The last decade has been a strange aberration in the IT & T
industry, mainly due to some of the panic factors emanating from
sources external to the industry and some other issues falling squarely
within the industry's own perimeters.
In the late nineties, there were two phenomena that dominated IT
budgets - the panic of Y2K and the crazy, frenzied days of e-commerce.
To a lesser extent there were minor panics created by deadline-based IT
drivers such as Euro conversion in Europe and the introduction of GST
in Australia.
The most common factor was that, fuelled by panic, several users
introduced ‘single purpose‘ packages or embarked on fast track software
development, leading to a collage of products and solutions - each best
fit for the purpose- but not fitting into any pattern or architecture.
The pieces in the puzzle do not fit . It is like several Lego pieces
were tipped into one big pile and messed around by a very naughty
child.
Adding to the chaos were vendor driven strategies for niche areas which
often forced the users to adopt a particular hardware or software or a
vendor-‘architecture' platform.
The net result….an ill defined, ill structured ‘infrastructure’ with no
semblance of an ‘architecture‘ what so ever...and of course the budget
buckets drained to the core and very little funds available to scrape
from its bottom.
