When you look at the cover of a box of LEGOs you don’t see a picture
of each individual brick that’s inside. Instead, you see the picture of
an exciting, fully assembled model, such as a pirate ship. To make it
even more exciting, the model isn’t sitting on a living room table but
is positioned in a life-like pirate’s bay with cliffs and sharks—Captain Jack Sparrow would be jealous.
What does this have to do with communicating system architecture and
design? Sadly, not much, but it should! Technical communication too
frequently does the opposite: it lists all the individual elements in
painstaking detail but forgets to show the pirate ship. The results are
tons of boxes (and hopefully some lines; see Chapter 23),
without a clear gestalt or overall value proposition.
Is this a fair comparison, though? LEGO is selling toys to kids, whereas
architects need to explain the complex interplay between components to
management and other professionals. Furthermore, IT professionals have
to explain issues like network outages due to flooded network segments,
something much less fun than playing pirates. I’d posit that the analogy
holds and we can learn quite a few things from the pirate ship for the
presentation of IT architecture.
Grab Attention
The initial purpose of the ...
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