The other day a vendor came and told me he wanted to help me solve my storage problems:

Vendor: we want to help you solve any storage problem you have
Customer: how's that?
Vendor: because we have a solution approach, we can help you solve your problems
Customer: right, you bring solutions to my problems! so here's one of my problem: How can I honour storage requests coming from various groups
Vendor: easy, buy our SRM tool!

The term solution can be ambiguous, as it can either mean
1. the answer to a problem:
the answer to my storage provisioning problem would be a SRM tool
2. the process of solving a problem
the key word here is process: what "things" can I put in place in order to solve, on a long term basis, my particular problem

As a matter of fact, as a customer, I was after the 2nd definition of "solution", when this vendor offered me the 1st one.
What I was looking for, was a process to solve my provisioning problem. A good process survives any technology.

In other words, the answer to my problem is a building block, part of an IT architecture

Mister Vendor, listen to me, an IT Solution is either
* building block, which is part of a framework called: IT Architecture.
* Service defined as part of a service catalog

If you own the architecture, you own the building blocks and all the components that go into them. Otherwise, just sell the components that make my building block, but don't expect to be my trusted advisor.

For an introduction to IT Architecture check this out

Next blog, I will post a table of content of an Storage Architecture document. keep coming!