AI of course, still in love with nano banana
Balancing Act: Robustness with Customer Focus
Martijn Veldkamp
“Strategic Technology Leader | Customer’s Virtual CTO | Salesforce Expert | Helping Businesses Drive Digital Transformation”
December 5, 2025
In large-scale enterprise IT, there is a constant, almost gravitational tension between two opposing forces.
On one side, you have the market. It demands speed and radical customer focus. It wants new features deployed yesterday. On the other side, you have Governance. It demands stability, compliance, and zero-risk operations. For years, the industry buzzword was “Agility.” The narrative was that if we just adopted enough scrum teams and microservices, the tension would vanish. But in regulated sectors treating every system as a “move fast and break things” playground isn’t happening.
Strategic architecture isn’t about choosing between speed and stability. It is about architecting a landscape where both can exist in harmony. The biggest thing I see in transformation roadmaps is the attempt to apply a single methodology to the entire IT landscape.
If you treat your core transaction systems like a marketing app, you introduce unacceptable risk. Conversely, if you treat your customer-facing channels with the heaviness of a SAP4Hana migration, you will be disrupted by a startup before you finish your requirements document.
To simplify and modernize a complex application landscape, we have to recognize that different distinct layers breathe at different rates. Speed layering.
Systems of Record, where change is slow, deliberate, and expensive (by design). We want friction here because the cost of error is too high.Systems of Differentiation, where unique business processes live. It connects the core to the customer. We need flexibility here to configure new products, but we still need structure.Systems of Innovation, where we test new customer journeys. If an idea here fails, it should fail fast and cheap without shaking the foundation.
The Architect role shifts from being the “standards police” to becoming city planners. We don’t just draw diagrams, we define zones. We tell the organization: “Here, in the innovation zone, you can use the newest tech and deploy daily. But here, in the core, we measure twice and cut once.”
Implementing this strategy is rarely a technology problem, its a people challenge. It requires coaching stakeholders to understand that “slow” isn’t a dirty word, it’s a synonym for “reliable.” It requires mentoring solution architects to recognize which layer they are building in and to choose their tools accordingly.
When we get this right, we stop fighting the tension between Innovation and Stability. Instead, we use the solid foundation of the core to launch the rapid experiments of the future. We achieve a landscape that is calm at the center, but agile at the edge.
That is how you build an IT strategy that survives the long term.
