291–300 of 333 posts
These custom software builds, built around specific corporations, with all the sales and account management and expectation planning and making sure that *when" this fails, it is the other party's fault....
We need to find better ways of doing this stuff.
Reminiscent of the state of Indiana's lawsuit against IBM for allegedly botching a project to automate the state's welfare system — lots of finger-pointing on both sides; the trial court's 65-page decision started out with the words, "Neither party deserves to win this case" [0]. The case has been up to the Indiana Supreme Court already [1]; on remand last summer, the trial court found that IBM is liable for USD $128…
Sales and Engineering - very different competencies. Companies like IBM are NOT technology companies. They are sales-culture oriented, and their product HAPPENS TO BE technology. In fact you could argue, the only way to win big enterprise contracts in the first place, is to be a sales-culture company. But after selling the deal, their workers have to solve a difficult engineering and organizational management problem…
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Sales and Engineering - very different competencies. Companies like IBM are NOT technology companies. They are sales-culture oriented, and their product HAPPENS TO BE technology. In fact you could argue, the only way to win big enterprise contracts in the first place, is to be a sales-culture company. But after selling the deal, their workers have to solve a difficult engineering and organizational management problem…
The project sizes are fine. The team sizes are too large. There's too much empire building and career-minded politicking going on in companies of this size, which gets in the way of actually working on the product. Managers increase scope to increase their budget, then do busy make-work to justify the budget so they can get more next round. The engineers need to look busy even though things aren't defined, and optimi…
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Having worked on similar things on a smaller scale but higher up the chain, I can tell you the list of possible issues is a mile long. Everything from lack of leadership and conflicting goals to ever-changing scopes and insufficient resources is a candidate for the big blame. A lot of people, organizations, and systems have to work well together to succeed. As techies, we think the technical solution is the most supe…
And, often times that discussion leads to a decision maker saying - that shouldn't be the case, it's your problem, not ours that you can't handle that. So you end up assigning someone to 8+ hours of work to do it, you also have to end up having 2-4 meetings on the topic, and on and on.
Not having ever worked on anything like this, the death knell for these projects must be the inability to ever reduce functionality into a reasonable core set. Basically the 80/20 rule but where there are practically an infinite number of edge cases that stretch the project on indefinitely? You could serve 80% of the payroll burden with software that cost $10m. 90% coverage costs $100m. 98% costs $1,000m. And 100% co…
> You could serve 80% of the payroll burden with software that cost $10m. 90% coverage costs $100m. 98% costs $1,000m. And 100% costs $∞ I read something in a trade journal probably probably about 15 years ago, that really stuck with me: When businesses buy big software solutions (I think the article was about ERP systems), they should prepare to adjust and change their processes (within reason, of course) and not ju…
I was the CTO for a large, Fortune 100 company. When I first took over the position I would regularly get requirements documents for internal projects that were 3 or 400 hundred pages. The project team would dutifully carry out the requirements gathering process, everything was meticulously documented, with data flows, and process maps, etc. Everything was a requirement, everything was mandatory, and everything had t…
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I disagree, IBM is a multifaceted company. These kinds of projects fall under what used to be called IBM Global Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Global_Services . It could be compared somewhat to EDS (HP), Accenture, Perot Systems (Dell) etc. I've never heard of over-delivery from any of these kinds of outsourcing arrangements, they always seem so obviously destined for boondoggle. IBM proper, the one that…
I’m surprised the Stratix FPGA platform isn’t getting more marketing. Half a TiB/s memory bandwidth [0] (white paper) when GPU’s memory transfer is the bulk of the overhead could help Intel make up for lost gains in SIMD application marketshare. [0]: https://www.altera.com/content/dam/altera-www/global/en_US/p...
HP has GenZ, IBM is going to move from DDR or DDR buffers to CAPI attached RAM -- expect to see HBM2 attached to CPUs in 2019. I'd be happy to discuss that kind of thing in email.