Apple Architect: Steve Jobs
Recently I met with Group of Architect and discuss about Steve Jobs and its impact on Enterprise Architect. During that meeting, i note down some important points which we should learn from Steve Jobs as an Enterprise Architect.
1. Simplicity: We all know that Apple products are simple but this is a real art to take something complex and make it really intuitive and easy to use.
2. Results Driven: By combining the focus, clarity and purposefulness with performance based and intuitiveness Jobs really stood out. EA’s could leverage this principle to go back and make sure they are producing results and not just pontificating.
3.Focus and clarity: Know your business and focus on what is important. Job’s established rules that there will be a core focus and spent hours declining projects because they didn’t align to the priority areas. It’s so easy for EA’s to be randomized by things that frankly don’t matter to the business of EA. In an EA program or an engagement/project determine what architecture models, descriptions or even meetings align to your business goals and objectives.
4.Purposefulness: Uniquely, Jobs was able to get to the root of “why” or the purpose behind all things he did. Likewise with EA we must make sure we always get to the root of our purpose and how to fulfill it.
5.Discipline: Jobs and the overall apple team is known for their extreme rigor and discipline. This shows in their products as the quality is extremely high. The overall EA industry is maturity but there are still well adopted practices that we as EA’s could be more rigorous in our delivery.
6.No Compromise:When it came to quality and meeting the vision there was no compromise. EA’s could use this principle to protect the business such as regulatory compliance, non-functional and functional requirements. This one needs careful balance though, EA’s don’t want to be viewed as stonewalling the organization either. However, you could also argue that if our business model of EA was perfected and we had better traceability to what the business wants we could execute on this principle more?
