In my part of the world, it’s not uncommon for people to say that someone wouldn’t recognize something if it “bit them in the [rude rump reference]”. For many organizations, that seems to be the explanation for the state of their enterprise IT architecture. For while we might claim to understand terms like “design”, “encapsulation”, and “separation of concerns”, the facts on the ground fail to show it. Just as software systems can degenerate into a “Big Ball of Mud”, so too can the systems of systems comprising our enterprise IT architectures. If we look at organizations as the systems they are, it should be obvious that this same entropy can infect the organization as well.
See the full post on the Iasa Global site (a re-post, originally published here).