Contents
Everything here, numbered so notes can refer to each other briefly. Most people arrive with one broken boundary.
Contents — all 50 notes
Numbered so that one note can refer to another briefly, which several of them do. The numbers are positions in this list and nothing else — not a ranking, not an order of importance, and not the order to read them in.
Foundations
Identity and reference data sit underneath all four joins. Nothing else is reliable until they have one master each.
The joins
Four boundaries in a standard chain, five where agency workers exist. Each has a payload, a mechanism, a failure mode and an owner.
Buying
The decision framed around the joins rather than the features, which is the framing that predicts how it will go.
Running the estate
The recurring work the estate generates, and the monthly comparison that catches a silent failure before payroll does.
- 4.1Who Owns the Whole Thing
- 4.2Reconciling Between Systems
- 4.3Investigating a Wrong Figure
- 4.4Reporting Across the Chain
- 4.5When One Module Upgrades
- 4.6The Spreadsheets in Between
- 4.7How These Estates Fail
- 4.8What Changes as You Grow
- 4.9Testing a Join
- 4.10The Documentation That Matters
- 4.11The First Quarter After a Change
- 4.12The Chain Owner's Runbook
- 4.13Analysis Across the Chain
- 4.14Whether the Numbers Are Believed
Obligations
The obligations attach to the assembly rather than to any module, which is the thing most estates have never assessed.
What not to build
A connected estate makes things possible that were not before, and some of them should stay impossible.
Reference
The end state as a checklist, the problems no integration resolves, and the routes through this collection.