Architecture as a Problem Solving Tool

Background: Concept Of Architecture In Commerce

Architecture is often considered as just the aesthetics of the building design but there are entire undergraduate and post graduate courses on building architecture. The study of building architecture does give a background in classic proportions for a building but also has a great deal of formal definitions, formulas and tables on the structural loads for foundations and support walls as well as the requirements for the building services such as electricity and water supply and sewage disposal. A great many technical issues are pre-solved for use in the design and development of a new building.

The idea of architecture has now been extended to the area of information technology although this is fairly recent say within the last 25 years; two of the most influential authors in the early years were Brancheau, and Martin. Brancheau and Wetherbie (1986) wrote “an information architecture is a high level map of the information requirements of an organization,” however, I believe the use of the term ‘map’ diminishes the amount of structure inherent in an architecture. Martin in 1990 drove the emphasis for information with his books on Information Engineering and his depiction of an architecture to describe the enterprise. Following this there was a focus on standard processes by the management consulting and software development world and the concept of service oriented architectures (SOA). I believe the emphasis is changing again with the requirement to determine the structure of the enterprise architecture before reviewing the processes required.