At a recent offsite meeting with Bankers Almanac and Accuity, as I was listening to all the suggestions about developments we could make, I started to make a list of principles that I thought we ought to use to guide our technology plans. As it happens, the list came to 10, but I’m sure there could have been more. And the list is in no particular order of importance, just things that occurred to me when they cropped up. See if you agree with my choices:

1. Retire legacy/shadow systems and simplify as we go along (clean up after ourselves)
2. Automate wherever possible – and to whatever extent possible
3. Separate data from the products they go into – don’t define data as products
4. Build to a service based architecture
5. Hold everything in XML – even it we also hold, for instance, number series elsewhere as well. It is the best medium for an information business. 
6. Everything should be able to be cut by its major attributes – especially geography
7. Design everything so that analytics can be derived easily. Data about data can be even more valuable than just data
8. Make everything internet based
9. Buy don’t build wherever possible
10. Build in performance and scaleability from the outset