Stop feeding the big app

Having just wrapped up my involvement in a Fortune 500 CMS project, I’m convinced that big apps are on their way out.

If you work in IT for a Fortune 500 company and work on a big app, ask yourself these questions:

1. Have you meet with the big app pre-sales, regional sales and professional services teams, and did they recommended you upgrade, purchase additional software and buy more consulting hours?
2. Did the big app sales team keep telling you about their other applications and recent acquisitions?
3. Did you use an excel spreadsheet or calculator to work out how many processor licenses you needed and how much it would cost?
4. Did you find yourself asking the vendor what they considered a processor? Was a dual processor the same as 2 processors? What about a quad processor? At $20-35k per processor, semantics matter.
5. Did you find yourself asking the vendor if you needed to purchase licenses for development and staging?
6. Were you inundated with questions from your hosting and support providers? Questions like…What hardware should they buy? Do they already support all the components? Do they need training? When do they need to buy the boxes? Who needs access? What type of architecture is it? What should they do with the existing architecture? Does it cost more to support? Does it scale?
7. Did you either a) negotiate vendor training for the development team and business areas OR b) build a powerpoint presentation explaining why you didn’t
8. Did you gather global requirements for the app? If so, did you hear - “We already have a system in country xzy that does this and works.”
9. Did you migrate country xyz’s app into the “global solution”, and catch hell from them because the “global solution” does less and costs more?
10. Have you become one with Powerpoint

If you answered yes to most of them (and you probably did), its important to realize how we got here.

The big app model persists today because it looks good on paper. In this IT model, you only need a few apps to run the business. You can standardize the technology and move support to low cost countries. Business areas are on board because they hear it will cost them less and they will get better support.

But the big app model is not working. It is taking too long, costing too much, and big app vendors are not innovating. Have you seen a big app that doesn’t look old?

Its time for a change.

So what can you do as an IT manager?

1. Stop feeding the big app. Move to a “just keep the lights on” support model. Stop paying the big app vendor a percentage of the overall sales price for support per year. Stop enhancements. Stop all non-critical bug fixes. Stop 24-7 support. If you are concerned about your customers being upset, chances are they are already upset. So start rolling out better solutions in less time (next step)
2. Invest the money instead in hosted solutions that can be rolled out in under 30 days. Hosted solutions don’t require you to expand your internal infrastructure, they typically offer APIs so you can move data around internally when needed, and they are innovating.
3. Build a small internal team to support these “new” apps. Make sure they are on the business side of IT, and have them gather enhancement requests from your customers. Forward enhancement requests to the hosted solution provider and share any roadmaps with your customers.

It is time to get stuff done.

Leave big apps behind.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 12:30 pm and is filed under development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.