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Pointless IT Innovations Considered Harmful
Makarand writes "According to a comment column in the guardian innovations in IT are most often simply more trouble than they are worth. Most innovations in IT today are platform specific and are easy to
come up with in the computing fields. Innovating gets easier if the platform sticks around
for a long time. These innovations accrue incompatibilities making it difficult for users to switch platforms and absorb the costs of switching to a new platform. Users will not switch to
a competitor's product if they believe that their platform will be later updated to deliver the same benefits."
The gist of this article seems to be that it is innovations that deviate from established standards, rather than innovation per se, that are harmful.
This is pretty much a no-brainer at this point in time.
This is exactly what my employer did. Just over a year ago, they switched from a 3270-based front-end to a NT4-based system, still accessing the same mainframe servers on the back end.
Aside from the learning curve associated with the switch, and the loss of years of muscle memory, the company spent an obscene amount of money replacing the terminals with workstations, redesigning the physical layout of the work area, and developing the GUI.
And you know what? We're not one iota more efficient than we were before the switch. And our IT guys are out on the work floor MUCH more often.
(Before the switch, you basically only saw the IT guys out on the floor when someone's terminal died (about once every couple of weeks). Now, they have to come out several times a day to reset workstations, fix login problems, and do other NT-specific junk that was totally unnecessary with the terminals.)
But the funniest thing is that the GUI app only replicates some of the functions. So we still have to access the 3270 screens through terminal emulation to get all the functions done. So much for innovation.
The Quantum Panda