MCCUSKER
Nirvana for an organisation is self healing hardware and software. However, if you create more self healing hardware and software then you will need more self healing hardware and software to heal the self healing hardware and software that itself requires. Is this an area worthy of academic research?
O’NEILL
There is a lot of research going on into autonomous systems, and indeed at UTS we have a research group called Teleholonic Systems looking in to this exact area. Personally, I think this is really just an evolution (or perhaps devolution) of the whole object oriented agents—mobile agents—concept and fundamentally a different approach to a true architectural approach. It is bottom-up while architecture is top-down. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts remember.
A little bit of history might justify (or at least explain) my prejudice here. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s there was a split between the structured analysis and structured design (SASD) camps and the object-oriented camps. True architectural thinking evolved from the SASD guys in the ‘90s and we have picked up the baton through the ‘90s and ‘00s. Let’s just say I am fundamentally opposed to bottom-up approaches and I don’t think they’ll ever solve with brute force this NP-hard problem.
O’NEILL
Assuming it’s not too late, and to fulfil its promises, what value does the EA practice bring to large organisations?
MCCUSKER
The practise itself brings a range of values. It:
· aligns and realigns IT with corporate strategy (more akin to looking after all the dinghy’s, ocean racing yachts and the battle cruisers in your organisational fleet, than merely navigating any particular boat).
· provides insight into complex problems—the becalmed fleet problem or which continent are we sailing to for the next few years problem.
· has an advanced understanding of systemic effect—did A cause B or B cause A, or were A and B the result of C’s effect on A and B.
· leads various teams to find root cause(s) and engender a philosophy of systemically addressing issues back through the organisation.
· positions (often repositions) organisational problems using the accumulated knowledge of multiple perspectives and multiple layers of abstraction to deepen the collective insight into the problem itself and the nature and probability of the reoccurrence of the problem.
· links concepts, meta-concepts and optimised patterns and can ground this back into the “actual” current systems and provide a clear vision.
The major value is being able to drive from the particular to the general, especially to inform the organisation whether the occurrence of problem X is a small problem that can be easily patched or is a significant problem. In order to successfully do this the profession itself needs to be able structure its own knowledge in a way that can be consolidated, taught and systemically critiqued by those acknowledged as skilled in the area, as well as researched and be considered as a useful body of knowledge with a particular value contribution.
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