Responsibility for technical decisions
As a consultant, I have been working in many organizations and one thing I have noticed is that responsibility and reasoning for technical decisions are missing.
In my opinion, someone or someones should responsible for the technical decisions that have been made. Technical decisions should be based on some rationale and those arguments should be documented somewhere.
For example, if the organization decides to use a microservices architecture reasoning for this should be documented. And if the organization decides that every team can choose its own framework and programming language this reasoning should also be documented somewhere. In some cases, this might be just fine and in some, this could be harmful. If the organization has only vendor teams then letting every team choose their own programming language and framework, might not be so good idea. This might complicate upkeep and make it costly, you might need multiple programmers to make any changes in the services.
Not every technical decision needs to be documented thoroughly but things like choosing the framework or programming language should be documented. Documentation doesn't need to be complex or long, the rationale behind the decisions would suffice.
What about you? Have encountered the same thing? And does my ramblings make any sense to you ;)
I would say that an integration architecture plan could be done beforehand by some trusted party. The architecture plan is made by listening to the needs of the business and adjusting that to the capabilities of IT. For example, trendy microservices let the vendor code everything and create an overkill solution in the sense of total cost-of-ownership (TCO). In our integration architecture plans, we agree on the different approaches beforehand with the customer and utilize them on the real need. This way the chosen approaches serve the purpose and the monitoring and audit-trail needs can be centralized thus the operating and maintaining are cheaper = lower TCO. Quite often integration architecture plan's side result is an integration handbook - a short set of rules that every vendor must follow starting from approaches and patterns and ending with detailed naming rules if required. A small advert to the end - you can find a complete set of services from HiQ to this - without any vendor lock: https://hiq.fi/en/services/integrate/
I agree 100% If there is no owner, nobody takes responsibility and with lack of documentation, people might get confused what they are supposed to do.