Friday, September 09, 2011

The Topography of Enterprise Architecture

A lot of the terminology of enterprise architecture depends on some basic categories and distinctions, which help to define the dimensions for various schemas and frameworks.
  • Top-down / Bottom-up
  • Ideal / Real
  • Abstract / Concrete
  • Espoused / In-Use


But the meaning of these terms depends on your perspective. See for example my previous post What Does "Top-Down" Mean?

One popular categorical distinction is between “ideal” and “real”, with a progressive series of intermediate states. This category implies a process known as “realization” moving from the “ideal” towards the “real” (for which the Zachmanites prefer the mediaeval word “reification”), and a contrary process known as “idealization” moving from the “real” towards the “ideal”.

(The Zachmanites claim that this distinction derives from some unnamed ancient Greek philosophers, but I have not been able to verify this claim. The earliest sources I can find for this notion are mediaeval Christian and Arabic philosophers such as Ibn Arabi and Ockham. What Plato and Aristotle talked about was Form and Matter, and although Form is often translated as Idea, that's not exactly the same.)

But it is interesting to see exactly what people regard as more “real”. For example, many people seem to think that the technology model is more “real” than the business model. In other words, a pattern of magnetic dots on a physical data storage device counts as more “real” than the flesh-and-blood customer that this pattern of dots represents. Such a technologically based notion of “reality” may be useful for some purposes, but it is inescapably a technological perspective. And no EA framework that uncritically adopts a technologically based notion of “reality” can claim to be free of a technological bias.

 

 

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Form vs Matter  

For more on reification, see my post Deconstructing the Grammar of Business (June 2009)

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