IT Efficiency

From Arnout Engelen

[edit] Efficiency

As a geek, the IT industry, as a whole, has long struck me as surprisingly and abhorrently inefficient.

When I say this, I am obviously not referring to the kind of 'efficiency' that is measured in dollars: the IT industry is making good money, and I'm certainly not in any position to tell IT companies how to run their business and make their money.

The 'efficiency' I'm referring to is the one you see by looking at the 'bigger picture', comparing the 'effort'(/money) that goes into the IT industry with the amount of 'value' that comes out of it.

It may only be an intuition, but I get the feeling 'we' (as IT industry) should be able to give our customers much bigger 'bang' for their 'buck', without making less money for ourselves.

[edit] Duplication of Effort

There are huge amounts of 'duplication of effort' going on in the IT world: people are reinventing wheels all over the place, and hardly learn from each others' work, let alone reuse it.

This lack of reuse of course has some practical reasons: part of it is because it's hard to search for code, part because software is written in many different languages, and middleware-ish systems for tying together code in different languages are still struggling to gain widespread use.

If this weren't problematic enough, there are also political and commercial issues that prohibit reuse.

TODO explain how the latter can be alleviated by opening up sources, and how commercial licensing isn't part of the solution, but part of the problem.

[edit] Generating Work

Some products (SAP, MS Windows) are so complicated to configure correctly that a whole ecosystem of support companies, education and certification etc. evolves around them. Indeed, every times a new version of Windows comes out, MS touts how much IT jobs this generates. A more pessimistic mind might say: how much money this will cost our users.

Now, it's certainly not an inherently bad thing to have such a support ecosystem around a product/system. However, the odd thing with the whole situation is that most of that ecosystem depends on the product being hard to use.

We should remember that our customers will always find new tasks for us to spend their IT budgets on, so making products easier to use will simply leave us with more interesting work to do, and eventually is better for everyone ;).

TODO mention somewhere that we should not only understand and use open-source ourselves - indeed, providing our own products as open-source might not even have advantages for ourselves in the short term, but more importantly, we should educate our customers to ask for open-source.