“Let me tell you the story of a company who’s on the verge of closing because of n-tier complexity, application server requirements and all that mambo jumbo” said a friend.
That company’s current client is a major public service institution. That institution has a set of complex policies designed, oh, by consultants whose employing firm of course was heavily paid to customize current “best practices” to secure the operating environment and making it use all the buzzwords that run around for it had to be modern. So when said company tried to deliver a software that it had a contract on, it was impossible to debug for they could not have any kind of access on the deployment systems. Which were run, not by the customer but, oh, by another consulting firm who was obliged to follow the rules set by the first one.
The governance of the above scheme looks good on paper, doesn’t it? At least I cannot deny it is a job creator for the consulting firms at the expense of those who want to do actual work.
Which brings me to the elitist question that I am going to fire up the next time I am lectured about Enterprise Architectures: “Have you personally implemented such a system? You, not someone you directed, you! Show me how, NOW!”. I’ve grown tired of people offering their paid opinion on IT systems that will improve anything when in fact the only system they’ve done is restoring their laptop’s Windows installation.
I’ve grown tired of people who prove the laws of Systemantics right with their ambitious, unworkable designs, namely:
A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
where in fact we know that since sometimes systems work, this is because:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.
But I guess in IT we are big fans of Rube Goldberg machines.
Managing organized complexity 