“Have I seen any building you’ve designed?”

I’ve been asked this more times than I can count. At dinners, weddings, the occasional barbecue. The best one was a few years ago, when I was viewing a house I was thinking of buying. The seller caught wind I was an architect and brightened up considerably, clearly assuming I’d be drawing up the renovation myself. I had to disappoint him. Not that kind of architect.

So what kind, then?

The title on my contract says Senior Cloud Architect. In practice, a good chunk of my work looks like Enterprise Architecture: the kind that involves business capability maps, target operating models, and long conversations about what a company actually wants to be in five years, not just which platform it runs on next quarter. I’m TOGAF certified, for what that’s worth, and the reason I’m not called an Enterprise Architect is simply that my current company’s operating model doesn’t include the title. Titles lag reality. Most architects will tell you the same.

A bit of the arc, so it’s clear where I’m writing from: twenty-six years in IT, eight of them in architecture. The rest was spent as a system administrator, then a system engineer, then a system architect. I’ve touched the racks, owned the tickets, stayed up for the migrations, and later sat in the rooms where those decisions get made. That blend matters, I think. It’s hard to draw a reference architecture that survives contact with production if you’ve never been the one called at 3 a.m. to fix it. On Easter Sunday.

This blog is where I’ll write about the things I spend my days thinking about, and occasionally arguing about. Broadly, five areas:

• Sovereignty. Data sovereignty, digital sovereignty, AI sovereignty. What it actually means in Europe and specifically in Switzerland, what’s regulation and what’s marketing, and how to tell the two apart.
• Cloud. Best practices, reference architectures, and the quietly uncomfortable trade-offs that rarely make it into vendor slides.
• AI. Less hype, more architecture. How organisations should think about it, plug it in, and keep it accountable.
• Market analysis and trends. What’s moving, who’s moving it, and why incumbents keep surprising themselves.
• Enterprise Architecture in a world of AI. The discipline is changing faster than its frameworks. Worth paying attention to.

If you’re on the technical side, I’ll try not to waste your time with over-simplifications. If you’re on the business side, I’ll try not to lose you in acronyms. The goal is the middle ground where most real decisions actually are made: informed enough to be useful, plain enough to be read.

I’ll post when I have something worth saying. No content calendar, no themes-of-the-month. Just the sort of observations I wish someone had written down for me earlier in my career, and the ones I’m still working out.

Welcome to Not That Kind of Architect. Thanks for being here.

Panos