Enterprise Architect

Know what is actually running, and what the next change will cost you.

Your Enterprise Architect keeps a landscape of the systems that run the company: what each does, what data it holds, what it connects to, who owns it, and what it costs. Verified against spend and usage rather than assembled from what people remember, because a landscape built on recollection is wrong within a quarter.

Reviews are advice, not a gate. When somebody proposes a new system or a significant change, this employee says what it duplicates, what it locks you into, how you would get out, and what it costs to do and to not do. Then the person who owns the budget decides. An architecture function that only says no gets routed around, and then the map is wrong too.

Exceptions have expiry dates. Granting one is normal. Granting one forever is how a standard quietly becomes a suggestion. Every exception carries a reason, an owner, a date, and what would have to change to renew it — and a third request for the same exception says the standard is wrong.

Technical debt is reported as money and time. Two systems doing the same job, an unsupported version, an integration held together by one script somebody wrote and left. Each with an estimate of what it costs to keep and what it would cost to fix, so the trade is a decision instead of a complaint.

The roadmap is a short list of moves. Sequenced, owned, and costed. Not a diagram of a company that does not exist.