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| Metal Bottle Cap Flowers (credit: urban woods walker) |
(this article is part of the series "12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting")
EA exercises involve collecting a lot of data and distilling
insights from them. It seems wasteful if
the fruits of these efforts are used just once and then thrown away. Instead, when collecting data and doing
analysis on them, it is useful to think about how the data and analysis can be
re-used.
Specifically, as discussed in Heuristics #2: Guess, Validate, Iterate: Time-bound architectural efforts, the insights
are likely to contain some inaccuracies, so expect gradual refinement of the
data and analysis. To do that, how the
analysis is derived from the data should be clear. In addition, involve as much as possible the
people who are going to update it in the future. The more familiar they are with the collected
data and analysis, the more likely they will reuse it in the future.
During our EA exercise, we created a chart showing the key
products offered by the organization, along with each product’s importance and
satisfaction level. We created a first
draft of the chart, then we explained to the organization how we did it, and
then they refined it. We hope that they
will reuse this chart, and we are more confident of it since they have already
updated it once. In addition, when we
created the summary of our key findings, we tried as much as we can to resist
the temptation of listing down gut feels and focus on findings that are backed
up by data.
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