Evolution of Architecture part II: what is evolving?

I guess I should have been more specific in the yesterday’s post when I wrote about the "forgiving environment". In order for evolution to work well, the environment has to be sufficiently (but not overly to avoid complete extinction) unforgiving in providing evolutionary feedback back to the species that are evolving. Feedback provided to other species and the ecosystem as a whole does not count! If a change in the design of bees causes one of the plant spices that depend on them for pollination to fail, it will not act as an evolutionary feedback on the bees themselves (provided they have alternative food sources) and will not force them to change further or abandon this evolutionary path.

If we take a closer look at what is actually evolving in the enterprise IT ecosystem, the answer will most likely be ideas and views (architectural memes) and practices. Both of these are carried by humans in a symbiotic (or parasitic – depending on the way one looks at it) relationship and the latter usually survive the death of organizations and projects: when have we last heard of an architect committing seppuku when his creation failed to attain the required systemic properties?

So, similarly to the above bee analogy, failure of a project or even entire organization as a result of absent or subpar architecture in most cases will not provide noticeable evolutionary feedback to the ideas, views and practices that perpetrated it. On the contrary, such failure might even help to spread them as their hosts disperse through the organization and beyond as spores of a burst puffball mushroom. In an ironic twist, since majority of people rarely see themselves at fault and their actions as a cause of failures, these architectural memes often mutate into best practices as they spread through and colonize IT ecosystem.

So even though the Enterprise IT environment can be unforgiving to failures from business point of view, it is, in most cases, mild and sheltering to people and practices that cause them.