Recently, we were contacted by a local company and asked if we could help them understand why their IT staff were having such a hard time bring stable products to market. We spent a few weeks onsite listening to the different teams talk through their processes and we realized rather quickly that the issue was not with the development team's ability to execute an idea, it was the way they were being asked to implement the idea.
What the company in question was missing was an architect.
It's not a hard task to write a standalone application or service that does a small task, and does it well. It's a completely different thing to create an enterprise level solution that spans multiple departments, skill sets, hardware, and sometimes continents.
The company, we will call Company ABC, was asking their developers to deliver a scalable solution, which lived in a hybrid state, both on premises and in the cloud, which tied responsive web, Android and iOS layers tied together through APIs and message buses and they were asking the developers to come up with this integration landscape.
The architects here at Greenfield were able to look at the problem and offer a solution which allowed the "one year project, still not to market" project, to be re-imagined and brought to market three months after we became involved simply by allowing the developers to create their pieces within a clearly defined ecosystem.
Architecture matters. It will save you time, money, and will allow your company to scale while allowing your IT staff to focus on what they love most, which is building really cool applications via code and being successful in the eyes of their employers.