I was at the airport waiting for my flight. I looked around me and saw players and roles: passengers boarding aircraft, gate agents checking tickets, aircrew with their flight bags marching resolutely through the boarding gate, flight stewardesses with their well-coiffed hair, smart clothing and luggage and their high heels, catering contractors with their equipment jammed into the side of the plane transferring the four hundred meals for the flight to Frankfurt.
I saw and heard systems everywhere – the alarm system as someone was still busy typing in their pass code into the security-controlled door, the public address system as announcement after announcement droned on, the perimeter security system with heavily armed and armored vehicles driving around the tarmac, the boarding pass system with the gate agents swiping bar coded boarding passes into a scanner, the integrated TV system that at the same time, displayed CNN sports, switched to ABC News and then to flight announcements and then produced a list of standby passengers who would now be able to board because of no-shows.
I saw facilities everywhere – the cubicle with the boarding pass printer that spat out boarding passes, the seating area for smokers, and the one for non-smokers, the people movers that disgorged passengers at designated places in the terminal, the vending kiosks that provided quick drink or bite to eat, the concession stands, the security screening stations with their skeleton doors for detecting metal.
I saw activities everywhere – gate agents issuing boarding passes, checking boarding passes, passengers boarding an aircraft, pilots poring over their checklists – as I watched the cockpit through the huge airport plate glass.
The mind of an architect never rests. Just as the businessman and entrepreneur sees the world through the prism of the dollar, the enterprise architect sees the world through the prism of activities, passengers, and task flows, information flows, systems, and technology.
Just as the jumble of buildings at ground level becomes a town plan, seen 10,000 feet from the air, stepping back to view ground reality provides a lens that discovers prior design and meaning. And everything magically snaps into order as structural and behavioral patterns emerge from the chaos that is life.
Base-lining is a process of representation. Architecting is the process of assigning order and behavior to that representation. Architects jealously cultivate that detachment that allows them to view the chaos without making value judgments. That same detachment allows them to infer and discover hidden meaning behinds structures and behaviors.
Personally for me, since becoming an enterprise architect and developing that third eye for structure and behavior, airports, hospitals, shopping malls, large office building complexes, small town main streets, and railway stations have provoked a new level of curiosity. Any system where there is apparent chaos has an inner design and activity tempo that must be unlocked – the third eye is invaluable!
I saw and heard systems everywhere – the alarm system as someone was still busy typing in their pass code into the security-controlled door, the public address system as announcement after announcement droned on, the perimeter security system with heavily armed and armored vehicles driving around the tarmac, the boarding pass system with the gate agents swiping bar coded boarding passes into a scanner, the integrated TV system that at the same time, displayed CNN sports, switched to ABC News and then to flight announcements and then produced a list of standby passengers who would now be able to board because of no-shows.
I saw facilities everywhere – the cubicle with the boarding pass printer that spat out boarding passes, the seating area for smokers, and the one for non-smokers, the people movers that disgorged passengers at designated places in the terminal, the vending kiosks that provided quick drink or bite to eat, the concession stands, the security screening stations with their skeleton doors for detecting metal.
I saw activities everywhere – gate agents issuing boarding passes, checking boarding passes, passengers boarding an aircraft, pilots poring over their checklists – as I watched the cockpit through the huge airport plate glass.
The mind of an architect never rests. Just as the businessman and entrepreneur sees the world through the prism of the dollar, the enterprise architect sees the world through the prism of activities, passengers, and task flows, information flows, systems, and technology.
Just as the jumble of buildings at ground level becomes a town plan, seen 10,000 feet from the air, stepping back to view ground reality provides a lens that discovers prior design and meaning. And everything magically snaps into order as structural and behavioral patterns emerge from the chaos that is life.
Base-lining is a process of representation. Architecting is the process of assigning order and behavior to that representation. Architects jealously cultivate that detachment that allows them to view the chaos without making value judgments. That same detachment allows them to infer and discover hidden meaning behinds structures and behaviors.
Personally for me, since becoming an enterprise architect and developing that third eye for structure and behavior, airports, hospitals, shopping malls, large office building complexes, small town main streets, and railway stations have provoked a new level of curiosity. Any system where there is apparent chaos has an inner design and activity tempo that must be unlocked – the third eye is invaluable!
2 comments:
Very interesting and well said. I've always had an interest in discovering the structures that compose life and its parts. In college I fell in love with economics because it provided a framework for understanding economic behavior, and as a consultant, after a series of deathly boring projects, I discovered enterprise architecture and fell in love with it for the same reasons. Certain analytical personalities are interested in this stuff and others (maybe most) are not.
Very true! Enterprise architecture leverages patterns - and patterns can range from the most abstract to the most concrete implementations. Patterns encapsulate ontological "free lunches" as they say - they provide a compact way to represent large amounts of information. And patterns are what we are looking for, to make the uncertain look more certain. The DoD Architecture Framework 2.0 is heavily oriented towards this approach and yes, very few people get it.
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