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Is Your API Estate Ready for AI?
The API Legacy There was a moment, roughly a decade ago, when APIs were the answer to everything. Large organisations were facing a genuine crisis. Mobile had arrived. Digital channels were multiplying. The legacy estate, mainframes, MQ bridges, batch processes, point-to-point integrations, was never designed to be consumed by an app on someone’s phone. APIs…
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When Technical Excellence Is No Longer Enough. The Aperture Shifts.
You do not become a leader overnight. There is no moment. No handover. No clear line between the work you were doing before and the work you are doing now. The transition from architect to leader happens gradually, across roles, across years, across a slowly expanding set of responsibilities that arrive without a manual and…
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The Room AI Cannot Be In
In Edition 2 of this newsletter, I wrote about AI in architecture work. Not the hype, the application. Where AI is genuinely useful across the solution definition lifecycle. Where architects must stay at the controls. And the people dimension of adoption across a diverse team. That edition was about what AI can do. This one…
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How Every Decision Worth Making Travels The Organisation
Large organisations are complex by necessity. The scale of what they operate, the breadth of what they deliver, and the number of people required to do it means that structure is not optional — it is the mechanism through which complexity is managed. Most large organisations settle into some version of a matrix. Horizontal technology…
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Paradigm Shifts, Personal Reflection, and the Uncertainty Ahead
Every generation of technologists inherits a set of assumptions about how systems are built, how they behave, and what they are for. And every generation, without exception, has had those assumptions overturned. The pace at which that happens has never been constant. But the direction has never reversed. The mainframe era defined computing as centralised,…
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Event-Driven Architecture: The Promise, The Reality, and The Necessary Foundations
The vision for Event Driven Architecture is genuinely compelling. Build your systems around business events. When something meaningful happens in a domain — a payment is made, an account is opened, a limit is breached — the fact is published, post fact. Other domains consume it. They react. They choreograph. No tight coupling. No synchronous…
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Leading a Team That Nobody Understands
I’ve been thinking about what makes architecture leadership different. Not harder. Not more important. Just different. The architecture role sits in a unique position in most CIO functions – accountable for outcomes architects don’t control, working on timescales organizations don’t recognize, having expertise constantly questioned by people who aren’t architects. This creates leadership challenges that…
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AI in Architecture Work: What’s Actually Working and What Still Needs Work
Every business wants AI in everything. Every transformation now has “AI-enabled” in the business case. Every stakeholder meeting includes the question: “But what about AI?” There seems to be an omnipresent expectation to integrate AI or adopt AI in everything. The expectation that architects will somehow make everything “AI-powered” is growing. But here’s what nobody’s…
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Where Architecture Actually Happens
Ask anyone outside technology what a software architect does, and you’ll get remarkably similar answers: “They design systems.” “They make technical decisions.” “They draw diagrams.” Sometimes even the unflattering “They just draw boxes.” Ask most people inside technology – developers, product managers, even executives – and you’ll get slightly more sophisticated versions of the same…