To Architect or Not to Architect for Time to Market: What can Architecture do for me

Panel Discussion: Day 1 - July 25, Wednesday

To be an architect, You have to be a realist, but you have to be an optimist. Jim Collins wrote in Aug 2000, Best beats first. He said that the notion of being first to reach scale may be the most widely accepted myth. In fact, being first seldom proves to be a sustainable advantage and usually proves to be a liability. The real challenge is to build a company that can prosper far beyond the tenure of any single product and product life cycle. The game is different if you are preparaing your organization to live through multiple product life cycles.

Unfortunately, we live in a world which has little regard for the above. Or may be there are organizations which follow the rules. In this panel discussion, we are going to ask our panelists how did they balance the time pressure wrt quality of delivery? What are the factors for setting the priorities and making the decisions? What happens if customer is not willing to forgo the timeline for good quality? Do architects have a way out? Who wins this short term vs long term war? Who holds the nerve? Does the Best beat the first eventually?