Reference Architecture
A pre-approved, documented template for a recurring class of solution, so that similar problems do not get individually redesigned.
Every organisation solves the same handful of shapes repeatedly: a public web application, an internal API, a batch data pipeline, an event-driven integration. A reference architecture makes the good version of each the default — with the security, observability and deployment decisions already made and already approved.
The return is in delivery speed and in reduced governance load, because a solution that conforms needs far less review.
They rot faster than any other architectural artefact. A reference architecture nobody has updated in two years is actively harmful — teams follow it, inherit obsolete choices, and lose trust in the whole idea. Give each one an owner, a review date, and ideally a working implementation, since a template that can be generated is used and a document that must be transcribed is not.