Why Technology Kingdoms Rise and Fall

My guild brother Mark Clerget has a great post about Why Technology Kingdoms Rise and Fall.

That lack of disrespect for the basic customer-vendor food chain required about 2 weeks of redesign of some key backend stored procedures and processes. Needless to say, it didn’t serve to improve my perspective of Sybase. The customer spent between $100k-$200k in the original port from Sybase to SQL Server. What value did it add….ZERO. It cost more, took longer and performed poorer. Fast forward...now the customer decided that their strategic direction is to migrate all Sybase applications to Microsoft SQL Server. So, it will cost Sybase millions of dollars from this customer and any customer that I do business with in the future that is willing to listen to my experience.

The lesson I learned is this, technology kingdoms rise and fall primarily due to fear, pride and ignorance. Excellent consultants, at least the ones I am willing to work with, have no room for any of these traits. If you are on a project where fear, pride and ignorance are given free reign, raise the red flag high. Waive the flag with vigor. Get executive sponsorship and root it out. These people are the type that are continually complaining, blaming and failing. An end user cracked me up with describing these type of people like this..."Their cubicles are vortexes where all happy thoughts go to die". Sadly their teams and their organizations are where good projects go to die as well.