Читать книгу The Art in Business System Design - Jeff Chapman - Страница 11

Some I.T. personnel are as far apart as the East is from the West. Three metrics separate the developers from the management:

+ Easy to use

+ Fast

+ Proprietary

From management’s perspective software and file formats should be fast, easy to use, and universally available. In this way the company can avoid lock-in to knowledge experts or particular vendors. Management wants to periodically toss their empty wooden bucket into the nearby flowing river of tools, vendors, and talent, and swoop out a full scoop of the latest technology.

The developers however actually prefer the opposite: software and file formats that are cumbersome, resource intensive, and proprietary. In this way they can become the experts and increase their value to the employer. They want to provide a specialized adjustable three-setting showerhead (with its own plumbing) to tickle management’s fancy.

So with both sides pulling in opposite directions what actually gets developed… what can possibly morph into physical being? Somewhere amidst the massive amounts of energy used in the politics and positioning of the two sides a compromise springs up in-between.

Irrespective of the methodology employed or the layers of middle management helping to assuage the differences, software developed in a corporate environment ends up partially complicated in the more obscure parts, just fast enough to get the job done, and reliant upon one or two inside hacks. We manually scoop buckets of water into the intake valve of the water boiler to feed the massage shower head. It can be no other way.