I started blogging this week and have been trying to get some things out of my brain, to make room for some more useful stuff.. I expect I will get some posts done in this future which are more substantially researched content which might serve valuable. But for the moment, you have to indulge my ramblings..

Today I wanted to get the concept of "Darwinian Architecture" out there.. So what is Darwinian Architecture ?

In simple term, current architectural principles focus around plans, blueprints and patterns.. This view provided a great reference framework for people to try and apply. It allowed for the adoption of a discipline which was crucial to the next phase of deployment (ie. engineering)!!

Rapidly the industry has now realised that in a highly marketing driven and growing economy, technology adoption is far more dynamic. Additionally, the IT industry has a love/hate relationship with standards, defacto standards and innovation/kaos.

So Darwinian Architecture is the concept of enterprise architecture is a process of evolution. In evolutionary terms (my simple intepretation), nature spontaneously generates a change in a species (innovation). This change is accepted or rejected (Natural Selection) depending on the success of animal (product) within its environment(market/economy).

The alternative (and to a certain extent more manageable) is the paradigm of urban planning. The difference between urban planning and evolution is the former assumes some degree design criteria of target architecture/plan/blueprint. Even though this is a fairly loose concept in urban planning because of the complexity of the architecture. Evolution assume no future state (I ignore concepts of faith and religion), but there are some basic contraints defined by the environment, and the sciences of physics (gravity, etc..).

So my plan in the near future is to put some more substantial thought to the impact of this concept on IT Architecture & Engineering. Lets see if the paradigm sticks and if some concept of framework or methodology comes out to help manage this process (eg. managing evolution sounds like a great concept :)