Saturday, January 22, 2005

Scott Rosenberg hits the nail on the head in his critique of Nicholas Carr's op-ed in today's NYT: [...]Nicholas Carr of 'Does IT Matter?' puts the FBI software meltdown in the context of other recent enterprise-scale software train wrecks like McDonald's Innovate and Ford's Everest (he could have dragged in the IRS, too). [...]Carr is right that large institutions get into trouble when they try to replace big old systems and introduce complex new features at the same time. But his advice -- give up on those new features, be happy with what you've got -- is needlessly ostrich-like. The answer is not to abandon change but to structure change so that it's not a big bang but an evolutionary process. The failures in so many of these software disasters don't stem from ambition but from impatience and bad planning. (Via Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment.) Rosenberg might also have mentioned mission creep, that disease of management by committee in which to buy the assent of various parties, their pet features are tacked onto requirements without regard for coherence, feasibility, price, or schedule, and not-invented-here, in which off-the-shelf solutions are denigrated by in-house IT managers who fear for their relevance. 3:00:52 PM