My goal here is to encourage you to share my belief that doing architecture right is key to solving these problems, and to building the systems we need for the next century. Patterns are a powerful means of promoting architectural vision, in software as well as in building, so this paper will point out ways in which patterns contribute to the architectural initiative. Fred Brooks stresses the importance of conceptual integrity in determining architectural quality, and these two points encompass both the description of that integrity as a property of the artefact, and the organisation, rules and rationales that help us realise it. Architectural complexity is closely dependent on scale. But the systems we re concerned with are more complex than this.
Enterprise architecture offers a lifeline.
In the development community patterns have become a key component in the vocabulary of design and implementation. Patterns, Pattern Catalogues, Pattern Languages Patterns come in collections of different sizes. Much of the literature exists in the form of stand-alone single patterns. These constitute useful descriptions of point solutions to problems. Give a child a hammer, it is said, and suddenly everything is a nail.