Enterprise Software A Dangerous Choice

I’ve worked in several IT shops where various CIOs sold the business on how some great new Enterprise technology was going to make IT better, faster, and more successful. I’ve never seen it work out all that well.

In one particularly absurd environment they went through at least three completely different Enterprise technologies in the space of about five years.

  • First there was Rapid Application development with Powerbuilder.
  • Next up was Java and J2EE.
  • Then it was .NET that was going to save the day.

The end result was predictable. The large centralized IT department could barely deliver an application because they were always on a learning curve. The business picked up on this. Multiple CIOs and middle managers were demoted or asked to be successful elsewhere. The central IT department was largely broken up and distributed out to individual business units. There is very little reuse since each unit does it’s own thing, but at least they feel like they have some control.