About Architects, Abstracting and How to Practice the Art of Anti-Abundance

That’s a lot of A’s in this title! Maybe I was a little bit too abundant. But don’t blame me: abundance is quite normal if you work in ICT. More is good. Big is good. Expensive ecosystems give you status. Overdimensioned (eco)systems are very good (never know if you need abundant functions later). Overloaded functional features are good. Risk-averse built-to-last architectures are the way to go. (You don’t really think I mean this do you?) So far for Abundance, now for Abstracting, a task that architects typically need to be able to deal with in their day-to-day work. Look at the pictures below. Inspired by one of my collegues. You can see a model* of The World, Africa, The Desert and a handful of Desert Sand. We could even add more abstraction levels: the Universe, a single grain of sand, the atoms in the grain etc. So we sometimes need different levels of abstraction. The abstraction level depends on what you want to tell and to who you want to tell it. (IT) architects sometimes here people ask: do you have an overview picture of the complete architecture? The people asking think that such a picture exists (it should, shouldn’t it?) and that architects by all means should be able to reproduce that very quickly. That’s what they’re paid for, right?  Well, if that seems to be the case, we could get inspired by modelling our tiny ITC world just like Google Earth: it can zoom-in from the universe, to the world, to a country, to a city, a street and even more details lately, In ICT environments, this still is a very tedious and difficult job. So wWhen will the time come that IT architects can model the (virtual) world they are working in with zoom-in/zoom-out tools comparable to Google Earth??? Or to make things more SIMPEL: should ICT architects just not try to model the world they’re working in but instead limit themselves to modeling the essence of the questions they need to answer? Less is more approach???

* Any model isn’t representative because it allways leaves out certain details, but some models can be useful…