It’s Not About the Tool
For practically every profession under the sun there are tools that make the job easier. From bakers to builders, everyone has their choice of implements to ply their trade. Naturally these tools will range from entry level, toy tools to expensive gadgets with more features and sophistication. Enterprise architecture is certainly no exception.
One of our primary tools for designing architecture, of course, is a modeling tool. Modeling tools help us visualize our design into standard, in our case UML, models. There are a variety of these tools in the marketplace, ranging from basic “drawing style” tools to far more advanced suites with “model awareness”, version control, team collaboration capabilities, etc.
If you are like most in this profession, you love your toys and gadgets and as such you’ll find yourself drawn to the toy with the most bells and whistles and the largest price tag. You want to be the Carpenter with the Golden Hammer. You want to use the tool that does the most with the most pizzazz. Although there’s nothing inherently wrong with this attitude, there is a very important point to be made here.
Remember the training montage in Rocky IV? Ivan Drago, Rocky’s undefeated superhuman opponent, was training with state-of-the-art technology, monitored by a large team of scientists, and developed with impressive precision. Rocky, on the other hand, trained in a remote, snowed-in location without electricity using sleds, logs, and lots of old-fashioned exercises. In the end, the tools had nothing to do with who won the fight. It came down to the fighter’s experience, an understanding of what it takes to win, and a strong determination to be the best.
Think about it. The majority of books out there today, including our greatest literary masterpieces, were either written by hand or hammered out on near broken down typewriters. Unforgettable meals have been cooked by campfire and pyramids were constructed without cranes or power tools.
In the same way, the most successful, useful enterprise architecture models come about not because of the quality or feature capabilities of a particular modeling tool but rather from the experience, brains, and methods of the architect who used the tool. Successful architects recognize patterns, similarities with past projects — however different they may appear on the surface — and are able to apply this knowledge to the problem at hand. They create a design by following a defined process – in our case “Investigative Architecture”: getting the facts from research, interviewing their stakeholders, and proposing the best solution within the context of the business problem.
So while we at Systems Flow will always enjoy our tools and gadgets, we recognize that, when it comes to complete designs, “It’s not the tool that builds the house, it’s the carpenter swinging the hammer”.
Latest posts by Craig DeRuisseau (see all)
- It’s Not About the Tool - Sep 6, 2012