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Scenario #2: Time to scale up (the take)


Here was last week's question:


Your company just purchased a rather large book of business from a competitor that is exiting the business.  They are still planning to hold onto their custom applications, but will be sending you a dump of their customers in a structured format (think spreadsheets or XML).


Some of the responses from LinkedIn have gone towards the fact that the custom app is doing something special that should be considered (along with the missing unstructured data). However the common, larger theme that I want to get at touches on scale.


When you look to on-boarding a new book of business into a preexisting ecosystem (assuming you have a similar application you are going to use), there are two key things to keep in mind:

  1. How to massage the data you received from the acquired unit to minimize data integrity issues (duplicate accounts, missing/invalid data, etc).

  2. How to scale it.

  3. The first part almost always entails some development whether as a throw-away to do the initial import or something that can be bolted onto preexisting tooling. If the latter, then the second point also becomes critical.

While you may need to scale up the service and support personnel to build out and handle the influx of new customers, and marketing to get them on-boarded, you cannot forget to ask whether or not your current apps can handle the load

  • Can the underlying database handle the new data/users?  Are the correct indexes in place?

  • What happens if all of the accounts you just bought decide to create accounts or sign on at the same time?  How about half of them?

  • Are there any scheduled events/processes that happen such as a bi-weekly/monthly email notification? What happens if that expands to 10x the size of your current lists? Can you still get them all out on time? What if they all decide to click the embedded link at the same time?

While some of these can be solved by throwing more hardware at the problem, the underlying applications may need to be refactored or a new approach used to maintain your current SLAs.


Or as one former colleague suggested: have your team continue to ask what-if questions when it comes to your apps and what happens when you add X number of users.  Let that guide your focus as your team begins working on the integration.


Thank you for playing, and look forward to tomorrow's next challenge!


cab

PS: If you're interested in the master list of questions to help with your your initial investigation, check them out here!

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