Inter-Operability and the Pragmatic Mindset

My colleague recently moved house. On the surface it looked amazing, ready to move in without much work to do. But once she started living with it day to day it became apparent that all was not as it appeared. There was lighting so out of date you couldn’t get replacement bulbs, switches that did nothing and fundamentally, a system for hot water that no one was prepared to service. The heating needed to be taken back to fundamentals, the electrics reviewed and everything that flowed from that integrated in a way that suited the way we live now. And yet when it was put in, back in the distant 1980s it was totally cutting edge! Owner after owner had put in their own bits, modifications that suited their needs and the result was a bit of a mess.

All of which got me thinking about data.

Few data leaders get the luxury of starting from scratch - you inherit systems which have been years in the making. As the landscape has evolved, we’ve gone from storing data, to processing it, visualising, reasoning and now acting on it. There’s a lot going on there.

As Jane Smith chief data and AI officer said recently on LinkedIn;

“You’re ‘gifted’ gold star storage from one era, MLOps from another, legacy platforms no one dares retire, home grown systems no one understands and governance that has to connect it all.” 

So you decide to do something about it and start to short list a few vendors and book some discovery calls. Consultants come in with a blank sheet of paper – vendors show you their neat video presentation based on a green field site but the reality is that your data landscape is so much messier than that. Like an archaeologist you are now looking at something that represents the company’s history. As Jane says, this represents;

“20 years of decisions, hundreds of mergers and acquisitions, abandoned transformations and political commitments.”

At PTR we are very familiar with this scenario, and unlike a product vendor or huge consultancy firm we are not going to force you to rip and replace. We enjoy asking “which bits fit” and helping you to solve the puzzle. This integrated, interoperable approach takes into account all the years of decisions you have inherited. This is what data leaders have been calling the “realpolitik” of it all!

For us this is nothing new, we have always approached our client’s problems this way. When something is failing or holding you back there is often a valid reason why it was set up that way – the question is, does that reason still exist today? Ways of working can literally become encoded into the architecture, so the new architecture design should come later and be shaped around what exists now rather than being imposed on it.

When it comes to that “blank sheet of paper” – yes I do have one of those, but not in the consultancy sense of imagining a perfect green field stack. For us it’s about fully understanding your reality and understanding the decisions that got you there in the first place - then we can think about the solution.

Too often we see solutions forced into a vendors “best practice” model rather than engineered to evolve with the client’s ecosystem. That’s when the cracks start to show and the 2am integration failures begin.

What’s required is an approach where we all work together to deliver what you need now. In the house analogy it’s about which bits need ripping out and replacing and which bits are perfectly good to go with a bit of sprucing up and the right integrations.

It’s not about choosing the perfect stack, it’s about creating enough interoperability, trust and executive clarity for the ecosystem to evolve.

If you like the sound of the way we work then we would love to talk to you! Our consultants start out by checking out your systems and make recommendations from there. We promise not to stand there with a wrench in our hand asking “which cowboy did that?” But like the best tradespeople we have a team of experts around us who can help you sort things out when it all looks like a tangled mess!

All you need to do is drop us a line at our enquiries page or join us on LinkedIn where there is always up to date and relevant information about data and how we use it in real life.