One of important advices I had was on the importance of principles in one’s life. It lays the foundation for all decisions one make in one’s life. It should rarely change and should be long lasting. Similarly it is important to have well defined architecture principles for any IT engagements. It provides the guidance and also put constraints to design and implementation decision. Any design and implementation decision should be evaluated against those principles to ensure the compliance. So it is important to have consensus on the architecture principle during architecture definition phase and it should be documented. For example, architectural principle of “Vendor neutral Technology Architecture “ put the constraints that no vendor specific aspect should be used so that it helps in leveraging multiple vendor technology innovation for implementation in future. TOGAF provides excellent style of documenting the same in terms of statement, rationale and implication. I would like to recommend the usage of the same.
