Peter Crowther wrote:
>> ...

lots of good comments. (Thanks.)

> I suspect you're coming from a
> background of solving "hard" problems, where throwing tin at the job is
> acceptable, to a world where return on investment determines whether a
> project can be justified or not.  ...

Heh. Bingo.

But the other side of the coin is that so many projects in this "easy 
problem" world are failures. A higher failure rate than the clean-slate 
hard problem world!

I've had a $300K hard-problem budget zero'ed because, in part, the last 
easy-problem folks spent $26M (some say $52M) to implement a very 
standard three-tier system that didn't work. OK. I get that. This is the 
way it is, and I've got plenty to say about that, too, over a beer.

But I'm an engineer. I want to understand why the three-tier projects 
fail. And how to avoid that. I know that there are people who can make 
them succeed despite the math, using leadership and operations research 
and charm and ruthlessness and lots of money, or whatever. But that's 
not my domain. I may not have the choice to always pick the right tool 
for the job, but I do want to try to understand what makes something the 
right (or wrong) tool.

-- 
Howard Stearns
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Division of Information Technology
mailto:hstearns at wisc.edu
jabber:hstearns at wiscchat.wisc.edu
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