Most IT problems get misdiagnosed before they get solved.
Before you replace it, rewrite it, or restructure around it, let’s find out what is actually wrong. Here is what that looks like in practice.
five problems. Five organizations. Five wrong diagnoses.
Each of these was already being solved – expensively, invasively, or incorrectly – before the actual problem was identified. These are the cases that define how I work.
Financial Technology
A mission-critical proxy had failed three times in six months. A full replacement project was underway. The system had never failed.
The actual problem was a connection pool configuration set twenty years ago and never updated. Two days to diagnose. An afternoon to fix. The replacement project was cancelled.
Major CanadiaN Bank
A team had grown from one application to seven. A Big Four firm diagnosed an organizational problem. The problem was architectural.
A foundational domain modelling mistake had been compounding for years, creating linear cost growth with every new product. One application could replace seven. Same team. Lower cost.
Global Investment Bank
A compliance process had been silently failing for five years at the rate of 10%. 80,000 regulatory documents were missing. Nobody knew.
Discovered during unstructured time. Diagnosed independently. Fixed in production during business hours without disruption. The kind of gap that triggers eight-figure regulatory fines.
another Major CanadiaN Bank
An ETL system supporting five data streams was maintained by 15-20 people. It processed fewer than 7,000 records on a typical day.
The infrastructure was disproportionate to the problem by an order of magnitude. A re-architecture improved throughput tenfold and identified a path to a hundredfold improvement.
Canadian insurance company
Management wanted to eliminate manual work performed every morning by the operations team. The manual work was the only thing preventing trading errors.
Three hundred pages of daily manual checks had been built by the operations team in direct response to years of bad data from ten upstream systems. Management had been misreading this as inefficiency for years. The renovation objective needed to change entirely. One question to the operations manager confirmed everything.
Three ways to work together
Gain insights into your cloud spending, your E2E IT/architecture maturity, or perhaps get help with any kind of IT architecture deliverables
Cloud Cost Triage
A 10-day diagnostic that identifies where AWS and Azure spend is drifting and what the real savings opportunities are. Fixed scope. Zero charge if nothing meaningful is found.
Architecture Maturity Assessment
A structured assessment of your full IT environment across 10 dimensions. Gives leadership an accurate picture of where architecture practice actually stands.
Fractional Architecture
Senior architecture leadership on a monthly retainer. For organizations that need experienced judgment without a full-time hire.
If you are solving a problem that keeps getting more expensive, it is worth a conversation.
A 20-minute screening call costs nothing and requires no preparation on your part.