Trends represent a prediction of possible future states based on past observations. All architecture teams must carefully examine trends to make pragmatic decisions for the specific solution. Sometimes, an architecture team will want to align their decisions with predicted trends and sometimes, the team will intentionally want to make decisions that are antagonistic to observed trends.
Current Corporate IT Environment Trends
All IT Environments are undergoing evolutions and revolutions with technologies, processes and people. There are many areas that must be observed:
Perspective Capture Questions: Corporate IT Environment Directions/Trends Area
a) What general directions/trends is the corporate IT environment moving?
b) What specific directions/trends exist for the follow areas:
i. Other Systems (existing and planned) coming in the future for the organization
ii. Risk Tolerance levels
iii. Enterprise Architectural Environments
iv. Corporate IT Standards
v. Provisioning, Patch, Deployment Systems
vi. Instrumentation, Monitoring and troubleshooting systems
vii. IT Security Environment
viii. Data Center Services
ix. Development and Test Environments
x. Technical Pressures
xi. Operational Metrics
xii. Physical Facility Capabilities
xiii. Financial Pressures
xiv. Resource Pressures
xv. Recoverability Systems
xvi. Time Pressures
xvii. Operational Processes