Field Notes

Standalone architecture briefs on the problems that don't fit a series — the models, taxonomies, and trade-offs enterprise architects are actually asked to defend. Each note ships as an infographic, a deep-dive PDF you can hand to your team, and a checklist, in the same vendor-neutral spirit as the rest of this site.

By Tom Ward, Enterprise Architect — Cloud & Infrastructure

• EA Practice· 2026-07-23 PDF

  You Can't Consolidate What You Can't Compare

  Acquire five banks and you inherit five of everything — five payment platforms, five correspondent networks, duplicated party and account data — and no way to compare them, because every bank describes its systems differently. Map every institution onto one shared, MECE industry blueprint and three things that were invisible finally surface: Duplication, Gaps, and Misalignment. Drawn from The Open Group and BIAN's Archi Banking Group case study.

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• Operating Models· 2026-07-23 PDF

  What Is a Digital Product?

  Ask ten leaders what a “digital product” is and you'll get ten answers — Gartner says executives agonize over the definition. But you can't fund, own, or retire what you can't define. A rigorous definition and a five-part anatomy — Service Offer, Contract, Instance, System, and the other products it depends on — plus the four operating moves the precision unlocks once you can finally say what a product actually is.

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• EA Practice· 2026-07-23 PDF

  Start With Purpose

  Most Enterprise Architecture practices don't fail at architecture — they fail at purpose, and get rebooted. The Open Group's own leaders' guide calls the reboot the most common EA practice in industry. A working guide to the four purposes of an EA Capability, the four death traps that trigger a reboot, and the one question the survivors answer before they draw a single diagram: what is this architecture actually for?

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• IT Economics· 2026-07-23 PDF

  Three Views. One Dollar.

  Finance sees a GL account, IT sees a Linux server, and the business asks what it costs to originate a loan — the same dollar in three languages. A working guide to the TBM Unified Model: the four-layer cost taxonomy, the allocation ladder that decides whether anyone believes your numbers, and the configure-versus-customize trap that quietly costs organizations their benchmark alignment.

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