Even the best laid plans need to accommodate exceptions, particularly exceptions that might one day become the new norm, or the bedrock of a new architecture. "If the marketing department says: I need a Web site in 12 weeks:'," says Gartner's Rosser, "IT needs to be able to respond to that." He goes so far as to advise IT managers to think of architecture as two different sets of guidelines for two different situations. "There's the systematic back-end stuff and the opportunistic stuff. You need a different set of rules for the opportunities." An opportunistic architecture, for example, may have different quality-assurance strictures or less formal configuration-management requirements. "And when the ad hoc systems succeed," Rosser says, "you'll need to be able to plug them back into your systems." How companies decide just which projects will be the exceptions is determined by the organisation's corporate culture, budget, degree of technological investment and how centralised or decentralised IT is.
On the cautious end of the scale are companies such as Denver-based Johns Manville International, where CIO Chan Pollock spends significant resources developing and maintaining the company's architecture. Two dedicated employees maintain and update the various standards, which are reviewed and approved by business development executives, then publicised for all to see via the company's intranet. In return for that level of attention, Pollock and his staff expect that exceptions will be kept to the barest minimum. "We're not a company that has a lot of high-tech aspirations," Pollock says of the building-materials company. "We're a process manufacturer. So we're pretty dictatorial about what we're going to deploy and why. We have a strong preference for buying over building, and just about everything out there supports our needs. Occasionally something comes along that's outside the ballpark, but if it fits into our business requirements we'll figure out a way to accommodate it." CNF's Swackhamer focuses his architecture efforts on gaining cost efficiencies and leaves functionality decisions up to the CIOs of each division. If a business unit in one of the four companies wants software outside of its architecture, managers must make a business case for why they want the alternate product, and their CIO needs to approve the petition and bring it forward to the CEO.
Enfrastructure's Watson adopts a stance halfway between tenderness and tough love. On the one hand, he's the first to acknowledge that the pace of technological change can require some pretty sharp deviations from the master plan, however well crafted that may be. "The Internet's a great example of that," he points out. On the other hand, Watson, like Swackhamer, insists that would-be deviators do the maths and show their work before they get a pass to play truant from the stated architecture plan. "I advise them of the other ways they can get what they want using the existing architecture," he says. "If they still want to go on, they have to use a standard five-year discounted cash-flow model to make their case."
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