Seeing the Forest and the Trees

Architectural landscape and system design

The architectural landscape is not often talked about as a standalone topic outside of specific instances such as migrating from on-premises to the cloud. In many ways, it’s similar to system design in its intention, as well as patterns. In most cases, the design of a single system within a larger ecosystem will match the design patterns of the systems around it. If the trend at our company is to utilize SOA, then we will see SOA at every level. The biggest difference between the architectural landscape and system design is the scope that the design encompasses.

We can’t see the forest for the trees is a proverb that was first published in 1546 in The Proverbs of John Heywood. The idea is that from the middle of a dense forest, we can see every tree that surrounds us in great detail, from the trunk all the way to the crown of the tree—but from this vantage point, you literally cannot see the whole forest; we don’t know how vast it is or the directions in which it flows, because the breadth is lost. This saying has become so common it is now an idiom in the English language.

People often relate to this idiom when they are too close to a problem to see the bigger picture or have been too ...