I’m Matt Shanaman. I’ve spent 29 years connecting systems that were never designed to work together — 23 of those in consulting and architecture, including four years at Microsoft — and the last eleven building quoting and design software for the kitchen and bath cabinetry industry.
Almost all of it reduces to one pattern: many parties, one authoritative record. Everyone has a legitimate claim on the same data, needs a different slice of it, and believes their own version. Early in my career that record was a patient — I helped build the centralized platform that let a hospital’s registration, ADT, lab, and clinical systems work from the same patient record, under HIPAA, at over a thousand concurrent users. The difficulty was never a single system. It was reconciling what each one thought the data meant, and who owned which part.
For the last eleven years the record has been an order. That work has been unusually specific: systems where multiple manufacturers, sales representatives, and dealers collaborate on a single order, and where the quote is not a document that precedes the product but the actual definition of it. The configuration a dealer builds becomes the bill of materials, the routing, the cut list, the price, and the promise date. Very few software problems compress that much into one data structure, and very few people have spent eleven years on it.
Alongside the technical work, I’ve spent much of my career advising IT leadership — at Microsoft as a trusted advisor to mid-senior leadership in Fortune 100 organizations, and since 2015, on contract, in technical advisory and as chief architect for a kitchen and bath SaaS provider. Systems problems and organizational problems are usually the same problem viewed from different chairs.
I also build and sell software of my own: GaugeFactor, GraphOrbis, and applications for other markets. GraphOrbis can be used for kitchen design, so in this market I am not a disinterested party. What I disclose, and what I recuse from →
I trained as a biomedical engineer, where the core exercise is porting a system between domains — modeling a mechanical structure as an electrical circuit, a fluid system as a mechanical one — and proving the translation preserves behavior. Modernization is the same operation on different material. Business logic written in 1998 and the same logic running as a cloud service are two representations of one system, and the work is making sure the second behaves like the first.
It’s also a discipline where you validate before you ship rather than after. That’s why an extraction engagement ends with rules tested against real historical transactions instead of a sign-off meeting.
I work from Arizona, remotely, with clients in North America and abroad.