Electric fish are fascinating critters (at least to me — regular readers will remember I spent years studying these suckers). One of their more remarkable features is their electric organ – the gadget they use to generate electricity. It started out as a muscle. Aeons of evolution eliminated its ability to contract while increasing the amount electricity its cells generate.
That’s how evolution works — it grabs whatever is convenient and adapts it for whatever use is called for.

We do a lot of this in IS as well, continually adapting and evolving our legacy systems, databases, and computing platforms to whatever new requirements pop up. And this is a good thing to do.

Eventually, though, we find ourselves in evolutionary dead-ends, where our adaptations, kludges, shortcuts, and patches turn into barriers that prevent further change. Mother Nature handles this situation through extinction. You’d probably prefer a different strategy.

The alternative to evolution is design, and design is what distinguishes architecture from gluing a bunch of stuff together wherever it happens to fit. In this, the final article in our series on technical architecture (hey, don’t cry!), we deal with design.

Architects, whether designing IS infrastructures or office buildings, have to be both technically and artistically inclined. So far we’ve talked about the analytical, technical aspects of architecture.

Good designs, though, are as much a matter of art — aesthetics — as of technical prowess. Aesthetics pays off, because ugly designs turn into unreliable, clunky, nasty implementations. It can’t be logically proven, but it’s so nonetheless.

Defining aesthetics is more or less impossible, though, because aesthetics is mostly a matter of taste. You still need to make consistent design decisions, though. To do so, develop a set of clear, consistent principles designers can use as a starting point. And to develop good design principles, you need to understand the important design issues.

A design issue is any technical problem you need to solve or computing function you need to deliver on a regular basis. For example, physical connectivity is a design issue. You have several design principles to choose from: One connection per end-user device with network gateways to resources as needed; multiple end-user connections (for example network, modem and desktop TAPI); or ad hoc decisions as seem appropriate for each situation.

I’m a big fan of a single connection to the desktop and doing everything through the network, but that may not be the right solution for you.

Take another design issue: How to handle data redundancy. You have several design principles to choose from. You can: modify your systems to eliminate redundancy; define master/slave relationships among your data stores and periodically resynchronize everything; build technology that propagates update transactions to all redundant data, keeping everything synchronized in real time; or live with the mess and not worry about the redundancy. Pick one and don’t lose your guts.

In fact, for each design issue the most important thing is to pick just one design principle and live with it — and also, make sure your design principles are consistent with each other.

Which brings us to standards. Many design principles establish the need for a standard. In fact, every standard you establish should stem from a design principle — otherwise you don’t need it. For example, you may establish a design principle that all data will be stored in a single mainframe RDBMS, accessed through standard ODBC calls. This principle calls for selection of a standard ODBC-compliant RDBMS.

Now the really hard part: Your design principles are important, but they aren’t religion. You’ll sometimes have to make pragmatic decisions that violate a design principle or standard. Figure a way to mitigate the impact, and do what’s right for the business.

Your company’s strategic, tactical, and infrastructural goals drive the applications, information, and ultimately the computing platforms you provide. These define the design issues you need to resolve, which in turn cause you to select a set of consistent design principles.

It’s these design principles that lead you to choose specific technical standards.

Otherwise, your standards are just red-tape.