Kant versus Hume

@AliArsanjani has raised an interesting dilemma for the identification and design of business services, which he traces to the philosophical debate between David Hume and Immanuel Kant. 

So is Kant right or Hume?

Immanuel Kant, grandiose philosopher, maintained that we have synthetic notions a priori; notions prior to experience that are embedded, as we would perhaps say today, in our DNA. David Hume, the empiricist, on the other hand maintained that our mind is a tabula rasa -- a clean slate that experience writes upon and we have no notions prior to experiences.

Should SOA start to be embedded in the DNA of the Enterprise or is it something that should be left as best addressed piecemeal, project by project, on an as need basis?

IBM Developerworks, 7 October 2005

Back to Kant and Hume

Several folks have raised important points in this connection. Namely (assuming I have interpreted the comments correctly):

1. A question of SOA Governance: "Do services come from some apriori (generalized, enterprise-wide or industry-wide) schema (Kant), or do they come from the specific local requirements (Hume)?"

2. Instill SOA into company DNA: "The DNA or "Nature" has to be "Nurtured" in an Information Technology (IT) still in its infancy. You could think of the IT DNA as the defined lower metrics required for any IT shop to deliver Information. The key performance criteria for Information delivery SOA as a roadmap to bridge the communications gap between the "IT think" people and the "Business driver think" people."

3. Natural Selection: The more we put in the DNA, the more restrictive the future generation of SOA will be, the less we put in the DNA the more fragile our SOA generation will be.

4. The Grand Design approach: "...grand design, and hints at a roadmap created by an external, pervasive entity ... the lingua franca for cross-platform coding...."

To me, project motivation comes from two very diametrically opposed sources: pragmatics of funding (business drivers) and the passion of professionals (to do "the right thing").

In some organizational cultures, we will have an entry level of maturity that is going to be project focused and natural selection may indeed rule.

At the other end of the spectrum we have enterprise wide transformation efforts that are occuring with some degree of SOA governance that follows a roadmap, "grand design". This allows the "instilling of SOA into Company DNA" in a spiral form : not necessarily top-down, not project by project, but by whichever comes first. The governance in place sees to it that where the passion of professionals or the pragmatics of funding are the drivers, that success is achieved within the designated , I repeat, designated scope.

As diverse projects weave their way to SOA, SOA governance sees to it that Variation-oriented Analysis is conducted across projects by the enterprise architecture board (with business and IT representation), Service Refactoring is done to factor out common services that eliminate redundancy (the third Service Litmus test).

IBM Developerworks, 28 November 2005

The DeveloperWorks blogs are being taken down, so I have reproduced Ali's posts here with his kind permission.

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I posted the following comments to these blogposts.

I interpret your question in terms of SOA governance. Do services come from some apriori (generalized, enterprise-wide or industry-wide) schema (Kant), or do they come from the specific local requirements (Hume)?

Some people refer to this distinction as topdown/bottomup, but there is an important difference between this distinction and other topdown/bottomup distinctions.

RV October 2005

I interpret DNA as a set of generative patterns. I wonder whether this metaphor can be formulated in a way that is consistent with Christopher Alexander's principles of emergent order.That would certainly be my own preference, rather than equating DNA with grand design, which I think introduces too many problems - both practical and philosophical.

In the past, the Enterprise Architect has been seen as the custodian of grand design. But I am seeing an important shift in the role of Enterprise Architecture (EA), made possible and/or necessary by SOA. EA constrains the way the SOA developer delivers a project, in the interests of some larger-scale order. But where do these constraints come from? From a general apriori standard universal model (Kant), or from a specific and empirically discovered model (Hume), grounded in the strategic context of a specific enterprise and its customers? My view is that the latter allows EA to align better with asymmetric demand. I wrote about some of this in my most recent article SOA Governance – from Chaos to Order – The Transformation of Enterprise Architecture (CBDI Journal November 2005).

RV November 2005

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I have also referenced his argument in the following posts.

Enterprise Mashups and Situated Software (March 2006)
The General and the Particular (September 2006)
What Does Top-Down Mean? (September 2011)