Explained: Conway's Law and EA

Here is a question this series has been circling for eight posts without ever answering properly. Aldermont has three core banking systems because it acquired three banks. Fine. But the last of those acquisitions closed in 2019, and the one before it in 2008. The bank has had years, in one case nearly two decades, and enormous financial incentive to consolidate. Every architect who has passed through has flagged it. So why are there still three? … Read More

Explained: Architecture Governance

The head of retail digital has a feature ready to ship. It is a small thing, a redesigned account-summary screen in the mobile app, and the team could deploy it this week. There is one obstacle: to pull the balances it needs, the fastest path is a direct call straight into the Northline core, bypassing the shared integration layer the architecture team has been carefully building. It would work. It would also be exactly the kind of point-to-poin… Read More

Architecture: The Application Portfolio

The heat map from Aldermont's capability analysis put a red box around "customer management" and noted, dryly, that the bank delivers it three times over. That single red box hides a real mess underneath it: three CRMs, each inherited from a different acquired bank, each with its own database, its own integrations, its own small band of people who know how it works and are quietly nearing retirement. Leadership now wants to act on … Read More

Explained: Capability Mapping

Aldermont's leadership wants to know one thing before it commits hundreds of millions of dollars to the core consolidation: where is the bank actually weak? Not which team is understaffed, not which project is late, but which of the fundamental things the bank does are being done badly, expensively, or three times over. It is a simple question and nobody in the room can answer it cleanly, because every answer they reach for is really an answ… Read More