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In IT, Beware of Fad Versus Functional
Lemeowski writes: Cloud, big data, and agile were three of the technology terms that were brandished the most by IT leaders in 2014. Yet, there could be a real danger in buying into the hype without understanding the implications of the technologies, writes Pearson CTO Sven Gerjets. In this essay, Gerjets warns that many IT executives drop the ball when it comes to "defining how a new technology approach will add value" to their organization. He says: "Yes, you can dive into an IT fad without thinking about it, but I can promise you'll look back and be horrified someday. The only time you can fully adopt some of these new methods is when you are starting from scratch. Most of us don't have that luxury because we are working with legacy architectures and technical debt so you have to play hand you've been dealt, communicate well, set clear and measurable outcomes, and use these fads to thoughtfully supplement the environment you are working in to benefit the ecosystem."
So bad executive behavior, which has been immortalized in dilbert for *decades*, is now worthy of an essay?
There's a certain sense of irony here.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Agile Project management methodology has a lot of good features.
Cloud based processing can help the organization.
You can get a lot of useful information from Big Data (Previously Business Intelligence, Previously Decision Support System)
And they are still hanging on to Enterprise Class software.
But they jump headfirst without realizing what their main plan or problems they will use it to solve.
But what normally happens they just replace their existing technology and try to rig the new one to do what they did before and hope magically they will get a benefit from it.
These types of technology require you to change your full organization culture, and workflow to gain the advantage of the new technology. Just saying you got a big data project by joining all your DB tables in some big views and giving you a few reports isn't really big data.
Hosting your email on gmail isn't going to the cloud. Or even just remotely hosting you stuff on cloud systems, isn't embracing the cloud it is just offshoring your data.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Nonsense... high level IT people (IT directors, CTO, etc) aren't worried about whether it really 'adds value' for the company or not, they probably won't be around (at least in my last few jobs) to have to deal with the consequences - the only consideration for them is that it 'adds value' to their resume/CV, so they can move on to that next job with "Successfully transitioned company 'Z' to a cloud based architecture cutting datacenter and hardware costs to virtually nothing" (ignoring, of course, the fact that it's all falling apart slowly after them).
Not meaning to put down "the cloud" there, there are instances where it can be a benefit, but in general the decisions aren't made on that kind of 'case by case' basis, they come down from "on-high" by executives who have no real idea about the technology beyond what they've read in "CIO magazine", and are 'mandated' on an all-or-nothing basis. Rarely does said executive actually wind up sticking around to deal with the outcome of their 'sweeping change'. And, of course, by then the next exec comes in with some brand new thing being touted ("now we'll focus on 'big data', and 'flattening out the organization') and even as the last thing is maybe just barely starting to become stable it's time to move in some new direction.
Because technology changes much more quickly than real world analogs, and sometimes everyone suddenly decides "OMG, if we don't have teh new stuff we're gonna die".
I've seen a lot of money thrown at fads which took resources away from things which actually add business value or generated revenue.
A brick and mortar business doesn't have the huge shifts which happen in tech, where all of a sudden completely unproven stuff becomes perceived as completely mandatory.
I've seen entire development teams pulled off core products which generated money in order to implement some crap buzzword technology which, in the end, nobody ever actually wanted and which didn't add business value. And by the time anybody realized that, the core technology which generated money had been left to rot for a period of time.
And, of course, unlike other industries .. management in tech frequently have no clue about tech, and therefore have no way of understanding the consequences of their stupid choices. They just think it's all interchangeable and subject to whatever idiotic whims they come up with.
Back when companies used to have roadmaps (do they still have those?), it was not uncommon for a bunch of tech people to be rolling their eyes saying "yeah, right, like we'll be making those in a year" as management told them about the wonderful (and completely meaningless) future of the company, only to be told something completely different in six months.
The people in the concrete business? They don't suddenly get told they'll be making stuffed talking animals in a few months.
I consider it a sad fact of reality that most tech execs are completely delusional, and truly believe that just because they say something based on whatever crap Gartner is selling, that in six months time it will be reality. And they're often too short sighted to realize that the crap we abandoned from six months ago isn't any more true than the stuff we'll abandon six months from now.
Because tech execs consider themselves visionaries, and visionaries aren't constrained by pesky things like reality.
Me, I'm betting anybody who has worked in tech long enough has a whole litany of stories about how the "exciting new future" turned out to be "yet another dud championed by idiots".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It was called "Time sharing".
Yep. I've used nothing but Ruby/Rails for 8 years now and it has increased my productivity to a level that wouldn't have been possible 15 years ago. But I just spent a weekend writing a C program, my first in 10+ years. Why?
Because I need to be able to analyze wav/aif files and create a fancy "waveform" like soundcloud. I have a great little Ruby gem for doing it and it takes 3-4 minutes to generate a PNG of the wave form for each audio file. My C program takes .05 seconds to do the same. Yes, I got a speed up of about 3000-4000 times by using my own hand-written C that takes into account everything that I know about optimizing code. I started out doing assembly and machine code (I'm serious) 25+ years ago so I know what makes a modern CPU fast. Ruby ain't it :)
But that's one little piece. Most of my applications are pulling data from databases and putting it on the internet - speed like that would be of little value and it would take me 5 times as long to write the code in order to get a minimal speedup.
Use each tool where it's appropriate. But don't claim that "_____ sucks" just because it doesn't fit your needs.
Do you have ESP?
And he makes a FUNDAMENTAL mistake by focusing on "defining how a new technology approach will add value".
At the CxO level that is easy to do. It will allow the company to synergize your core with blah blah buzzword blah buzzword.
But the reality is that it is about adding more achievements and buzzwords to someone's resume so that they can move on before their choices bite them.
These are the questions I end up asking when someone runs into the I.T. department shouting that we need to upload all of our code to the cloud and power down our data center.
1. Does this technology put our companies assets at risk?
2. Does this technology significantly improve the performance/security/reliability without violating rule #1?
3. Does this technology put us in a situation where a single vendor/point of failure/attacker can road block us?
4. What are the long term costs of this technology compared to our existing infrastructure?
5. How disruptive is this technology and do it's benefits outweigh the disruption?
In many cases once we get into the conversation and the person has a better understanding of what's going on behind the scenes, suddenly "cheapass-hosting-services.com" stops looking like such a great deal.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.