EA & The Pagoda Blueprint

“The little reed, bending to the force of the wind, soon stood upright again when the storm had passed over”

Aesop

Preamble

The consequences of digital environments go well beyond a simple adjustment of business processes and call for an in-depth transformation of enterprise architectures. 

To begin with, the generalization of digital environments bears out the Symbolic System modeling paradigm: to stay competitive, enterprises have to manage a relevant, accurate, and up-to-date symbolic representation of their business context and concerns. 

With regard to architectures, it means a seamless integration of systems and knowledge architectures.

With regard to processes it means a built-in ability to learn from environments and act accordingly.

Such requirements for resilience and adaptability in unsettled environments are characteristic of the Pagoda architecture blueprint.

Pagoda Blueprint

As can be observed wherever high buildings are being erected on shaking grounds, Pagoda-like architectures set successive layers around a central pillar providing intrinsic strength and resilience to external upsets while allowing the floors to move with the whole or be modified independently. Applied to enterprise architectures in digital environments, that blueprint can be much more than metaphoric.

The actual relevance of the pagoda blueprint is best understood when the main of data, information, and knowledge is set across platforms, systems, and organization layers:

That blueprint puts a new light on model based approaches to systems engineering (MBSE):

• Conceptual models, targeting enterprises organization and business independently of supporting systems.
• Logical models, targeting the symbolic objects managed by supporting systems as surrogates of business objects and activities.
• Physical models, targeting the actual implementation of symbolic surrogates as binary objects.

Pagoda Blueprint & Digital Environments

The Pagoda blueprint gets a new relevance in the context of digital transformation.

Moreover, the blueprint is not limited to enterprise architectures and can be applied to every kind of systems:

• Devices associated to physical platforms supporting analog communication through the Internet of Things (a).
• Equipements associated to physical platforms controlled by systems, supporting digital communication (b) and functional alignment (c) .

That would greatly enhance the traceability and transparency of transformations induced by the immersion of enterprises in digital environments.

Systems & Knowledge Architectures

If digitized business flows are to pervade enterprise systems and feed business intelligence (BI), systems and knowledge architectures are to be merged into a single nervous system as materialized by the Pagoda central pillar:

• Ubiquitous, massive, and unrelenting digitized business flows cannot be dealt with lest a clear distinction is maintained between raw data acquired across platforms, and the information (previously data) models which ensure the continuity and consistency of systems.  .  
• Once structured and refined, business data flows must be blended with information models sustaining systems functionalities.
• A comprehensive and business driven integration of organization and knowledge could then support strategic and operational decision-making at enterprise level.

Rounding off this nervous system with a brain, ontologies would provide the conceptual frame for models representing enterprises and their environments.

Agile Architectures & Homeostasis

Homeostasis is the ability of a viable organism to learn from their environment and adapt their behavior and structures according to changes.
As such homeostasis can be understood as the extension of enterprise agility set in digital environments, ensuring:

• Integrated decision-making processes across concerns (business, systems, platforms), and time-frames (tactical, operational, strategic, … ).
• Integrated information processing, from data-mining to knowledge management.

To that end, changes should be differentiated with regard to source (business or technology environment, organization, systems) and flows (data, information, knowledge); that would be achieved with a pagoda blueprint.

Threads of operational and strategic decision-making processes could then be weaved together, combining OODA loops at process level and economic intelligence at enterprise level.

Further Reading

• Modeling Paradigm
• Views, Models, & Architectures
• Abstraction Based Systems Engineering
• EA & MDA
• EA: The Matter of Layers
• EA: Maps & Territories
• EA: Work Units & Workflows
• Ontologies & Enterprise Architecture
• Ontologies as Productive Assets
• Models Transformation & Agile Development
• Agile Architectures: Versatility meets Plasticity