What about limiting ORM masochism and making applications interact nicely through the kind of "data access layer" the article discusses?
In my opinion what you suggest would be a good solution... But try to pass that by mos. Manager for which (in most companies) we are already late to compleate the newly received feature/requirement
A sound architecture (admittedly unlikely) would help the kind of incompetent organization you allude to to maintain order and fail later.