Q&A on the Book Software Wasteland - InfoQ
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Q&A on the Book Software Wasteland
Culture & Methods
Q&A on the Book Software Wasteland
Leia em
Português
May 07, 2018
10<br>min read
by
Ben Linders
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Key Takeaways
Almost all Enterprise Information Systems now cost vastly more to implement than they should
Most of the excess cost can be attributed to complexity
When you have hundreds or thousands of complex applications, you are completely stuck in what we call the Application Centric Quagmire
More large firms spend most of their IT budget on integration (without achieving more than ad hoc interfaces)
The fix is to become truly data-centric, where an integrated core model precedes the addition of functionality
In the book Software Wasteland Dave McComb explores what is causing application development waste and how visualizing the cost of change and becoming data-centric can help to reduce the waste.
InfoQ readers can read an excerpt from Software Wasteland: A Tale of Two Projects.
InfoQ interviewed McComb about the amount of waste in the informations systems industry, why the application-centric approach has become popular, what organizations can do to visualize their application development and maintenance problems and how to solve the problems, how reverse engineering can help us to reduce complexity, and what organizations that have reduced their software waste can do to prevent falling back.
InfoQ: Why did you write this book?
Dave McComb : It bothers me that we are rewarding bad behavior in the Enterprise Information Systems industry. The worse a system integrator or application software company’s ability, the more money they make, provided they can convince their clients that anti-productivity is necessary. If you can convince a client that a project should cost $100 million, you have a nice several hundred person project for several years. If it were widely known that such a project could be done by five people in six months, this waste would evaporate.
InfoQ: For whom is this book intended?
McComb : It’s intended for the executives who are involved in the sponsoring, selection and management of Enterprise Systems projects. This book is for the clients, to arm them against the wasteful practices that have become the norm.
InfoQ: How bad is the situation regarding waste in the Information Systems industry?
McComb : There are an embarrassing number of cases where systems cost more than 1,000 times what they should. Most people have heard about Healthcare.gov. Some know that to date it has cost $2.1 Billion (against an original budget of $93.7 million) . Even fewer realize that it could have been built (much better) for under $ 1 Million, which is exactly what HealthSherpa did. Healthcare.gov ended up adopting many of the design elements that were developed at HealthSherpa.
The Canadian Firearms Registry was sold as a $2 Million project ($119 million in cost and $117 Million in offsetting revenue). It cost $2 Billion, and registered 8 million guns before being decommissioned.
Most of the best stories are in the Government, partly because they are easier targets to the firms that prey on them, but also because so much of it is in the public record.
Private firms also often pay far more and often get very little from their large application and integration projects. We know of two large firms that launched a $1...