Shining Light on IT Failures
January 7, 2010
Tim Bray’s “Doing It Wrong” provides some common sense, useful perspective on failures in traditional information technology in organizations, and a couple of killer quotes. Bray was among the first to tackle SGML. He labored at Sun Microsystems, cranked out an interesting content processing and visualization system, and contributed to various Web standard efforts. His “doing it wrong” essay makes one point: traditional IT methods produce some spectacular and all-too-common flops. He writes:
Obviously, the technology matters. This isn’t the place for details, but apparently the winning mix includes dynamic languages and Web frameworks and TDD and REST and Open Source and NoSQL at varying levels of relative importance. More important is the culture: iterative development, continuous refactoring, ubiquitous unit testing, starting small, gathering user experience before it seems reasonable. All of which, to be fair, I suppose had its roots in last decade’s Extreme and Agile movements. I don’t hear a lot of talk these days from anyone claiming to “do Extreme” or “be Agile”. But then, in Web-land for damn sure I never hear any talk about large fixed-in-advance specifications, or doing the UML first, or development cycles longer than a single-digit number of weeks.
There’s no one size fits all, just use the newer methods whether you snap together components in the cloud or build an on premises system. In short, emulate the Facebook / Google approach and when possible. Minimize the approaches recommended by the IBM type experts. The cloud and iterative approaches make sense.
One of his most interesting comments in my opinion is:
So if your enterprise wants the sort of outcomes we’re seeing on the Web (and a lot more should), you’re going to have to adopt some of the cultures and technologies that got them built.
Spot on. The problem is that the changes technologists like Tim Bray identify do not compute in certain organizations where business methods deny that a fundamental change is taking place. When Eric Schmidt suggests that publishing companies use technology, the publishing companies here this as “use new printing methods”. What Messrs. Bray and Schmidt are saying is closer to “shift technical domains.” That is going to be almost impossible for many organizations because the time required to figure out how to merge technical domains is in a race with available cash.
Lots of business dislocation awaits organizations unable to understand what folks like Messrs. Bray, Schmidt, and W. Brian Arthur are trying to communicate. That sucking sound I hear so often is companies going out of business.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 7, 2010
Oyez, oyez, this is a freebie. Ah, so many of my blogs posts are. I must report this miserable situation to the Labor Department (DOL).
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