On a Friday afternoon in December 2026, the AI architect of Nordvik Region has three documents open. The scene is illustrative. The first is the Region's AI inventory, a list with one line for each AI system: its purpose, its owner, its risk class and whether it is in pilot, in use or stopped. The second is the written mandate under which the platform team and the security architect run coding and architecture agents; for each kind of action, it says what the agents may do without asking. The third is the agreement with the unions on the rostering system for home care, which says what the system may allocate by itself and who approves every roster.
None of the three was written to draw a picture. The inventory answers "what do we have", the mandate "what may it do" and the agreement "who decided". By the end of the afternoon the architect has joined them into one file and one figure: the Region's landscape as it will stand on 1 January 2027, with eleven marks on it (Figure 14.1). Two of the eleven were on none of the three documents.
This chapter shows how to do what the architect did. The landscape model, the text file from which every figure of an organisation in this book is drawn, is filled field by field from records the organisation already keeps. Two dimensions that no record holds, reversibility and reach, are assessed, the seat is found, and what nobody knows is drawn as unknown. The claim is modest and, I think, important: a landscape is a join of records that already exist, and the places where the join fails are the first things the picture has to say.
Primary topics explored
- What an organisation already has
- From record to model
- Assessing reversibility
- Assessing reach
- Finding the seat
- Drawing the unknown
About Landscape
Landscape is a companion to The Transformed Architecture. It examines what happens when artificial intelligence takes the manager's chair: algorithmic management of direction, evaluation, consequence, development and care, the effects on people, the management of AI agents, Europe's legal answer, and how to design an accountable AI boss, for European enterprises and public authorities.
It builds on the conclusions of Architecture as Code, AI Governance, AI Platform and Security, AI Red Team, AI Threat and The Transformed Security Architect.
Executives, line managers, HR and people leaders, works councils and trade unions, public employers, architects and AI governance leads, data protection and legal officers, procurement and programme leaders, and risk, compliance and audit.
Gunnar Nordqvist
Conceived, directed and published the books of The Transformed Architecture.
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Chapter 14: The One-Page Landscape: Drawing It From What You Already Have in Landscape gives the detailed explanations, practical examples and implementation patterns behind this summary.
This whitepaper belongs to “Drawing Your Landscape” and is one of 26 drawn from the manuscript.