Publication: Abstraction in Business Architecture

One of the key characteristics of architecture is looking at the ‘big picture’, but a major challenge is that we can’t present the big picture on one great big piece of paper – it has to fit on a single sheet or model. In order to do that, we have to come up with new concepts that summarize the overall picture into a small number of elements and relationships. We can do this through a variety of techniques, like divide-and-conquer, categorization, generalization, and so on. <br/>The principles of abstraction are aimed at just these problems. This Column will provide an introduction to abstraction and make some links to business architecture.<br/>