I am a business owner, Enterprise Architect, father, husband, glider pilot, photographer and general grumpy old git.  For over three decades, I’ve built Small Businesses, and specialised in Enterprise Architecture and corporate business consulting. My fascination with computers started in high school, programming Fortran on punch cards.
If you look at my formal track record, it reads exactly how you’d expect. A lot of Building businesses, Corporate consultancy, managing complex financial services projects, large-scale digital transformations, operating professional entities across South and Sub-Saharan Africa and the some projects in the UK and Oceania.  In IT continuous learning, is a fact of life, which I enjoy.  I recently completing an MSc in Digital Business with Salford University. All aligned to my lifelong interest in driving business innovation bridging technology and business 
But if we are being completely honest much of the traditional corporate approach to digital transformation is fundamentally broken. It focusses on IT Transformation, and complexity, and lack of co-ordination across domains often make it slow and disjointed.  

The Corporate Trap vs. Architectural Reality
For years, I’ve watched (and helped) massive organizations throw vast resources at legacy platforms and proprietary ecosystems. Sometimes I was lucky enough to work in spin-offs creating true innovation, like KCB Vooma. But generally big organisations approach most digital transformation from a cost saving perspective, addressing delivery times, processes, and a control over data first. They become trapped by the very systems that were supposed to liberate them. Those that escape this, usually take a formal approach to design, implementing some kind of Enterprise Architecture, or Design Driven approach. Even then, most of my work with bigger customers amounts to Technology Transformation , not real Digital Business.  
I realized that the standard playbook wasn’t working. True business agility, and digital capability doesn’t come from buying the most expensive enterprise software on the market; it comes from changing ways of work, and business models and real relationships designed using rational, critical thinking and architectural sovereignty. Artificial Intelligence, and Cloud and Everything as a service transforms what is possible, making capabilities freely available to individuals and small businesses that were once only available to the largest of enterprises. So the Way of Work, and the business models of transformation of the emerging Digital Economy.  The differentiator is no longer what you can do, because AI and the internet enabled service ecosystem makes the cost of entry so low. Increasingly, the only real asset a business will have is it’s community of customers, partners and suppliers.  
That realization informs everything about how I consult, build, and teach.
Simplicity (And Why it Matters to You)
Flying and maintaining sailplanes has taught me an interesting lesson. Gliders are remarkable machines, often with very sophisticated software in the cockpit, but structurally, and functionally, there is noting that does not have to be there.  Simplicity really is the pinnacle of sophistication. When there is nothing left to remove, you have the essence of the thing, the most efficient machine. This applies to any system really designing an enterprise architecture framework for a banking institution, or a solopreneur, the core philosophy is exactly the same. 

You have to understand the underlying mechanics if you want to optimize the machine.
Today, through my consulting firm, and in this Digital Micro-enterprise, I advocate for an holistic and minimalist approach to digital business architecture.
I won’t advocate bloated corporate software or hype driven marketing fads. Instead, businesses need to design and implement sovereign stacks—leveraging powerful platforms, and open-source ecosystems .
In the consulting world – we apply structured, proven frameworks like TOGAF and the Banking Industry Architecture Reference Model (BIAN), or the Higher Education Reference Model (HERM) and theories like Diffusion of Innovation (DOI), to support Digital transformation. I show organisations how to accelerate change, maintain absolute data control, and build high-leverage technology systems that they actually own using these. However, as the internet enabled digital ecosystem develops, the ability to do the same things, and innovate in ways that scale prevents in the larger organisations, means that the economic benefits will tend to favour smaller organisations. When I looked at the SME world, there seems to be a lack of this kind of structured approach.  
Why and for whom?
I enjoy learning and sharing. While studying for my MSc in Digital Business at Salford, I set up this site to host some academic work. But seeing the engagement, I decided to expand it into an information resource and newsletter to also cover the practice of Digital Business. Specifically for smaller businesses where the same theory is applied in different, and in many cases, more interesting ways. 
If you want to understand how to structure a business architecture that scales, maintains sovereignty, and delivers genuine velocity, you might be in the right place to get some value.
You are invited to follow along as I take an Architectural approach to learning and applying the theory to a micro-enterprise, by building this into a Digital Business. 

Welcome to Bruce’s Guide.