We have finally come to the point where we need to start an IT-related project.

We have two business events that today are managed manually by using a spreedsheet and they are:

Who has been part of a production, e.g. copyright and credits (Production)
Request for personal information, e.g. GDPR (Customer support)

The solution today, manually updated lists in Excel, is not scalable in the long run as the business grows.

End credits from episode #74 of Architecture Corner on Youtube

As average, between there are 5-25 individuals involved per project and we already have more than 100 productions on file. Even with reoccurring crew and cast, the numbers grow.

During a very limited PoC for the sales process do we get ten requests per week that contains personal information. When we run this in full scale, it will be a cumbersome activity without a better IT- support.

We have a few Architecture Principles, and among them are Avoid use, re-use, rent, buy, develop.

Avoid use is not possible due to GDPR, Copyright laws and Industry-standard contracts. Re-use is therefore the next option.

The cloud based system we use for production planning manages individuals and their roles per project. But it can’t manage the information for all projects. There are no public API’s or import/export functionality. They are a US company and their servers are located in US which makes this questionable from a GDPR perspective.

This application will not support GDPR in our sales process, so re-use is not an option unless the vendor make huge improvements to their cloud services and we host it ourself.

Then we have rent, buy and develop a new IT-solution as remaining options.

Rent is preferred but this is the core business for us and we probably need a sector specific solution. First, is there such a creature? Secondly, what happens if the service disappears?

Buy a product instead of rent, is less risky but very few products, if any have lifetime of more than 50 year required by copyright laws.

Agile Development

This is we also need to evaluate develop as an option.

In theory, an agile project with two clear Epics, and a few features for each of them should be a a rather simple project

But in practice, it involves at least 12 different capabilities from the whole company, we need to think of Privacy by Design, we don’t have any technical infrastructure or processes for development and finally, as a small company, we have budget constraints.

Disruptive architecture