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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.
I'll have you know im very well versed in that which is fad, and that which is function, you insensitive clod. I attend my scrum stand-ups daily to make sure I get updates about our Cloud. once thats taken care of, I write the most functional devops scripts in nothing less than the latest ruby code to ensure our SAAS, PAAS, DAAS, and GAAS are all ITSG A OK. Now if you'll excuse me, I believe my Zune is finished charging.
Good people go to bed earlier.
So over my nearly 20 years in IT/CS, I've seen a few:
I worked for a large retailer. We migrated from an old frame-relay leased-line network to a much more capable multihomed IP-over-VPN configuration to connect all of our retail locations around the country back to HQ. This new system worked well. Our CIO retired, and a new one was brought in. CIO Magazine a year or so later had an article about "Satellite Internet, The Future?" Our CIO then "spontaneously" started lobbying to get us to scrap our efficient, inexpensive, high-bandwidth network for a satellite system.
I can't tell you how many projects I saw rewritten in Ruby on Rails just because that was the new hotness, only to be abandoned later when everyone realized that Ruby is awful.
I myself wrote a bunch of stuff in Erlang not because it was the best language but because that was the new hotness.
Two unchanging things I've noticed are:
A lot of time, the new hotness makes common problems go away or common tasks easier, but ends up making more complex things harder. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but people tend to get stuck in the model of thinking that the new technology has to be used for everything, and they end up shoehorning their complex projects into frameworks that aren't the best choice.
No matter what the new technology is, and no matter how fantastic it is, it's not going to replace C/C++ for systems-level work, and Python and Perl aren't going anywhere. Truly successful technologies have long tails.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
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.
I'd love to comment but I have to finish up my hadoop task on AWS before the end of this sprint.
It was called "Time sharing".
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.
My point is, minivans are perfectly adequate for getting several people, some people plus cargo, or a fairly large amount of cargo from one place to another, reasonably efficiently on fuel, with only a single vehicle to do all of it. For cargo a minivan has the lowest floor of a wagon-type vehicle short of a sedan-based station wagon, has a high roof making large things fit easily, and has three large doors making accessing cargo or seating space fairly easy.
A minivan is not a sports-car. A minivan is not a 4x4. A minivan, however, is probably more efficient than either in the primary use for a vehicle, which is typically on the road. It has a lower load-height than a pickup truck, and can hold a 4x8 sheet of plywood while most pickup trucks can't without leaving the tailgate down.
I don't own a minivan either, but right now I don't need one, as I have a beater truck in addition to my other vehicles. I, like most people, have chosen style in my vehicles over raw utility.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This is why I still use DOS.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."