Enterprise software tends to suck. Bigtime. It even has it’s own word: enterprisey. And believe me: it’s not a good thing.
Enterprise software tends to become complicated. Fast. Why? I’m a developer myself and at this level the most common reasons why things go wrong (in no particular ordre) are below:
- Poor developers
- Good but lazy developers with deadlines
- Good but numb developers
- Good but ignorant developers
I would place myself along the “Good but numb” crowd of developers.
There are also some things that may have went wrong even before it got to the developers:
- Unclear requirements but clear deadlines
- Conflicting expectations
- Miscommunication about priorities
All from real life experience.
And all those things are not even that bad. There’s one other factor that is often not explictly mentioned in the textbooks but one that is of utmost importance and that is: enterprise software is all about people. And not only the people that have to use it in the end; the often so lovingly called end users. No, it’s maybe even more about management, project leaders, consultants, experts, developers, team leaders and just about every which person involved in the project.
It’s all about prestige and even at the point where the application is not considered to be useful anymore by its own developers because of all the conflicting requirements, there’s still a lot of prestige to be gained for the rest of the people involved by just delivering the seven figure baby and forgetting all about it.
I was to include it here but I am too far gone right now so I will blog about the wrong tools for the wrong job another time even though it is also a major factor to the failure of enterprise software.