Wasting Money On Expensive Enterprise Tools
conferences, management, software development
I’ve seen the symptoms occur in every IT shop I’ve worked in, though rarely in consulting firms. They symptoms are:
- The CIO/CTO sees something about a new product that’s buzzword compliant be that Y2K certified, agile, or SOA.
- The tool costs at least six figures.
- The tool is “enterprise class” whatever that means.
- The tool is a must have when pitching the business on a new project. “Well, we need Product X to allow us to build a true enterprise system, otherwise it won’t scale.”
- No one asks anyone who’s going to actually use the tool what they think about it.
- It sits somewhere in a Gartner magic quadrant.
- Once some momentum is started there’s no way the purchase isn’t going to happen.
- It’s standards compliant–the vendor’s proprietary standard.
The end result is the product gets purchased and the line IT employees get screwed. Real alternatives to spending money on an expensive tool that may become just shelfware are ignored. I can think of tons better ways to spend six figures:
- New developer boxes for developers who haven’t had a new machine in years. Total cost maybe $6000.00 per developer for a nice high end box with dual 30″ monitors. Productivity goes up and for $100k you can outfit at least fifteen developers. On top of that you get a huge morale boost because the developers actually believe the line about really appreciating the employees.
- Bring in a high end mentor/trainer/coach at say $200/hr to teach things like TDD, real OO design, refactoring, XP practices. Total hours covered 500 or enough to spend an individual week with twelve developers.
- At about $3500 per conference send 28 developers to conferences. Conferences like like TSS Symposium, JavaOne, OSCON, SD West, RubyConf, NFJS, ETech, etc expand their abilities and vision.
- Setup a break room for developers and stock it with Foosball tables, video game systems, and free snacks, water, coffee, and soda.
- Buy Areon chairs for all the developers and hand out the rest as bonuses for high performing teams.
Ed Gibbs @ January 12, 2007
I agree with your post except I don’t necessarily believe it’s a bad thing to purchase enterprise software. I’ve worked in an IT department of a large company and I have seen this behaviour.
The problem is, managers don’t give any decision power to the employees who will be using the software. A manager’s counter argument would be that “the employees won’t research the product”… well that’s only true if the managers don’t value the employee input. There’s a difference between saying it and doing it.
I agree some enterprise software is worth the cost and effort. Oracle Financials is a beast of a software package, but in the area of Financials there aren’t a whole lot of other good options. My problem is with the wholesale purchase of almost any enterprise software because it looks bright and shiny and it will solve some percieved problem we never knew we had.
I’ve often wondered about this behavior, as well. I asked some mid-level managers at my previous employer why our company continued to purchase big-ticket tools for which open source alternatives existed, and they had an interesting answer that had not occurred to me before: The company wanted to have someone to sue in case the product didn’t work or in case they couldn’t get support for a problem.
Not exactly an engineer’s mindset, I guess.
I’ve heard that one as well from several employers and clients, but I think it’s a myth they subscribe to. Suing a vendor even one doing a bad job is quite rare. And doing it is often much more pain and expense then it’s worth.
I’ve even seen a company have their whole mainframe taken down by a large vendor for several days, and still never manage to actually sue them or get any damages awarded.