Technology Strategy Patterns

Preface

Welcome

Thank you for picking up Technology Strategy Patterns.

This book came out of a paper I gave at the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference in New York City in the spring of 2018, called “The Architect as Strategist.” I’m grateful for the many conversations it sparked. At the conference, a number of the architects in attendance asked if it could become a book. And so it is.

Intended Audience

This book is for anyone in information technology who wants to do more strategic, relevant, important work for their organizations. Therefore, there is no code in the book, and nothing too technical. People who will get the most out of it include:

• Architects

• Principal developers or tech leads who wish to become architects

• Technology managers in engineering, testing, and analysis, whether on the product development side or the IT back office

• Product managers

• Project and portfolio managers

• Business consultants

• Technology executives

• Strategy analysts and managers

• Anyone interested in strategy, architecture, and leadership

Whether you are a senior developer, enterprise architect, or CTO, or have never read a line of code in your life, I know you’ll find something useful, and feel welcome and at home here.

Purpose of the Book

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 you’ll get approval, support, and funding to make your ideas a reality. The primary assumption of the book is that you’re 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 you’re 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 I’ve approached this aspect of my work, as much an intellectual memoir as anything else.

While I’ve 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. That’s on purpose. I’ve 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 business”—without quite being told what that is or how to do it. This book serves as the translation—the Rosetta Stone, if you will—for 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. They’ll 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 you’re done, keep the book handy to refer back to later as needed. You won’t make a new strategy every day, but I think you’ll see how many of the techniques can be woven into your daily work.

The tools in this book are proven. They work. I’ve 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.

I truly hope that you find this book useful and inspiring for years to come, and that it serves you. It was written with affection and care. May it strengthen and deepen your work, and help you, your company, and your customers succeed.

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Using Code Examples

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We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Technology Strategy Patterns by Eben Hewitt (O’Reilly). Copyright 2019 Eben Hewitt, 978-1-492-04087-3.”

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my friends and colleagues at Sabre who shared important insights and supported this work.

First, to our wonderful enterprise architecture team of Andrea Baylor, Holt Hopkins, Tom Murray, Jerry Rossi, and Andy Zecha. You’re such a joy to work with every day. I’m grateful to get to hang out with such knowledgeable, sharp, funny, dedicated, passionate, good people.

President Clinton Anderson, previously of Bain & Company, and Sabre Hospitality VP of Strategy Balaji Krishnamurthy, previously of McKinsey, both inspire me, are such fun to work with, and teach me every day. I’m so grateful to work with you and know you. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and methods, and in so doing, helping inspire this book. You both get stickers.

A special thank you to Justin Ricketts for his support on this project and for being so terrific to work with. I am grateful to my colleagues across Sabre, especially Tom Winrow.

Thank you to Brian Mericle, enterprise architect, and my longtime friend and colleague, for his valuable edits to this book.

Thank you to my old friends and mentors Todd Davis, Deryl Heitman, Steve Miller, and Ted Taylor for the many opportunities you afforded me to grow and learn.

Thank you to Mike Loukides, my longtime friend and editor at O’Reilly, who always pushes me to see farther. I’m grateful for your help in developing this book and these ideas. Thank you for our sprawling, fabulous conversations. Thank you too to Brian Foster for welcoming this book at the Software Architecture Conference and your guidance of this work. Thank you to my development editor, Alicia Young, whose diligence and care improved this work. Thank you to all my friends at the wonderful O’Reilly Media, including Mary Treseler, Nan Barber, Rachel Monaghan, and Sharon Wilkey for your terrific work that improved this book. I am grateful for what you do in the world to help spread the knowledge of innovators. What a beautiful company you created, Tim; may it ever flourish.

I am most indebted to my wife, Professor of Philosophy Alison Brown, for her wisdom, better ideas, revisions, suggestions, summations, expansions, explanations, expiations, encouragement, tenacity, and love. You are the sine qua non, as ever.