Effective High-Level Architecture Principles Spoon-Feed Business Implications To Stakeholders

High-level architecture principles encapsulate and communicate an enterprise's goals, vision, and values. They are key constructs that provide guidance to governance bodies and individuals for making decisions in a manner consistent with the enterprise strategy. But as high-level statements, architecture principles can sound like obvious truisms. The key to practical use of principles as a powerful enterprise architecture (EA) tool is to state them in a form that includes detailed implications of adhering to the principles, spoon-feeding stakeholders the impact of following the agreed-upon rules. The recently approved architecture principles of the US federal government provide a fine example of proper form and content that architects in private- and public-sector organizations can use as a model for their efforts. The business focus of the federal principles is particularly noteworthy and relevant to public and private sector organizations alike, as architects are increasingly required to think in terms of solving business problems, not technology problems.