StoryTime

Platform, Architecture, DevOps, and the Orchestration of Enterprises.

Tools are tools, but your company is not just your choice of tools. Let's think about how things connect and must work together.

Gui Martins

26 Jun 2025 — 4 min read

Photo by TheMarketingHustle.com / Unsplash

It recently came to my attention that those words in the title are confusing to people, and it is not surprising when you think about it. At the core of the issue there are many companies that want to sell you their "solution" of what DevOps, Platform, or the new flavor of the week is. At the other side there are people that label developers and Operations guys as DevOps. Whereas operationalized development is overlooked, processes are forgotten, and tools are king.

There comes a time in any enterprise where their growth changes their processes and their personnel grows apart. The "solution"? SalesForce, SAP, Azure, AWS, GitLab, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Oddoo, Teams, Google Meets, Terraform, Bicep, PowerShell, Bash, Nushell, Python, GoLang, C#, etc. See what I did there? See how messy it gets? Those are tools to solve an issue, not the solution for your issues.

In all my years in the IT world - working from Support to Enterprise Architecture, from Operations to Development - there is always a gap between where the company wants to go, and the understanding of what their processes are. That is not to say employees and directors do not feel the needs, it is just that their focus is on their bottom line. Let us be clear on something here right away: bottom line is king. Your business is king. Lest not forget we create our businesses to achieve a goal and pay the bills.

Here is the problem now: your company needs to meet their goals to keep their personnel and avoid layoffs, but you also need to enhance your processes and create better output. Easy, right? Let's just adopt SalesForce and finally drive better sales. Let's adopt the latest JavaScript framework and create websites that are at the bleeding edge. I could keep going on and on with examples about how a tool becomes so enticing with their marketing that they become the solution in our heads.

For the record, those tools are great. There is nothing wrong in using the right tool for the job. Just as a carpenter chooses the hammer to nail the board to the base and not a drill, we must choose what aligns to our needs. Therein lies the problem: discovering your needs. Until we do, shifting goalposts because a new tool has arrived and promises to solve our problems without understanding what are the problems are will do but one thing: add complexity.

Remember this: your company needs to solve its problems. Not the problems that the tools solve. Most of the times as we come along as FancyWhale this is the biggest pain point. The drive of the project is a tool or a new product, but the understanding on how that fits in the vision of the company is lost through the turmoil of the outside world. Marketing, SEO, Sales, Clients, Manufacturing, Politics, and others; all important, but none will work if you do not Architect your company to be prepared to deal with those through your own processes and organizational orchestration.

Most of the time we go through this with our clients and need to take one, two, or many steps back to try and understand each other. We need to figure out where we all came from, where we are today, and most importantly:

Where are we going to?

Only then things fall in place. Those are the projects that we help our clients be the most successful. Not because what we have created was "the best" or "the fanciest", but it was what they truly needed. Was it as Feature Complete as the entire suite from that "off the shelf" product? Probably not. Was it solving the actual process issue that the company needed in the most aligned way? You betcha!

In the end of the day, what we need are partnerships that understand where we need to go.

I won't give you the answers, because I do not believe there is one for everybody. But I will leave you with a few references for you to think, reflect, and reconsider: