Computer Scientists

"A system in which a few things interacting produce tremendously divergent behavior; deterministic chaos; it looks random but its not."

"You can see these two species coexisting in a long period of stability; then on of the them drops out and all hell breaks loose. Tremendous instability. That's the Soviet Union."

"Happily for physical science, cybernetics included, faulty philosophical premises do not vitiate the value of experimental findings. Thus, F. H. George is quite correct in stating that some parts of cybernetics can be accepted even by those "who are radically opposed to the Mechanistic Materialists and their modern counterparts. But they certainly cannot accept a cybernetics which is defined as "the application of an old idea, idea that human beings and animals are essentially very complicated machines.""

"George... equates cybernetics with behaviorism, states that cybernetics regards human beings and animals as essentially very complicated machines."

"George has some important (if not necessarily original) things to say and he has the positivist’s ability to avoid confusing abstractions. He holds strongly that the construction of inductive process machines will produce devices that can go far beyond the abilities of their inventors (a more general statement concerning Weiner’s recent argument in Science... He sees the importance of eventually gaining physiological statements to supplement psychological process description."

"In many ways it is true to say that syntax is mathematical logic, semantics is philosophy or philosophy of science, and pragmatics is psychology, but these fields are not really all distinct."

"These computing machines had already been designed, and some built, by Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener, and others, and were almost ready-made for the job. These scientists, as well as others such as von Neumann, Shannon and Bigelow, were in a position to see that machines of an electronic kind were ideally suited to carry out the whole of the operations of range-finding and location without any human intervention whatever. These electronic computing machines were already developed to a very high degree of efficiency for the solution of mathematical equations, and some technical difficulties had led to the suggestion that a process of scanning, similar to that used in television, might be incorporated into the computer. Another innovation was the use of binary notation rather than decimal notation as in the early computer."

"The sudden recent rise to prominence of cybernetics was due, immediately, to World War II. There existed then a series of problems which had not previously been met. The main one was that of range-finding for anti-aircraft guns in high-speed aerial warfare. The older systems involved human computers and these, with manually controlled locators, were wholly inadequate for the job in hand. The essence of the process involved was to track and predict the direction, velocity, and height of enemy aircraft. The human being's part in the operation was much too slow and inaccurate, and there were people available with machines already developed to do the job adequately; these machines were, of course, computing machines."

"When the rate of change increases to the point that real time required to assimilate change exceeds the time in with change must be manifest, the enterprise is going to find itself in deep yogurt."

"The only generally agreed upon definition of mathematics is "Mathematics is what mathematician's do."… In the face of this difficulty [of defining "computer science"] many people, including myself at times, feel that we should ignore the discussion and get on with doing it. But as George Forsythe points out so well in a recent article*, it does matter what people in Washington D.C. think computer science is. According to him, they tend to feel that it is a part of applied mathematics and therefore turn to the mathematicians for advice in the granting of funds. And it is not greatly different elsewhere; in both industry and the universities you can often still see traces of where computing first started, whether in electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, or even business. Evidently the picture which people have of a subject can significantly affect its subsequent development. Therefore, although we cannot hope to settle the question definitively, we need frequently to examine and to air our views on what our subject is and should become."

"George Forsythe, in a recent paper “A University's Educational Program in Computer Science,” points out that the ordinary computer is one of the most important tools devised in the history of man, the third giant step in man's intellectual history."

"Whether computers are used for engineering design, medical data processing, composing music, or other purposes, the structure of computing is much the same. We are extremely short of talented people in this field, and so we need departments, curricula, and research and degree programs in computer science...To aid in these endeavors, These binary converter tools can be easily utilized.. I think of the Computer Science Department as eventually including experts in Programming, Numerical Analysis, Automata Theory, Data Processing, Business Games, Adaptive Systems, Information Theory, Information Retrieval, Recursive Function Theory, Computer Linguistics, etc., as these fields emerge in structure... Universities must respond [to the computer revolution] with far reaching changes in the educational structure."

