Gartner Advises Enterprises To Adopt An 'Emergent Architecture'

Gartner is advising corporations to adopt a new style of enterprise architecture called "emergent architecture," which the analyst firm says is necessary to respond to the growing complexity in markets, economies, networks and companies.

Also known as middle-out enterprise architecture and light EA, the emergent architecture approach is best summarized as "architect the lines, not the boxes, which means managing the connections between different parts of the business rather than the actual parts of the business themselves," Bruce Robertson, research VP atGartner, said in a statement released Tuesday.

"The second key characteristic is that it models all relationships as interactions via some set of interfaces, which can be completely informal and manual – for example, sending handwritten invitations to a party via postal letters - to highly formal and automated, such as credit-card transactions across the Visa network," Robertson said.

Gartner has identified a variety of properties that differentiate emergent architecture from the traditional approach. Some of those properties include decentralizing decision-making to enable innovation, recognizing the broader business ecosystem and devolving control to constituents, and defining a minimal set of rules to enable choice.

Gartner said enterprise architects must yield to business units' demand for more autonomy. For example, employees want to use their personal devices, partners and suppliers want integration with certain business processes, customers want access to information using the technology of their choice and regulators are requiring more information.

“The traditional top-down style worked well when applied to complex, fixed functions -- that is, human artifacts, such as aircraft, ships, buildings, computers and even EA software," Robertson said. "However, it works poorly when applied to an equally wide variety of domains because they do not behave in a predictable way. The traditional approach ends up constraining the ability of an emergent domain to change because it is never possible to predict -- and architect for -- all the possible avenues of evolution."