Articles on enterprise migration, integration assessment, platform selection, and the PRISM methodology. Written from 25 years of real engagements.
Early in my assessment work I captured integrations the way most people do: what they connect to directly. Then a change assessed as contained took down a system nobody had connected to it, and I added a field to every assessment I have done since.
Clients tell me not to bother documenting a simple integration because everyone knows what it does. That confidence is exactly why the personal and financial data it carries has gone unexamined.
Seven integrations at one destination, all using the same method. Each one, viewed alone, is fine. The redundancy only becomes visible when you inventory by method and target together.
The inputs and outputs get all the attention. But most of your migration risk lives in the single box on the diagram labelled "processing". That is where the accumulated business logic nobody has written down actually sits.
Hand the same list of integrations to two architects and you get two risk registers. Hand it to the same architect twice and you often get two as well. That is not an assessment. That is an opinion with a spreadsheet.
Most pipelines have four zones and monitoring bolted on the side. Why a designed-in Loop zone catches silent failures before they compound.
Event-driven architecture solves specific problems brilliantly and creates unnecessary complexity everywhere else. Here is how to know which situation you are in.
Every enterprise has integrations that exist but aren't documented. Here is the discovery process that finds them before they derail your migration.
The hardest conversation in consulting is delivering bad news about a system the client built or bought. Here is how to frame difficult findings so they lead to action rather than defensiveness.
Most organisations deploy AI agents without the governance frameworks to manage them. Here are the specific controls you need in place before agents go live.
AI agents are entering enterprise architectures faster than most teams can evaluate them. Here's what they actually are, how they differ from traditional automation, and why data architects need to understand them now.
The opening session of a PRISM assessment reveals more about an organisation's data architecture than weeks of documentation reviews. Here's what actually unfolds when you start looking beyond the surface.
Mid-market organisations face a unique data platform challenge: too complex for simple solutions, too constrained for enterprise platforms. Here's how to navigate the PostgreSQL ecosystem and emerging alternatives without overengineering your architecture.
Most internal API failures aren't caused by code bugs or infrastructure limits. They're caused by upstream systems that suddenly change their calling patterns and overwhelm APIs that were never designed for the new load.
Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention creates a hidden gap in GA4 attribution that most marketers never discover. Here's how it breaks your conversion tracking and what data architects need to know.
Most migration overruns stem from the same fundamental scoping errors. Here's how to avoid the traps that turn six-month projects into eighteen-month ordeals.
The right intake questions determine whether your architecture assessment delivers actionable insights or generic recommendations. Here's the PRISM approach to framing assessments that actually guide decisions.
Most AI applications in data architecture are solutions looking for problems. Metadata tagging is different. Here's why the problem is perfectly suited to what AI actually does well.
Your integration architecture is sending warning signs. Here are the five critical signals that indicate it's time for a formal assessment, and why ignoring them costs more than addressing them.
Most architecture assessments are subjective exercises that depend entirely on who's running them. Here's why that's a problem and what repeatable methodology looks like in practice.
After inheriting dozens of integration architectures, I have discovered that teams consistently miss one critical dimension that determines whether their solution will scale. Here is what they are overlooking.
Start with a conversation about your engagement.
Start a Conversation