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Design Documentation

The discipline of writing a design down, revising it under review, and stating its own risk plainly — carried to revision 16, 26 and 35 on the largest programs.

Also known as Architecture Decision Records, Design Review

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 18 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

Design documents in this record are not artifacts produced after the fact. They are the mechanism by which a design is reviewed, argued over and approved, and their revision numbers are the evidence.

The Duval County Courthouse network design ran to 262 pages at revision 16 by the time it was executed. The consolidated CAD/911 dispatch design carried through thirty-five revisions and a review with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The enterprise Palo Alto firewall architecture reached twenty-six revisions over its life. The Annex data center consolidation ran on three documents at revisions ten, twelve and ten, each with its own drawing set, test plan and back-out plan.

The overview of the data center consolidation stated plainly that redundancy would be reduced for a period, and what was being done about it. A design document that hides its own risk is worth less than no document.

Subtopics

  • AutoCAD & MicroStationWhere the career began — and the tool used decades later to plot wireless coverage heat maps by hand.

Applied in

  • Enterprise Agreement Pursuit — Global AutomotivePursuit March–April 2025 · headquarters session May 2025 · relationship carried forwardCisco services subject-matter expert on a bid for a global automotive manufacturer's North American arm — a two-day clarification window, an affiliate's engineering bench as the differentiator, a loss, and a headquarters meeting four weeks later.
  • Modernizing Legacy Industrial Systems with AI2026An unsupported industrial application whose analysis was still right and whose reference data was not — rebuilt from its inputs, without altering a line of its code.
  • Career Reference Record — Design, Build and Publishing PlatformApril–September 2026A cross-linked reference work built as a derived graph: edges declared once, every index, backlink and chart generated from them, published static with per-document access control.
  • Enterprise Architecture Practice Build2024–2026An architecture practice of up to fourteen, built and run to a design review gate and a weekly rhythm — so engagements were delivered against one design language rather than individual preference.
  • Casino Surveillance Network Design and Segmentation2024–2026Surveillance refresh and segmentation for a metropolitan casino property — designed as Principal Architect and governed as Director, through a phased implementation and a mid-program re-scope.
  • Client Architecture Portfolio2024–202688 numbered engagements across two years, twenty-plus live at any moment, across healthcare, manufacturing, financial services and the public sector — the inverse of nineteen years inside one estate, and a different problem.
  • Multi-Property Gaming Group2024–2026Four properties for a regional casino group — security and segmentation, core refresh, wireless, surveillance separation and firewall consolidation.
  • Diversified Industrial Manufacturer2025–2026Business-unit and data center assessments, automated discovery and network assurance, an enterprise architecture review, and integration across two acquisitions.
  • Network Orchestration Proof of Concept2025–2026Itential and Gluware assessed against traditional automation for the group's parent company — built out on virtualized topologies rather than judged on datasheets, under a signed statement of work, closing with a master services agreement.
  • Enterprise Networking Practice Lab2026Three repurposed servers being rebuilt into a 2.3 TB virtualized network emulation cluster, funded on a cost-per-month argument against a six-month procurement lead time — and the end of a practice running on engineers' own hardware.
  • SD-WAN Portfolio — Banking and State Legislature2025–2026Three concurrent SD-WAN engagements in regulated and public environments, with the low-level design at revision 2.0 and every configuration passing a routing review before production.
  • State and Local Government Delivery2025–2026A state transportation department data center relocation inside a single summer window, and county switching, firewall and platform replacement alongside it.
  • Commercial Site Rebuild and Live Domain MigrationApril–September 2026Twenty pages moved off a hosted page builder onto a static build, and a live domain repointed to a new host without touching any of the six records carrying its mail.
  • Municipal Infrastructure Assessment to RFP2024–2025An infrastructure assessment for a town government, scoped from the start to become the foundation of its own procurement rather than a proposal for follow-on work.
  • Architecture by Influence2010–2024A CIO's instruction — manage by influence rather than by headcount — and the fourteen years of practice built on it, in an estate where nothing could be mandated anyway.
