Friday, December 21, 2007
Enterprise Architecture and Extreme Frustration Patterns
Enterprise architecture initiatives would be a whole lot more successful if we focused on what makes folks happy and not just blindly following processes...
Nowadays, many enterprise architects aren't struggling with technical problems, but are struggling with social issues. One of the common patterns is the advent of Indian outsourcing. I run across lots of folks who deal with poorly written code so full of bugs that you can't even compile it. In jest, I do ask folks whether they asked for the code to be compilable as a requirement.
Part of the modern career path for those within large enterprises is to find ways to escape heavyweight processes and the tedium of much of the work that is rote which pervades many projects. Nothing destroys morale more than etting off of a project that you didn't much care for to work on something fun, only to be repeatedly dragged back for firefighting problems caused by outsourcing firms.
American IT workers likewise experience the other side of frustration in having to defend code that they didn't actually write. Getting blamed by users for crappy software when you are the single person in an IT department innocent of all blame because you have been advocating refactoring the damn mess for a year.
Outsourcing has brought along some worst practices by allowing process weenies to make decisions they really have no business making. Imagine having all technical decisions made by the least technical person, then being force fed their incompetence, then getting blamed for the resulting poor quality...
| | View blog reactionsNowadays, many enterprise architects aren't struggling with technical problems, but are struggling with social issues. One of the common patterns is the advent of Indian outsourcing. I run across lots of folks who deal with poorly written code so full of bugs that you can't even compile it. In jest, I do ask folks whether they asked for the code to be compilable as a requirement.
Part of the modern career path for those within large enterprises is to find ways to escape heavyweight processes and the tedium of much of the work that is rote which pervades many projects. Nothing destroys morale more than etting off of a project that you didn't much care for to work on something fun, only to be repeatedly dragged back for firefighting problems caused by outsourcing firms.
American IT workers likewise experience the other side of frustration in having to defend code that they didn't actually write. Getting blamed by users for crappy software when you are the single person in an IT department innocent of all blame because you have been advocating refactoring the damn mess for a year.
Outsourcing has brought along some worst practices by allowing process weenies to make decisions they really have no business making. Imagine having all technical decisions made by the least technical person, then being force fed their incompetence, then getting blamed for the resulting poor quality...
