Tag: risk management
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Known Weaknesses
Photo by FlyD on Unsplash Author’s Note: The workplace examples in this piece are generalized from requests I have reviewed and stories shared by friends, colleagues, and community members over the past several years. Details have been altered, and none describes a specific person, team, or project. ~Dom The Bug Wasn’t Where They Were Looking…
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Second Place
Photo by Riho Kitagawa on Unsplash The report had been running longer than anyone currently responsible for it. It wasn’t sophisticated: a few pages, a handful of filters, and a set of numbers that a team opened every week to track progress against a defined target. Nobody thought of it as architecture. People thought of…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Borrowed Simplicity
Photo by Jonathan Phillips on Unsplash Somewhere in every mature platform there exists an object no one will delete. It could be a table, a view, a scheduled job, or a permission granted to a group that no longer matches any team on the org chart. It is probably not documented, and it is not…
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The Fractal Delusion: Why Motion Isn’t Proof
From the road, it looks like progress. A project site at full stride has a particular kind of confidence to it. Steel ribs climb into the sky. Concrete trucks arrive on schedule. Cranes swing slow, deliberate arcs, placing beams where they belong as if the building is assembling itself. You can stand at the fence…
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Trust Is Infrastructure
Photo by Joseph Corl on Unsplash In the decades following the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, Americans learned a bitter lesson about trust: the news wasn’t just a carrier of facts anymore. It was a platform with incentives. What once felt like shared information slowly became something else: an arena where attention was the product,…
