Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...

I was in Best Buy when I overheard two technologists whom I could tell worked for a competitor (They were still wearing their employee ID badges) and they were talking about the architecture of a business reengineering effort where the CIO and his cronies were brought in to get things in order. Some how though all they seemed to do was to cause lots of their good people to mail out resumes and overspend on fat bottomed architectures. NOTE: I did not make up this term, it came out their mouths...



They described legacy client-server approaches as architectures that were big-bellied in that all the business logic was hard-coded in the middle tier. The discussion seemed to point to the fact that they couldn't develop SOA around them. Others within their architecture team were of the belief that they would leverage the "features" of their favorite database vendor.

Essentially all business logic was encoded in stored procedures in the data tier. They used templating approaches to achieve consistency and standardized all language constructs on this tier by writing only in SQL. They even process XML in SQL.

I suspect that if I hung around long enough to eavesdrop on their conversation, they may have talked some architecture approaches being top heavy...