In-Depth Understanding of Abstraction

The art of abstraction is to imagining, the science of abstraction is to unifying.

Organizations become complex as an evolutionary trend, not for their own amusement, but for adapting to the dynamic business ecosystem. Ideally, the enterprise framework that is created needs to be maintained and used by the managers to adapt and improve the business in the future by abstracting major concerns, facilitating strategic goals and objectives of the enterprise, achieving a situational balanced compromise or a trade-off and improving organizational maturity.

Abstraction and generalization: The art of abstraction is to imagining, the science of abstraction is to unifying. To drive transformative changes, it’s important to apply an architectural framework to perceive the business with both a broader scope of abstraction and an in-depth understanding of its interconnectivity and interdependence. An architecture abstract layers include generalization - reusability, specialization or customization, classification (portfolio Management).

So from an architecture lens, generalization is about abstraction and reusability. From a problem-solving perspective, to keep perfecting solution architecture, take an existing or proposed solution and extract from it, by abstraction and generalization, to come up with an optimal set of guidelines, processes or the next practices to solve problems smoothly.

Abstract components (components = different artifacts) of enterprise: An effective architectural framework helps to define a very flexible business blueprint, having the abstract components with loose structures. It’s important to identify those key elements which can be applied to give a holistic picture of what is working or not in order to allocate business capital and resources scientifically and reach the "future statement" in a stepwise manner effortlessly.

Architecture is a practical organizational planning tool, to define a very flexible business blueprint, cover all areas of the business, with the abstract components including capabilities, functions, roles, events, rules, data, etc; not just for knowledge collection, but more about capturing business insight and foresight, facilitate the planning and communicating of business change initiatives. In general, architecture initiative is taken up mostly in a top-down approach, many of these initiatives will be abstract as it is derived from the business values and goals set up by the business owners and stakeholders and gain the common understanding of different artifacts of businesses.

Translating the abstract concept back into the real world: Architecture is not just about abstracting; from abstraction to elaboration, business architecture facilitates the planning and communicating of business change initiatives, translating the abstract concept back into the real world example or telling a digital powered story fluently. Open your mind - listen carefully, and expect to find some new insight. If abstraction is to make things brief, stories should be vivid enough to inspire imagination and persuasive enough to encourage comprehensive planning and step-by-step actions.

From a management perspective, it’s important to apply architecture as a communication tool to facilitate digital dialogues, enforce cross-functional collaboration, and consequent customization, tell the full story with the colorful vision, varying opportunities and possibilities, upward challenges and downwards risks. The story-lines might be developed around themes such as: How the initiative differentiates the organization from its major competitors; how the initiative restores the organization to competitive parity by reversing erosion in customer loyalty and how the initiative ensures the organization’s compliance with regulatory requirements, etc.

An architect’s mindset is abstract, critical, coherent, and persuasive. Gaining an in-depth understanding of abstraction improves planning flexibility, enforces communication effectiveness and tailors the varying business audience, in order to close cognitive gaps and facilitate transformative changes.

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