I am an architect who wandered into the wasteland of the modern enterprise some thirty-five years ago and, largely through a mixture of morbid curiosity and sheer inertia, stayed to flaneur the scene.

My formative years were spent in the necessary, if exhausting, pursuit of unlearning the “Master Plan.” I was tutored in the non-linear, polyphonic structures of Daniel Libeskind - a man who understands that a building is not a box, but a polyphonic confrontation. Things that you should see of his are here and here. That education, supplemented by the socially contingent, often gloriously everyday architecture of Sarah Wigglesworth, taught me a singular truth: the most vital part of any system is not the stultifying hierarchy etched onto a whiteboard. It is found in the gaps, the absences, and the graphic, bloody traces of human movement between them.

For the past two decades, I observed the “Transformation” industry figuring out what-to-about-digital, from a position of detached, perplexed skepticism:

• The Martech Explosion: Where the uninitiated saw a bloated mess, I saw a frantic, heterogeneous, and entirely necessary response to the “connected customer” rightly identified by @chiefmartec. Marketing was busy wrestling with the messy reality of the fickle human-now-online, the rest of the enterprise was occupied with the expensive hobby of hoisting dead monoliths into the “Cloud” without altering a single syllable of the internal, rotting logic.

• The “Digital Transformation” Era: billions of pounds squandered on “Modernization” programs that were, in point of fact, nothing more than corporate autopsies - grotesque obsessions with a “Target State” that was dead long before the pitch deck had reached its merciful conclusion.

• The Design Acquisition Wave: witnessing first hand the furious period - documented by John Maeda annually at SXSW - where behemoth firms grabbed and swallowed design houses and agencies not for their “wicked problem-solving” intellect, but cause-everyone-was-at-it, only to command them to sit in the corner and make the “user interface” look more friendly, more sharper (sic), more better (more sic). A failure of imagination on a truly industrial scale.

I have come full circle. Architecture - the real centuries-old, philosophically-wrought kind, not the “Senior Engineer with a clip-on tie” variety - is precisely the apprenticeship the enterprise requires. It is quite interesting to watch IT Architecture stumble toward maturity, colliding head-on with principles that Architects have been grappling with, and reconciling, for centuries. Frank Lloyd Wright - not a man known for his humility - said: “Architecture is the scientific way of making structure express ideas.” To which the follow-up has to be “…so have you got any?”

A former colleague of mine, a CTO of the “get-it-done” engineering persuasion, and a steely-eyed missile man type field marshall of resources, insists that an IT architect is judged largely on their ability to “know what is in production.” He is right, of course, as far as the baseline goes. If you don’t know the grain of the wood, you’ve no business at the bench. But I think it’s because IT Architecture has fallen so far behind, that one must aspire to more than mere inventory, even if it’s the tax one pays to enter the conversation. The real work is making that structure express a coherent intent. As Ann Pendleton-Julien observes in Design Unbound, while the engineer is desperate for the cold comfort of certainty, the architect seeks the productive, luminous territory of ambiguity.

My intention now is an “ontological rescue mission,” though I’d prefer not to be so insufferably grand. I do simply rely on a few reliable principles to transduce the human signal with the machinery:

• The Ground: I use Simon Wardley’s maps to find the terrain and both Dave Snowden’s Cynefin and Estuarine Mapping to identify when we are being willfully, pathologically complicated.

• The Material: I look for the Rhizomes and Lines of Flight of Deleuze - the becoming connections that actually get the work done - and the brilliant, materialist clarity of Manuel DeLanda.

• The Systems: I lean on Andrée Ehresmann’s Memory Evolutive Systems, the “World Building” of Ann Pendleton-Julien, and the affordances of Gibson and Norman to try and ensure the machine doesn’t merely blink at us in bovine silence.

• The Strategy: I am inspired by the sociotechnicality and transition design of Jabe Bloom and Cameron Tonkinwise to move beyond “fixing things” and toward designing for the good.

One does not need a dour, five-year roadmap to “Cloud Native” salvation. One needs to cease performing blind analytical autopsies on the parts of an elephant on the abattoir floor. The energy is already latently present - it is in the gaps, the synapses, and the traces. We simply need to lead it to a place where it might do some good.