Architecture by PowerPoint

A recurring theme among enterprises is the denial of real-world architectural complexity. CIOs love PowerPoint slides that show a spaghetti diagram of the messy applications and interfaces they have now, then a clean diagram of just a few boxes with neat interfaces showing the Nirvana that will occur once they finish the latest project, for which they are seeking an improbably large budget.

Vendors do much the same thing, producing point solutions which address some genuine but limited problem and paint a pretty picture of the world after you have implemented their solution, glossing over the pesky problem of removing legacy applications that are the cause of the current complexity.

An example of this is in an area in which I specialise, master data management. Large companies have numerous overlapping systems which generate key data about the context of their business transactions: information on customers, products, suppliers and so on. This information is known as master data and the trouble is that the average large company has a median of six systems which generate customer data and nine systems for product data.

Cue the software industry, which will happily sell you master data hubs or repositories which purport to offer a single source for all the previously competing master data. Of course, if all you do is add this new repository, and then have just put one further layer of complexity in, a process by which the existing ‘legacy' master data sources are either retired, or at least have their competing definitions and data merged before being consolidated in the new, shiny master data repository. At this point you have one repository to rule them all, and your problems are over.

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