Stable information Systems in Times of Change
Not so long ago, the advance of Information Technology (IT) appeared to be the result of the cummulative impact of tiny incremental improvements. But looking back on the long history of IT a different pattern emerges. We see periods of stability built on a family of technologies punctuated by brief periods of dramatic change, followed by another period of stability elevated to a new family of technologies. Punched cards gave way to green screens, which in turn gave way to personal computers, fat clients, web browsers, digital devices, IOT, and cloud computing. At every stage in the progression of IT, an entire ecosystem rapidly evolved with new products displacing their precursors in their respective niches. We are currently on the tail end of one of those periods of rapid change, as we see AI technologies rapidly filling gaps in nearly every aspect of our IT ecosystems.
With each generation of technology many things remain the same. Computers are still valued for speed, reliability, and accuracy. And the core challenges remain the same:
- Creating a user experiance that enables users to easily do things correctly while making it impossible to do them wrong
- Protecting the information you hold in trust from inapropriate use
- A business domain event model that drives downstream processes within and beyond the domain
- A data and API architecture that is intuitive, yet flexible and open ended
- A security solution that is simple to implement provides transparency and accountability while protecting sensitive information and processes
- Short cycle times for delivering major new functional capabilities without breaking
- And more
Meeting these challenges is our mission, and we consistently deliver innovative and excellent information systems in a field where over seventy percent of projects fail, with the larger and more complex projects being more likely to fail. For example, one customer was struggling to align their global manufacturing with market demand. They were making more of many products than the market wanted and less of the products it wanted. Yet, their sales forecasts were very close to actual market demand. Our solution: drive production from the sales forecast by linking corporate, business division, shop floor, sales, and distribution systems in a seamless flow of business information and events.
Our Values
Software should be intuitive for the intended user, It shpould be easy to use correctly and impossible to use incorrectly.
Software development should be a collaborative activity with the business user defining the why, business case for the software, what it should accomplish, and when the implementation should take place. The software architect determines how the software will accomplish the objectives of the business.
Defining the personas interacting with the system is tightly coupled to the solution design and requires the architect to work closely with the business team. A new system often presents an opportunity to improve business performance, consistency, and resilienc by refactoring of business processes and the organization supporting them to take advantage of advances in technology and improved system design. New software should not default to simply plugging into the business processes and personas as-is.
Downstream actions should be driven by business events and should not require additional action on the part of the user to initiate downstrem processes.
An event may be fired by a business calendar cycle, but calendars and schedules should only drive downstream processes that are driven by the business cycle.
Data should be complete and organized in a way that a user can interpret the data without the aid of application code that is filling in missing context.
Data structures should be open ended, allowing for arbitrarily large sets of dependent entities within a data aggregate.
Meet the team
Harry Townsend
Technical Architect
How can we help you?
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