A river originates from the hill, brings nutrition to the plains, and finally merges with the sea. There are seasonal rivers, when rain falls, it brings water to plains, then there are perennial rivers like the Ganges.
No, this post is not about rivers. But on becoming a great architect/consultant that helps companies solve their business problems.
Farmers have their land (business). They need to sow the right seed(solutions), make it grow well(implementation and support) to have a bountiful harvest. Many times they succeed but sometimes due to various factors, they may fail too (success or failure of a solution to produce results).
It's their land. So they have to understand various seasonal factors, market factors, to decide on what to sow. If the land is akin to a business, then the question "What to Sow?" is the problem/challenge they face. The answer to this question is the solution, they are looking at.
Once they decide on what to SOW, few other points need to be decided. What fertilizer to use? How much water is needed? What other crop safety measures need to be taken? these are all key building blocks that help to solidify the solution (the crop that needs to be farmed).
Once all these are decided, the farmer needs to make way for the water to come to his land at a speed and quantity, that does not harm the crop.
Now let's come back to the river. Without water, nothing can happen. The crop will not grow, right? In architecture parlance, water = technologies. After the solution is decided, a model is built, then finally this model should come to life. That can be done only by technology implementation. Farmer can decide and build a solution on what to sow and other related questions, but unless he makes provision for the water to come to his land, the crop would not grow.
So the overall point in this post is, as an architect you should know the problem statement, the context in which this problem is there, factors that will or may affect this that needs to be taken care of by building micro solutions within our solution, and once, all this is done, then only, figure out the way to use technology to provide an implementation.
You may ask, to build a solution, many times, one needs to know whether technology may fit or not, or, whether part of a solution is implementable or not? Yes, we might need to develop POC's and/or reference implementations, but, those can be related to a farmer, that allows a bit of water into his land, to make the land soft and ready for sowing.
Technology is the core foundation on which we build our solution, but if an architect only looks at the technology then his growth will be very limited. One has to grow out of technology and move into the realm of system/critical thinking/problem-solving area. This is the sweet spot where you will be able to get the big picture, figure out a solution, test it out with reference implementation/POC's and make a business better.
Hence, to become a world-class architect/consultant one needs to
- Understand the problem statement
Understand the context in which this is happening
Understand the internal and external factors that may affect our solutions
Think thoroughly taking above given inputs to arrive at a technology-agnostic solution
Test various parts of our solution with various technology stacks
Finalize the solution for implementation.
Technology comes only as the 5th and 6th points, not the 1st point.