Paint Yourself Into The Corner pattern

Here's how it works. Typically, a new CTO or CIO gets hired/promoted and after a couple of days declares that, "We are now an 'X' technology/platform shop."

I'm going to start calling this the Paint Yourself Into The Corner pattern. You read it here, first. This is similar to the "Fire, Ready, Aim" pattern. It starts out with a CTO (or CIO) declaring that a certain technology or platform is the new standard before understanding what all of the problems are. This decision is usually made on the alleged cost savings to be achieve through standardization, alleged efficiencies to be achieved by having similarly skilled staff in a matrix organization and is largely based on the CTO/CIOs own past skill set (familiarity). Sound stupid? Well, it is. However, why do I see it happening all the time? I've seen people put more thought into what kind of car they want to buy than the time they spend figuring out what types of technology are best for their business.

Enterprise, or any other kind of "technical" architecture is not all about technology. CTOs in particular often forget this. Architecture is about devising manageable solutions that will actually get used to solve specific business problems. It's not about "simplifying" the toolset to make the tools more manageable! Some of these solutions will be very complex but, complexity can be managed. Managing complexity can also be applied to the toolbox.