By Paul Preiss
When I started as an architect, there was only one place to find the really hard problems or the really fun ones. And that was the big company… the enterprise. That was where you went for cutting edge techniques. Because cutting edge was about doing really big stuff (data) with really expensive stuff (servers and devices). But the exciting part was never the domain. That part was reasonably run of the mill. HR data, insurance, bank accounts, management, document signoff, legal, payments and payroll. But the vast majority of domain work was glorified MS Access:
- make schema,
- make CRUD app,
- connect with ‘services’.
The cool part was in the size and complexity of the data, and with innovating each layer in incremental and sometimes interesting ways. However, the tradeoff was corporate politics, management, cost-cutting, bad decisions by incompetent staff and the inevitable enshittification that rips the life out of creative and passionate professionals. The same thing can be seen in hospital/doctor comedies. The kind of existential angst experienced by professionals who are held back by corporate greed and mismanagement. But I believe we are about to see a new architect professional emerge.
Not enterprise, but individual. The way a profession is supposed to be.
And we are going to need a lot more of them. Like a LOT, with capital letters.
The Interesting Parts are Moving to the Edges
The edge of the network = interaction types. The edge of the company = human customers + technical friction. The edge of the city = tiny to small to medium businesses with practical problems. The edge of structure = embedded devices, smart buildings, augmented reality. The edge of societies = technical law, country clouds, national app registries, regulated external services with import tariffs, local politics and much more.
These edges need exactly the kind of skilled and experienced people that all other major industries enjoy. And to cover the kind of demand we are going to see without harming people and businesses, the old corporate controls aren’t going to work.
Fun Stuff in Smaller Packages
I had a wonderful time the other day chatting with a chief architect about how much the average small business owner has to deal with now. Once upon a time you could open an Italian restaurant and, well, make Italian food. If it was delicious you could do it for decades… Now if you don’t have a credible technologist on staff you just might not survive. Let’s make a little list:
- Automated payroll management – because no one would accept less and we have to pay taxes digitally and keep employment records, so…
- An HR solution for staff management – and it better be integrated with the PoS because that’s basic functionality now…
- PoS with modern payment types, table management and integrated with the kitchen…
- Order management for tickets and tables integrated with…
- Supply-chain ordering, stock management and waste management…
- And we haven’t even listed our restaurant on Yelp, OpenTable, Google Reservations, and a thousand other apps needed to get enough tables filled to pay our cloud bill much less serve food.
And well that’s a restaurant. I spent the first part of my career building those things for big business because they were the only ones that really needed them. It really was cool then.
There are small banks, theaters, construction companies, paint companies, mid-tier manufacturing. And that doesn’t include the individuals, the mid-sized players, the job doing smart homes in custom mansions.
And not a single one of them has seen a real architect.
We need to keep creating the people with deep and broad competencies that have been honed over a decade of delivering outcomes at high volume and with high stakes. People who never ventured higher than chief architect and dont want to. Professionals, to whom chief architect still means a person that delivers real systems to real people. They dont manage, they make.
But That’s Not Even the Interesting Parts
That’s just paying the bills.
Spatial computing is already in the fitting room of your local clothing retailer. Point your phone at yourself, see the jacket on your body before you touch it. It’s in the physical therapy clinic down the street where a recovering patient does guided exercises with real-time feedback overlaid on their actual movements. It’s in the trade school where an apprentice electrician practices a wiring job in augmented space before touching live current. Over a billion people are already doing this regularly. Most of them have no idea what it’s called.
I once showed a business model canvas by a friend of mine, Gar Mac Criosta, to a coffee shop owner in Dublin. It was for a digital cafe and the guy freaked. Innovations that could mean real scale for his business. “What do you mean I could hold roasting classes on AirBnB for tourists?”…
And it gets weird fast.
The building you’re sitting in right now, if it was built or renovated recently, is probably a computing platform whether anyone told you or not. HVAC, lighting, access, occupancy, energy… all networked, all making decisions, hardware sitting in the walls and ceiling doing things nobody fully documented. Your neighborhood office park landlord is running an IoT estate. Your kids’ school probably is too. The small regional hospital down the road definitely is. And the person who made the architectural decisions for all of it was most likely a vendor sales engineer who hasn’t answered an email since the contract was signed.
Security alone should terrify you. Edge devices sit in physically accessible places, updated by automated processes nobody audited, sold by vendors whose support lifecycle ends well before the hardware does. A compromised smart building in a hospital isn’t an embarrassing IT headline. It’s a patient. A poorly thought through connected shop floor in a small manufacturer is someone’s livelihood. Maybe someone’s hand.
