As my work at Het CAK is being taken over by an internal employee, my assignment as Systems Architect will end in about a month. It’s been approximately half a year and I have learned a lot and hopefully helped a bit as well.When I first started at Het CAK I thought the assignment was clear; define a new systems architecture for them to work with. As time went on it became clear that it wasn’t that straightforward.

The new ideas of the Business architect not only require a change in systems architecture but a change in the organisation structure as well. Instead of focussing on the functions defined by the law they will now start to focus on the citizen at the other side of that law. This means that instead of one person in the company focussing on a specific law, he will now need to know a bit about all the laws they support and be able to easily access information based upon a specific person, covering all the applicable laws.

My main focus the last year was on making sure the architects know all they need about supporting legislation. Making sure we’d cover standards and principles defined by the legislators, unifying communications formats, checking privacy legislation and interaction with other government bodies like the tax service and the adress information store.

I’ve learned a lot from the senior architect that was added to the project later. He showed me how to divide the entire architecture picture up into small chunks so they are more accessible, then take each chunk and write it out in more detail.

All in all it was a good experience for me. I’m looking forward to my next assigment in hopes that it’ll be just as good!