"Machine-held strings of binary digits can simulate a great many kinds of things, of which numbers are just one kind. For example, they can simulate automobiles on a freeway, chess pieces, electrons in a box, musical notes, Russian words, patterns on a paper, human cells, colors, electrical circuits, and so on. To think of a computer as made up essentially of numbers is simply a carryover from the successful use of mathematical analysis in studying models. Most of this series of lectures has been devoted to applications of computers, and this is not the time to give details about their usefulness. I merely wish to point out certain types of things being done with computers today that could not have been done in 1945. Some of these are technological, some are intellectual."

"To a modern mathematician, design seems to be a second-rate intellectual activity."

"[Computers] are developing so rapidly that even computer scientists cannot keep up with them. It must be bewildering to most mathematicians and engineers... In spite of the diversity of the applications, the methods of attacking the difficult problems with computers show a great unity, and the name of Computer Sciences is being attached to the discipline as it emerges. It must be understood, however, that this is still a young field whose structure is still nebulous. The student will find a great many more problems than answers."

"The use of practically any computing technique itself raises a number of mathematical problems. There is thus a very considerable impact of computation on mathematics itself, and this may be expected to influence mathematical research to an increasing degree."

"I came from the information strategy community in the early days and even by the late 1960's, we were quite competent to do information strategy. Although the strategy tools and the methods have improved substantially, the analytical process was quite good understood decades ago. Our problem was, we were have grave difficulties getting from strategy... to implementation."

"Issues of quality, timeliness and change are the conditions that are forcing us to face up to the issues of enterprise architecture. The precedent of all the older disciplines known today establishes the concept of architecture as central to the ability to produce quality and timely results and to manage change in complex products. Architecture is the cornerstone for containing enterprise frustration and leveraging technology innovations to fulfill the expectations of a viable and dynamic Information Age enterprise."

"The Information Age is unfolding just as predicted by many of the sociological prognosticators of this century. Information issues are on everyone’s mind and on multitudes of lips. It is hard to pick up a newspaper or current affairs magazine without seeing a feature on the internet, web pages, e-mail, television terminals or some other new technology. In fact, technology innovation is relentless and escalating and technology stocks continually drive the stock market to high after high. There is no field of human endeavor that is exempt from the onslaught of information technology."

"The older disciplines of Architecture and Manufacturing have accumulated considerable bodies of product knowledge through disciplined management of the "product definition" design artifacts. This has enabled enormous increases in product sophistication and the ability to manage high rates of product change over time. Similarly, disciplined production and management of "Enterprise definition" (i.e. the set of models identified in the Framework for Enterprise Architecture) should provide for an accumulation of a body of Enterprise knowledge to facilitate enormous increases in Enterprise sophistication and accommodation of high rates of Enterprise change over time."

"In the early ‘80’s, there was little interest in the idea of Enterprise Reengineering or and the use of formalisms and models was generally limited to some aspects of application development within the Information Systems community. The subject of "architecture" was acknowledged at that time, however, there was little definition to support the concept. This lack of definition precipitated the initial investigation that ultimately resulted in the "Framework for Information Systems Architecture." Although from the outset, it was clear that it should have been referred to as a "Framework for Enterprise Architecture," that enlarged perspective could only now begin to be generally understood as a result of the relatively recent and increased, worldwide focus on Enterprise "engineering.""

"It is only the advent of an automated model storage facility or repository that brings any of this into the realm of feasibility and makes architecture a reality. It does not mean to suggest that all of these ideas will be immediately available in any particular repository product. It only means that they come into the realm of feasibility as repository technology becomes a reality."

"Soon, the enterprise of the information age will find itself immobilized if it does not have the ability to tap the information resources within and without its boundaries."

"The world contains entities, processes, locations, people, times, and purposes. Computer systems are filled with bits, bytes, numbers, and the programs that manipulate them. If the computer is to do anything useful, the concrete things in the world must be related to the abstract bits in the computer. Zachman’s framework for information systems architecture (ISA) makes that link. It provides a systematic taxonomy of concepts for relating things in the world to the representations in the computer."

