Eben Hewitt - Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as Strategy

The book has two aims. The first is to help architects, product managers, and executives at technology companies or in technology organizations who are charged with producing technology strategies. This stuff works across industries. My hope is that with these practical tools and guidance, your strategies will be deeper, stronger, and clearer, and youll get approval, support, and funding to make your ideas a reality. The primary assumption of the book is that youre in technology management of some kind, or want to be, and want to think more holistically and incisively about your technical roadmaps. The second aim is to help you in your career. I suppose an alternate, but less becoming, title for this book could be How to Become the CTO.

If youre familiar with patterns-oriented books, such as the Gang of Four classic Design Patterns (Addison-Wesley), this book takes inspiration from them without adhering too tightly to the template they typically employ. One of my favorite books, and one that changed how I think about software and the evolution of ideas, was A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander (Oxford University Press). I have devised and refined this bricolage of ideas over several years from this and many sources. This book is, in a sense, just a written record of how Ive approached this aspect of my work, as much an intellectual memoir as anything else.

While Ive written books before on Cassandra, the Java programming language, software development, architecture, SOA, and web development, Technology Strategy Patterns is my first real book in nearly a decade. Thats on purpose. Ive been developing these ideas for the better part of that decade in my work conceiving and executing strategy as CTO, CIO, and Chief Architect at global tech companies. It represents a synthetic fabric of three areas:

• The first is a set of frameworks borrowed from the world of business strategy consulting as it is conceived in McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and Harvard Business School. We technologists are often told that if we want to be heard, be understood, and get funding, we must speak in the language of the businesswithout quite being told what that is or how to do it. This book serves as the translationthe Rosetta Stone, if you willfor the language of business executives to teach you what they know to strengthen your work and help it succeed.

• Second, I borrow from the world of philosophy, having studied and fallen in love with it in graduate school, and finding its rigors and explosive power very helpful in my 20-year career in tech.

• Finally, there are many perhaps idiomatic tools and frameworks that I developed myself while running large teams of engineers, helping grow businesses, instituting organizational and cultural changes, and designing and implementing globally scalable, mission-critical, distributed software systems running thousands of transactions per second. Together, they form an array of lenses that you can variously employ over time in different contexts as needed. Theyll help you define, create, elaborate, and refine your architecture goals and plans, and communicate them in rhetorically powerful ways to an audience of executives who must approve them as well as the teams who must implement them.

I recommend that you read the book front to back. As the Mad Hatter says, Begin at the beginning, and when you get to the end, stop. The ideas build on each other, refer to each other, and are carefully organized in a logical architecture of their own to reveal to you the beautiful world of strategy one peek at a time. After youre done, keep the book handy to refer back to later as needed. You wont make a new strategy every day, but I think youll see how many of the techniques can be woven into your daily work.

The tools in this book are proven. They work. Ive used these techniques for years, in many contexts with many different leaders in many different organizations. Employing these techniques has repeatedly helped me win technology strategy funding for $1M, $10M, $30M, $50M, $75M, and more. If you employ these tools, your ideas will be sharper, your plans more accurate, relevant, empathetic, and fruitful. Executives will approve and fund your work, and your teams, your company, your customers, and your partners will benefit.