From Agile to Radical: business strategy and architecture

One of the topics many people fail to understand is the intimate relationship between business strategy and system and software architecture. This is the case for folks on the business side as well as many engineers.

To illustrate this, one company I work with is involved in standardization in the context of home automation. It provides devices that integrate into a home automation system, an area several of the SaaS giants, such as Google and Amazon, are quite interested in. These large players are, obviously, looking for a situation where they have free access to all devices in a home and can collect all the data, control every aspect of each device and provide integration across devices.