I was leading an effort a while back to look at replacing a group of 40-odd systems, tied together by batches, to run a large worldwide retail operation.
After scoping out the work, my recommendation? Build a small app to handle receiving. You do receiving at all of your locations, it's being done by several different separate systems, and it's an opportunity to write a small, cross-platform app that can be used by anybody with zero training right away.
It was shot down! Why? Because large projects aren't done that way around here
That has nothing to do with anything, yet it prevented getting started immediately.
As a hired-gun, I moved on to bigger and better things. The org dropped 100M+ on just the kind of rewrite this author is talking about before giving up in failure. (Actually they changed the goalposts so that they won, then had a big party. But there was very little done compared to the money they spent)
It's the wrong mental model. It's painful to watch, like a kid with a big hammer trying to make a large circular block fit inside a small square hole. It's not going to be good even if somehow you make it happen. It's going to be ugly as crap. You end up destroying the thing you're trying to help.
> The org dropped 100M+ on just the kind of rewrite this author is talking about before giving up in failure.
That is evidence that the author has a point. He also said, at the very end, that this is a two-part article, and part 2 will deal with how to address these problems. I would not be surprised if he advocates something like the approach you suggested in this case.
After scoping out the work, my recommendation? Build a small app to handle receiving. You do receiving at all of your locations, it's being done by several different separate systems, and it's an opportunity to write a small, cross-platform app that can be used by anybody with zero training right away.
It was shot down! Why? Because large projects aren't done that way around here
That has nothing to do with anything, yet it prevented getting started immediately.
As a hired-gun, I moved on to bigger and better things. The org dropped 100M+ on just the kind of rewrite this author is talking about before giving up in failure. (Actually they changed the goalposts so that they won, then had a big party. But there was very little done compared to the money they spent)
It's the wrong mental model. It's painful to watch, like a kid with a big hammer trying to make a large circular block fit inside a small square hole. It's not going to be good even if somehow you make it happen. It's going to be ugly as crap. You end up destroying the thing you're trying to help.