During early system conceptualization, we start to envision the form or shape of the system, its boundaries and interactions, its primary elements and their interactions. The sketchy shapes of these elements, expressed mainly in terms of their responsibilities, analogies, and drawing on patterns and experience, take a rough form, allowing us to investigate the system concept. Then, as the system concept (identity, value propositions and capabilities) takes shape, so too does the Conceptual Architecture.

In designing complex systems, separation of concerns is a key strategy for gaining intellectual traction and enabling ourselves to reason about important design decisions while considering cross-cutting concerns that are part and parcel of the decomposition-composition dual of systems design and development. The concerns focused on at this point are related to giving shape to the system paying attention to user-facing capabilities and developer-facing properties of the system. We seek to bring intentionality and experience to design to achieve more the system properties we want, recognizing that ultimately system properties are emergent and we will need to sense and respond and adapt as we learn more from the system in context.

The architectural elements of software systems (that is, elements significant enough to the system to draw out and deal with in architectural design) are constructs of inventive human thought. We mold and shape them to accomplish a purpose, subject to constraints and forces. We leverage analogies to draw experience and knowledge from other domains, including mechanisms of nature (e.g., swarms), man-made (e.g., mechanical mechanisms like hubs), and social constructs (e.g., social and economic mechanisms like brokers).

The Conceptual Architecture Diagram is a lightweight and yet powerful tool for sketch-prototyping the system structure, and for rendering the structure of an existing system, to explore adaptations to it. Thus it allows us to explore the system from its earliest conception through evolution. As we experiment on paper, it is cheap to postulate various alternatives and explore their ramifications.

As system capabilities are defined, the associated responsibilities are allocated to “chunks” or components of the system, and these responsibilities are an important thinking tool for architectural designers who need to make software abstractions cognitively malleable and communicable. With something so simple as elements each with their list of responsibilities and relationships, we can experiment with different factorings and hence different abstractions or elements each with a different basis for cohesion of responsibilities. Further, it becomes possible to assess:

• clarity of responsibilities
• whether responsibilities are missing
• components for cohesion of responsibilities
• the system shape for balanced distribution of responsibilities

Architectural components may play different roles in the system, so their responsibilities are related within role-scopes. That is to say, for example, a component may play a minor role in system health monitoring and an active role with respect to some other system capability (e.g., providing shopping cart functionality). 

In highly dynamic systems, as software intensive systems are, structure and dynamics are designed together — if we focus on structure we impact dynamics, and vice versa. When we focus on dynamics — on behavior and “how it works” and properties that emerge from the structures as they perform their function and interact — our design decisions have to be expressed in terms of the structure for the structure houses, if you like, the implied responsibilities and interfaces.

The conceptualization of a product isn’t limited to the conceptualization of its use, but the product in use. We’re designing what the product is capable of in conjunction with what the product is and how it is built. A car isn’t a faster carriage, and although early cars had aspects of a carriage, the engine was quite different than a horse, and this translated to mechanisms to make the wheels move (from passive to active). In other words, when we conceptualize a new kind of product we iterate across designing capabilities and the mechanisms and structures that deliver those capabilities, and the product changes the ecosystem (a gasoline powered car raises the need for places to replenish fuel) so to make the product successful we also (impact the) redesign (of) key aspects of the ecosystem or larger system of systems into which our system fits, interacts and in important ways shapes and is shaped by.

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. … The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together” — Steve Jobs

Conceptual Architecture grants us passage between the from-the-outside and the from-the-inside views of the system, allowing us to design interactively across the concept of the system and the internal concepts that allow that conception to take form. And it allows us to think about the elements and how they play together. More specifically, it is the conception and narration of the organization of the parts or elements of the system and its key, or architecturally significant, mechanisms — as the system is conceived, developed and evolved. More pivotally, it is an agent of consilience, helping us to bridge various divides in system design.

Some related resources and ideas:

• Visual Architecting Process™ Core Activities
• Visual Architecting Process™ Poster
• More Making It Visual (skip to the diagram and the paragraphs thereafter)
• VAP =d= Agile Architecting
• The Architect’s Process

Conceptual Architecture is a key medium for describing the “big picture” and essential design ideas of our system, helping others to more rapidly comprehend a complex system, how it is composed and its critical mechanisms or interworking to achieve some key internal system capability essential to sustaining itself. The Conceptual Architecture Diagram serves as a high level map of our system, providing for navigation around complex systems, location of responsibilities, and identification of dependencies.

But Conceptual Architecture is also a focus of essential design work! As we conceive of the system structure, we’re tackling questions of decomposition and modularity, with the dual of composition and emergent properties. We do so to make the system organizationally and cognitively tractable, bringing order to the system. We might think of this as a kind of “social order” if we see its elements as agents of system responsibilities, working with cohorts to deliver system capabilities and in this interaction effecting emergent properties. But even if we don’t go that far, we are at least bringing a kind of mechanical order, complete with hierarchically composed sub-orders, to the system.

