An off the shelf software project - Part One
I should probably post Part one of the saga
https://youtu.be/jZZ0MUPW5MU
It's all very sad. This big American corporation rode into town and unloaded their junk COTs project on a naïve government department.
The system being implemented was a tiny legacy application with about a dozen in house staff and approximately 10,000 external customers.
The main driver was to take the legacy adabas system off the mainframe and replace it with a configurable Case Management COTS product.
Smooth talking salesmen said that there would be no need for developers. The business users could be trained to configure the off the shelf software solution.
Three years later and many millions of dollars down the drain we have a dogs breakfast of a solution. The product could not talk to our oracle databases so JAVA developers had to be recruited to develop a layer between the product and the database.
Configuring the product requires highly skilled consultants who have a systems architectural understanding of the entire framework. Any change can ripple and bring down the entire system.
Dates are incorrectly formatted and have to be fixed one field at a time, the system runs like a dog and users are periodically thrown out and cant log back in.
System has been live for two months now and a dozen new production bugs are raised each day.
Business are fuming. What a mess. The original senior managers who were part of the selection and were flown on junkets to the USA have retired. (Probably got a nice fat brown envelope to help with that.
A bloody disaster and its still unfolding.
I should probably post Part one of the saga
https://youtu.be/jZZ0MUPW5MU
It's all very sad. This big American corporation rode into town and unloaded their junk COTs project on a naïve government department.
The system being implemented was a tiny legacy application with about a dozen in house staff and approximately 10,000 external customers.
The main driver was to take the legacy adabas system off the mainframe and replace it with a configurable Case Management COTS product.
Smooth talking salesmen said that there would be no need for developers. The business users could be trained to configure the off the shelf software solution.
Three years later and many millions of dollars down the drain we have a dogs breakfast of a solution. The product could not talk to our oracle databases so JAVA developers had to be recruited to develop a layer between the product and the database.
Configuring the product requires highly skilled consultants who have a systems architectural understanding of the entire framework. Any change can ripple and bring down the entire system.
Dates are incorrectly formatted and have to be fixed one field at a time, the system runs like a dog and users are periodically thrown out and cant log back in.
System has been live for two months now and a dozen new production bugs are raised each day.
Business are fuming. What a mess. The original senior managers who were part of the selection and were flown on junkets to the USA have retired. (Probably got a nice fat brown envelope to help with that.
A bloody disaster and its still unfolding.
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