ERP Financial Consolidation
In most globally-expanding organisations, with multiple regional ERP systems, financial consolidation poses a major challenge. Due to the nature of acquisition and multiple outstation operations, financial consolidation relies mainly on Excel spreadsheets with inaccurate data, leading to non-compliance.…
Read more »A Brief Architecture Assessment
I was on a two-week assignment up North with a SMB client. The ask was to produce a view of their existing IT landscape and make initial recommendations for improvements and potential “quick wins”. There’s only so much…
Read more »A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words
Many eons before the advent of computers and sophisticated spoken languages, the conveyance of ideas among individuals relied on pictures. The use of visual representations for communication has persisted throughout history. In contemporary times, especially within the realm…
Read more »A Global HR Solution
United we stand, divided we fall Patrick Henry One of my clients in London had organically grown over a number of years and had become an international brand. The regional offices pretty much functioned autonomously when it came…
Read more »IT Architecture Is A Team Sport
Teamwork makes the dream work John C. Maxwell Developers often think that they are smarter than everyone else, especially their business colleagues. Since Architects tend to come from a development background they may bring that ‘baggage’ with them…
Read more »Data, What Data?
Many large organisations struggle to manage their IT architecture because they do not understand what data the Business relies upon and in many cases, the Business doesn’t fully understand it either! The symptoms of the above can usually…
Read more »Unlocking Security Architecture
Security often seems to be an afterthought when designing applications. Some architects tend to fob off the responsibility to either some Application Server we are using, the environment team that will harden our servers, or the network team…
Read more »Non-Functional Requirements
Architecture begins with requirements. Functional requirements dictate application and data architecture. Non-functional requirements (NFRs) dictate the technical characteristics of the future solution. To be usable in determining the technology architecture, NFRs should have one clear and important attribute…
Read more »Design For Disaster
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Mike Tyson There are many different considerations when looking at Disaster Recovery (DR) and in many ways it is a specialist field of technical architecture. It is…
Read more »Cloud-First Strategy
A “cloud-first strategy” is an IT management approach wherein an organisation prioritises the utilisation of cloud computing services and solutions when evaluating new applications, projects, or IT initiatives. Under this strategy, the default choice is to employ cloud-based…
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