The Organisation as Code

Guest speaker: Chris Barlow! Chris Barlow | LinkedIn
Chris is currently Architecture Practice Manager at MSD as well as Regional Ambassador for Agentics NZ.
Chris' approach combines architecture practitioner depth with entrepreneurial and innovative flair. This should be a fascinating session - join us for a lively discussion and the usual opportunity to network with fellow tech strategists!

Today's orgs mostly run on knowledge in people's heads, diagrams that go out of date and approval steps designed for a different pace.

While technology is changing faster than at any point in our careers, the slow part is no longer doing the work. The bottleneck shifted to the edges. The work itself is fast; deciding what to do and signing off what was done or not, and most organisations aren't built to speed up either end.

The roles are blurring too. Engineering, design, product and analysis are collapsing into each other as everyone works with agents. Almost nobody is planning for what that means, and we need to rethink what architecture is for when the work no longer divides up the way our org charts assume.

I would rather show something working than describe it, so I've been using my own projects as a test bed. I hold an organisation as a live model rather than a set of diagrams. I capture the facts once and let the approval documents write themselves. Our local Agentics NZ community demonstrated a distributed swarm infrastructure that proved maths theorems at scale with nothing behind it but a git repository.

In this talk I'll share what those experiments have taught me, what they mean for how organisations need to change, and where that leaves the role of architecture.