The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

5.4. What Is "an Architecture," and Why Should I Care?

People in the computer and IT fields have a way with jargon. A cookie is not something you eat, boot is not something you wear, and architecture has nothing to do with buildings. Usually, you can leave such jargon in the domain of the geeks (which is the jargon term that IT people use to refer to themselves).

When it comes to how your enterprise uses its IT assets, however, there are a few basic terms and concepts you must master—in particular, architecture and service-oriented architecture. Why? Because the future of your enterprise depends on how well you put them to use. SOA is not merely about how computers are structured, it is about how businesses and organizations are structured. It is going to affect everything you buy and everything you sell.

When used by geeks, the term architecture means the general style in which the parts hang together. That is a pretty vague definition, for sure, but it is still useful. Let me give some examples.

In the earliest days of computers, the architecture was "mainframe/datacenter"—large computers sat in special rooms where they were operated by technicians. Only these technicians interacted with the computers, each of which was an island unto itself.

As time went on, computers came out of the data centers and into people's offices, and now, even into their pockets. At first, these computers were connected to each other in discrete clumps called local area networks, and an architecture ...