Application landscapeΒΆ

A vast cork board covered in strings of different colours connecting hand-drawn cards. Some strings lead to blank cards marked unknown. One card says enchanted ledger, do not touch, Gerald knows why. A small gargoyle is asleep underneath it.

The application landscape of a mid-sized non-profit that has grown organically over fifteen-plus years is not an architecture. It is a history.

Tools were acquired when someone had a problem and found a solution. Integrations were built when two systems needed to talk to each other and nobody said no. The person who knew how it worked left three years ago and documented it in a Word document that is somewhere on a SharePoint site that nobody can find.

Your job is not to fix all of this immediately. Your job is to understand what exists, map it, and start making decisions about what stays, what goes, and what gets governed going forward.

Know what you have before you touch it.