Trust No One Architectures
A Trust No One Architecture is one where each organizational unit minimizes accidental risk by owning as much of their processes as possible. Companies end up with a Trust No One architecture where each sub-organization is most likely to meet its' goals if it controls as much of its development, technical and operational processes as possible. Each division / operational unit acts as an independent entity with loose coupling at the edges and just enough cooperation to meet the company goals. I recently attended a talk of a Departmental Information Officer for a large bank who said their software process accelerated and their business deliverables came in earlier when they pulled architecture, operations and infrastructure back from the corporate level to the department level. The bank traded costs, standards and duplicate work for time to market and agility. This was in strong opposition to the previous attempt at minimizing risk by centralizing...
