I’ve been sitting here for a while struggling with a feeling I couldnt explain, a sense of shared fantasy and shared lies, repeating over and over in my head. It has a lot of names (hype, fear, big business) and even more proponents than it did last time.
25 years ago the architects I trusted said, architecture is complex and requires a complex skillset.
20 years ago they said, agile as a fad will take more architects, not fewer or it will create massive debt. And it will create a massive schism between developers and architects.
17 years ago they said, cloud will cost more than on premise, do it if its innovative and speed is essential not because its cheaper.
15 years ago they said Microservices may be a pattern, maybe a set of patterns, but it doesnt apply everywhere.
10 years ago they said serverless is a pattern, maybe a set of patterns, but it is going to get you locked into a vendor and it will be too complex to maintain.
7 years ago they said LLMs are language models, not world models; they are going to run into the enterprise like a bicycle into a stone wall.
5 years ago they said AI code proliferation and technical debt growth is going to be a societal problem, not just an enterprise one.
4 years ago they said small language models and open source models are useful, but they will be deployed en masse, and that will be unmaintainable.
3 years ago they said that the rush to create data centers would promote IT to a global economic and environmental threat.
All of these are still true.
This year we are saying, it is time that architects stop jumping on the latest bandwagon.
The world needs professionals, not more marketing and not more IT management willing to do whatever deal lowers cost. Serious people who don’t think the word architect can be boiled down to a one-liner on LinkedIn. That being an engineer requires degrees and certification, not a self-proclaimed title bump. That EDA, DDD and other techniques are useful tools but not the pinnacle of learning. That AI code is great until it isn’t and it takes more than an Anthropic course to know the difference.
Aren’t we tired of the masters of IT, simply failing? Then covering it up with billion-dollar spend?
I believe the world we are headed towards needs a much stronger set of systems to control the relationship between humans and technology. That vendor power should be curbed through not just regulation but through individual liability for decisions. That professionals should be extremely well-trained and required to give not just expert but also ethical advice.
I believe our focus should be on achieving human outcomes with technology, and that no technology should be allowed to replace human outcomes. I believe it is better for humans if technology is widely available and not only for the truly wealthy.
I believe we have a chance to change this before we hit a true catastrophe.
My answer to that need has been and is a center for ethically bound professionals, trained in a rigorous and tested body of knowledge.
These systems are the ones we invented for medicine, law, industrialization, and buildings. They are the ones we turn to when our kids are sick, our life is on the line, and for the places we live.
I believe it will work for sick enterprises and high technology as well.
Maybe I’m wrong.
But what if I’m right?
What if we could have more speed in technology because our teams were made of professionals?
What if architecture and engineering were fully supported in academia, law and organizations the way they are in building?
What if every architect needed 2 years after undergraduate education to learn the fundamentals of architecture?
What if they went on to a 4-5 year residency where they practiced those skills under board-certified mentors?
What if contributing back to the profession was a requirement for practice?
What if specialized architects were not representing completely different areas of expertise (business, software, cloud) but were instead a focus area of a single-purpose and valuable professional body?
What if seniority meant measured seniority in competency, not a transition to a psuedo- management position?
What if a board of directors could access a robust, battle-tested group of professionals who reach across their organizations and partners to facilitate and make tough decisions?
What if people, not just shareholders, meant something to the profession?
What if an ethics charge could remove a troublesome professional without the need for a contract to be canceled or a scraping of a whole team?
What if we researched our technology in the enterprise and small business context BEFORE we deployed it?
What if we didnt have to invent random fad techniques and instead worked on a shared body of well researched proven ideas?
I believe that world is already here. And joining it will light a fire in IT bigger than any fad.
If your enterprise won’t listen, maybe your governments will.
What do you believe?