About us
# Welcome to Architecting for Innovation
Architecting for Innovation started as an offshoot of the Australasian Architecture Network Group on LinkedIn — originally just a handful of Enterprise and Solution Architects meeting at the pub for a few beers and a chat.
Since then, we've grown into a community running regular meet-ups — predominantly online these days, with occasional in-person events in capital cities. Our topics have evolved over the years, but they've always carried an architecture undertone with an eye on innovation.
## Past meet-up topics
- Who Needs Data Architecture Anyway?
- Architecting Intelligent Enterprises
- Business Capability Modelling — Creating a Performance Framework
- A Journey into Enterprise Architecture
- Architecting for Governance at Scale
- How Architectures Fail, and What to Do About It
- Databricks Delta Lake Deep Dive & Roadmap
- Digital Transformation in Banking
- Customer 360
- EA for Digital — Digital for EA
- CQRS and Event Sourcing
- The Future of Data in a Hybrid/Multi-Cloud Environment
- Practical Mechanisms to Align Business Architecture with Technology Architecture
- Making Sense of Data-Driven Architecture
- Modern Data Pipelines with Kafka and MongoDB
- Salesforce/MuleSoft with Telstra Track & Monitor
- Are You Well-Architected?
- Leadership, AR and (A|V|M) Crime
- Kafka with MongoDB and Confluent
- The CIO and the Start-up Founder
- Modern Apps in a Microservices Age
- Internet of Things in the Property Market (IoT in PropTech)
- Creating a Strategic Enterprise Architecture — From Noisy to Influential
- Building a Sustainable Open Source Ecosystem
- Unveiling the Sydney IoT Landscape
- A Pragmatic Approach to Microservices and Cell-Based Architecture
- Open Source Technology in an Open Architecture World
- Product Across NPP and Cyber-Security in the Global Payments Landscape
- FinTech Sydney — Start-up to Enterprise
- Disruptive Innovation
- FinTech
- IoT Security
- Attracting and Retaining Architects
- DevOps
- Wearable Devices and the Internet of Things
- Predicting the Future of Cloud
- Tom Graves Masterclass
## What we offer
We work hard to bring value to our community through:
- Access to relevant market intelligence and networking opportunities
- Thought leadership events hosted by and for the industry
- Exciting job opportunities from great companies
Our focus spans the broader technology and digital landscape, always with an eye on innovation and disruption.
Interested in joining a panel for an upcoming meet-up? Get in touch — we'd love to have you.
Thanks, Andrew Blades
LinkedIn · [Andrew@TheBridgeSearch.com](mailto:Andrew@TheBridgeSearch.com) · [www.TheBridgeSearch.com](http://www.thebridgesearch.com/)
Upcoming events
2
From Collins Diary to Agentforce: How The Grout Guy Architected a Trade Business
·OnlineOnlineArchitecting for Innovation — Lunch & Learn #88
From Collins Diary to Agentforce: How The Grout Guy Architected a Trade Business for the AI Era
Grout Force One has landed back home. ✈️🇦🇺
Fresh off the Dreamforce stage in San Francisco, with a 2026 Salesforce Customer Success Award in the carry-on, CEO Brad Young and CTO Anthony Messina from The Grout Guy are joining us to lift the tiles on one of the great Australian tech stories you’ve probably never heard of.
It started with one man, one van, one very specific obsession with grout… and a Collins diary.
Today it’s 150 techs, 50,000+ jobs a year, and a multi-agent system that does the admin the diary used to.
Emailed work orders that used to take two days to process now take two minutes. Agents reviewing photos of mouldy showers helps push a quote out in minutes, not days. One admin used to look after four techs; now it’s 25+. And the business is growing 40% year on year.
No big bank. No telco. No army of architects. Just a trade business that worked out the data had to be sorted before the AI could get clever, then went and built it.
We’ll get into:
- The foundations — what had to be unified before a single agent was worth switching on
- The agent crew — how their multi-agent system handles scheduling, quoting, lead management and tech prep, and where the humans stay in the loop
- The build vs buy call — what they bought, what they built, what they partnered on, and what they’d do differently
- The plot twist — why the system they built for themselves is now a product (Servly) for other tradies, and what that did to the architecture
- The scar tissue — the lessons learnt along the way, what they’d tell anyone starting the same journey, and what they’d never do again
The format: Less keynote, more yarn over the back fence. Brad and Anthony will walk us through what they built, how it fits together, and the lessons they learnt the hard way, including the bits that didn’t work the first time. Anthony will sketch the architecture, warts and all, and Brad will tell us what it looked like from the tools side. Bring your hardest questions. They can take it.
