More Thoughts on VDA

That whole VDA thing is starting to pick up steam, including this post by Jonathan Kahn who provides some very elegant analysis of my assertions.

“In Zapthink’s recent article about avoiding Vendor Driven Architectures, David Linthicum makes the case that choosing one vendor for your enterprise’s SOA needs is perilous and potentially costly. While this caution bell rings soundly, it appears that today most enterprises may have little choice but to turn to their chosen vendors. Once this process has been started by an inquiry, there is a tendency to march down a very rigid, pre-defined sales process in a winner-take-all battle of wit, determination and even (dare I mention it) discount-wielding (usually in the form of multi-product bundle discounts and ‘free’ support). Sound familiar, oh yeah, I bet it does.”

The notion of VDA is really something most enterprise architects understand far too well these days. However, enterprise architects really work from experience and thus the narrower their experiences the more likely VDA will occur. Indeed, if there is anything that bugs me about this business it’s the number of enterprise architects out there that don’t’ focus on the core business problems, and don’t learn to align technology to the business, SOA or not. I’m finding that is another level of maturation that many have just not reached yet, and the core businesses are absorbing millions of dollars in lost productivity considering that the architectures (SOA) are more tactically oriented, thus static, vendor driven (VDA), and thus difficult to change around the needs of business.

“All the various pressures to produce with a fast-food style delivery, the architecture blueprints that would ordinarily take patience, devotion and painstaking process to distill into meaning, forces us down a deterministic path of Product Platform Selection or (worse still,) Presumed Business Requirements. Increased urgency to IT alignment and buzzwords like “agility” in the business climate only serve to accelerate the decomposition of even the most seasoned IT Architect’s resolve and diminish the most confident practitioner’s integrity in the unbiased practice of their art. Adding to the challenge are the growing list of skills, certifications and aptitudes that some of the recent Executive Architect-seeking clients we’ve been working on, seem to consider as pre-requisites.”

So, how does one fix this? Education is key here along with admitting you have a vendor addiction and getting help. I can just see 20 architects sitting on a room, all in a circle…”My name is John Smith, and I’m have a vendor addition.” The first step is always the hardest…SOA is something you do guys.