In Focus: The AI Case for Enterprise Architecture

Information in this post reflects publicly available sources as of July 12, 2026. For most of the last decade, the received wisdom about enterprise architecture was that it was in decline. Cloud dissolved its authority, agile teams routed around it, and "we don't do EA here" became a mild boast at engineering conferences. Then, over roughly the past eighteen months, the message inverted. EA is now being described across the industry… Read More

Explained: EA in the Age of Cloud and Microservices

In 2005, if a team at Aldermont wanted a server, they filed a request. The request went to a central infrastructure group, which reviewed it, approved it, ordered the hardware, racked it in the data center, and handed back a hostname some weeks later. That chokepoint was slow and everybody hated it. It was also, quietly, the single most effective architecture governance mechanism the bank has ever had, because nothing could exist without passing… Read More

Explained: Conway's Law and EA

Here is a question this series has been circling for eight posts without ever answering properly. Aldermont has three core banking systems because it acquired three banks. Fine. But the last of those acquisitions closed in 2019, and the one before it in 2008. The bank has had years, in one case nearly two decades, and enormous financial incentive to consolidate. Every architect who has passed through has flagged it. So why are there still three? … Read More

Explained: Architecture Governance

The head of retail digital has a feature ready to ship. It is a small thing, a redesigned account-summary screen in the mobile app, and the team could deploy it this week. There is one obstacle: to pull the balances it needs, the fastest path is a direct call straight into the Northline core, bypassing the shared integration layer the architecture team has been carefully building. It would work. It would also be exactly the kind of point-to-poin… Read More

Architecture: The Application Portfolio

The heat map from Aldermont's capability analysis put a red box around "customer management" and noted, dryly, that the bank delivers it three times over. That single red box hides a real mess underneath it: three CRMs, each inherited from a different acquired bank, each with its own database, its own integrations, its own small band of people who know how it works and are quietly nearing retirement. Leadership now wants to act on … Read More