Enterprise architect and author Lisa Woodall challenges technology leaders to look beyond systems and rediscover the people behind them.

I was invited to do a keynote speaker event for ING the bank, in Amsterdam. It was a gathering of enterprise architects, they expected the familiar language of systems, frameworks and technical roadmaps. Instead, they were asked to consider something far simpler.

“What’s it like to be human?”

That was the question I posed as I opened a keynote to more than two hundred technology professionals. My message was direct. For all the advances in digital systems, enterprise architects may have lost sight of the people those systems are meant to serve.

“We woke up human, and then we turned technical.”

My career spans nearly three decades of large-scale organisational change, I used the talk to reflect on how the discipline of enterprise architecture has evolved alongside major waves of technological change. From mainframe computing and early data warehousing through to the outsourcing boom of the early 2000s, and now the rise of artificial intelligence, architects have been central to how organisations transform their operations.

I suggested, the profession’s focus on systems and infrastructure has sometimes overshadowed a deeper question.

“What is technology really for?”

I began my career in the 1990s as a business analyst at an insurance company operating largely on mainframe systems developed in the 1970s. Much of the organisation’s work was still manual. Only a small proportion of processes had been digitised.

As new technologies emerged, teams were tasked with transforming the IT landscape and introducing new systems across the business. Looking back, I believe those early roles were already part of enterprise architecture, even if the job title did not yet exist.

Over the following decade, I worked through major organisational changes, including mergers that nearly doubled the size of the workforce and expanded the company’s IT estate across dozens of locations.

“We had multiple commercial systems, multiple personal lines systems, and the dreaded multiple finance systems,”

The work involved consolidating platforms, standardising processes and automating operations.

But it also required shaping how the organisation itself functioned.

That realisation became clearer as outsourcing and offshoring trends gathered pace. I described a period when physical paperwork was shipped overseas to be re-entered into systems by teams thousands of miles away.

“It wasn’t just about shaping systems, it was about shaping the business.”

Later roles in public sector mapping services and global media organisations I was to a very different environment. In highly creative and fast-moving businesses, technology discussions. increasingly centred on how digital tools affected colleagues and customers, rather than simply technical integrity.

Those experiences led me to a broader conclusion about transformation.

“Being human and honest really matters.”

During the talk I outlined several major shifts that organisations have navigated in recent decades. The millennium bug at the turn of the century forced companies to rework critical systems to avoid potential failure. The rise of the internet pushed organisations to open internal processes to customers through digital services. The COVID-19 pandemic compressed years of remote working transformation into a matter of weeks.

Each of these moments, was framed primarily as a technical challenge. Yet each also carried a profound human impact.

Today, I believe the same dynamic is emerging with artificial intelligence.

“Much of what we read about AI is about eliminating the human, but what if we thought about digital intelligence as empowering people to contribute more, to be more creative and help businesses grow?”

The most striking example I shared came from an exercise I conducted with technology leaders at a previous conference. Participants were asked to estimate how satisfied employees and customers were with their IT services.

Most believed the answer was between three and four out of five, consistent with the metrics reported on corporate dashboards.

When asked how those same people felt about the services they used, the reaction was more neutral. And when the conversation turned to what colleagues might say informally, around a dinner table or water cooler, the consensus shifted further still.

The most common description was a single word.

“Meh.”

The contrast highlighted a gap between formal performance metrics and everyday experience.

“If we’re designing systems believing we’re moving from three to four, that’s a very different problem from designing for a world where people actually feel ‘meh’.”

To bridge that gap, I urged the architects to spend more time observing how technology is used in practice. Instead of relying solely on requirements documents or workshop feedback, leaders should watch how employees interact with systems during their daily work.

Even occasional observation, can change how architects think about the systems they design.

I framed this perspective as part of a broader approach to transformation built around five themes: reflecting on inherited patterns, reimagining the future collectively, reframing complex challenges, rewiring the operating core of organisations, and reconnecting with the people affected by change.

“Transformation sticks when people do,”

The talk ended with a discussion about the future of the architecture profession itself. Some in the audience questioned whether the term “enterprise architecture” still captured the breadth of what the discipline now involves.

I acknowledged the debate but said I still values the title after many years in the field. Yet I also see a shift underway toward a broader concept of enterprise design, bringing together strategy, service design and technology.

Whatever the label, the role remains central to how organisations evolve.

“Enterprise architects aren’t just drawing diagrams, They’re drawing the connective tissue of change.”

And if the next era of transformation is to succeed, architects may need to look beyond systems and frameworks to something far more fundamental.

Remembering that the people building those systems, and the people using them, started out the same way.

Human.

Whatever next?