Selected experience
Canadian telecommunications carrier: future-state enterprise architecture and cloud migration
Major Canadian telecommunications carrier
A sprawling application estate needed a target-state architecture the C-suite would fund and delivery teams could actually execute against.
Outcomes
- Future-state architecture co-created with and signed off by the C-suite
- 100+ applications migrated to Google Cloud Platform
- 20+ engineers coordinated across concurrent workstreams
The architecture only mattered once the people funding it had argued their way to owning it.
Locate → Land → Live, retroactively, describes the shape of this work.
A major Canadian telecommunications carrier had the problem most large estates eventually reach: enough accumulated systems that no single group could describe the target state, and enough competing opinions that no proposal survived contact with the executive team. The founder worked as an Enterprise Architect and Consulting Manager through a top-five global consultancy at the time — not as A&O.
Locate meant distilling sprawling enterprise requirements into a target-state design simple enough to be argued with. That last part is the difficult one. An architecture nobody can dispute is usually one nobody has read closely enough to disagree with, and it will not survive the first budget cycle.
Land meant co-creating the future-state architecture directly with the C-suite rather than presenting it to them. The distinction matters: presented architectures get approved and ignored, while co-created ones get defended by the people who helped shape them. That buy-in is what tied the architecture decisions to business value in a way that held when trade-offs got expensive.
Live meant the migration itself — over 100 applications moved to Google Cloud Platform, with 20-plus engineers coordinated across concurrent workstreams. Migration at that scale is mostly sequencing and dependency management rather than technical novelty. The interesting decisions were about what to move first and what to deliberately leave alone.
The future-state architecture was signed off with C-suite buy-in. Over 100 applications were migrated. The delivery was strong enough to secure a signed follow-on phase.