IT Architecture & Creative Problem-Solving

 It is important to leverage the architectural perspective to experiment, explore, and encourage a new way to solve problems. understand the complexity and guide people through it.

In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, problems become over-complex and interdependent. Architecture could be a problem-solving framework that consists of multiple aspects, and the multiple aspects could be architected in their own right. Architecture is an ingredient of planning and designing for creative and systematic problem-solving.

Focus on preemptively building a solution in anticipation of the problem: Many of today’s business problems are complex, to understand the “scope” of the problem, it’s important to leveraging the architectural perspective to make sure that everything works as a "system," not just from a technical perspective, but from the perspective of the system's goals, as well as make sure all of the elements necessary for an outcome are present. It also means that you have to start small and think big, understand the context and intangible variables, and see things from different angles to gain different perspectives.

Architecture should be considered as such, meaning that you will need to set up the environment for implementing solutions such that it becomes hard to not do good design for creative problem-solving; it becomes hard to not develop generic code, to make it hard to not follow set processes. Often the failure of problem-solving is caused by “We always do things like that,” mentality, even circumstances are already changed a long time ago. When architecting a solution, requirements, qualities and cost factors should be prioritizing while comfort zone and market trends taking place. Always be careful about examining the potential points of engagement, rather than jumping to the “we'll fix this" mentality.

Solve not just technical issues, but human and social concerns: Architect is able to see beyond tactical solution, understand the need for root cause analysis for an issue with regards to existing system and is able to find a systemic solution to deal with human and social concerns, provide in "solutions" can be sustained not only in the "systems" but in the systems of people. Art, design, science, and humanity are interconnected. You have to look holistically at the problem domain in order to architect and design a tailored solution by deepening the understanding of issues, accumulating interdisciplinary knowledge, and providing unique insight.

There is understandably tension sometimes between the creative and the administrative, strategic and tactical, logical and intuitive, etc. Great problem-solvers demonstrate the courage to leave inside box thoughts and standards to seek additional resources, update knowledge, and embrace alternative solutions. By leveraging the architectural framework, you can look at the problem domain holistically and apply the “simplicity and flexibility” principles to architect, design, integrate and consolidate when defining requirements via experimentation and continuous discovery.

Prevent issues, not just fixing issues: Nonlinearity, interdependence, hyper diversity, rules, regulations, information exponentiality, unpredictability, etc, are digital new normal today. Many organizations seem lacking appreciation of cost savings in a problem that never happens due to the stiff organizational culture in conjunction with the lack of architectural perspectives. There are unknown interactions and very high inner dynamics in business complexity today. Preventing problems requires architectural perspective, information technologies, people, processes, and systems to analyze and predict the possibility of a problem. Simplifying complicated things is an optimal choice for preventing problems or errors.

Perhaps no individual architect is capable of defining all of the current needs, foreseeing all of the future events and recognizing all of the potential opportunities for business exploration. Some trends are more significant than others in their impact on business growth. Some corrections require drastic paradigm shifts with corresponding economic impacts or predictable political challenges. This alone will eliminate a vast majority of flaws in designing problems, and prevent some potential issues.

The pace of change is accelerated both in businesses and society, either as an individual or an organization. Turn around the tough situations, and enjoy the challenges about complex problem-solving. Architecture is an investment. It is important to leverage the architectural perspective to experiment, explore, and encourage a new way to solve problems. understand the complexity and guide people through it.

Posted in: EA,Problem Solving