About Governed Objects

I'm Eric Brafford, founder of Brafford Labs and creator of Governed Objects.

My background is somewhat unconventional for someone developing an enterprise architecture specification. I've spent more than 20 years working across business strategy, operations, analytics, and technology—often bridging the gap between what business leaders need and how technology actually delivers it.

That experience has shaped how I think about enterprise systems. I've seen firsthand how tightly business information, rules, and processes become coupled to individual applications, making it difficult for organizations to maintain consistency, adapt to change, and retain control over their own business logic.

Governed Objects grew out of a fundamental question: What if business objects, rather than applications, were the center of enterprise architecture?

Through Brafford Labs, I'm developing an open specification and reference implementation to explore that idea. The goal isn't simply to introduce another technology framework, but to investigate whether we can establish a more durable foundation for business systems—one that preserves organizational control while allowing applications, providers, and AI agents to evolve independently.

This is an emerging project, and there are meaningful architectural and implementation challenges to work through. I'm interested in connecting with people who bring different perspectives, whether in enterprise architecture, software engineering, data governance, AI, or business operations.

I welcome thoughtful criticism, technical discussion, and potential collaboration. The objective is to develop something useful, and I believe the strongest ideas improve when they're challenged.