• Drawing Dead | An Architect’s Perspective on the Enterprise AI Bet

    Drawing Dead | An Architect’s Perspective on the Enterprise AI Bet

    Photo by Julian Gojani on Unsplash You know what you are holding. Two cards, face down, and you have looked at them enough times to stop looking. You know the rules of the game, which hands beat which, and roughly how often the deck cooperates. You know how many chips are on your side of… Read more

  • The Board Is Not Flat

    The Board Is Not Flat

    Photo by Elena Popova on Unsplash Yes, I know that’s Go. That’s partly the point. ~Dom I don’t particularly like chess. I am reasonably decent at it, although I have never played enough to earn a rating, and I recognize most of the reasons people admire the game. Chess teaches patience and sacrifice, and it… Read more

  • Custody

    Custody

    Photo by Ishan @seefromthesky on Unsplash There is a particular sentence that appears in incident reviews, architecture meetings, postmortems, and inherited projects with remarkable consistency. “That predates me.” And usually, it is true. The person saying it did not make the decision. They were not in the room when the architecture was chosen, the exception… Read more

  • Cultivating Revenue

    Cultivating Revenue

    Photo by Max Chen on Unsplash Author’s Note: This week’s article deliberately steps a little outside the usual language of boardrooms, business schools, and technical architecture. The metaphor that follows comes instead from the fiction I read and the games I play. That is intentional. An idea’s origin tells us something about its context, but… Read more

  • The Implied Zero

    The Implied Zero

    Photo by Frank R on Unsplash Author’s Note: The opening example is a composite, paraphrased from several professional conversations over many years. Details have been generalized, and no specific organization, analysis, or business decision is being described. The concern examined here is the analytical pattern itself. ~Dom The conversation that removed it probably took about… Read more

  • Letters to Versailles

    Letters to Versailles

    Photo by Jessica Kantak Bailey on Unsplash There is something almost unfair about seeing Versailles for the first time. We arrive knowing how the story ends. We know about bread and debt, revolution and executions. We know the monarchy will fall, just as we know the palace will eventually become something closer to a monument… Read more