"There is a set of architectural representations produced over the process of building a complex engineering product representing the different perspectives of the different participants."

"[Zachman reasons that] an analogous set of architectural representations is likely to be produced in building any complex product."

"[In Mr. Zachman's view] the architect's drawings [represent] a transcription of the owner's perceptual requirements."

"To keep the business from disintegrating, the concept of information systems architecture is becoming less of an option and more of a necessity"

"Decentralization without structure is chaos."

"With increasing size and complexity of the implementations of information systems, it is necessary to use some logical construct (or architecture) for defining and controlling the interfaces and the integration of all of the components of the system."

"• Top down implies level of detail that is, looking at the highest level of summarization and then decomposing hierarchically to lower levels of detail as required."

"The analytical approach employed by both BSP and BISC is "top down". The implications of the words "top down" are multiple and varied, and all apply to these analysis. For instance:"

"Although many popular information systems planning methodologies, design approaches, and various tools and techniques do not preclude or are not inconsistent with enterprise-level analysis, few of them explicitly address or attempt to define enterprise architectures. Some examples of such popular offerings include"

"Business System Planning (BSP) and Business Information Control Study (BICS) are representative of enterprise analysis tools that are growing in importance and are likely to become mandatory for ant business that continues to grow and evolve."

"Business System Planning (BSP) and Business Information Control Study (BICS) are two information system planning study methodologies that specifically employ enterprise analysis techniques in the course of their analysis. Underlying the BSP and BICS analysis are the data management problems that result from systems design approaches that optimize the management of technology at the expense of managing the data."

"(Enterprise Architecture is) the set of descriptive representations (i.e., models) that are relevant for describing an Enterprise such that it can be produced to management's requirements (quality) and maintained over the period of its useful life."

"It is not adequate merely to produce running code. In the long term, enterprise value lies in the models themselves. They have intrinsic value in their own right, as they constitute the baseline for managing change"

"A framework as it applies to enterprises is simply a logical structure for classifying and organising the descriptive representations of an enterprise that are significant to the management of the enterprise as well as to the development of the enterprise's system [with the aim of] rationalising the carious concepts and specifications in order to provide for clarity of professional communication, to allow for improving and integrating development methodologies and tools, and to establish credibility and confidence in the investment of systems resources."

"A significant observation regarding... architectural representations is that each is of a different nature than the others. They are not merely a set of representations, each of which is an increasing level of detail than the previous one. Level of detail is an independent variable, varying within each architectural representation."

"The Third Law of Consulting: Never forget they're paying you by the hour, not by the solution."

"The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem."

"The principle is simple and powerful enough to be Marvin's Fourth Great Secret: If what they've been doing hasn't solved the problem, tell them to do something else."

"Helping myself is even harder than helping others."

"As any poet knows, a system is a way of looking at the world."

"The generalist, is like the fox, who knows many things. Just as anthropologists learn to live in many cultures, without rifles, so do certain scientists manage to adapt comfortably to the paradigms of several disciplines. How do they do it? When questioned, these generalists always express an inner faith in the unity of science. They, too, carry a single paradigm, but it is one taken from a much higher vantage point, one from which the paradigms of the different disciplines are seen to be very much alike, though often obscured by special language.""

"Science is the study of those things that can be reduced to the study of other things."

"Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men."

"The general systems movement has taken up the task of helping scientists unravel complexity, technologists to master it, and others to learn to live with it."

"We have come through a strange cycle in programming, starting with the creation of programming itself as a human activity. Executives with the tiniest smattering of knowledge assume that anyone can write a program, and only now are programmers beginning to win their battle for recognition as true professionals."

"Asking for efficiency and adaptability in the same program is like asking for a beautiful and modest wife. Although beauty and modesty have been known to occur in the same woman, we'll probably have to settle for one or the other. At least that's better than neither."