A city licensing office maps current information flows for permit issuance and finds five separate person stores holding overlapping applicant identities. What should the architecture team prioritize next?

Current-state information-flow maps expose redundant stores, brittle handoffs, and ownership gaps that product catalogs alone hide. For a municipal licensing capability, five overlapping person stores typically drive wrong applicant matches, repeated data entry, inconsistent notices, and eroded citizen trust. Architecture should convert that visibility into prioritized master-data and consolidation interventions—golden-record rules, stewardship agreements, survivorship, and controlled migration—aligned to where duplication most harms capability outcomes rather than treating every store as equally urgent. Buying a larger warehouse so each store grows independently expands storage without resolving identity conflict, so operational pain and report disagreement continue. Deleting four stores overnight without stewardship or golden-record rules risks destroying legitimate history, breaking dependent processes, and creating unsafe merges. Replacing every application with a single vendor suite before documenting ownership boundaries confuses platform shopping with architecture: brand consolidation without interface and accountability design often recreates the same duplication inside a new stack. Exam caveat: flow mapping is a diagnostic and prioritization tool, not automatic permission to purge or re-platform; interventions still need sequenced cutovers, data quality gates, and legal retention awareness. Operational check: score each duplicate store by impact on permit cycle time, mismatch incidents, and citizen rework; pick the highest-impact identity domain; assign a steward; publish matching rules; and track reduction in conflicting applicant records after the first consolidation wave.