solutions architect needs significant people and process skills. They are often in front of management, trying to explain a complex problem in laymen’s terms. They have to find ways to say the same thing using different words for different types of audiences, and they also need to really understand the business’ processes in order to create a cohesive vision of a usable product.
Solution Architect focuses on:
- market opportunity
- technology and requirements
- business goals
- budget
- project timeline
- resourcing
- ROI
- how technology can be used to solve a given business problem
- which framework, platform, or tech-stack can be used to create a solution
- how the application will look, what the modules will be, and how they interact with each other
- how things will scale for the future and how they will be maintained
- figuring out the risk in third-party frameworks/platforms
- finding a solution to a business problem
Here are some of the main responsibilities of a solutions architect:
Ultimately, the Solution Architect is responsible for the vision that underlies the solution and the execution of that vision into the solution.
- Creates and leads the process of integrating IT systems for them to meet an organization’s requirements.
- Conducts a system architecture evaluation and collaborates with project management and IT development teams to improve the architecture.
- Evaluates project constraints to find alternatives, alleviate risks, and perform process re-engineering if required.
- Updates stakeholders on the status of product development processes and budgets.
- Notifies stakeholders about any issues connected to the architecture.
- Fixes technical issues as they arise.
- Analyses the business impact that certain technical choices may have on a client’s business processes.
- Supervises and guides development teams.
- Continuously researches emerging technologies and proposes changes to the existing architecture.
Solution Architecture Document:
The Solution Architecture provides an architectural description of a software solution and application. It describes the systems and it’s features based on the technical aspects, business goals, and integration points. It is intended to address a solution to the business needs and provides the foundation/map of the solution requirements driving the software build scope.
High level Benefits of Solution Architecture:
- Builds a comprehensive delivery approach
- Stakeholder alignment
- Ensures a longer solution lifespan with the market
- Ensures business ROI
- Optimises the delivery scope and associated effectiveness
- Easier and more organised implementation
- Provides a good understanding of the overall development environment
- Problems and associated solutions can be foreseen
Some aspects to consider:
When doing an enterprise level solution architecture, build and deployment, a few key aspects come to mind that should be build into the solution by design and not as an after thought…
- Solution Architecture should a continuous part of the overall innovation delivery methodology – Solution Architecture is not a once-off exercise but is imbedded in the revolving SDLC. Cyclically evolve and deliver the solution with agility that can quickly adapt to business change with solution architecture forming the foundation (map and sanity check) before the next evolution cycle. Combine the best of several delivery methodologies to ensure optimum results in bringing the best innovation to revenue channels in the shortest possible timeframe. Read more on this subject here.
- People – Ensure the right people with the appropriate knowledge, skills and abilities within the delivery team. Do not forget that people (users and customers) will use the system – not technologists.
- Risk – as the solution architecture evolves, it will introduce technology and business risks that must be added to the project risk register and addressed to mitigation in accordance with the business risk appetite.
- Choose the right software development tech stack that is well established and easily supported while scalable and powerful enough to deliver a feature rich solution that can be integrated into complex operational estates. Most tech-stacks has Solution Frameworks that outline key design options and decision when doing solution architecture. Choosing the right tech-stack is one of the most fundamental ways to future-proof the technology solution. You can read more on choosing the right tech stack here.
- Modular approach – using a service oriented architecture (SOA) model to ensure the solution can be functionally scaled, up and down to align with feature required, by using independently functioning modules of macro and micro-services. Each service must be clearly defined with input, process, output parameters that aligns with the integration standard established for the platform. This SOA also assist in overall information security enhancements and fault finding in case something goes wrong. It also makes the developed platform more agile to adapt to continuous business environment and market changes with less overall impact and system changes.
- Customer data at the heart of a solution – Be clear on Master vs Slave customer and data records and ensure the needed integration between master and slave data within inter-connecting systems and platforms, with the needed security applied to ensure privacy and data integrity. Establish a Single Customer and Data Views (single version of the truth) from the design off-set. Ensure personal identifiable data is handled within the solution according to the regulations as outlined in the Data Protection Act and recently introduced GDPR and data anonymisation and retention policy guidelines.
- Platform Hosting & Infrastructure – What is the intended hosting framework, will it by private or public cloud, running in AWS or Azure – all important decisions that can drastically impact the solution architecture.
- Scalability – who is the intended audience for the different modules and associated macro services within the solution – how many consecutive users, transactions, customer sessions, reports, dashboards, data imports & processing, data transfers, etc…? As required, ensure the solution architecture accommodate the capability for the system to monitor usage and automatically scale horizontally (more processing/data (hardware) nodes running in parallel without dropping user sessions) and vertically (adding more power to a hardware node).
- Information and Cyber Security – A tiered architecture ensure physical differentiation between user and customer facing interfaces, system logic and processing algorithms and the storage components of a solution. Various security precautions, guidelines and best practices should be imbedded within the software development by design. This should be articulated within the solution architecture, infrastructure and service software code. Penetration Testing and the associated platform hardening requirements should feed back into the solution architecture enhancement as required.
- Identity Management – Single Sign On (SSO) user management and application roles to assign access to different modules, features and functionality to user groups and individuals.
- Integration – data exchange, multi-channel user interface, compute and storage components of the platform, how the different components inter-connects through secure connection with each other, other applications and systems (API and gateway) within the business operations estate and to external systems.
- Customer Centric & Business Readiness – from a customer and end-user perspective what’s needed to ensure easy adoption (familiarity) and business ramp-up to establish a competent level of efficiency before the solution is deployed and go-live. UX, UI, UAT, Automated Regression Testing, Training Material, FAQs, Communication, etc…
- Enterprise deployment – Involvement of all IT and business disciplines i.e. Business readiness (covered above), Network, Compute, Cyber Security, DevOps. Make sure non-functional Dev-Ops related requirements are covered in the same manner as
- Application Support – Involve the support team during product build to ensure they have input and understanding of the solution to provide SLA driven support at to business and IT operations when the solution goes live.
- Business Continuity – what is required from an IT infrastructure and platform/solution capability perspective to ensure the system is always available (online) to enable continuous business operations?
Speak to Renier about your solution architecture requirements. With more than 20 years of enterprise technology product development experience, we can support your team toward delivery excellence.
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