Modular systems enable us to:

Early on, we’re dealing with our conceits of formative system elements — on paper. We’re crafting lo-fidelity sketch-prototypes of the system structure, and iterating across the conception of the system and our discovery and exploration of how we might conceive of, arrange and build the system. Because it is cheap to do, relying more on how generative our imagination is leveraging the grist of experience, patterns, capabilities in other systems and frameworks, and so forth, we can explore various alternatives, discovering elements and relationships, illuminating the system conception or possibilities we might offer in terms of system capabilities. We can play with different factorings of responsibilities into capabilities and onto elements. And we can evaluate our postulated alternatives with respect to coverage or completeness as well as balance, harmony, conceptual integrity and consistency, in addition to the achievement of desired system outcomes. All of which allows for a much more active, adaptive, creative exploration of the system concept and structural organization before the direction is channeled and cast in shaping, anchoring expectations and code.

We don’t claim to be able to so well conceive of the system in its ultimate form that we go into system development with a perfect and complete design. We do claim that we can begin the evolutionary adaptation process with a more plastic and malleable medium than a growing mass of code. And then we can support code evolution with, again, a more malleable medium for exploring architectural-level refactoring and adaptations — changing sketches and more formal models to explore the impact of ideas before we incur the cost of making the changes in the code base. All the while maintaining greater intellectual traction over a complex system, because we have cognitive aids to system understanding and work with system constructs in their own terms, rather than always and only in terms of code which contains details that obfuscate.

Some related reading:

“Conceptual Architecture” is the conceptual view(s) of the architecture of a system. It describes at a broad brushstrokes conceptual level the significant design ideas of the system. In particular, this view includes diagrams and text which identify, explicate, rationalize and contextualize the key structures and mechanisms of the system, and the relationships among them.

Conceptual Architecture expresses the key architectural elements and their relationships that give “shape” to the system. Each of these architectural elements, or abstractions, play a critical role in the system which is signified by their responsibility assignments. They collaborate and interact, and these relationships are a significant design consideration not only because interaction points (analogous to articulation points in physical systems) and “seams” in the system are non-trivial, but because interactions give rise to synergy that makes the system more than a simple aggregate of executing parts. The parts, their arrangement and concert, cohere within and give expression to the system “gestalt.”

Conceptual Architecture Diagram

The Conceptual Architecture Diagram renders the formative architectural abstractions (named boxes) and their interrelationships (lines). For complex systems, there may be a set of such diagrams, exploring the (de)composition of more complex, architecturally interesting architectural elements.

Component-Responsibility-Collaborator-Rationale (CRC-R) Descriptions

The Conceptual Architecture also identifies the responsibilities of each of the architectural elements. We advocate doing this on Component-Responsibility-Collaborator-Rationale (CRC-R) Descriptions* for each (conceptual architecture) component, so that the reasoning behind component design choices is captured along with the responsibilities (connecting the dots to desired outcomes, strategic decisions, lessons from experience and grounding assumptions, etc.), and dependencies and other relationships are also recorded. It is a simple and “just enough” format that matches the spirit and intent of Conceptual Architecture, supporting conception, communication and evolution of the key design ideas, including the fundamental organization, of the system.

Mechanism Sketches

Beyond the (set of) Conceptual Architecture Diagram(s) and CRC-R descriptions, architectural mechanisms (i.e., mechanisms of architectural significance) are sketched (in diagrams and descriptions) to conceive and convey their essential design nature — the design intent, contextual assumptions, structure, and “how it works” dynamic considerations. The capabilities of the system emerge from the inter- and intra-working of the parts of the system, and mechanisms allow us to focus on specific processes within the system, conceptually (at this point) designing architecturally significant functions of parts of the system.

Architecturally significant mechanisms are those that have more diffuse or systemic impact or are make-or-break important to system outcomes. Many of the patterns in our field’s literature formulate tried-and-true mechanism designs addressing very specific system capabilities (often internally focused at system sustaining and structural integrity concerns because these are common across systems irrespective of their specific user-facing functionality). A system has functions just like a body has functions. And many of these are internal system sustaining functions that have to do with continuity rather than serving any immediate external demand being made of the system.

Together, the expressions of the Conceptual Architecture form a conceptual framework within which we conceive of, reason about, communicate and share, extend and reify and evolve the key design ideas of the system.

