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I agree with a handful of your points, but I think the biggest thing broken with enterprises is that accountability is hyper-distributed, both internally (throu

I agree with a handful of your points, but I think the biggest thing broken with enterprises is that accountability is hyper-distributed, both internally (through massive org/bureaucracy) and externally (by selling things to your users', bosses', bosses) and not having a clean enough feedback loop. It makes them effectively irrational machines, who can survive (or die) fairly independently of their ability to create value. I think these misaligned incentives are the reason Enterprise projects suck, not because people are lazy and stupid (is anyone really honestly arguing that?), but also not because we've literally reached some hard-limit on the theoretical ability for 6,000 people to do great work. I also disagree that the problems enterprises purport to be tackling are all that large or overwhelming... not that they're not large or even overwhelming, but the idea that some group working on Oracle's Business Intelligence Solutions is saddled with a much harder problem than I dunno... Google, or Oculus, or NewRelic is super hard for me to swallow.

beat 11y ago
Good points. I've worked a lot in banking and healthcare, so where I see complexity isn't the software so much as the regulatory environment. This leads to a much more process-intensive way to work. I was in a brief conversation this morning about Conway's Law in the enterprise, and something I realized (I'm surprised I'd never realized it before) is that that ever-changing fault lines of corporate org structures break existing, successful software projects. Conway's Law says you create software that is a reflection of your organizational structure. What if the org structure changes, but you have a valuable legacy software product to support? Now the software and the organization are at odds with one another. That feels like a Big Truth to me, one of the key reasons things get screwed up in the enterprise.
- Terr_ 11y ago
  Another factor is that sometimes the software becomes the "battleground" between different facets of the company, especially when there's some social/organizational problem nobody is capable or willing to deal with. By spending money (dev effort) and eroding the software, the company gets palliative care. Hypothetical example... suppose Sales makes little white lies when quotas are looming or commissions are at risk. This causes problems for Finance when they have to reconcile some things down the line. Rather than fixing incentives, a feature-request comes in for a meaningless "I Pinky-Swear I'm Telling The Truth" checkbox that all sales-people must tick in the workflow. Next release, the sales-people complain about the unnecessary extra time it takes, and there's a counter-effort to make it ticked by default for users in certain "trusted" roles. Either way, it hasn't helped much, because the sales-supervisors have no incentive or willpower to chasten the salesfolk for broken pinky-swears. So a new feature-request comes in, for "Sale Validation Logic" or "Sale Approval System"...

beat 11y ago

Good points. I've worked a lot in banking and healthcare, so where I see complexity isn't the software so much as the regulatory environment. This leads to a much more process-intensive way to work. I was in a brief conversation this morning about Conway's Law in the enterprise, and something I realized (I'm surprised I'd never realized it before) is that that ever-changing fault lines of corporate org structures break existing, successful software projects. Conway's Law says you create software that is a reflection of your organizational structure. What if the org structure changes, but you have a valuable legacy software product to support? Now the software and the organization are at odds with one another. That feels like a Big Truth to me, one of the key reasons things get screwed up in the enterprise.

Terr_ 11y ago
Another factor is that sometimes the software becomes the "battleground" between different facets of the company, especially when there's some social/organizational problem nobody is capable or willing to deal with. By spending money (dev effort) and eroding the software, the company gets palliative care. Hypothetical example... suppose Sales makes little white lies when quotas are looming or commissions are at risk. This causes problems for Finance when they have to reconcile some things down the line. Rather than fixing incentives, a feature-request comes in for a meaningless "I Pinky-Swear I'm Telling The Truth" checkbox that all sales-people must tick in the workflow. Next release, the sales-people complain about the unnecessary extra time it takes, and there's a counter-effort to make it ticked by default for users in certain "trusted" roles. Either way, it hasn't helped much, because the sales-supervisors have no incentive or willpower to chasten the salesfolk for broken pinky-swears. So a new feature-request comes in, for "Sale Validation Logic" or "Sale Approval System"...