Chris Conway
Chief Architect, Quantiv
I’ve found myself in several cities with strong Georgian influences over the last few months – Bath, Newcastle, Edinburgh.
Aside from the similarity in the style of architecture, what struck me was a strong sense of wider planning. These Georgian areas aren’t simply a collection of buildings, albeit in the same style. They include housing, shops, markets, theatres, roads, bridges and gardens, which together form a collective civic purpose. And that purpose is defined by its combined characteristics, both physical (housing, roads) and emotional (culture, history) – and the two constantly influence each other.
Georgian planning – a forerunner to systems thinking
Arguably, those Georgian approaches were a precursor to ‘systems thinking’ concepts. In particular, understanding a community is a living network of interconnected elements that support patterns of behaviour.
In turn, this reminded me of the architect Christopher Alexander’s books, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, and later A Pattern Language. Both cover exactly these sorts of patterns in architecture and civil engineering, outlining a catalogue of recurring themes for designing rooms, buildings and even towns.
While I’m not an architect or civil engineer, I’m aware of Alexander’s books because his methods were later used in software engineering. Initially, this was led by Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham, and these ideas were later turned into one of the IT industry’s few founding texts, the ‘Gang of Four’s’ Design Patterns book.
Why IT solutions share architectural qualities
Like those Georgian communities, we shouldn’t think of IT solutions as just a collection of applications, services and integrations. They share those architectural qualities, being made up of both the physical (the code, infrastructure, etc.) and the emotional (the accessibility of the overall service provided).
IT solutions also have similar characteristics. Good ones are resilient and include mechanisms to accommodate changes. They’re also defensive, offering a sense of continuity even in the face of changes.
That defensive instinct is the same self-preserving behaviour you’d expect from any healthy system, whether it’s a community protecting its identity or an IT team standing up for its application or service. So, it’s not just about awkwardness.
Systems thinking in planning
Good civic planning also avoids ‘silo’ thinking. Rather than only concentrating on individual civic services, the best planners now use systems thinking to consider them as one, perhaps reinforcing the view they were never really separate in the first place.
IT has its own version of the silo mistake too. Applications are often built and funded in isolation, each optimised for its own set of requirements, and each judged purely on its own metrics. The interactions between them, such as the shared data and operational dependencies, might be treated as ‘someone else’s problem’ to the detriment of the wider solution.
Overall, many of the principles used by civic planners could translate almost unchanged to IT solution design:
- Observing before intervening – understanding how a system is actually being used before refactoring or replacing it
- Recognising the limits of a model – no architecture diagram can fully capture a solution, so we should treat change as inherently inevitable instead of something to be avoided
- Likewise, we should accept complexity – a certain amount of ‘local’ self-organisation among applications is a feature, not something to be discouraged
- Valuing quality over quantity – standardisation across applications matters but not as much as standardisation between applications
When using systems thinking in an IT context, the best approach is to use it to pay close attention to the points where applications and services meet, instead of building one giant monolithic application just to avoid having many small silos.
Intersection-oriented design
At Quantiv, we call those meeting points ‘intersections’ and they’re the basis of the ‘intersection-oriented design’ ethos behind our NumberWorks method. Rather than trying to map every internal step of each activity in advance, we focus on their meeting points. So, what’s consumed, what’s produced, who’s involved and what constraints apply.
This focused approach is more honest than saying it’s possible to consider everything about a system at the same time, and it’s flexible enough to let a wider system keep evolving.
Systems thinking also covers management of resources, i.e. the measurable things that show how a system has behaved over time. In civic design, this could be the number of houses, roads or utilities, along with the uses of them through actions and outcomes.
For IT solutions, this management covers physical outcomes and ‘emotional’ ones, like data volumes, development backlogs, processing capacity and even technical debt.
Our NumberCloud platform is designed to capture exactly this sort of information, providing feedback about how a system is behaving in practice against how it was assumed it would behave.
This approach allows a system to be understood by watching how it behaves before interventions are made, instead of assuming a change in advance. But it also provides a framework in which that behaviour can be understood. And it’s that framework that supports the longevity demonstrated in those Georgian cities.
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Contact the Quantiv team today on 0161 927 4000 or email info@quantiv.com to discover how our services could benefit your organisation.
