When we took over the core application from a start-up as a new product team 1.5 years ago, it became clear after a short time: this is a tinkered monolith full of technical dept, and the company is a Workaround Company ™. At the same time, the application was used daily by all our operations teams as an integral part of all workflows to deliver our service.

For over a year we have been probing ways to replace the monolith. At the same time the company grew and started to offer more services, which the monolith was not suited for.

Then came Corona. As a company, which relies on people being able to move around freely to benefit from our service, social distancing and lockdown immediately made its mark on us. We had to introduce short-time work, so we only had half the time for software development. We could have given up, and stay stuck with the old system and way of thinking. How could the time of COVID-19 of all times be turned into the catalyst for us to create something that has been so difficult for a year?

This is a talk about how we as information architects can translate a crisis into hope. How we can manage to create a new order in times of chaos. How we can apply Pace Layering and Decoupling, Domain Driven Design, and Container Based Information Architecture. And how we try to achieve long-term change in the company on the level of strategy and culture. Will we succeed? I don’t know yet, since at the time of submission of this talk we have just started. But there is a legitimate hope, and a path to a better world of information architecture at BetterDoc. And whatever the outcome will be in September, I would love to share it in this talk to you and the IA community.