Reflection: the power of language (2) – my first proper IT “mental model”

Secondly and specifically, I found this separation between "solution" (design) and "guidance" (architecture) provided me with my first “working mental model” of how to think like a professional Architect who is trying to exploit IT in solving their enterprise’s business problems.

Back in 1993 I was “on the edges” of an amazing effort to craft a repeatable approach to the design of infrastructure(*); something called the IBM End2End Infrastructure Design Method (E2E).  For the first time since my days with aero-engines I saw people trying to agree on how they did “systems thinking”, this time about systems made of IT.

They invented the SBB, the System Building Block (when asked “What’s an SBB?” the answer was “What do you want it to be?”  More on that later!).  At its heart, this was the idea that systems were constructed of standard parts – and that those standard parts should be common across all the systems in an enterprise.  

In other words, if you want to create an IT environment capable of supporting an enterprise’s myriad of applications, all doing an amazingly diverse range of things and yet sharing and exchanging information, then it’s probably a good idea for the enterprise to guide and govern the way those otherwise independent systems are built, and is there a better way of accomplishing that than the enterprise’s architect giving each application’s designer “the enterprise’s catalogue of parts” from which to work?

And in E2E, an SBB was exactly that.  An opportunity for the EAer to guide the SDer in selecting “approved” or “well understood” parts, rather than them going off and doing their own thing.  As it happens, in 1993, the EAer used a sister method to E2E called CTA (Corporate Technical Architecture) that was the forerunner of todays EA methods, all of which call these things ABBs (Architecture Building Blocks), which we’re now careful to describe as a specification rather than as a technology (with selection criteria to allow appropriate technology choice of course!), but the basic idea remains.