  • Consolidated CAD/911 Dispatch System2016–2024Two agencies with separate commands onto one dispatch platform, cutting response times from five to ten minutes down to one to two.
  • Citywide Network Total Cost of Ownership Study2023–2024A weighted scoring instrument for a manufacturer standard ahead of a refresh — which earned itself within three weeks, when a reseller's savings claim turned out to be priced against the wrong baseline.
  • Main Data Center Physical Connection Layout2009–2024The as-built record of every port, patch and strand in the main data center — a naming convention where the identifier is the location, carried to revision 21 over fifteen years.
  • Ed Ball Hearing Room — Backup Council Chambers2022–2024A committee room specified to run a City Council meeting if the Chamber were unavailable — which makes it a continuity facility for the legislative body, not a meeting room.
  • Enterprise Architecture Program2009–2024The EA practice itself — business, information, technical and solution viewpoints, with strategy, assessments and multi-year capability roadmaps for a platform shared by agencies that answered to different elected officers.
  • Enterprise Multi-Tenant Firewall Architecture2020–2024Six independently governed agencies on shared infrastructure, none able to reach, disrupt or inherit the regulatory exposure of any other.
  • Electronic Paper Tablet Assessment and Rollout2019–2023A personal device that became a supported city endpoint — after the enterprise web filtering estate I had built turned out to be the thing breaking it.
  • Reliability Engineering Practice2000–2023A reliability toolchain bought for one utility engagement in 2000, carried into a city estate, and still running twenty-three years later — availability as a computed number rather than a drawn assertion.
  • Requirements or Findings: When Architecture Gets Called2007–2022The same function with the same authority produces requirements on one capital program and findings on another — and the only variable is whether the project called it before or after the build.
  • Enterprise Packet Capture and Network Forensics Platform2009–2022Full packet capture on eight critical-path points, owned across thirteen years and two platform generations, with retention pushed past thirty days.
  • Architecture Technology Governance Committee2008–2021The second governance body, and the one where architecture decisions were actually worked — with the operations and delivery teams in the room rather than only architects.
  • E911 Caller Location and Backup Answering Point2013–2021Making the dispatcher see a room instead of a phone number — then building a second answering point so the dispatch center was not a single point of failure.
  • Disaster Recovery Validation and Application Tiering2020Criticality bound to recovery objectives in an instrument rather than a narrative, and a definition of "tested" that the estate could not yet meet — reported rather than softened.
  • Annex to Main Data Center Consolidation2010–2018Moving one data center into another with the estate live throughout, on three design documents at revisions ten, twelve and ten.
  • St. James Building Wireless2014–2015Building-wide wireless for City Hall, specified as a measurable coverage floor with heat maps as acceptance and the remediation cost carried by whoever promised the number.
  • Enterprise Change Management Standard1999–2012A change process designed for a utility in 1999, carried into the City as its enterprise standard, and handed to operations in 2012 — after which it outlasted both commercial platforms bought to run it.
  • Duval County Courthouse Technology Program2008–2012A $12M IT program inside a $350M, 800,000 square foot capital facility, cut over live to a fixed date.
  • Enterprise Security Committee and Governance Program2009–2012The city's enterprise architecture review board, chaired and chartered — and, in the years before the City had a Chief Security Officer, the body where security policy was set.
  • Internet Perimeter Firewall Replacement2006 – 2008An unsupported, undocumented Check Point estate replaced with firewall blades in the core — held as a stated performance objective, carried from written justification to floor-by-floor cutover, with no vendor producing a design at any point.
  • Insurance Carrier E-Commerce Platform2001–2003Mainframe to public web in 2001, across a colocation tunnel and two firewalls — where the deliverable was the boundary, not the website, and the documentation reached revision 243.
  • National Insurance Carrier Enterprise WAN1999–2001Five sites joined over an AT&T frame relay cloud at committed rates from 32K to 320K — an era when the design had to decide what mattered, because not everything could.

Through subtopics

2 further projects reference a subtopic of this entry rather than the entry itself.

Career

Documents

See also

Also searched as

  • TOGAF
  • architecture decision record
  • ADR
  • reference architecture
  • architecture repository
  • target state