Here is a comment I originally posted on Tom Graves' blog.
In his book The Art of Judgment (which I can strongly recommend as a counterweight to the Herbert Simon account of decision-making which dominates much IT thinking), Geoffrey Vickers talks about three related types of judgment – reality judgment (what is going on), value judgment and action judgment. I’m feel sure you will agree that an architect needs to be able to make all three types of judgment.
In practice, these three types of judgment need to be integrated, holistically, and it seems to me that an appeal to general principles reduces and perhaps trivializes the deep relationship between the different types of judgment. I can see that an appeal to principles may have some transitional value for inexperienced architects in immature or chaotic organizations, but I think this limits the quality of the judgments that can be reached.
Here is Tom's reply.
Good points on the three judgement-types: useful distinction, likewise the importance of integration between them. That integration is essentially what I’m aiming to do with this type of framework (which, again, is still only at the ‘work-in-progress’ stage).
Tom Graves
Tom Graves, How Useful are Principles in Enterprise Architecture (13 January 2012)
Richard Veryard, Rationality and Decision-Making (Slideshare, 18 November 2008)
Geoffrey Vickers, The Art of Judgment: A Study in Policy-Making (Sage 1965)
See also
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