This in a nutshell is why the new U.S. health care bill is really a stimulus package for the IT and healthcare industries.
Integration of systems can be a nightmare.
As the UK can attest, large systems fail from sheer complexity, if the politics, internal resistance, and silo mentality don't screw you.
One of the reasons SAP succeeded was that in order to implement the software you had to rearrange how your company worked - not the other way around, modify the software to fit your unique business processes. Yes, SAP consultants make a lot modifying the software but those modifications are constrained.
Enterprise software is lucrative but you give up the freedom to do what you ever want. Design by committee.
Are you seriously suggesting that "complexity" was the root problem here? Rather than say cronyism, incompetence and greed?
edit: amused to see another comment on a different thread that uses the phrases "cronyism and incompetence". Did I subconsciously read that and copy it, or is it just the most apt description?
I'm sure incompetence plays a part, but two other factors at play are the fact that no one person really understands how things work, and when things start getting that distributed it's probably fairly likely that there are logical fallacies that have been built into the system and adhered to by strict processes for decades. It doesn't take much fudging for a bureaucracy to paper over these edge cases, the accounts shrug and say close enough, and the consultants are then put in an impossible scenario where different parties give them different business logic and no one has the authority or will to reconcile the issues from the top down.
Take a simple payroll system. Start with basic employees. Add in contract workers. And, this is the hard part, handle the exceptions - those who get paid more even though they are at the same level, those who get more vacation, those who have legacy benefits. Scale to an entire city.
Test. Because if people don't get their paychecks, you have a very angry group of customers.
Comments
This in a nutshell is why the new U.S. health care bill is really a stimulus package for the IT and healthcare industries.
Integration of systems can be a nightmare.
As the UK can attest, large systems fail from sheer complexity, if the politics, internal resistance, and silo mentality don't screw you.
One of the reasons SAP succeeded was that in order to implement the software you had to rearrange how your company worked - not the other way around, modify the software to fit your unique business processes. Yes, SAP consultants make a lot modifying the software but those modifications are constrained.
Enterprise software is lucrative but you give up the freedom to do what you ever want. Design by committee.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/pbr...
Are you seriously suggesting that "complexity" was the root problem here? Rather than say cronyism, incompetence and greed?
edit: amused to see another comment on a different thread that uses the phrases "cronyism and incompetence". Did I subconsciously read that and copy it, or is it just the most apt description?
I'm sure incompetence plays a part, but two other factors at play are the fact that no one person really understands how things work, and when things start getting that distributed it's probably fairly likely that there are logical fallacies that have been built into the system and adhered to by strict processes for decades. It doesn't take much fudging for a bureaucracy to paper over these edge cases, the accounts shrug and say close enough, and the consultants are then put in an impossible scenario where different parties give them different business logic and no one has the authority or will to reconcile the issues from the top down.
Take a simple payroll system. Start with basic employees. Add in contract workers. And, this is the hard part, handle the exceptions - those who get paid more even though they are at the same level, those who get more vacation, those who have legacy benefits. Scale to an entire city.
Test. Because if people don't get their paychecks, you have a very angry group of customers.