Anand Gopalan's Blog Integration Consortium

Many a time in architectural design discussions with client, I find people tend to focus on the solution part even before defining the existing problem or future need.

As a consultant one should always focus on the business need or the actual problem at hand, rather than to define a new architecture o rearchitecture the existing environment.

Only this way we can bring the business value the customer is looking at. As a practice, I usually pause in between and evoke more responses from client. Typically over one week we should redefine the customer requirement in clear terms and define the scope and only then should we harp on to the architectural blue print.

But sometimes people tend to get away with a very good design and SOA architecture and implement the same. But in the long run the customer realize that say a component like BAM which is not their immediate requirement but an extended security architecture which was one of their primary requirements has not been given due focus.

Such instances send a wrong signal to the customer that they have been a victim of a poor design that is based on harnessing superior product capabilities rather than translate their exact requirements to actual design.