10.12.10
Walking With Zombies
[Cartoon]
Zombies are folks that have gone through their entire lifecycle and just don’t know they are dead. How many architects are applying design patterns that are now considered to be anti-patterns? These are patterns that have had a full lifecycle but continue to walk about like zombies.
The “master file with transactions” design pattern has been a prevalent business design pattern since monetary transactions have been recorded. Early on in Information Technology, there were punched cards to represent the accounts and another set of punched cards to be posted to the accounts. This grew out of basic accounting concepts.
The banking industry was very account-oriented until the 1980s when they discovered it was more profitable to be customer-oriented. This led to many systems problems. The systems did not carry adequate information on the customer to make it easy to identify all the services used by a customer.
Banks used many automated processes to combine the accounts for each customer and begin providing a single statement, once a month, for each customer. This was a big saving for the bank since they no longer needed to mail out a statement for each account.
But, mistakes were made by the banks. There was the case of the customer that sued his bank for including all of the accounts he maintained for his mistress with his family accounts. When the man’s wife saw the statement, she started divorce proceedings. It cost the man a bundle, a bundle he expected the bank to make good on.
Spotting the zombie design patterns can be tough. They have been around a long time and have probably brought great benefit. Old-timers that know these patterns will fight to keep these zombies walking about. They may even see an attack on the patterns as an attack on themselves.
But, anti-patterns are usually found out. Unfortunately, it is often when the cost to make a change has become almost prohibitive. Consider the high cost in the example of banks migrating to customer-centric. Or, consider the more common environment where previously great mainframe systems continue to operate batch style processes in a business that needs real-time information. In most of these cases, migration has become cost prohibitive.
The Enterprise Architects should be the advisors that help to uncover the business anti-patterns. Enterprise Architects are well-trained on spotting technical anti-design patterns. They know that successful patterns are often replaced by better ones. With this understanding, they need to have a strong sense of their business direction and apply their pattern recognition skills. Early detection can prevent reaching that cost prohibitive stage of migration.
Organizations that walk with the zombies will eventually become a zombie themselves. In other words, those that stay current will survive. Those that fall behind will be left for dead. Those that listen to their Enterprise Architects will have a greater potential of survival.
The Enterprise Architects can see what is coming and are already preparing. They know that this will be their time. Corporations will be able to completely focus on their business, and automation will be viewed as an agile enabler. Automation will finally become the self-service contributor that the Corporate Office has always wanted it to be. –Enterprise Architects Masters of the Unseen City
Closing the Business / IT gap.
