The Importance of Simplifying System Architecture

As a Technical Architect at Perficient, I have the opportunity to help a number of our clients determine and shape the landscape of their system architecture. It’s honestly one of my favorite parts of the job. Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of different types of implementations. And the more we see, the more patterns start to emerge. We get to see what works really well – and what can leave room for improvement.

If you’ve worked in technology, you can probably relate to seeing some of the less desirable implementations. You start out with the best intentions, but maybe the scale of the systems that need to be supported changes along the way. After initial determinations, certain types of integration concepts are no longer feasible for the small scale. And as the scale incrementally expands, the status quo changes. Before you know it, you are trying to manage 30 different systems with interwoven dependencies – and you start to see more and more failures in the data integrity.

3 Potential Problems & Pitfalls

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There are a number of downsides once you’re dealing with a disparate type of system architecture:

1. It makes it very hard to debug issues that emerge. There could be multiple points of failure, which means it’s that much more difficult to find and monitor issues as they arise.
2. It can be very hard to maintain data integrity in your systems. As systems grow and expand without master data management, it becomes more difficult to identify the source of truth for your information. And that means you may not be able to trust the data in front of you.
3. Since there are interwoven dependencies, it’s more difficult to deploy updates. That means your team will spend time trying to figure out clever ways to deploy changes that should be rather straightforward, instead of spending their efforts on future projects that can help drive business.

In the end, all of these issues really boil down to time, which could be much better spent helping your organization reach its goals. It can happen to anyone, and the circumstances are fairly common. In fact, we have seen very innovative companies struggle with the same challenges.

Need Any Help?

Here at Perficient, we have a lot of experience in helping clients simplify. If you have questions or want to talk about options, reach out and contact us anytime.