Does Our Technology Equate To Lies?

I recently had a conversation with a CTO with experience heading large and global teams. His recent work had concentrated on installing SOA-based systems into his organizations. He brought a viewpoint of his to my attention that related custom software development to a lie. The lie that you tell yourself, he said, was that a custom or one-off module or block of code solves your business problem the way you want it to. You're lying to yourself because the problem wasn't solved in an configurable, and maintainable, and service-oriented way.

He went on to support this statement by relating a story about lining up the dates in a fiscal calendar of a system that did not lend itself easily to change. A custom solution working around the constraints of an existing system was needed to meet the demands of the business, and he was not quite satisfied that the solution had to be of a custom nature. In his view, he preferred the solution to be service-oriented and configurable.

While I understand the CTO's view towards a service-oriented and configurable architecture, I don't think that his lie is attached to the appropriate concepts. Service-oriented or not, you can effectively eliminate the lie he speaks of by managing the lifecycle of the customized solutions.

If your business is sufficiently pained by the problem where you need a customized solution implemented and deployed urgently, and the solution has been appropriately constructed and tested, then by all means deploy it. But if the custom solution is not the most optimal, configurable, or maintainable, then put an expiration date on it and schedule the time and resources to implement the optimal solution by the expiration date. This way you would provide urgently-needed relief of the pain your business is experiencing, while having an outlook toward the optimal future.

But it is crucial that the follow-up happens. The common occurrence, and the real fear here, is that once a solution is implemented and deployed, people move on to solving the next problem or working on the next great project without coming back to readdress that sub-optimal solution. This custom development often ends up being yet another buried non-catalogued nugget of logic.

In the CTO's anecdote above, the custom solution is necessary to work around the larger system's constraints. But what if this custom development was configurable, maintainable, and service-oriented from the start? It is still a separate custom component, one more component to be maintained in the catalog of assets. In maintaining a service-oriented architecture, having an up-to-date and discoverable catalog of components, the contracts they satisfy, and their development artifacts is key to performing effective maintenance. SOA implementations typically have more components than non-service solutions, not less. SOA implementations without these catalogs can quickly become burdensome and error-prone to maintain.

So I think that the real ways organizations lie about custom software development are:

- not assigning an expiration date to sub-optimal solutions, and not managing the transition process from sub-optimal to optimal

- not maintaining an effective catalog of solutions, contracts, and components

- expecting a silver bullet or all-inclusive solution to eliminate the need for custom development

- not actually solving the organization's problems because no custom (or market-leading) solution is considered to be the optimal solution for the business

Unlike the CTO's organization, I've seen organizations with very painful problems put off implementing solutions for years because the solution candidates don't fit into the "optimal" category, service-oriented or not. If the solutions are not considered to be the holy grail, then nothing will be implemented at all. And the business continues to limp along in pain without further technology assistance.

Wrapping up my conversation with the CTO, he was considering implementing one of the larger off-the-shelf tools that can effectively assist in service orientation. He left me with the impression that these solutions, their price tag, and their large deployment footprint offered him great comfort in removing the custom development lies from his organization. But alas, that is a lie for another day.