Introduction:

It seemed like the IT Industry collapsed and burned with the "Perfect Storm" of disasters at the beginning of 2000. First, Y2K came and went quietly, making companies wonder if the money they had spent to prevent the predicted disaster had been wasted. Then the "Dot Com" fiasco came to a head, further indicating to businesses that investments in computer technology may be foolish. Then came 9/11/2001 and suddenly Corporate America had more important places to spend their money. But the end had been coming for a long time, as it does for any industry that constantly promises great things and almost never delivers.

Computer Solutions or Snake oil?

It is very easy to see the potential of well designed and crafted hardware and software computer systems. Actual examples exist, though they are not common. Far more prevalent are very expensive, multi-year projects that ended as total failures. The true magnitude of the cost will never be known because companies buried it their overall budgets. What senior management saw was that IT promised great things and delivered only one, a massive black hole that consumed an unbelievable amount of resources, including hundreds of whole companies. Famous software catastrophes include high profile failures like the S&L failure in Denver that may have started the dominos falling to create the S&L crisis. There are also unknown failures that cost millions and may have actually caused companies to fail, such as the First Trust/Lansa project and Frontier Airlines/AS400 projects in Denver. Other famous failures in Colorado include the Colorado State multi-million dollar fiascos involving the welfare, registration/elections and vehicle title systems engineered by big name consulting firm Accenture, among others. We could go on and on, the examples are endless, or as one pundit put it, the norm rather than the exception.

Largely because of these massive failures, companies and governments backed away from building new computer systems and web presences out of whole cloth and looked for a more efficient, economical approach.

But the computer industry hype machine is nothing if not resilient, and thus was born the ERP/SOA/OOP strategy, and its evil step children, COTS, RAD, Agile software development, and SaaS. Some of the same companies that created the big dollar failures in the past are now selling new "technologies" that are really nothing more than sophisticated smoke and mirrors. The entire Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm is built around the concept that companies can retain and enhance their existing software and/or COTS systems by encapsulating them and connecting them using "Services". These services are a nebulous concept, however, which can mean just about anything in the hands of skilled purveyors of cyber-babble. Babblers include consulting firms like EDS, Anderson Consulting, Accenture, Microsoft, etc., not to mention CIOs and other computer executives who embrace these vaporous concepts in order to increase their influence and fill their pockets. "Services" is the ultra buzzword of the 21st century, bolstered by volumes of standards and "best practices" published by ITIL, ISO, Microsoft and others. Careful reading of these tomes will reveal a concept without an implementation, a framework without support, an idea without substance.

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