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Walzmyn writes:
"The company I work for is not a tech company. We are, however, a multi-national, multi-billion dollar company that claims to be the largest of our kind in three industries (and second largest in a 4th). And yet, our company network sucks. There is a mishmash of Citrix and SAP, multiple web-portals, and none of them work with each other. The several thousand non-technical people that work for this company are routinely asked to interface with this system and end up spending time with the helpdesk or with a supervisor looking over the shoulder for something that was supposed to be private.
I've heard of similar situations with other companies, so I wanted to ask the folks that live and breathe the tech sector this: Why can't a company this size get something so fundamental done right? Why can't they at least hire a third party to do it right for them?"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by evilviper on Wednesday February 19 2014, @11:20PM
Tech companies don't do any better, they just tend to be smaller, younger, and don't have that obscene amount of legacy.
I've worked with big legacy systems. I've been involved with porting, modifications and modernizations of those systems. While they can look incredibly simple on the surface, they may have hundreds of man-years of obscure legal, accounting, logistics, or other rules embedded in them. They may have their tentacles into 100 other systems for various bits of work... And some of those systems may be OS/2 boxes controlling $100,000 of building automation equipment, for multiple warehouses. And ALL of that has to be reverse-engineered from the existing application, before one new bit of code can be written. And in the mean time, the existing app still needs those routine updates to handle... whatever.
In those situations, I've reluctantly accepted the reality that it is overwhelmingly easier to put whatever hacks in-place to get the old code running largely unmodified on the new systems. Be it tablets using Citrix to connect to a server, running a 500-seat license of an old terminal emulator program, that is the only one still interpreting an ancient character set used by an old mainframe build by a company that hasn't existed in decades, now running on expensive but nearly-compatible reproduction hardware, which still needs a couple layers of legacy compatibility/emulation to run your app.
But in your case, it may just be several different departments buying different COTS solutions, which minimally do what each one needed, but are fundamentally incompatible with the others, and provide no useful form of interconnection. No matter the industry, companies have their own little fiefdoms that won't ever cooperate, even with a heavy push from senior management.
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