Recently I've been hit with some incredibly deep visions for new approaches to aligning technology with enterprise strategy and value flows that I am jumping out of my skin to start designing and developing.
This isn't the first time I've felt inspired to go after something big, and what I'm experiencing in this moment has the familiar feel of excitement and purpose from previous endeavors. But given the state of the world and the outsized role that tech has played in it over the past couple of decades is making me rethink my approach and my "why" completely.
Couple this with the fact that I have been struggling to find interesting things to write about in the sea of mediocrity, breathless hype, and used car salesmanship that we call LinkedIn, and it has become clear to me that building something in public would be a great opportunity to not only clarify my own thinking through writing, but to give a window into the types of decisions I find myself having to make and the approach I take to conceptualizing and designing future-ready systems.
Background
"I was dreamin' when I wrote this...forgive me if it goes astray."
Prince “1999”
Speaking of 1999, that was the year I started my career in CRM when I went to work for Siebel Systems as a messaging and infrastructure architect. Prior to dropping everything and moving to Silicon Valley for that opportunity, my career was primarily focused on networking, servers, and other things that had green blinky lights on the front of them.
At Siebel my career kind of took off and I got into a bunch of different areas within IT, but I also had the unique opportunity to work closely with business stakeholders thanks to the novel organizational structure that CIO Mark Sunday implemented, with "Business Analysts" being the liaise between IT and individual business domains.
Mark also introduced the most effective agile (small-a agile) methodology I've experienced in my career, long before we had Big-A "Agile" as a concept.
At some point, dealing with blinky lights, and apps, and databases, and other tech stuff made me start to question the how and why behind the IT function, and after having met the author Nicholas Carr at a seminar on business process reengineering, and reading his book Does IT Matter? I found religion in innovation through system design.
Over the nearly 25 years following, every enterprise system or application that I have designed has been done so through the lens of technology as the enabler of innovation, value creation, and competitive differentiation, not the driver.
And now in the mid 2020's, I design systems that not only align to (or even drive) business strategy, but also prioritizes the human experience for all stakeholders, focusing on customer and employee experience.
Current State
I have about 2.5 years worth of notes - mostly hand-written for reasons I can talk about another day in another post - detailing the evolution of my thinking on designing enterprise systems.
The most common problems the enterprise faces today are variations on the same problems the enterprise has always faced in terms of how data, information, and knowledge are stored, retrieved, and applied to business processes and value streams.
The thing that continues to blow my mind as we jump from one technology hype cycle to the next is how nearly every new "enterprise" technology fails to understand the very enterprises it tries to sell into.
Or...on the other side of the table...how enterprises manage to get this wrong over and over and over again, yet still keep buying into the next big thing that promises utopia with zero risk or effort.
And now with humans coming out of the multi-year shared trauma that was Covid, the toxicity of both social and traditional media, the yelly-screamy nature of AI hype, and the fact that we are essentially living in a post-truth society driven by narrative and perfomative performance, how the hell does anyone know what's really "real" anymore?
A Decent Start
The first cohesive and tangible thoughts I published were on the concept of a socio-technical architectural framework I loosely termed "STAF" (because I'm clever like that).
The general reaction to the STAF post was, "what is this crazy person talking about?"
And that's perfect because it was a new and original thought. Or at least "new" in the sense that the synthesized thought hit me all at once and I was finally able to articulate the concepts after they had collected free rent in my head for years.
But after publishing this, and promising a follow-up that overlaid a proposed technical architecture to help put this into a more concrete form, I realized there were so many directions I could take this concept and this thinking.
What's Next?
I have a lot of stuff I have to think about in terms of where I want to take this ideas I'm having.
What problems do I intend to solve for? How do I describe a concept that requires baseline knowledge of how both businesses and humans operate in addition to raw technical knowledge?
Do I want to build this? Do I just want to give the idea away for others to find ways to implement? Or do I just want to talk about it?
Rather than holing up in coffee shops or thinking out loud on whiteboards, I'm going to ask myself these questions and more, and work through my approaches to answering them to expose my thinking and my methods.
Next Page | Previous Page | Page Name | Published Date |
|---|---|---|---|
 What Problems Am I Trying To Solve? | Introducing STAF: The Socio-Technical Architectural Framework | April 14, 2025 |