Your company runs by moving data around. Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Custom reports. Home-grown internal applications and web interfaces. Python scripts. Third-party vendor systems.
A lot of pieces. A lot of gears turning. A web of interdependencies.
It works, but…
- Is it the most efficient?
- Is it structured to facilitate growing with your business, or is it brittle—perhaps to the point where seemingly small adjustments pose significant technical hurdles (time and $$)?
- What about reliability and recovery: If one piece acts up, does it bring down a large portion of the operation? If a catastrophic outage occurs (say with your cloud provider), can all key components quickly be brought to running state in an alternate environment?
- Is it positioned to support online client self-service? Maybe the process is usable for an internal employee who knows the nuances of your spreadsheets and how to manually move data through the various steps—but can the process be restructured in a way which preserves the ability of staff to manually override and manipulate while simultaneously allowing clients to self-service using the same processes in a more constrained way?
- Are you happy with what you have, but wouldn’t mind a second set of eyes taking a look to see if they can identify potential areas of improvement or overlooked lurking risk points?
Do any of these ring true to you?
Perhaps Ben can help by performing an architecture review—in a nutshell, a short-term engagement where Ben works with your team to help them and you better understand what you have (including its dependencies and risks), and to identify ways to improve, strengthen and streamline it.
Interested? Drop Ben a line!