Sustainability

Sustainability in our sense is institutional as well as environmental: whether a system can be maintained, corrected, understood and eventually retired by people who did not build it. Most digital infrastructure is built with no plan for its own succession. It is undocumented or documented inaccurately, dependent on a small number of individuals, expensive to modify, and effectively impossible to switch off once anything depends on it.

This is rarely a failure of competence. It is what the incentives produce. A project is funded to deliver a capability by a date; nothing measures whether the result will be maintainable in eight years, and the people who will face that question are not in the room. So the cheapest path is taken on every decision that only matters later: an undocumented integration, a bespoke data format, a dependency on one supplier's roadmap, a specification that exists only in the heads of the team that wrote it. Each is individually reasonable. Together they produce systems that institutions cannot fix and cannot leave.

We work on durability by design. Maintainability as an explicit and scored procurement criterion rather than an assumed property. Documented exit paths, with a stated cost and timeline for discontinuation agreed before dependency exists. Resistance to lock-in treated as a requirement rather than a preference. Specifications written to be legible to a successor. And honest whole-life accounting for systems that are cheap to deploy and extremely expensive to remove — which is most of them, and which is almost never how they are costed.