Architecture State of The Union - 2024
Calling it a state of the union makes this sound very American, but I’ve been watching a lot of American politics lately so that’s where my head went to.
People that know how I do things know that I am very old school. I’ve got a whiteboard in my home office with the names of people who are either open minded to new work, or available. Lately this whiteboard has been getting so full that I’ve needed to get something slightly bigger. At last count, I had 46 architects on that board. This is a far cry from what things were like 12-18 months ago, where the board would have a steady 10-15 names. This is obviously not very solid statistical evidence, but in my unique position as the only person in NZ that exclusively recruits architects (nice plug there for Collada), I thought it worthwhile giving an overview of why I see things as being difficult.
There is not one specific reason as to why the architecture market is fearing so poorly, but a culmination of things. Although I did a couple of economics papers at uni I have all but forgotten that. It’s pretty obvious that the economy has impacted things. This is more looking at specific impacts as they relate to architecture.
Who Makes the Decisions
In my experience, when times are tough and there are programmes being cut and redundancies occurring a key decision maker is the CFO. People in finance are typically evidence-based and focus on the costs and benefits of specific activities. As an architect, your approach is more conceptual, and you may not always have a clear monetary benefit for every activity you undertake. This puts you very much in the firing line of these finance folk.
Architecture is Expensive
This somewhat ties into the above, but architecture is not a cheap function to run. If you look at different domains in an organisation, architecture is often seen as an expensive discipline, which can make it more vulnerable during economic downturns. When the market is unfavourable, companies typically look for ways to reduce costs, and high-cost functions like architecture are often among the first to be scrutinised.
Showing Value
This is seemingly less of an issue for solution architects as they tend to be more aligned with transformation initiatives with more tangible outcomes. However, for more strategic architects, it can be tricky to show exactly what value you bring to an organisation. Where you might look at a team of developers and you can generally get a feeling for the output they are creating, their product is a lot more tangible. Strategic architecture is often seen (in my opinion incorrectly) as a nice to have, it’s a discipline that organisations understand there is a value, but they can’t quite pinpoint it. I’d also note that often when an enterprise architecture function is set up correctly, it generally takes longer to see the cracks once it’s been disestablished.
Specific Requirements
I wrote about this last year and appeared to have got it completely wrong. I was promoting the idea that generalist architects would have a bright future, organisations needed people who weren’t wedded to a particular technology. Well turns out things are slightly different. What I am seeing is that the organisations that are doing transformation are now looking for very specific skills, so the generalists are missing out on many roles at the moment. I still think there is demand coming in this space, but whilst there are plenty of architects looking, organisations can be more picky.
I’m going to do another one of these next week, let’s call it part two, it’ll cover some tactics you can use, if you are looking for work, that might help you get into things. Overall though, I do see things getting better in the next couple of months, most of what I am seeing is more tactical than strategic, so those of you who are at the HoA level or leadership level might still have a while before things pick up.
Let me know your thoughts, feel free to give me a call if you want to discuss this, or the architecture market in general