References and More Information

1. a model of change, showing how the vectors of change are different at different points in the lifecycle, so that agility means different things, depending on where in the lifecycle the product-market is
2. a discussion of how the meaning of business and the meaning of design are shifting
3. Jeff Bezos notion of fractal strategy, leveraging it to illustrate how fractal strategy enables intrinsic agility
4. positioning IT as a leading player on a strategic stage where relationships and business intelligence are key drivers of innovation and agility
5. the tandem role of strategy and architecture in an agile business and the implications for architects
6. a fractal notion of leadership, in a business that relies on fractal strategy and tandem architecture to combine intentional goal-seeking with emergent responsiveness

Business strategy and its tandem architecture creates coherence of purpose and concert among the many socio-technical systems, the many smaller pools of action and influence, within an organization, so that bigger, more ambitious, impactful things get done. While embracing emergence or extemporaneous dynamic responsiveness, we also note that strategic differentiation takes intentional focus to align inspired, creative, inventive thought and action so that many contributions of mind, will and hands build the systems that create and sustain competitive distinction in the market.

We borrowed Jeff Bezos’ image of strategy happening fractally at Amazon, and put words to what is done, varyingly, in organizations. The important thing about creating this image of fractal strategy and tandem architecture though, is that it gives us a way to have the conversation about the relationship between strategy and architecture. Why? Because there is inconsistent understanding of the role of strategy, let alone architecture!

In some organizations, strategy is ignored or derided — they claim there is “no strategy,” and that is treated as a point of cultural pride. A point of cultural pride. Hmm, that sounds like identity, which is a key part of strategy.  So strategy in the organization is fractal, with an independent “cowboy” (shoot first and aim after) culture set as the unifier at the corporate level, and other elements of strategy pushed out to the business elements. But as soon as that company wants to achieve something more coherent across its businesses, it finds itself needing to work strategically and architecturally to create a shared intent and the relationship platform for enabling that coherence. So, whether “dynamic, organic, fractal strategy” enters their parlance, allowing them to explicitly talk about intentional and emergent strategy or not, they have to get more intentional if they want to do those bigger things that require concert to make them more the way they would like them to be (Herbert Simon’s wonderful way of defining and motivating design).  

The impetus for writing this report, was an increasing rumbling around the future of IT and EA. Well, of course we know IT and EA has a healthy prognosis. Still, many choose to see IT as a cost-center — one that encumbers with a mish-mash of entangled, brittle systems, and expensive tastes in technology frills that can’t be afforded in lean times, at that. So it is worth articulating the counter-position, don’t you think? Anyway, that’s a key message — articulating the role of IT and architects (product, system and enterprise) in sensing, catalyzing and responding to change.  So the report makes points like:       

“Many of the business capabilities that IT supports and enables have to do with building and maintaining relationships and their information spaces to run the business and create strategic advantage. … 

Relationships, both formal (with codified transactions) and informal (with dynamic, even ad hoc, interactions), are enabled through high connectivity. In Connections, James Burke, commenting on the Gutenberg printing press, observed “the easier it is to communicate, the faster change happens.” Alternately put, new ideas come about through conversations, and conversations through relationships, and increasingly these are digitally enabled and/or enhanced.”  …

“When we recognize that this is a world where organizations increasingly compete on and for relationships, perception, and fidelity, and on information leverage, the strategic role of IT jumps into sharp relief. Place this in a context of change, and IT finds itself with a leading role on the strategic stage. Whether it is playing the role of the proverbial bad guy responsible for runaway costs and change encumbrance or a partner in a landscape-defining dance of change depends very much on how well IT is integrated into strategic decision making — at various levels in a fractal approach to strategy setting.”

and

“Complexity is a key driver of architecture. That is to say, as complexity increases, so does the need for architecture. It is not that we want complexity to go away, for value comes hand in hand with complexity. Instead, we want to harness complexity and, as it were, to tame it so that it serves rather than obfuscates and subverts the value we are creating.”

and

“The role of architects in an agile enterprise, therefore, includes taming the transmogrifying mess created by responsiveness, dynamic learning, and accommodation, even while leading with intentionality to innovatively envisage, build, evolve, and sustain systems and their explicit, enabling and constraining architecture decision sets.”

– Ruth Malan and Dana Bredemeyer, The Art of Change: Fractal and Emergent, Cutter Consortium Enterprise Architecture Executive Report, Vol. 13, No. 5, 2010.

We hope that the Report persuades managers and architects that there is an important relationship between architecture and strategy, and that relationship doesn’t have its foundation entirely in the business side, nor entirely in the technical side — but rather in a partnership where strategy and architecture work together collaboratively. That is, they inform and are informed by each other, enhance and are enhanced by, lead and are led by each other. And I hope that the paper unfolds the salient topics in an accessible manner — accessible across the languages of business and technology — to motivate and enable that dynamic tandem relationship.

The Art of Change: Fractal and Emergent is the first in a two-part series, and focuses on the what and the why. Part Two, The Art of Change: To Lead is To See, To Frame, To Draw focuses on the how. We hope that you find the Fractal and Emergent paper, with its focus on agility through fractal strategy and tandem architecture, inspiring and useful. If so, you can play a role in Part Two, helping us improve it by becoming a reviewer or simply by providing encouragement.

You can download a complimentary copy of The Art of Change: Fractal and Emergent at http://www.cutter.com/offers/artofchange.html.