Who manages your system architecture?

This week, I spent two days in systems engineering workshops. Systems engineers are concerned with designing products and solutions including mechanical, electronic and software components. Systems engineers and architects address all requirements of a system, including regulatory constraints, such as functional safety, customer-facing functionality, such as the features that the customer uses on a daily basis, and evolvability and maintainability, decreasing the total cost of ownership over the lifetime of the system.

The systems engineering workshops were concerned with the implications of digitalization, which we define as software + data + artificial intelligence. The consequence of digitalization on most of the systems is that changes are required to their architecture. The interesting finding was that in several companies, there was nobody in the organization who was responsible for the overall systems architecture. Instead, the original architecture had become incarnated in the organizational structure. Each of the departments or units was responsible for one subsystem or component in the traditional architecture.

Of course, the strong relationship between architecture and R&D organization isn’t new. Many are aware of Conway’s law from 1967 and in earlier posts, I’ve presented the BAPO model. However, in both cases, the assumption is that there’s some role or team that governs the overall system architecture.