Paul Preiss
CEO & Founder of Iasa
Paul Preiss is the CEO and Founder of the Iasa, one of the largest Enterprise and IT architect associations in the world. Through his time at Iasa, Paul has taken the association from a single user group in Austin Tx to an international organization with chapters in over 25 countries. Paul's vision is a unified architecture profession with effective education, credentials and ethics which fully supports corporate strategy and delivery. He is a tireless advocate for the field and speaks on topics ranging form architecture ethics to best the best setup and structure for architecture teams. Paul has spoken at hundreds of events as well as held conferences and training for architects all over the world. He is an expert software and enterprise architect in practice and continues to work with companies on optimizing their technology strategy.
Prior to developing Iasa, Paul was the chief architect for Dell Pan Asia where he helped to integrate the technology strategy across 14 countries. He also served as the chief architect for the Sears point of sale replacement in North America consisting of 2000 stores and thousands of suppliers as well as the chief architect for a digital asset management firm, Ancept.
Presentations
CoDL and CaDL: Architecture Description Languages for Governance and LLM
Wednesday, 3:15 PM EST
Most architecture documentation lives in slide decks and wikis — formats that humans struggle to act on and LLMs can't reason over reliably. This talk introduces CoDL (Constraints Description Language) and CaDL (Capabilities Description Language) as lightweight, structured notations for expressing architecture in a form that both governance processes and AI tooling can consume. Drawing on the BTABoK's Architecture Description competency — which emphasises producing structured, stakeholder-relevant, and traceable representations of systems — the session shows how formalising architectural intent into machine-readable schemas unlocks new possibilities: automated compliance checks, LLM-driven design critiques, and governance workflows that run without manual chasing.
Attendees leave with a working mental model of what these languages look like, where they slot into everyday architecture work, and why getting the notation right is the prerequisite for everything else in the AI-assisted architecture stack.
Relating Business Model, Product Features, and Fitness Functions
Wednesday, 5:00 PM EST
Architecture too often floats free of the business model that funds it, producing technically coherent systems that fail to deliver the outcomes that actually matter. This talk builds a full, traceable chain from business model canvas — how the organisation creates and captures value — through product feature decisions, down to the fitness functions and quality attributes that determine whether the system can actually support those features at scale. Using BTABoK's Business Model and Product & Project concepts as the foundation, the session demonstrates how each layer constrains and informs the next: a subscription revenue model demands very different availability and onboarding characteristics than a transactional one, and those differences must propagate into explicit architectural decisions, not just intuition.
Attendees get a hands-on framework for doing this analysis on their own products, making the invisible architecture of their business model visible and actionable.
Automating Designs: A Basis for LLM-Based Design Loops with BTABoK CLI/MCP
Thursday, 9:00 AM EST
LLMs are already being used to generate code, but using them to generate and validate architecture is a fundamentally harder and more interesting problem. This talk introduces a practical approach to LLM-based design loops built on the BTABoK CLI and MCP (Model Context Protocol), where structured architecture artefacts — canvases, decisions, fitness functions — become the inputs and outputs of iterative AI-assisted design cycles. Rather than asking an LLM to freeform a system design, the loop grounds generation in BTABoK schemas, validates outputs against CoDL/CaDL constraints, and surfaces gaps for human review.
Drawing on BTABoK's Design concept — architecture as deliberate, constraint-aware shaping of solutions — the session is honest about where LLMs add genuine leverage (option generation, consistency checking, documentation) and where human judgement remains essential (trade-off resolution, stakeholder alignment, ethical constraints). Attendees leave with a concrete architecture for building their own design loop, not just a demo.
The Three Types of Architecture Decisions
Thursday, 11:00 AM EST
The Architecture Decision Record has become a staple of modern architecture practice, but most teams treat all decisions the same way — and pay for it later in rework, confusion, and decisions that quietly rot. This talk makes the case that architecturally significant decisions fall into at least three distinct categories — structural decisions that shape the system's fundamental form, cross-cutting decisions that enforce constraints across components, and local decisions that make sense only in narrow context — each requiring different levels of rigour, different audiences, and different lifecycle management. Grounded in the BTABoK's Decisions concept, which frames decision-making as a core architecture artefact rather than a byproduct of design, the session gives practitioners a practical classification model they can apply immediately.
You'll walk away knowing which decisions deserve a full ADR, which need something lighter, and which ones are silently doing the most damage when they go unrecorded.