Study Paris to improve your IT architecture

The IT architecture of a typical company is an aging maze of applications, hardware, and networks that undermines rather than promotes corporate strategic goals. Senior IT managers should study another complicated set of systems—the infrastructure of a modern city—to learn how underlying principles and physical assets can unify an organization. Paris, with its wonderful variety of buildings from many centuries, seems particularly apt for this analogy.
Back in the 1850s, Napoleon III empowered the city planner Baron Haussmann to create a vast new infrastructure system, including sewers, bridges, parks, streets, and boulevards—the Paris of song and story. (His goals were not only to promote commerce and public health but also to widen the streets in hopes of preventing Parisians from erecting barricades and thus to prevent further revolutions of the kind that had brought him to power.) Since then, Paris has planned its redevelopment coherently, renovating old assets while replacing others and adding new ones. The city’s infrastructure unites them all, defining the cityscape and controlling its evolution.
Read this classic article to learn how the city-planning analogy can help companies use their IT architectures to compete more successfully.
August 2000
The Paris guide to IT architecture