This is not a new phenomenon. So why does this situation persist ?

From my humble observation tower, it's difficult to blame the customer. I blame the industry. It is simply not performing its primary function; that of serving the best interest of its customers.

So what's going on? Several things.

First and foremost, project managers underestimate the complexity of the tools with which they wish to work. A complexity that is totally unnecessary for business applications that process data intensive transactions.

Second, they believe vendor performance claims for these tools. It's hard to think otherwise when high-profile analysts and sections of the press support them too. Remember when you were being told that Enterprise Java Beans were 'the Holy Grail' for business application development? Tell that to the poor project manager in a large financial institution that scrapped 6 months of development with EJB because of scalability problems. And where is EJB now? Forgotten. Replaced with J2EE - of course. And two years from now? Replaced by something else.

I am sure you know similar stories. As the Aberdeen Group rightly argues in their February 2003 report on Programmer Productivity: 'to bridge the object-relational mismatch, developers must perform an awkward translation between objects and databases'. In layman’s terms, this is not a marriage made in heaven.

Finally, like every human, project managers forget. They forget about their failures and insist that 'this time, I'm going to get it right.' But they don't, because they refuse to believe the truth of the matter; that the tools they are using neither fit the purpose, the skill set, the timeframe nor the budget that executive management has decreed. And so the cycle repeats itself. And the result is the waste of valuable corporate resources.

Some businesses can afford this waste... most cannot.

So, welcome to the increasing numbers of you that have 'seen the light'. The fog is beginning to lift and you join the ranks of those with an increased sense of responsibility - to your customers and to the company that pays you.

Sincerely,

Jean-Georges Schwartz
Chief Executive Officer