A stalling modernization, five specialized teams, and nobody who owned the data.
A twenty-year modernization at an 87,000-person physical-security company was stalling because no one owned the data.
The Situation
The company was modernizing a core application that had grown over roughly twenty years. They'd brought in a large consulting firm and expected the first version of the new platform inside a year. Five months in, it was already stalling. The work had been split into teams around the visible pieces. Kubernetes. Authentication. Logging. Deployment pipelines. The quiet assumption underneath was that if each team delivered its part, a working architecture would somehow emerge from the sum of them.
What We Found
We were brought in on the authentication design, and one plain question opened the whole thing up. Where would the auth system actually store its data? Nobody could say clearly. Pulling that thread, we found new databases and infrastructure already being stood up with no overall data strategy behind them. A PostgreSQL setup was going in alongside the company's existing, heavily invested SQL Server, and no one could explain how the pieces were meant to fit. When we asked for a picture of how the future platform's data would work, the best thing that existed was a hand-drawn sketch from the lead architect.
What Changed
That was the piece nobody owned. We named it, and got a real data strategy in place before those mismatched decisions hardened into something no one could unwind.
What Followed
The gap got found and fixed while there was still time to fix it, and a modernization that had been drifting toward an expensive failure got back on the rails.
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