A new multi-channel proposition was being developed by the company. Decisions had already been made regarding the preferred architecture solution.

As an architecture peer and domain stakeholder, I collaboratively engaged with understanding and reviewing the proposed solution, and thus highlighted a number of issues:

• the solution proposed wasn’t customer-centric and therefore was missing some key use cases
• the solution proposed involved extending a legacy platform in ways it had not been designed for
• we were looking strategically to replace this legacy platform in any case
• the supplier was going to charge us millions of pounds to extend the platform, and it would be a lengthy delivery

I proposed an alternative architecture based on more accessible platforms, creating a new reference architecture that could be used for multiple other customer propositions. The new architecture would also support the realistic ways in which the customer could interact with us. It would be cheaper to build, quicker to deliver, component-based and more easily migratable to other strategic platforms in the future if needed.

A huge additional tech debt was avoided. Delivery costs and time were also saved, and we avoided designing and building more complex processes to manage the cases where, if the customer didn’t behave as the system was designed, we would need to perform additional steps and reconciliations. This also simplified the maintainability of the solution.