Monday, December 10, 2007

HOA - Not just your homeowners association anymore.

While I'm not usually that excited about yet another acronym, I think the idea of HOA -- Human-Oriented Architecture -- is a fairly decent one. And, seeing as how one of my over-arching themes here is that talking to people about "SOA" isn't always the best way to get them jazzed up about SOA, the ideas from Joe McKendrick's recent blog post at ZDNet piqued my curiosity.

A couple good ideas there are 1)bottom-up pushing of enterprise initiatives is a difficult strategy, and 2)learning from the benefits of wiki-style mass collaboration might get us the mindshare we need to be successful.

I'll take that idea and run with it in the sense that I'd say we need tools that embrace that idea as well. If we need to have full involvement from business and IT to be successful in these kinds of initiatives -- and I'm fully convinced that we do -- then we need to give both constituencies the tools they need to collaborate effectively in the planning, design, implementation, and ongoing utilization and management of the resulting architecture. Further, I'd say that in an ideal situation all groups would even be able to use the same underlying tools...all via UIs that make the most sense to the way they conceive of the problem(s) they are trying to solve.