Excerpt from Enterprise Architecture Fundamentals:
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The benefits of the Pagoda blueprint in digital environments come from its ecumenism: in line with the Stanford paradigm, the blueprint can be applied to all kinds of symbolic systems: equipment, computer, or organization. To begin with, the immersion of systems in digital environments ensures a seamless continuity between the platforms layer and Cloud implementations (figure 6-6).
More generally, the Pagoda blueprint ensures proper communication between all kinds of systems through the alignment of layers with language capabilities: digital, symbolic, and natural.
The significance of these points can be demonstrated with the Internet of things (IoT) and Service-oriented architecture (SOA) (figure 6-7):
- Broadly speaking, the term IoT covers everything connected to the internet; but, as a technology, it is focused on the non-symbolic connections of devices (whether or not these devices come with symbolic capabilities) in order to use basic and fast communication channels in digital environments (a).
- Systems functional architecture, typified by services (cf. chapter 12), uses symbolic communication channels at the operational level (b).
- EA’s top layer adds natural languages and human interfaces to enterprises’ communication and collaboration capabilities at the organizational level (c).
Such alignment between communication channels, languages (digital, symbolic, natural), and architecture layers points to a broader integration between EA’s layers and its ability to deal with digital data, to process symbolic information, and to use it as knowledge (cf. chapter 9).
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(From Chapter 6)