Systems practitioners when they are done with school and gets to be a Systems Analysts, or a Business Analysts, will suffer the same virus of BEING ONLY AS GOOD AS THE PERSON DEFINING the requirements. This is a reality in the jungle of systems developement.
This true to all no matter how intelligent they are, no matter how expensive or prestigious the school they came from worldwide, whether they collect the highest honors, etc.
At best, they will be able to develop applications on a trial-and-error basis. They will spent months of trying to understand a user requirements and processes, and try to predict the creative/uncreative and unpredictable demands that comes in trickles.
No matter how expensive the design tools are
adopted, they will fall victims to problems of scope since the poor users are always intimidated by thick reports/proposals done with sophisticated charts. Of course with expensive consultants they will sign of specs most specially of the higher ups are compeling them to implement the system. Lo and behold, it is not the bosses who are doing the acceptance testing…it is the little indians who were coerced in the approval process.. tsk! tsk!
And most likely, their assignment will be done in fragments and independent from other applications since the IT department do not have an integrated plan. Even if they do, most likely the CIO who came from the same tragedy of development and fragmented experiences will not and cannot manage the integration process.
Ergo, data will be difficult to reconcile, and even data elements of the same meaning will have different attributes from application to applications.
Even if the applications gets to be implemented, the organization gets to hostage to the underpaid overworked systems worker. With documentation almost nil, it is certain that if this poor worker quits, the person will not continue to update the system, he will rewrite it according to his understanding…more headache to the CIO who is also being hostage by his fragmented teams.
When the applications gets chaotic, enters the systems providers, the middleware, the many IT pretenders/brokers who will profess solutions at great expense. Guess what, the same staff who authored the chaos, after a costly training are targets for piracy by the same
vendors/provider to run their other prospective clientele.
For 5 decades, this scenario will continue to victimized students investing in years of studies and companies funding the growth of IT.
This spells bad news for the developing countries with specialist trainedon these products. Unknowingly, they will be continually fund the training for eventually migration to developed countries who can afford to pay higher wages and better quality of life.
Of course the good news, the winners are the IT vendors and solutions providers who will always claim that compared to the previous lifestyle, their products will offer fragmented relief. The IT who gets trained and gets pirated.
Who says the IT Management is simple. It is as hard as a job of President of a country for you have so many political bosses.
Yet in the higherarch of recognition, the IT boss is just a technician. and with the chaos around him, he is doomed for high blood pressure. Remeber, it is so easy to recruit new GM, Controllers, Marketing Officers for the supply is plenty. But to get a good CIO is rare and very difficult for the criteria remains unclear.
The answer is to provide continuing education for the users to learn to define their applications, understand how it integrates with the rest of the enterprise architecture, understand what are nice to have and must have, and be empowered to control development.
After being a practitioner for 43 years, this
is now my advocacy and in a small way teach users design, integrate, and manage projects
based on 4 simple user friendly forms.
So far, my student appreciates it. Slowly, the small and medium enterprises who cant afford the expensive products have an alternative enterprise solutions. This is the only way to democratize technology.
Manuel