Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Main idea
Organizing information around contexts — a product context, a support context, a customer context, a source code context, a standards context — does not presuppose dismantling what exists. The CRM keeps its accounts, the ticketing tool its tickets, the repository its code: these are business objects, and they are in their rightful place.
What a context adds is of another order. It gathers, around a goal, its sources, its rules, its decisions, its notes, its objectives, its limits and its links — and those elements come from several tools at once. A customer context connects tickets, a sales history, product usage, contractual commitments and identified risks; none of the applications that hold those elements could carry the whole, because each holds only a part.
The context is therefore a cross-cutting layer, not one more tool in the list. It does not compete with the applications on what they do well; it occupies what none of them could occupy, for lack of seeing beyond its own perimeter.
Why it matters
It changes the nature of the project when an organization wants to capitalize on its knowledge. The reflex is to pick a central tool and make the others converge on it — migration, duplicates, endless arbitration over the master tool. Treating the context as a layer that runs through removes that question: nothing is to be migrated, what has to be decided is what you write in addition, and where.
It also explains why the breakdown of contexts does not follow the breakdown of tools. A context is defined by a goal, hence by a team and a piece of work — and it draws on as many applications as it needs.
Nuances and limits
Running through presupposes being able to read in other people's tools. A closed tool, with no programmable access, puts the share of material it holds out of reach, and the context is then built on copies that age.
And the cross-cutting layer has a cost of its own: it does not fill itself, and nobody owns it by default, since it belongs to no tool.
Open questions
- Who owns a context that runs through several teams, when none of them holds the whole of it?