150 assessments
150 technologies across 5 industries, each placed in Adopt, Trial, Assess or Hold with a written brief explaining the call, the signals behind it, and what would move it.
Practice
Enterprise architecture, as instruments.
Most architecture functions produce documents. The ones that change anything produce instruments — repeatable things that make decisions faster, more consistent, and defensible six months later when nobody remembers the meeting.
These are three of mine, built and published in full. Not slideware about the art of the possible — working instruments with the method, the weights and the decision rules open to inspection, because a framework you cannot audit is just an opinion with a diagram.
Scout · Decide · Govern
They chain. The radar supplies the technology positions that NEXA weighs and that EARB tests submissions against. A NEXA verdict becomes evidence in a board paper. AI Governance picks up where the others stop, because AI systems keep changing after approval. One estate view, four decision points.
6 dimensions
A vendor, product or capability gap scored across 6 weighted dimensions against a bar set by the size of the commitment. Four verdicts, the reasoning, and the single thing that would change it.
10 readiness criteria
Triage so that only the right things reach a board, 10 readiness criteria so submissions are reviewable, six decision outcomes instead of two, and the questions the board will actually ask.
Assure
AI Governance — intake, accountability, responsible AI
What actually attaches to this AI use case?
Ten classification dimensions and published triage rules returning the review lane, the assessment modules, the generative and agentic overlays, and — the part most intake processes omit — the obligations you are required to produce. 9 control themes mapped across the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001 and the OECD principles.
Why this, rather than more documents
Technical debt is rarely created by one bad decision. It accumulates through many reasonable ones taken without anybody asking what they duplicate, what they replace, or what it would cost to reverse them. By the time it is visible on a balance sheet, the people who made those choices have moved on and the reasoning is gone.
The same is true of application rationalisation. Estates do not become sprawling because somebody decided they should; they sprawl because nothing in the process ever required a new thing to displace an old one.
Instruments fix this at the only point where it is cheap — before the commitment. Ask what this duplicates. Ask what gets switched off. Ask what it costs to walk away. Ask the same questions every time, write down the answers, and the estate stops accumulating decisions nobody can explain.
None of that requires a transformation programme. It requires asking a consistent set of questions and recording the answers — which is all any of these three actually do.
Common questions
- How does enterprise architecture reduce technical debt?
- Technical debt accumulates one unexamined decision at a time. It is rarely created by a single bad choice; it is created by many reasonable choices made without anyone asking what they duplicate, what they replace, or what it costs to reverse them. Architecture reduces debt by putting those three questions in front of every decision, consistently, before the commitment rather than after — and by making the answers a matter of record rather than memory.
- What is the difference between an architecture framework and an architecture instrument?
- A framework describes how to think. An instrument is something you actually use on a Tuesday afternoon to reach a decision faster and more consistently than you would have alone. Frameworks are taught; instruments are operated. Most architecture functions have plenty of the first and almost none of the second, which is why their output is documents rather than decisions.
- What is application rationalisation, and where does it fit?
- Application rationalisation is the disciplined reduction of an existing estate — retiring, consolidating and replacing what is already running. It is the counterpart to scouting, deciding and governing new technology, and it is usually where the largest and most measurable savings sit, because the estate you already own is where the cost actually is.
- Are these instruments free to use?
- Yes. Every method is published in full, including the weights, the scoring rules and the decision bands, and each is available as machine-readable JSON. They are free to adopt, adapt or argue with, with attribution. Nothing requires an account and nothing you enter leaves your browser.
Next
Application rationalisation
All three instruments above look forward, at things you might add. The estate you already run is where the debt actually lives, and where the measurable savings are. That is the fourth instrument, and it is in progress.