Is the SAM application ready for growth?

From Dordrecht and Drachten, a small but ambitious SAM team works to support municipalities in their asset management. The SAM application had already been developed into a tool that could be accessed anywhere via the browser. Last year it was time for the next step. “More and more performance is being demanded,” Gerard said. “We wanted to make some technical changes and add new functionalities. A new structure, new frameworks. A next step with the working title: SAM Next.”

This step was necessary for the application to also function optimally on mobile. “Creating a fault note, loading a photo: it has to be possible anywhere and anytime with any device,” Gerard said. “Our technical infrastructure was not adequate for that. Moreover, because our customers are decentralized governments, we have to meet strict requirements when it comes to security. Therefore, with a view to further development, two engineers in the office – also Rockstars by the way – made an analysis of the current and desired situation and drew up a plan of action. In addition, we wanted someone to check whether we had included everything.”

“Experienced IT Consultant Edwin flew in to do an Architecture Scan. “I inventoried the complete landscape,” he says. The quality requirements of RockSOLID principles form the basis for this. “Architecture, methods, software packages, versions of software libraries, and so on. I asked a lot of questions so that it became clearer and clearer: what is the goal and what is and especially what is not needed for this?” Gerard adds: “Edwin reviewed for us what was important to address, what needed to be done immediately, what could possibly be done later, and what investment would provide what value. That produced a good piece that formed the basis for the continued development of the application. It gave us peace of mind to know that we had made the right choices.”

One of those choices involved whether or not to move to the Cloud. The outcome was a hybrid solution. “With that, performance is more than guaranteed, without incurring high costs,” Gerard said. “That was simply not necessary in our case. Importantly, though, we are now ready to move to a full Cloud solution as soon as we do need to.”

Edwin: “The cloud is by no means always cheaper and easier. It also brings new concerns. Many companies want to go to the cloud because of the cost, but the cloud is not always cheaper. You pay by usage, so it can get pretty expensive. It’s a completely different billing model than you’re used to. You only choose the cloud if it supports your strategic goals. In this case, SAM would not have benefited from a scalable environment. It wasn’t necessary.

“Edwin’s scan was a nice complement to the experience of the engineers we had in-house,” Gerard says. “It was also nice to motivate our choices. This kind of thing requires a long development process with a lot of pre-investment, then it’s nice when you have a good piece in hand that shows you’re approaching it the right way.”

SAM Next is now well advanced. “Soon we will be able to start transferring the first municipalities,” Gerard says. “During the process we still regularly took Edwin’s advice to check whether we were still doing what we had set out to do. This way we are laying a foundation that will allow us to make really good strides, and we saved costs with that.”

Sam has a total of three rockstars on the shop floor. “The quality of those developers is just very high,” Gerard said. “Often they are young, so they bring a lot of new insights and techniques. They look at the world differently, like AI. I now see them experimenting with that for programming. That is inherent in the generation, but the rockstars also have a certain level in that. Their professionalism is top notch and they like it with us because we are such a flat organization.