Benefits and Pitfalls

An RA has a number of benefits for the enterprise:

In addition to the benefits, RAs pose a few pitfalls :

The most effective way to mitigate these downsides is to remember that an RA should never be followed by rote. A reference architecture should be evaluated for each use and proven in practice. As a component of the IMA, the RA should be subjected to the same feedback cycle shown in Figure 14-1 as other IMA components. The feedback may change the project, or it may change the RA. Feedback on how well a particular RA worked in a project is likely to affect foundational components in the IMA such as the interoperability framework (IF) as well.

One way to use an RA in a project is to adopt it piecemeal and iteratively as needed. In this practice, the project uses the RA as a reference, but only implements a subset of the architecture because of specific project needs. For example, the RA might contain multiple servers and a load balancer to create a high availability environment, but in practice, the project leaves out the load balancer and uses only one server, because high availability is not a critical factor in this particular application.