SAPs

The Art and Science of Being an I/T Architect: SAP Disrupts Everything It's a frightening little piece on SAP upgrades- which the upside being that there's going to be a lot of work for consultants- even IBM is raising an army.

I saw a comment from Scott Mark on this that said..."talk about enterprisey - this is *exactly* the situation that large companies end up in; serious roach motels - for however complicated WS-* seems, it beats this kind of lock-in!". That seems like a false dilemna- it has nothing to with WS-*, it just proves that buying enterprise systems is potentially worse than building them yourselves.

It's not like SAP or one of the companies Oracle keeps buying have figured out some real significant technical problems that your above average programmers couldn't figure out. It's not a 3D GIS or even a database something like that- it's a business system that pushes dollars and nonsense around a company. So, of course, you end up customizing it, and, of course, you end up doing massive amounts of integration work (just to integrate the internal components), and of course, it when the underlying base software changes, none of your stuff works.

I'd like to propose simplifying business processes as a good way to make your software work better.