The Jigsaw Puzzle and LEGO Toys of Enterprise IT
In many enterprise IT organizations, there are separate teams those are focused on Enterprise Architecture (EA) vs. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). So many IT executives wonder the need of two separate entities. The usual questions are 1) does one replaces the other or are they complementary? 2) are there overlaps? 3) how to decide the boundary of responsibilities?
During a recent discussion, to answer these questions I used a parallel from my daughter’s toy room. I explained ‘EA is like a Jigsaw puzzle and SOA is like LEGO builds’.
As per Wikipedia, a jigsaw puzzle is a tiling puzzle that requires the assembly of numerous small, often oddly shaped, interlocking and tessellating pieces. Each piece has a small part of a picture on it; when complete, a jigsaw puzzle produces a complete picture. Here the complete picture is the Enterprise Architecture. Each tile defines the technologies with products and packaging of it. EA brings the oddly shaped technologies together to interlock and complete the tessellation. In essence, it is often two dimensional.
SOA brings the three dimensional picture where the organizational can build new composites (the LEGO builds) using the services (bricks). The builds are often multi-level, hierarchical and extensible.
Finally one person from the group asked- so what is Governance in Jigsaw or LEGO? The answer came from the group “it is that writings/instructions on the outside of the box or inside the instruction manual”. Looks like my analogy worked.
But, in LEGO, the governance is just guided by LEGO tubes. As per LEGO “The interlocking principle with its tubes makes it unique, and offers unlimited building possibilities. It's just a matter of getting the imagination going – and letting a wealth of creative ideas emerge through play”.
Now I am wondering whether we can have such similar simple, but powerful governance for SOA? May be yes. Lets our imagination work.
To play LEGO online, please visit LEGO Factory http://factory.lego.com/getstarted/default.aspx. You can conduct ‘PoCs’ and there are many “reference implementations” too.
Comments
Binooj,
The LEGO analogy is an excellent way to to capture attention.
The caveat is that many of us (including self) got utterly lost while attempting to build crafty 'solutions' using the LEGO blocks... envying the kid next door. This was before the days of the web where one could go and look-up how-to-build-a-truck-using-lego... ;-)
I guess the underlying message is that corporate 'kids' who need help putting LEGO solutions together, would have to seek external consultants?
Posted by: Mohan Babu K | May 26, 2008 08:23 PM