What Problems is DAS Architecture Attempting to Solve?

What prevents IT FROM supporting the business effectively?

• Poor strategic alignment between IT and business
  • Fuzzy and constantly evolving requirements as business needs change
  • Hard to rapidly bring to market and test new solutions in response to market changes and customer feedback
  • Hard to access the value of the data divided between multiple applications for machine learning and AI
  • No overarching architectural vision to guide application development, which leads to fragmentation of data across applications
  • Duplicate/overlapping applications due to merger/acquisitions
  • Security and privacy are afterthoughts at the application level, which creates gaps in protection and business risk
  • Users need multiple systems to complete a single task, and sometimes need to dual-key the same data
  • Users adopt “shadow IT” and manual work arounds to fill perceived gaps in “formal IT,” creating operational business risk
  • Steep learning curve for new business users to adopt multiple applications, manual processes and workarounds
• Unsustainable and inflexible business applications
  • Data separated into application/service silos makes it difficult to unlock the business value
    • Stale and inconsistent data/user experience across channels
    • Maintaining legacy applications past retirement date
    • Unconsolidated reporting/analytics
    • Difficult to adopt Machine Learning or AI technology
  • Existing integrations and hidden dependencies can make it difficult to upgrade applications
  • Multiple security models for authentication and authorization
    • Lack of access control on data moving between applications
    • Issues maintaining the provisioning of users across multiple applications
    • Inability to apply modern security practices across applications
  • Steep technical learning curve to engage new IT staff, often with limited or out dated documentation
  • Too many technologies makes support uneven
  • Hard to identify and implement generic services/components
  • Difficult/impossible to move IT staff freely between applications as needed
  • Poor adoption/enforcement of standards and procedures
  • Making changes to complex applications can be expensive and risky, especially where support is limited or unavailable

Why do application development projects fail?

• Scope and requirements creep
  • Communication of requirements between business and developers
  • Business users don’t know how to describe their requirements accurately
  • Business requirements are constantly changing
  • Long cycle time between requirement specification and implementation
  • When the business user sees the implementation they identify changes/new requirements
• Poor project governance and communication fails to manage business risk
  • Failure to manage expectations
  • Failure to break down large/complex deliverables into simpler components
  • Shortcuts during development to meet budgets and timelines cause problems post production launch
• Lack of architectural vision, standards and processes
  • Junior developers making architectural decisions
  • Proliferation of new and untested technology
  • No separation of concerns – storage, presentation and action all rolled up
  • Too much code leads to complex applications that are fragile in operation
• Complex data migration and data cleansing into rigid data models