Why Does Technology Suck?
I've noticed something. Technology sucks.
Let me be a little more specific. Technology, and in particular the giant systems which big companies buy, usually doesn't work properly, if at all. In comparison, home technology (for all its shortcomings) is extremely robust, stable, and usable.
And I'm not just talking about the well-known limitations of certain Microsoft products. I'm talking about everything in IT, from databases to web sites to Three Letter Acronym implementations (CRM, SFA, SCM, etc.). If a company spent more than a million dollars on it in the past twenty years, it probably sucks.
Maybe I'm painting things with too-broad of a brush. But here are some examples I've observed in my travels:
A client of mine recently migrated one of its mission-critical systems to a new technology. Lots of new capability, but it sucks. It crashes weekly, and has been down for hours and even once for days at a time.
A consulting firm I know once privately described its business model to me as "cleaning up after Accenture." This firm employed about 150 programmers, and the majority of its business was essentially picking up the pieces of big failed projects and trying to get something to work.
Customer Relationship Management software sucks so badly that googling "Why do CRM projects fail" returns over a million hits, and industry publications regularly run articles on the topic. Those are the same publications which are generally in the business of promoting new technologies. Yet companies continue to launch CRM projects. In fact, at my prior job, I lived through two failed CRM projects in the space of less than five years.
Some consultants claim that over half of all big technology projects fail at one level or another, and that nearly all never meet all the initial objectives. Companies would never accept this dismal level of performance from other major capital expenditures--imagine if there was only a 10% chance that a new office tower would function as designed, and less than a 50% chance that it would even remain standing after being completed. But in the world of IT, where technology sucks, this is the norm.
There are lots of reasons why technology sucks, and I don't know which are most important. Chances are that it's a combination of factors:
Too much focus on short-term gains (both to the vendor and project ROI) at the expense of building robust and stable systems.
Overpromising the capabilities of new technology.
A system of software vendors (Oracle and its ilk) and systems integrators (Accenture and its ilk) which makes it easy to blame someone else for failure, and encourages drawing out failing projects to the bitter end.
Price-sensitive bidding which discourages extra expenses like design and testing.
System integration is inherently expensive and time-consuming, and most enterprise projects require more system integration than anything else.
Customers prefer flashy (but only marginally useful) features over systems which are simple and robust.
Salespeople have a hard time saying "no" when the customer is dangling a multi-million dollar project, so dumb ideas don't get quashed early on when they should be.
I could write an entire article about each of these. But not tonight.