131–140 of 422 posts
"Content Management – Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) was the tool of choice to update and revise the content that appears on the website." If you want to blow a massive development budget AEM is a great choice; otherwise I'd advise you to pick a different content system. This decision alone probably sunk multiple millions of dollars. The platform license alone for their operating scale was probably a half million or…
They can do good work for some things, like regulation, audit, tax, etc -- there's a decent chance that whoever wrote the regulation you have to comply with works for one of the big4, which is quite advantageous.
However, for a technical project, complete boondoggle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
24 year olds? Since when are they sending the senior consultants out on engagements like this! I lasted not even 6 months working in professional services, really woke me up to what "prestigious careers" really are.
The only consulting firm I've ever heard spoken of somewhat favorably is McKinsey (and then only by ex-McKinsey people)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why anyone would pick that over a bunch of very mature open source offerings (with much larger developer communities) is beyond me.
Would like to know what open source CMS offering has a very mature offering? Wordpress is fine for a blog/news site.
It’s impossible to overstate how funny the shenanigans get when you combine a technologically incompetent legacy big Co. with one of these big professional services firms. The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be…
When I read "Agile Model" I could already see it, Accenture signing a Time & Materials contract, giving no shit about the badly detailed scope on the clients side (after all this means more hours), and some bad PMing on both sides. I bet the responsive detail was not clearly stated on the scope, Accenture noticed it but let it pass since it is T&M...
I'm an ex-Accenture (and also ex-IBM iX, that fixed Hertz site in the end) and to be fair this is not a widespread behavior on those companies, it really depends on who is the Senior leadership for those clients and areas are. I've seen some good and caring ones on both companies but I've also seem some terrible used car salesmen whose dominance in the higher executive levels (since they bring money) made me decide to switch from both.
It’s impossible to overstate how funny the shenanigans get when you combine a technologically incompetent legacy big Co. with one of these big professional services firms. The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be…
Can they find a loophole in a document somewhere or a mistake in some email that they can use to claim what they sold the client is out of scope, you mean.
Out of curiousity, what would the HN crowd recommend for the tech stack for a project like this? They had Angular, Mulesoft, and some other cruft I'm sure thrown in. What technology/languages/frameworks would work well enough to support Hertz and their subsidiaries for now and into the future? Here's what I'd choose as someone who hasn't done something like this in his 25 year career: Some front-end framework (is Rea…
Mulesoft, personally hate it - but it's definitely an option if you're trying to abstract out a whole bunch of legacy systems into clean APIs. Personally, I'd probably create some lightweight integration components in custom code (whatever language you like) deployed in containers on some scalable cloud platform over buying a chunk of enterprise middleware and trying to find the skilled resource to configure it. But, I don't think Mulesoft was a death knell here - merely a bit of a money pit. Same thing for AEM.
Overall, it doesn't look like they were choosing unreasonable tools to do the various things they wanted. e.g. they weren't trying to use Salesforce as a transactional database platform.
You could definitely pick a better stack, largely from open source, and deploy to the hyper-scale cloud provider of your choice - but I don't think the tech stack that's what screwed this project up overall.
I was at Accenture Digital, now rebranded as Accenture Song, when Hertz was a client in our office. Most projects had the same issues. I was hired as a developer to work on the front-end of a very ambitious app for one of the biggest oil companies in the world. One year later we delivered a crappy single page app, a relational database and some data pipelines, and in exchange we billed them no less than 20 million. I…
It's also usually that the big companies are so incompetent that paying 20 million dollars for nothing is still cheaper than hiring their own people to do it in house and ending up paying 40 million dollar for a team that will actually break stuff down and make everything worse.
> According to a presentation at a MuleSoft conference in 2018 they had at the time around 1,800 IT systems, 6 database vendors, and 30 rental processing systems '30 rental processing systems' interesting opportunity. the airbnb / squarespace rental ecosystem has a bunch of standards for syncing bookings, but I think they mostly amount to exchanging ical files. would be neat to develop a modern open protocol for inve…
We were supposed to get all this with the promise of SOA, SOAP, data routers etc, but that never really happened outside of the enterprise.
It’s impossible to overstate how funny the shenanigans get when you combine a technologically incompetent legacy big Co. with one of these big professional services firms. The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be…
I worked alongside one of these firms on a government contract. I was impressed by how perfectly optimized they were to extract money. The team's function was to report perfect KPIs at all costs. Managers spent virtually all their time bringing in more developers. Because "delivering a usable product" wasn't incentivized (specifically the 'usable' part, or what usability even meant), it was simply a race to generate…
At least, that's the theory of why the insurance marketplace failed so spectacularly.
Once you get to an organization of a certain size- private or public- the people with purchasing power are never the ones who need to use the service. As such, purchases are never made with the end users in mind. Instead, there'll be a list of checkboxes of things that sound nice, and if you're lucky, that list wasn't specially crafted to exclude everyone other than some Manager's buddy's business.