Lazy Programmer, Didn’t Handle Exception
Joel wrote the “Lazy Programmer, Didn’t Handle Exception” post saying that all the major telecommunication companies has outsourced development and complex architecture of their IT…
He says : “Over the years I’ve used Sprint, the old AT&T, Cingular, and BellAtlantic, and they’re all pretty much equally messed up. All of them suffer from hard working shlubs who are stuck in a situation created by incompetent managers, who have built esoteric mountains of complicated and brittle systems with a million moving parts, 3/4’s of them outsourced, where it’s simply impossible to get anything done.”
Ok, this is quite true for every telecommunication business. It’s complex, there are many moving parts and people often fails to understand this complexity. Telecoms customers suffer from this situation and find the service unsatisfactory.
However, I think that there are some explanations for this mess. Telecoms are the examples of enterprise that has been going through the most rapid changes of the nature of the business. Cingular or Sprint are slightly bigger companies as compared to FogCreek. So inertia is more significant. Imagine, what is safer to drive is it a tank or Honda Civic ?
The obvious answer : Civic is safer. If you hit a wall or a big tree driving at 30 mph you will probably get worse injuries being inside the tank.
So bigger business IT system is better to be flexible in order to keep everything spinning, while being not as robust and solid as Copilot.com
If you look at the SAP site you will find that they don’t have samples of the telecoms providers using SAP ERP for everything. There is some important functionality as Billing or CRM done through the SAP and everything else is custom solution or interface or integration of another back end via Net Weaver or in some older 1970x style way.. You will see that the best monolithic ERP provider is unable to fulfill Joel’s wish : to build one solution that covers everything in the telecoms.
So I think that Joel thesis seems to be quite light and superficial. He didn’t say something new, nor gave any suggestion how to solve the problem.
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.346232.0