It's been a while since my last post, but it's not the typical holiday break that has stopped any sign of blogging, it's more the speed and breadth of the work my team are doing that has kept my attention over the last few months.

My team are delivering the simplification of a vastly complex infrastructure that is complex simply because aquisitions have been made that have never been asymilated in to the central mothership so we have multiple systems doing the same thing for different groups of people. In some ways, that's actually helping me achieve my goal because we've been able to choose the most fit-for-purpose existing technology to use as the basis for a single system per service objective and discard the rest.
It sounds so easy doesn't it - "discard the rest", and if it was just the throwing away of technology it would be easy, but instead it hides a whole raft of difficult decisions that affect staff, budgets and our customers both internal and external. This isn't helped by the fact that our old mothership isn't exactly forthcoming about what we currently use in their estate which means we don't actually know what we need to extract and set up on our side of the fence, it's a great big unknown unknown.

On top of that with every month that passes, my company has to pay large amounts of cash in the form of a Transition Services Agreement (TSA) back to the old mothership for their services that we still use. Every month that I don't migrate a system or kill off a system, the bill keeps coming in This means I have a highly visible programme of activity that people want to see completed as soon as possible. The drive is therefore to deliver, detailed planning is for wimps! That does make the construction of business cases relatively easy: if you know you can save £250k/quarter by removing a dependancy on a suite of systems in general capex is forthcoming.

So, that's why things have been a bit quiet of late!