Organizations often lack a centralized IT architecture, resulting in each business unit trying to build its own set of tools. Lack of overall control causes a lot of duplicate systems and data inconsistency. IT initiatives in individual business units are driven by a short-term goal and are not well aligned with long-term organizational vision such as the digital transformation of the entire organization. Further, it adds complexity to maintain and upgrade those systems. Taking a simple step to define set standards and avoid duplication can help to save costs.

In the following diagram, you can see a complex architecture on the left-hand side, where business units are working in their own application without any standardization, which is causing duplicate applications with a lot of dependencies. This kind of architecture results in higher cost and risk. Any new experiment takes a long time to market, which results in losing the competitive edge. A standard process can provide a holistic view and high flexibility to create an agile environment by applying automation, which helps to reduce the overall cost and results in a more significant ROI:

To reduce the architectural complexity, the first thing is to eliminate duplication and identify the function reuse across the business unit. During gap analysis of existing architecture, you will find there is so much code, so many existing components, and a project that can be reused again across the organization to support your business requirement. To reduce the complexity of IT architecture, think of an out-of-the-box solution that fits your business needs and provides an ROI. Customization should be your last approach if no other option is available. 

Any new application needs to have a more accessible integration mechanism to interact with the existing system using service-oriented architecture (SOA). Harmonizing the user interface design across the application provides a set of standard UI packages, which can be reused for any new application. Similarly, other modules can be reutilized with service-oriented design. You learned about SOA patterns in Chapter 6, Solution Architecture Design Patterns, which help you keep all the different pieces of software working separately and still communicating with each other to build a full system.

In the modular approach, each team gets the responsibility of developing a service, which every team across the organization can use to avoid duplication. As an architect, you should help the team to create a service-oriented design, where each team handles individual architecture components as a service that can be developed independently. With the help of microservices architecture, you can deploy an entire application in a modular way, and if one component is not working, you can rework it without impacting the whole application. For example, a payment service developed to collect payment from a customer visiting an e-commerce website can be used to make payments to vendors in the vendor management system.

Once you set up a centralized IT architecture, taking a modular approach helps you to keep the cost down. Empowering your IT architecture team can help to align organizational units with the company's vision and support other parallel projects to follow the overall strategy. It also helps to provide consistency in other critical services that are often overlooked, such as legal, accounting, and human resources.

With the help of the IT architecture team, you can get excellent feedback and make sure that projects are aligned with business needs and requirements. By overseeing the overall architecture across teams, an architect can advise if whether there is any duplicate effort, project, process, or system that is not aligned with the business need. The centralized architecture will reduce complexity and tech debt, bring more stability, and increase quality. The overall idea of centralized architecture is to increase IT efficiency, so let's learn more about that.