Architecture and Innovation

A day in the life of an architect requires that you solve many problems. It would be easy if all of these problems allowed you to begin without any existing technology, people or political limitations, but the reality is that there are many constraints to arrive at the right solution. Adding to the pressure is that an architect is looked upon as an individual who can solve the most difficult problems in IT and, in some cases, the company.

You will need to harness your creativity and power to innovate to come up with the solutions to the many problems that arrive. This requires the architect and the architecture team to be innovative and getting the most creativity out of team members and coworkers to make your architecture program and your company more competitive and successful.

How Do You Harness Innovation?

The first thing you will need to do is make sure that your team members have time to think. Creativity cannot take place in a mind that is bogged down in constant crisis. You need to encourage team member or ask for time to think and explore new ideas. Some companies like Google even give each employee 20% of their time to be creative and come up with new ideas for the company (they also provide substantial incentives for ideas that generate revenue for the company which encourages people to use this time well). You may not be able to change your culture to dedicate so much time to ideas, but you can schedule time from creativity, give tasks that will require individuals and teams to think more around solutions or provide venues for different people to meet.

Learn Creative Techniques

There are many creative techniques or tools that can be used during the creative process. Different tools are effective at various times in the process and some can be used individually or within a group. Creative processes generally require that you have a problem statement to focus the group, but other times you need to determine what the problem is. This may seem obvious, but many times the problem stated is not the actual problem. How many times have you run into this problem:

The Web site is down again.

This is too generic to solve and the creative technique of asking questions can come in handy here.

Ask Questions

What, Why, When, How, Where and Who. Make the six question words your friends. It does not make you look ignorant (unless you should really know the answer) if you ask questions and can be a very effective tool for getting to the bottom of a problem. One of the most effective ones is why. Using it over and over can often drive to the real problem.

Why is the the Web site down again?

Because the site is timing out.

Why is the site timing out?

Because it is not building the page fast enough.

Why is it not building the page fast enough?

Because it is not getting the data it needs.

Why is it not getting the data it needs?

Because the database queries are performing slowly.

Why are the database queries performing slowly.

…

Generally, within six to eight questions you can be to the real problem.

But there are no guarantees with creative process and you may need to use other techniques to discover the problem and even the ultimate solution to the problem.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is probably one of the most familiar creativity techniques. You basically try to come up with as many ideas as possible. The key to making this successful is controlling the strong personalities that have the tendency to evaluate ideas or dismiss them before they have time to take hold.

Techniques that allow individuals to write down the ideas and then share them or post them and then vote on them may be able to control these personalities. If you are using these techniques in a group, then have each member write them down and put them up in a visible place in your company and encourage individuals to vote on the ideas they like or even to add to the ideas. You could even put this in a public place in your company and encourage anybody walking by to select their favorite ideas. Sometimes brainstorming comes to a halt and you may need to infuse some new ideas into the discussion. A tool like Random Input could help in this process.

Random Input

Random input is a lateral thinking technique, which means that you use random input to create ideas or connections that you would not have thought of to a problem. I feel this technique works best if you start of with a problem, but it can also be used from scratch and is great at injecting new ideas when new solutions are failing to come. This technique is simple and effective for coming up with new ideas or solutions to problems. Open a book or newspaper and just point at a random word or image. Really try to use the first word or image you find if it is not a simple fill word like the, and, or, etc. Your brain will work hard to connect the image or word with the problem.

Problem: The Web site is down again. We need it to be up 24x7 (In other words, How can we keep it up?)

You select the term “dark chocolate” from the catalog sitting on your desk. Now list the associations with the random word.

rich flavor = having more flavor, which means more servers in their own grouping so one is always up.

antioxidants = healthy, better health monitoring of the servers

etc.

By the way, this technique works with images also and you want to mix it up to cover both sides of the brain to stimulate full creativity. You can also take this technique further by using another tool called the Mind Map.

Mind Map

A Mind Map is very useful in trying to brainstorm or find associations with a random input. You take the problem or word and make it the center of the map. You then start making associations with the word and put them together, much like the brain’s own neurons organize themselves. A Mind Map helps you organize, associate and cluster key concepts around an idea. A typical Mind Map might look like the following:

You can use paper, a white board or even computer software to generate a Mind Map depending on your tastes. There is a very good piece of software for Windows, Mac and Linux called Free Mind located at SourceForge.

There are many other ideas for capitalizing on the creativity of yourself and of your coworkers. Try entering “Creative Thinking Techniques” in your favorite search engine to find many different tools that can help you harness your creativity.

As we have seen, there are techniques to help make you and your teams more creative, but creativity and innovation is very serendipitous. Expanding creativity will involve making sure you try to maintain an environment for being as creative as possible. Have gathering places for people from all over the organization or set up gathering meetings so discussion can take place. Use creativity techniques to encourage ideas. Give people time to think and be creative and work to be transparent with information. Remember that creativity can come from anywhere, and not just the group of “experts”.

---

Mitch Ruebush is the Leader of the Architecture Team for ING DIRECT, the largest direct bank in the U.S. He is president of the Philadelphia chapter of the International Association of Software Architects, and serves on the IASA Board of Directors. He has authored many books and articles and speaks at a number of events each year.