About the Speakers
Brad Young — CEO (and self-appointed Chief Grout Officer), The Grout Guy
Brad Young is founder, CEO and self-appointed Chief Grout Officer of The Grout Guy, which he's grown into a national tile and grout restoration business. He's the co-founder of Servly, which brings TGG's Salesforce-based operating model to other Australian trade and field service businesses. TGG won a Salesforce Customer Success Award at Dreamforce 2026, and Brad is a 2024 Business News 40under40 winner. Based in Perth.Anthony Messina — CTO, The Grout Guy
Anthony Messina is CTO of The Grout Guy and co-founder and CTO of Servly. He led the design of TGG's 'agentic tradie', the multi-agent system that handles scheduling, quoting, lead management and tech prep on top of its Salesforce platform.
Servly now takes that same operator-built approach to other Australian trade and field service businesses. Based in Perth.MC
Andrew Blades
Principal – The Bridge Search
Founder – Architecting for InnovationFrom leaking showers to the big stage and back to your lunch break. Let’s go!
Wednesday, 28 October
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM AEDT | 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM AWST (online, with overrun)37 attendees
AI Governance for Enterprise Architecture. Lunch & Learn #89
·OnlineOnlineArchitecting for Innovation — Lunch & Learn #89
AI Governance for Enterprise Architecture: From Governing Systems to Governing Intelligence
Your governance framework was built for systems that do what they're told.
Most IT governance still rests on a few comfortable assumptions: systems are deterministic, change happens on a release schedule, risks are predictable, and a human is always holding the wheel.AI didn't get the memo.
Models drift. Agents act on their own. Prompts get manipulated. Data turns up with no clear provenance, and AI tools multiply across the business faster than anyone can register them. The old controls weren't designed for any of it.
Devendra Nambiar, former CTO, CIO and Chief Enterprise Architect and a member of the National AI Centre's AI Technical and Delivery Councils, joins us to make the case that Enterprise Architecture has to evolve, from governing technology assets to governing organisational intelligence.
And he'll show us how.
We'll get into:
- The gap — why conventional IT governance can't handle model drift, bias, autonomous actions, prompt manipulation, data provenance and uncontrolled AI proliferation
- The new domains — model architecture, data provenance, prompt and agent architecture, behavioural architecture, and AI governance controls, and how they fit together as an intelligence governance capability
- The roadmap — assessing AI readiness, standing up governance frameworks and operating models, and designing oversight that actually works
- The end game — keeping AI systems trustworthy, accountable, safe and aligned to your organisation's values and objectives
- The big question — how do you govern intelligence itself when machines become participants in decision-making?
The format: Devendra will walk us through the framework, drawing on his forthcoming book The Fourth Horizon of Intelligence. The book asks how we govern intelligence in an AI-enabled world; this session is about how you make that work inside a real enterprise on a Monday morning. Then it's over to you for Q&A. Bring your hardest questions.
About the Speaker
Devendra Nambiar MBA, MIEE, MAICD — Technology, Cyber Security & AI Governance Executive; Author, The Fourth Horizon of Intelligence
Devendra has more than 25 years of leadership experience across government, defence, higher education and highly regulated industries.He has served as CTO, Chief Enterprise Architect, CIO, and Director of Strategy, Architecture, Security, Risk and Compliance, leading large-scale transformation, cyber security programs, AI governance frameworks and enterprise modernisation.
He's been recognised by Microsoft and Australia's National AI Centre for his contributions to AI strategy, innovation and governance, and today helps organisations build trusted, ethical, resilient and accountable AI governance capabilities.
MC
Andrew Blades
Principal – The Bridge Search
Founder – Architecting for InnovationThe machines have joined the meeting. Time to work out who's chairing it. See you there!
Wednesday, 18 November
12:30 PM – 2:00 PM AEDT | 9:30 AM – 11:00 AM AWST (online, with overrun)18 attendees
Past events
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