Where it started
An international organisation in aviation runs highly available systems that many others rely on. In a long-running programme, these systems were to be realigned. We worked there on the enterprise architecture and on the workflows in the programme.
How the bottleneck showed
Architecture decisions took a long time. Every larger change affected several systems and therefore several parties, and every party had interests of its own. By the time a decision was made, a lot of time had often passed.
Where it came from
The governance was set up so that every interface had several owners. The systems were as tightly coupled as the coordination between the parties. As long as both stayed that way, every technical decision had to go through the same coordination, and the architecture could only move as fast as the slowest point in it.
What we did
Organisation and process
We aligned architecture and workflows in the programme together. The aim was that decisions lie with the parties they actually affect.
IT
We decoupled critical dependencies between the systems, so that not every decision depends on all parties at once. We realigned the highly available components accordingly.
What stays
Less coupling between the systems means less coordination between the parties. As a result, the programme can make architecture decisions where they arise.
