Matt Burgess

An architect who wandered into the wasteland of the modern enterprise some thirty-odd years ago and, largely through a mixture of morbid curiosity and sheer inertia, stayed to flâneur the scene.

Formative years were spent in the necessary, if daunting, pursuit of unlearning the Master Plan. Tutored in the deconstruction of Libeskind - a true polymath who understood that a building is not a box, but is both polyphonic and a confrontation. That education, supplemented by the socially contingent, everyday architecture of Wigglesworth, taught me a singular truth: the most vital part of any system is not the stultifying hierarchy etched into an org chart. It is found in the gaps, the absences, and the graphic, bloody traces of human movement between them.

A front seat in the content industry ‘boom and bust’, (Anderson and DeGrandis were having a fun time too), witnessing first-hand how the internet simultaneously created exponential value and then commoditised it into infinitesimal margins, a full decade before the rest of the world used the word ‘digital’. For two decades, I’ve observed the “Transformation” industry from a position of detached, perplexed skepticism:

• The Martech Explosion: Where the uninitiated saw a bloated mess, we saw a frantic, heterogeneous, and entirely necessary response to the “connected customer” rightly identified by @chiefmartec. While Marketing was confronted with the messy reality of the human-still-fickle-but-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 in theory for their ‘wicked problem-solving’ intellect, but in practice cause-everyone-was-at-it. Only to command them to sit in the corner and make the interface look more user friendly, more sharper (sic), more better (more sic). A failure of imagination on a truly industrial scale.

We have come full circle. Architecture - the real centuries-old, philosophically-wrought sort - is precisely the apprenticeship the enterprise requires. Frank Lloyd Wright said: “Architecture is the scientific art of making structure express ideas.” To which the follow-up has to be: “…so have you got any?”

A friend and steely-eyed missile man engineering leader once told me, that an IT architect is judged largely on their ability to ‘know what is in production.’ If you don’t know the grain of the wood, you’ve no business at the bench. But one must aspire to more than mere inventory. In practice, this isn’t about high-theory; it’s about the coalface reality of the enterprise. Have spent years navigating labyrinthine ecosystems - tracking down siloed systems and reclaiming access for teams who had fallen into a state of learned helplessness.

When a non-technical team is paralysed by something like, I dunno, a rigid SharePoint or Sitecore implementation, the architect’s job should be to bridge that chasm. Figuring out and coaching folks on a journey to mastery, finding the automations and notifications the technical teams never volunteered because no one asked. This is the sociotechnical heuristic in action: shifting the power dynamic so the machine serves the human 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 wish that didn’t sound so insufferably pretentious. To do so, I’m leaning on a few reliable principles to transduce the human signal with the machinery:

• The Ground: advocate good sociotechnical practices, utilising Simon Wardley’s mapping to explore the terrain and the profoundly important stuff from the definitive name in anthro-complexity Dave Snowden. Separate from any formal institutional certification I refer to Cynefin and more recently his Estuarine framework. Exploring with these frameworks and tools with their inherent strategic utility in navigating complexity, especially via the lenses of the 3As (Agency, Affordance, Assemblage).

• The Material: the Rhizomes and Machinic of Deleuze & Guattari - the becoming-connections that make difficult things make sense - via the brilliant, materialist and highly accessible clarity of Manuel DeLanda.

• The Strategy: inspired by the deeply considered sociotechnicality of Jabe Bloom to move beyond just fixing things towards designing for good.

We don’t need a dour, three-year roadmap to Cloud Native salvation. We need to move away from 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 could just do with releasing it in places where it might do some good.