Rent-an-Enterprise-Architect

Rent-an-Enterprise-Architect is a fractional or interim chief architect engagement — strategic architecture leadership for organizations whose system landscape has outgrown ad-hoc governance, or whose EA seat is empty during transformation.

  flowchart LR
    A[Business strategy] --> B[Current-state]
    B --> C[Target-state]
    C --> D[Transition roadmap]
    D --> E[Governance board]
    E --> F[ADRs]
    F -.->|feedback| C
    E -.-> G[Solution-architect coaching]

When this fits

• You have 30+ business applications and nobody owns the big picture. Every new project starts by asking “what do we already have for this?”
• Your organization is growing out of its system landscape. M&A, new business lines, or just years of accretion have produced a stack that nobody fully understands.
• You are starting (or recovering) a transformation programme — ERP, IAM, cloud migration, monolith-to-services — and the architecture function is either missing or understaffed.
• You hire your first or next architect and want the role, governance, and decision rights designed before they walk in.
• Your existing EA function has become architecture astronauts producing diagrams that nobody uses. You need course correction.

What this role covers

A working EA portfolio, scoped to fractional time:

• Current-state assessment. A real picture of what is actually running, who owns it, who depends on it, and what it costs. Not the org chart’s version — the reality version.
• Target-state architecture. A grounded target-state design for the relevant time horizon (12–36 months), based on the business strategy and constrained by what is feasible to reach from here.
• Roadmap and sequencing. Concrete transition steps with business value at each milestone — not “boil the ocean” plans that nobody will fund.
• Architecture governance. Define the board structure, review cadence, escalation paths, and decision rights. A governance function that meets monthly and decides things, not quarterly and defers them.
• Architecture decision records (ADRs). Establish the practice. Decisions get written down with rationale and consequences, so successors inherit reasoning, not artefacts.
• Solution-architecture coaching. Mentor the solution architects in the organization. Quality-assure their designs before they hit implementation.
• Vendor and tooling decisions. Lead or co-lead the evaluation of major platform investments — ERP, IAM, observability, integration platforms. Independent of vendor referral interests.

Reference frameworks

We work explicitly with two reference frameworks, depending on organizational context:

• TOGAF — the de-facto standard for EA governance. Used as a toolbox where relevant: the ADM (Architecture Development Method) is genuinely useful; the rest is selectable. We will not impose the full TOGAF process on an organization that does not need it.
• Kotusev’s Best Practice Architecture — Svyatoslav Kotusev’s pragmatic alternative, grounded in what large organizations actually do versus what TOGAF claims they should. Often a better fit for organizations under 1,000 staff or with rapidly evolving business models.

We do not have a religion about which framework wins. The business reality decides.

What you get

• A named individual. No revolving-door consultancy. Your enterprise architect is your enterprise architect.
• A real current-state document within the first month — before any future-state work. You cannot design a target state without an honest baseline.
• Quarterly architecture review going to the executive team — what changed, what was decided, what is open, what we recommend funding next.
• A decision log (ADR-style) of every material architectural decision made during the engagement.
• A handover packet when the engagement ends — current state, target state, roadmap, ADR archive, governance artifacts. Your successor inherits clarity, not folklore.

What sets this apart

• Strategy + technical depth. The Pronix dual-founder structure (business + deep technical) means architecture decisions get framed in business terms without losing technical rigor.
• Operator background. We have run systems in production for decades. EA recommendations are constrained by what actually works, not what the framework suggests.
• No vendor bias. No referral fees from cloud providers, platform vendors, or consultancies. Recommendations are based on fit.
• Realistic about EA limits. Not every problem benefits from an EA function. We will tell you if your situation is too small or too volatile for EA to make sense.

Why this matters at the CEO level

• 💰 Decade-scale cost lock-in. Architecture decisions made today determine 10+ year cost trajectories. A single bad platform commitment can cost €5–15M over a decade in lock-in fees and migration costs.
• 🚧 Transformation success rate. Failed digital transformations almost always fail on architecture, not on technology choice. Programs with disciplined EA oversight have a materially higher success rate.
• 🤝 M&A integration economics. Integration costs are dominated by the quality of the EA function on the acquirer side. Acquirers without one consistently overpay for “integration synergies” that never materialize.
• 👻 Shadow IT and integration debt. Vendor selection without EA discipline produces shadow systems, duplicated capabilities, and integration debt that compounds across every subsequent project.
• 🔄 The future-migration option. “We’ll migrate off this later” only stays possible if EA discipline is in place today. Without it, every system added becomes permanent by accident.

Engagement format

• Typical duration. 6 to 24 months, renewable.
• Cadence. 2 to 6 days per month, plus workshop blocks (typically a full week per quarter for stakeholder alignment).
• Onboarding. First 4–6 weeks heavier — interviews with key stakeholders, system inventory, baseline current-state document.
• Pricing. Fixed monthly retainer based on agreed cadence. Workshop-block weeks priced separately.
• Geographic. Remote-first. Onsite blocks for workshops and key reviews.

Reach out and we will scope what fractional-EA coverage your organization actually needs.