10.13.09
Before Knowledge Comes Understanding
Back in the 1990s, when the IT industry was trying to understand and properly apply Object-Oriented concepts, a book titled, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software was published. This book opened up an entirely new way to look at OO. Many design pattern books have since followed with specific attention to programming languages and infrastructure components.
As the story goes, the authors of this mind-changing book, dubbed as the “Gang of Four”, were together at a conference and accidently attended a session in the same hotel as their conference, but given for a different group. They attended a building architecture presentation. In the presentation the architect described the types of patterns that go into the design of a building. This includes things like locating all of the plumbing functions in the same area on a floor. They immediately recognized the parallels to building applications using objects.
As the Gang of Four looked outside of their discipline and drew parallels, I believe there are some great parallels between Archaeology and Enterprise Architects. Archaeologists often begin an excavation only to find that one city has been built upon another. How often does an Enterprise Architect find that the current internet layer of an organization has been built on top of a COBOL or a FORTRAN base? How many organizations are still running CICS or IMS? With all of the knowledge we have gained over the last 30 years about componentization, why is most processing still dependent upon procedural design?
There are answers to these questions, but first an Enterprise Architect must excavate and uncover the artifacts that make up a corporation’s IT. This is the approach presented in my latest book, Enterprise Architects: Masters of the Unseen City. Just for fun, you might find the making of the book photos interesting. They can be found at: www.eatoolkit.com/photoalbum.html.
Because of spatial technology, archaeologists can now organize uncovered artifacts and present a virtual view of lost cities. An Enterprise Architect can use this same technology to visualize IT. For each organization there is a city view that could be presented of all of the knowledge of their use of IT. Each line-of-business could then see what is for them today unseen.
This visualization could cause a major shift in how IT is used in an organization. I believe that this will result in an explosion of innovation.
