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.
Twenty years of it were practised in an unusually hard setting — a consolidated city-county government where the Sheriff’s Office, the Supervisor of Elections, the Clerk of Courts, Fire and Rescue, Public Works and the library system each ran their own IT organisation, held their own budget, and answered to an independently elected officer. 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 programme itself was built as well as practised: 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 minimise 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 centre, 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 RationalisationReducing 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 programmes.
Applied in
Through subtopics
5 further projects reference a subtopic of this entry rather than the entry itself.
- Enterprise Architecture Practice BuildA fourteen-person architecture practice built and led, delivering against one design language rather than individual preference.
- Enterprise Multi-Tenant Firewall ArchitectureSix independently governed agencies on shared infrastructure, none able to reach, disrupt or inherit the regulatory exposure of any other.
- Annex to Main Data Centre ConsolidationMoving one data centre into another with the estate live throughout, on three design documents at revisions ten, twelve and ten.
- Consolidated CAD/911 Dispatch SystemTwo agencies with separate commands onto one dispatch platform, cutting response times from five to ten minutes down to one to two.
- Duval County Courthouse Technology ProgrammeA $12M IT programme inside a $350M, 800,000 square foot capital facility, cut over live to a fixed date.
Career
- Chief Technology Officer / Enterprise Architect Senior · City of Jacksonville
- Founder and Principal · MYT, Michael Young Technologies
- Founder and Principal Consultant · Young Tech Systems, LLC
Documents
- Enterprise Security Committee CharterThe 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 ExaminationsFour expert-track written examinations passed across eight years. These carried CCIE recertification through successive cycles — the exam record behind twenty years of maintaining #10042.
- TOGAFThe Open Group Architecture Framework — the formal vocabulary for work already being done at the City of Jacksonville.
- CCDE WrittenScheduled for October 2026 as the qualifying exam to return CCIE #10042 to active status.