I had an opportunity to witness a few individuals solve a problem for the Customer.
They were supposed to make presentations on the solution provided by them and I got the privildge of watching the same.
In the morning, a collegaue of mine had told be about the book 'The Invisible Actor' which is about a japenese actor teaching us how be an actor. And according to him ' A good actor is the one who makes the audience visualize the moon ( if the scene says so) . For Eg: Tabu is a good actor as she effortlessly makes you see things in the scene that she is supposed to convey . Take any scene from 'Chini Cum' and you will get what I am trying to say. According to the Japenese actor if the audience says ' What an amazing way to show the moon!!' ,the actor has failed as a good actor.
Eg: If we see 'Amitabh bachan' in sholay and not 'Jay' then amitabh has not done great job as an actor.At leeast in sholay i saw 'Jay' and not 'Amitabh'
Now you must be wondering ,what this has got to do with solutioning ?
Yesterday while sitting through to those presentations I realised that a good Solution Architect is the one who is successful in creating the picture of the solution without his traits in solution. Only then can we do justice to the solution and it will truely solve the problem. For eg: If I am writing a piece of software with the view that 'I have written a great piece of software','I am a pro microsoft guy', 'I am pro open source guy','I feel Project Management is the key challenge to address in this' ,there are high chances that the software will not solve any problem of life. But if I write the software with the sole aim to address the problem faced by the customer ,align all decision points with not what I believe is true but what the problem is making me believe as true ,then the Solution Architect will become invisible and real solutions will emerge.
Can our IT industry have Invisible Solution Architects ? I am surely striving to be one ....
