Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises

Chapter 4. The ABCs of Enterprise Partitions

I have discussed partitions and their role in reducing complexity in the last two chapters—first, with a conceptual overview, and then with a more rigorous mathematical treatment. By now, you should understand that partitioning is fundamental to managing complexity in enterprise architectures.

In the next chapter, I will discuss the process I recommend for creating a “simple” enterprise architecture. Much of this process will be focused on partitioning the enterprise, as you might guess. But what, exactly, does it mean to partition an enterprise? What does a subset of the enterprise look like? What aspects of the enterprise do we attempt to capture in the subsets? And perhaps as important, which do we ...