Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Tactical Integration Decisions...

Inherently, I am a pre-cognitive Engineer. I think about and operate in a future realm. It is they way I work best and achieve success.

Recently I became aware of a situation where a commercial product replaced an older, in house developed product. This new product has functionality and capabilities well beyond that of the "function" it replaced.

During the integration effort, it was realized that a bit of event / threshold customization was needed on the SNMP Traps front in order to get Fault Management capabilities into the integration.

In an effort to take a short cut, it was determined that they would adapt the new commercial product to the functionality and limitations of the previous "function". This is bad for several reasons:

1. You limit the capabilities of the new product going forward to those functions that were in the previous function. No new capabilities.

2. You taint the event model of the commercial product to that of the legacy function. Now all event customizations have to deal with old OIDs, and varbinds.

3. You limit the supportability and upgrade-ability of the new product. Now, every patch, upgrade, and enhancement must be transitioned back to the legacy methodology.

4. It defies common sense. How can you "let go" of the past when when you readily limit yourself to the past?

5. You assume that this product cannot provide any new value to the customer or infrastructure.

You can either do things right the first time or you can create a whole new level of work that has to be done over and over. People that walk around backwards are resigned to the past. They make better historians than Engineers or Developers. How do you know where to go if you can't see anything but your feet or the end of your nose?

1 comment:

  1. Dougie
    that is a very detailed observation. As a matter of fact the root cause of THIS situation may be added to the section where you talk about why EMS projects fail.

    To be honest, the reason why a LOT of IT projects fail ( I have been ERP, automation, GIS and NMS) is because the users try to limit the product.

    In a lot of SAP and Oracle ERP projects I noticed that users were trying to implement the same manual decade old process in the latest IT product they have purchased for million USD !

    The root cause of which is the "functional empire" bit you have mentioned. It also has to do with the lack of understanding at senior management level. Directors and managing directors will say yes to implement the IT system for point scoring and show casing for internal politics and cock mockery.

    Not for the sake business and improvement.

    ReplyDelete