

The Trouble With Enterprise Software - davidw
http://evora.mit.edu/smr/issue/2007/fall/01/

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run4yourlives
A good read, but ultimately disappointing, since it offers no real advice on
correcting the issue, spare "CIO's must get educated".

Question for all of you hackers: Do you have examples of companies that have
realized the issues in the article and then successfully implemented
strategies (no matter how crazy) that solved the problem?

Off hand, my opinion of enterprise systems and the "solution" to them is close
to what DHH (of rails fame) thinks: nuke 'em all and get little apps to do
little things. Are there other examples of different approaches?

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michaelneale
i thought the article was a little critical of the "little apps" approach. I
think the point wasn't so much the mess of things, its more that the
approaches used are very very basic (like a big unforgiving calculator more
then intelligence). I am not sure how the "DHH approach" makes that any better
(I have never seen a rails app that I would call intelligent at all - they are
web gui's for databases is all - pretty, cheap to build and pleasant enough to
use, for sure, but still, not "intelligent" in the way the article talks
about).

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run4yourlives
I agree, I don't think those little apps scale well. The problem is I haven't
seen anything that scales well.

I think the solution is not the technology, but the system they are forced to
deal with. I suppose I was looking for something more around how you can
change the corporation to fit the tech.

(Yes, I know that's entirely backwards)

~~~
michaelneale
yeah - well I guess its easier to "hope" as the article says that technology
can solve the problem, when really it is a people problem. I think we put too
much emphasis on the tech as to why things go right or wrong. We should just
shut up and do stuff (plenty of people do, they just don't necessarily blog
about it 24/7).

