Elena Kospa has spent eleven years as a CIO across two industries, and she's blunt about the pattern she sees repeated at every organization that treats architecture as an IT function rather than a leadership one: it gets funded last and blamed first.
"Nobody puts 'architecture' on a slide during a good quarter. Everybody wants to know who owns it during a bad one."
On what changed at Meridian: "We moved architecture governance into the same room where we make capital allocation decisions. Not a courtesy invite — a vote. That one change did more than any framework we adopted."
On AI specifically: "The board doesn't want an AI strategy, they want to know who's accountable when the AI is wrong in front of a patient's family. That's an architecture question wearing an AI costume."
The full conversation, including Kospa's answer to what she'd do differently starting over, is available as audio and video on The Architecture of Intelligence, Episode 008.