The Road of Moderation

In preparing my presentation on “Enterprise Architecture vs. Collection of Architectures in Enterprise”, I tend to think the relationship of the two is about the balance of the top-down guidance, planning, governance, and coordination with the freedom of organic growth from bottom-up. This also makes me think about the recent financial chaos in the world, which leads to the discussion of the effectiveness and performance in socialist system .vs. capitalist system, where the socialism emphasizes the centralized top down guidance, governance and coordination, while the capitalism emphasizes the organic growth with freedom for individual. After the melting down of the typical socialist system, represented by Soviet Union, by late 90s, now we see the typical capitalist system, represented by United State, is getting into fundamental problems as well.

This world is running with its own natural law. Our human being has limitation in understanding this universe, though explorations continue. Our limitation makes us impossible to plan everything in detail without being counter-productive to its own organic growth. Therefore, being agile is applicable not only to the current businesses and IT systems, but also to our human social systems, where architecture should exist to provide high-level guidance, framework, and governance, and to help in coordinating individual efforts towards a common goal, to enable the diversified “systems” running smoothly, and to accomplish a common big picture. The natural adjustments caused by chaos, mutual fights, sacrifice of lives are too expensive to adopt.

In conclusion: the best way is always in the middle of the road, named 中庸之道 (The Road of Moderation) in Chinese Confusion philosophy. In between the two extremes, I assume the Chinese Government is experimenting the road in the middle, which is a very meaningful experiment to the continuous development of human civilization.

(We are living in a big Human Social System now, especially after being connected by Internet. This system also needs “architecture” as we do for other systems and constructions. It needs a flexible architecture to provide guidance and governance and to support organic growth.)