Corporate I/T in a Nutshell

I wouldn’t know anything about this from my past experience:

From past experience, I’ve observed a trend where these companies (whether it’s Oracle, SAP, or you name it) make big promises, a company “bites” (knowing that the problems outlined really ARE big issues they’d LOVE to solve), and then the vendor proceeds to bleed millions of dollars out of their new customer.

Eventually, something is constructed/customized that accomplishes SOME of the original goals, but does so in a rather clunky, bug-infested manner, while other items on the “want list” get bumped to “future stages of implementation” (which often never really get completed, because they’re too costly and complicated).

By this time, upper level management is forced to cost-justify the monstrosity, so they do their best to keep their jobs (and pride) by praising the software as a “big improvement” or “big step towards greater efficiency”. Vendor then makes sure to quote them on that, and moves to the next sucker… uh, I mean customer.

–King_TJ, Slashdot comment on SAP and Microsoft

Oh, enterprise software, why must you tempt us with your buzzword compliant goodness?

Photo Attribution

Thanks to kevinzim for sharing “cogs” under a free license: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.