Have you seen the movie Sideways?  It sometimes reminds me of the IT world where everything seems OK and then something goes so sideways that you wonder if you are in the right profession.

 

4 years ago, my previous company was hired to develop a Contracts Management System (CMS) for an Energy Utility company based in Western Canada.  The Energy Utility was going through the process of fitting into a recently deregulated industry.  Anyone that has been through this understands the extreme chaos involved.  Here was a Utility company whose customer base, for over 20 years as a public utility, was in the few hundreds servicing small to medium commercial businesses and now had to scale to hundreds of thousands for the retail market, hence the need for software automation.

 

The amount of business change served up so fast was a painful experience for many.  Most business processes had to be reengineered (read: discovered), every software application either had to be replaced or retooled, or a net new packaged or custom developed application was put into place to handle deregulated business processes.  With respect to CMS, the workflow for processing contracts was incredibly complex and recursive based on the deregulation rules.  We used BizTalk Server and its workflow capabilities to develop the solution and also used BizTalk from an application integration point of view to be able to send contracts (XML documents) to other applications.

 

The division we custom developed CMS for thought we did such a good job that an independent ROI case study was produced.  We were pretty happy with the work we did and felt like we provided real value to an incredibly difficult business problem.  So far so good.

 

Fast forward 4 years - I am working for a different Systems Integrator in a different location, but I get a call saying that there is this Utility Company that is looking for a document workflow solution for handling contracts. I think to myself, this cant be.  But of course it is!  It is indeed another Contracts Management System for the same Energy Utility.  What are the odds?  Or maybe this is a sure bet?  No-one knows what happened to the old CMS as there are all new employees in the IT department.

 

It kinda feels like Groundhog Day as everyday I wake up and feel like I am still working on CMS forever and ever.  The sad part is that the Energy Utility has already spent a $500,000 on a system that apparently does not exist anymore.  What happened to it?  No-one knows.  How do you lose $500,000 in software?

 

This reminds me of an excellent book by the Alan Cooper, father of Visual Basic, called, The Inmates are Running the Asylum.   If there ever was a truism in the IT business, I would say this one is it.

 

Someday, when software industrialization actually makes it way into our world, these types of sideways scenarios will become less prevalent in both the business and IT world.  In the meantime, its Groundhog Day!