Horizon of Concern

The period of time that a particular person is focused on, a technician might be worried about events over the next hour, a professional could be concerned with next month's events, however a Chief Executive must also be more concerned about the next decade. In general the more senior the role the further ahead the vision

A longer term focus naturally leads to taking more of an overview of the system being discussed, focusing more on the principles and patterns involved than today's practices and procedures.

It is often useful to split a topic into five different "levels of concern":

Principle: The underlying way a domain works, elements of the situation that can never be altered
Pattern: A template which can be used to describe a range of situations
Policy: A statement of the preferred approaches to take. For example selecting the pattern to use from those available
Practice: A high level description of the way things are to be done
Procedure: A detailed description of exactly how to implement a practice

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The following pages link to here: Architect, Blue Sky, Enterprise Architecture