Typically when an architecture overhaul takes place, the first thing you do is capture the current state of the architecture (popularly termed as the "As Is" picture and the ideal future state of the architecture (porularly referred to as the "To Be" picture). At a lunch discussion today, we were going over how the "round trip" to validate what was achieved in never completed.

I would think that in order to complete this round trip, when one gets into an strategizing architecture, there should be the definition of four viewpoints:

• As Is Architecture: Captures the current state. Also known as Point of Departure (POD)
• To Be Architecture: Captures the desired end state. Also known as Point of Arrival (POA). From POA to POD, there may be several PONs (Point of Next)
• As Is (in the future) Architecture: Should capture characteristics that need to be captured to determine the actual POA
• As Was Architecture: Should capture the actual point of departure, if it is in variance from the documented one.

There has to be a way to use the latter two views to track back and to guage the success of a project. Unfortunately, this is rarely accomplished in a typical architecture redesign.