Overheard: Explaining IT to the business side – marketecture

It seems that every presentation has that one attractively drawn diagram that purports to illustrate how the vendor’s product fits into their customers’ IT environments. Such diagrams, however, rarely have any technical detail since they are not intended for consumption by developers or architects. Rather, they are typically created by marketing people to communicate to analysts, prospective customers, investors and the press. Yes, I’m talking about marketecture. Jason Bloomberg, What is the shape of a service-oriented architecture?

Ok. So marketecture is the basically a buzzword for explaining things to the business side.  Jason does a good job analyzing the use of diagrams in SOA marchitecture. All of them look sufficiently confusing to me.

 Now, marketecture (“marketing” plus “architecture,” in case you haven’t figured that out yet) serves an important purpose. We’re talking about fairly complex concepts such as distributed computing architectures, and no matter how you cut it, such architectures have a lot of different pieces that talk to each other in numerous different ways. Every vendor must come up with effective approaches for simplifying their message so that people other than hardcore techies can understand it.