by John McDowall
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| Technology Musings by John McDowall |
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Monday, September 02, 2002 Creating value and is EAI a dead end...Our industry is rife with stories of major technology investments gone wrong, and most of us have first hand experience with them. There is usually enough blame and recriminations to go round, but are we perhaps just expecting too much out of people rather than blaming the software, implementation etc. In the past several years there has been a push to develop software in "internet time", this was a concept I fought against (and in most cases lost...) as developing good software takes time. What the internet provided was a faster delivery mechanism and feedback system, i.e. you could deliver poor software faster to customers and hear about how bad it was in real-time - not a great model. I believe that tools are only as good as the people that use them, a great IDE does not make a poor developer a good developer. Similarly deploying complex enterprise software and then expecting the users to suddenly understand their business better and hence deliver value is almost equivalent to giving an average person a complete set of power tools and expect them to create a high quality custom home. We need to move away from mentality that clever software will fix all problems, software is a tool and for it to be really effective it needs to be used by well trained people. (Of course poorly designed software helps no one and this is not meant to be an excuse for poorly designed software.) Currently so much effort goes into the design of the software and systems and so little into the design of the human systems required to make it successful. This is not to suggest that we should be designing software with very simplistic interfaces, but rather we should match the software with the people using it and view them as a complete system to be optimized and designed to deliver business value. Deploying enterprise software and in fact any software should be considered as deploying a competitive weapon and as such the better people are trained to use it the more effective they will be. The time a team takes to become facile in any new tool is dependant on the amount of change from existing approaches, the learning capacity of the team, and the ability of the team to wok together. The bigger the distance to be crossed by the team the greater the possibility of failure or perhaps even worse; ending up at a different destination. This is what I think makes traditional EAI projects such high risk and why EAI is doomed to fail as a technology category. Enterprises will integrate systems and use this as a competitive weapon but only if they approach it a step at a time. To succeed requires tremendous focus and commitment to the team that is going to use the technology to achieve a new set of business goals. What is lacking from traditional EAI approaches is the focus on the business team and an incremental approach to developing success, both the software vendors and the system integrators are not orientated to helping companies achieve incremental successes as they are looking for large projects and as such tend to over promise and under deliver. The reason for under delivering is that an organization can only absorb so much new technology, processes and information at a time. Incremental delivery allows the organization to change and adapt to the new information and processes and use these new tools to succeed. Until we start putting organizational scalability before systems scalability we are not going to deliver on the potential of enterprise software. posted by John McDowall | 3:22 PM |
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