Good Architecture, Well Implemented

The recent ProveIt! conference represents an interesting shift in Industry 4.0. The fundamental idea of requiring vendors and integrators to demonstrate their capabilities in a controlled setting is a powerful way to highlight which vendors manufacturing end-users can confidently work with. In his opening keynote, Walker said something that resonated with us. “I don’t engage in theoretical discussions.” It’s easy to theorize what might work. It’s easy to talk about what works in a small scale proof of concept or demo. It’s easy to take a binary stance on complicated topics. But the real world is nuanced, the real world operates at a mind-bending scale, and the real world doesn’t operate on unproven theories and marketing bluster.

I’ve recently been spending a lot of time with architects at HiveMQ and this phrase they use stuck out to me. “Good Architecture, Well Implemented”. The core idea is that customers need to base their digital transformation on architectures and design patterns that have proven successful at scale, and then put in the hard work of implementing them well. It’s easy for anyone to sketch out a quick architecture that MIGHT work, or even prove it out in their test environment. It’s an entirely different thing to validate those designs under real-world conditions, with billions of mission critical events, alarms, and commands flowing back and forth. 

Digital transformation happens over many years, and the results will be relied upon for decades to come. Promoting architectural antipatterns with no history of success at scale will disrupt organizations’ digital transformation journeys, incur tech debt and require costly rework, possibly leading to the failure of an organization to digitally transform and remain competitive. The manufacturers we have been working with are laying the foundations and “setting the vector” - to use Walker’s metaphor - for the next 20 years of growth; a weak foundation simply can’t support the inevitable march of progress.

My advice for all organizations - wherever you are at in your digital transformation journey - is to carefully validate the credibility of the vendors and partners you are relying on and taking advice from. Ask your vendors to showcase their track record of implementing transformation at your scale. Be wary of click-bait articles and ‘hot-takes’ that go against the wisdom of the industry and what’s been proven to work. Ask vendors and partners to provide references and case studies that can validate their expertise. I’m all for innovation, and every company needs to start somewhere, but no one wants their critical project to be a guinea pig for an unproven approach that’s only been theorized to work. This next wave of Industry 4.0 adoption - like all shifts in industrialization that came before it - will have winners and losers. Manufacturers who successfully adopt digitization and become data driven will leapfrog their competitors. Organizations that fail to keep up - either because they followed unproven methodologies or because of systemic or organizational issues - will fall behind. The history of industrialization across the globe is littered with companies that failed to reinvent themselves.

The industry needs more forums like ProveIt! that demand vendors and integrators ‘put their money where their mouth is’ to really PROVE what they preach. The target audience made note of the vendors that chose not, or could not, ProveIt!. It’s incumbent upon us - the Industry 4.0 community, to work together to demand technological excellence and extol proven patterns for a successful digital transformation.