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Enterprise Architecture

The discipline of placing technology correctly in a business's data flows, risk posture and cost structure — the through-line of the last two decades.

Also known as EA

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 14 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.

The working definition used throughout this record is that the role sits on both sides of a fence: deep enough in the technology to make real decisions about it, and close enough to the business to know which decisions matter.

Nineteen years of it were practiced in an unusually hard setting — a consolidated city-county government where five constitutional officers elected independently of the Mayor (Sheriff, Clerk of the Circuit Court, Property Appraiser, Tax Collector, Supervisor of Elections), two state officers elected for the judicial circuit (State Attorney, Public Defender), a separate judicial branch, and several City departments with budgets of their own each ran technology of their own — while a charter gave the City’s technology division a governance role across all of it, the independent authorities aside, and every one of the rest had some part of its estate on shared infrastructure. Nothing published could be mandated. Every standard that took hold was adopted voluntarily by people free to decline it, which is a considerably better test of an architecture than compliance.

The program itself was built as well as practiced: creating and maintaining the enterprise architecture function, balancing business, information, technical and solution architecture viewpoints, and establishing the governing principles that guided solution decisions across it. What came out of that were repeatable technology patterns the engineering and operations groups designed and deployed against — chosen to minimize total cost of ownership rather than to be interesting.

The constant has never been a platform. Drafting and object databases, SQL, medical imaging and DOCSIS, routed networks and a CCIE, data center, cloud, and now post-quantum cryptography. What has not changed is taking something unfamiliar, working out what it does, and placing it correctly.

Subtopics

  • Application RationalizationReducing a portfolio assembled independently over decades — platform consolidation, technology lifecycle planning and technical debt reduction.
  • Architecture GovernanceReview boards, charters and the design of decision-making bodies — including one written so its chair could be outvoted.
  • Capability RoadmappingCurrent, interim and target-state design, multi-year capability roadmaps, and enterprise architecture assessments across a federated estate.
  • Design DocumentationThe 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.

Applied in

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Diversified Industrial Manufacturer2025–2026Business-unit and data center assessments, automated discovery and network assurance, an enterprise architecture review, and integration across two acquisitions.
  • 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.
  • Architecture Review BoardFrom November 2021The successor governance body, and the first with a budget attached — a five-to-ten year capital plan rather than a rolling list of purchases.
  • Enterprise AI Readiness Assessment2022–2024Two years of technology review and systems analysis on where AI could fit a consolidated city-county government — and, as often, where it could not yet be defended.
  • 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.
  • The Utility Relationship: Twenty-Five Years, Two EmployersOctober 1999 – January 2024Subject-matter expert to the same municipal utility from October 1999 to January 2024 — first as its consultant, then as the City's counterpart to it, because JEA is an authority under the city charter.
  • Enterprise Asset and Work Management Platform2009–2024Fifteen years and two titles on a platform carrying several lines of business and two outside agencies — stood up as a governed project, fed from the systems that knew the truth, and split in the chargeback model.
  • Fourteen Weeks on the ToolsApril – August 2024The densest hands-on stretch of the NRI tenure — seven client engagements worked personally, in the configuration and the peer reviews and the customer calls, while taking over a team from the second day.
  • Proving Products Before Recommending Them2010–2024A standing part of the architecture function rather than an occasional exercise — pilot against the estate's own conditions, then hand it over with the operators trained.
  • Enterprise Technology Budget Program2011–2024A $48M to $62M annual technology budget, built and defended in public across thirteen cycles for a consolidated city-county government.
  • Nine Years to an Integration Platform2014–2023A platform question carried across two evaluations and nine years — lost in 2014 to a vendor who could discount faster than a migration could be justified, and answered in 2023 by attaching it to a building.
  • The Capital Project Evaluation MatrixMethod authored March 2008 · the quadrant workbook created 18 March 2009 · last recorded use 17 May 2023The weighted scoring instrument behind the City's technology capital funding — and the single workbook built in March 2009 that was still deciding a security product purchase fourteen years later.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Records Retention and Disposition Standards2008–2018Classification, retention and defensible disposition under Florida public records law, across an estate where criminal justice records, patient information, court records and elections data shared one platform.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Through subtopics

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

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Multi-Property Gaming Group2024–2026Four properties for a regional casino group — security and segmentation, core refresh, wireless, surveillance separation and firewall consolidation.
  • 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.
  • 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 Multi-Tenant Firewall Architecture2020–2024Six independently governed agencies on shared infrastructure, none able to reach, disrupt or inherit the regulatory exposure of any other.
  • The Virtual Desktop Position2011–2023A decade of evaluation whose deliverable was a refusal — two platforms piloted and closed by change order, and an objection that held for eight years.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Enterprise Business Intelligence Platform and Capability2012–2016Architecture authority over the City's analytics platform, held deliberately apart from the group that built the reports — with the capability hired and taught to a published standard.
  • Comprehensive Performance Management — JaxOps, JaxAnalytics, JaxScore2013–2016The division's flagship analytics program in three layers, ending in a public dashboard — where disclosed numbers constrain the model underneath rather than the presentation on top.
  • 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.
  • Student Capstone Security Engagement and College Partnerships2009–2014A student team given scoped authorization to penetration test the live city estate — and a written response to their findings, taken to a second revision, rather than a thank-you note.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Nassau County Sheriff's Office Countywide Wireless2001–2003Multi-tower public safety wireless across a large rural county, surveyed by driving it and plotting the readings by hand.
  • 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.
  • CSX Railroad Map Digitization1996Digitizing CSX property maps dating back to the 1800s, with MDL application development against MicroStation.

Career

Documents

  • Enterprise Security Committee Charter2010The charter for the body that served as the city's enterprise architecture review board — written so its chair could be outvoted. Revision 5.0.

Attested by

  • Cisco Expert-Track Written Examinations2003 · undefinedFour expert-track written examinations passed across eight years. These carried CCIE recertification through successive cycles — the exam record behind twenty years of maintaining #10042.
  • TOGAF2015 · Not renewedThe Open Group Architecture Framework — the formal vocabulary for work already being done at the City of Jacksonville.
  • CCDE Written2026 · In progressScheduled for October 2026 as the qualifying exam to return CCIE #10042 to active status.

See also

Also searched as

  • TOGAF
  • architecture decision record
  • ADR
  • reference architecture
  • architecture repository
  • target state
  • business architecture
  • business capability model
  • BIZBOK
  • capability-based planning
  • value stream