Fanish Shukla

Enterprise and Solution Architect with 20+ years in aviation, banking, and insurance. Specialized in cloud-native transformation, integration architecture, and AI-driven governance. TOGAF and Azure certified.

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I’m an Enterprise and Solution Architect based in Zürich, and this page is less about where I’ve worked and more about what actually keeps me interested in this field after 20+ years in it.

What Draws Me to Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture, done well, is one of the few disciplines that sits at the real intersection of business strategy and working technology. I’m drawn to the moments where a messy, ambiguous business problem gets translated into a model that both a CFO and a backend engineer can look at and agree on. That’s the craft: not producing diagrams for their own sake, but building shared understanding that survives contact with a real system in production.

ArchiMate specifically has become a language I think in, not just a notation I apply. Business, Application, and Technology layers mapping cleanly onto each other is deeply satisfying in a way that’s hard to explain to people outside this field — but if you’ve ever watched a stakeholder finally see how their process depends on a system three layers down, you know exactly what I mean.

Where My Curiosity Goes Next

I’ve spent recent years pulled toward a few specific areas:

  • Governed cloud-native transformation — not “lift and shift,” but genuinely rethinking platform expectations for Azure/AKS environments so applications are designed for resilience from day one, not patched into it later.
  • Integration architecture as a discipline, not an afterthought — moving organisations away from brittle point-to-point dependencies toward event-driven, API-first patterns that can actually evolve.
  • Observability as an architectural concern, not just an operations one — designing systems so that health, performance, and failure points are visible by design.
  • Architecture in regulated, safety-critical environments — aviation and financial services both demand a kind of rigor that keeps the work honest; there’s no room for a diagram that quietly doesn’t match reality.
  • How AI agents change architecture governance — I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to make architectural decisions machine-readable and enforceable, not just documented, now that a growing share of code is written by agents rather than humans. It’s part of why I write here.

Core Competencies

Enterprise Architecture · IT Strategy & Governance · Solution Architecture · Cloud Transformation · Integration Architecture · Stakeholder Management · Global R&D Leadership · Risk & Compliance · Agile / SAFe · DevOps & CI/CD

Tools & Technologies I Work With

Cloud: Azure, AWS, GCP, AKS Integration: MuleSoft, Kafka, APIs Security: Entra ID, ISO 27001 Observability: Prometheus, ITOC Architecture Tools: LeanIX, ArchiMate, ServiceNow DevOps: Azure DevOps, Kubernetes Frameworks: TOGAF, ITIL, COBIT

Certifications

  • SAP LeanIX EA Practitioner L2 (2024)
  • ISO/IEC 27001 Associate™
  • TOGAF 9.1, The Open Group
  • Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect
  • Enterprise Design Thinking – AI
  • PRINCE2 Practitioner, AXELOS

Languages

English (C2 — Native) · German (B2)

Outside the Architecture Board Room

Most of what I write on this blog comes directly from problems I’ve actually run into — mapping ArchiMate concepts to aviation operations, or figuring out how architecture governance needs to change now that AI agents write a growing share of production code. If any of that overlaps with what you’re working on, I’d enjoy the conversation — my contact details are in the sidebar.