And the complexity isn’t slowing. It’s accelerating straight into the places with the least guidance. The custom home with four hundred networked devices installed by three different contractors who never spoke to each other. The regional clinic rolling out connected patient monitoring because a vendor rep made it sound simple. The construction company that just equipped their whole fleet with sensors because the ROI slide looked good.
Every single one of those is a system. A real, interconnected, high stakes system. And in every single one of those cases the person who should have been there at the start… wasn’t.
So the World Will Need LOTS of us…
There are tens of thousands of businesses that have never had an architect to help them imagine, design, and deliver their technology needs, so they have made do with scraps. Why should that be the case?
Here’s a number that should stop you cold. There are roughly 400 million small and medium-sized businesses on this planet right now, per the World Economic Forum and Statista. They represent 90% of all businesses, employ 70% of the world’s workers, and generate about half of global GDP. In the US alone there are 36 million of them. The EU has another 25 million. And the vast majority of them are navigating technology with zero architectural guidance whatsoever. Not bad architectural guidance. Zero.
We know what happens to small businesses without that guidance. About half are gone within five years. Cash flow is the headline cause but underneath it, always, is the inability to make the right decisions at the right time. And increasingly those decisions are technology decisions. What platform. What integrations. What to build vs buy. What to avoid entirely. Those aren’t developer questions. They are architect questions.
Now imagine that scale applied to the profession. If the world needs as many technology architects as it needs building architects, structural engineers, accountants and doctors relative to the complexity of what they manage… we are looking at hundreds of thousands of new practitioner roles. Not for the nameless cost-cutting monsters in glass towers, but for real businesses and stakeholders who just might still realize you saved the company by not allowing 100 million unencrypted medical records to go onto a public cloud account with a password like 12345678… (yes, that is a story from one of our members… he didn’t get his bonus that year).
The Individual Architect and the Societal Contract
Here’s what really excites me about this shift, and also what makes it complicated.
Enterprise architecture, for all its frustrations, gave architects a certain kind of cover. You had governance boards, legal teams, procurement processes. You were not personally on the hook when the CTO made a terrible decision. You might get ignored, you might get ousted, but you had the enterprise machinery around you.
The individual architect working with real businesses, with a construction firm or a restaurant group or a small regional hospital, has none of that machinery. And that is terrifying and wonderful at exactly the same time. Terrifying because the accountability is direct and personal. Wonderful because the value is direct and personal too. You actually see the thing you built work. You see the business survive. You see the owner understand what you did for them.
Solution architects, software architects, business architects, information architects and infrastructure architects are more in demand than ever!
This is what I mean when I talk about a societal contract for architecture as a profession. Not a mission statement. Not a framework. An actual commitment by a skilled, certified, ethically bound professional to deliver value to a client who cannot do it themselves. That’s what doctors do. Building architects. Structural engineers. And it’s what technology architects need to do if we are ever going to matter at the scale the world actually needs us.
The demand signal is already there. The IMF projects the tech talent shortage will swell to more than 85 million workers by 2030. Qubit Labs That’s not a rounding error. And critically, the shortage isn’t distributed evenly across enterprise IT departments. It’s concentrated exactly where the growth is. At the edge. In the mid-market. In the businesses that have never been served at all.
IT Management and Enterprise… Anything are Becoming Bot Farms Anyway
It is difficult enough when large companies don’t see technology as a competitive advantage, unless they are in the technology game themselves. And even those companies underfund their IT departments compared with ‘the busines’. Cutting costs and growing massive technical debt with exhausted workers who really just want to design and build things that matter to someone.
The name of the game is cut people, reduce spend, and churn out features like our Italian restaurant churns out pizzas but with less art. Which is what it’s always been. But at least they had the interesting problems. And while they still do… we must expand beyond the definition drive
The AI automation of enterprise IT middle management is already underway. Anyone paying attention can see it. And when that completes the architects who stayed in those roles waiting for the enterprise to value them properly will have a long commute back to relevance. The real architects, the practicioners, those with skin in the game and boots on the ground will never want for work.
The interesting work was always at the edges. Now the money is getting there too.
Join us at Iasa for the New Architecture Profession. And let’s go change the world.
Further Reading
- World Economic Forum, Driving Global Growth Through the Power of Small Business (2026) — data on global SME scale and impact on GDP and employment.
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Business Employment Dynamics (2024) — five and ten year small business survival rates by industry.
- ManpowerGroup, US Talent Shortage Report — tracking the IT talent gap from 40% in 2014 to 70% in 2024.
- Iasa BTABoK, Societal Contract — the case for architecture as a profession with a genuine and accountable contract to clients and society. (https://iasaglobal.org)