Situational Shanty Town

Wikipedia defines a shanty town as:

… “marginal” or informal settlements are units of irregular, low-cost dwellings, usually on lands belonging to third parties, and most often located on the periphery of cities. These dwellings are often assembled from pieces of plywood, corrugated metal, sheets of plastic, and any other material that will provide cover.

This is what immediately sprang to mind as I read yet another article on IBM developerWorks that left me shaking my head. This one was on ‘situational applications‘ which to me sounds like a euphemism for ‘zero design hacked together crap that the enterprise has to deal with for the long term’. I’ve seen far too many of these things actually in production to have much positive regard for them. For those who favor the ‘city planning’ paradigm for Enterprise Architecture, situational apps are the shanty towns of the enterprise.

Someone needs to clue IBM in on this basic fact: any real or imagined efficiency in development approaches zero benefit in the overall lifecycle of an application. This effect is negatively magnified when developers ‘just have to’ use some new technology-of-the-week for their project (the veritable random pieces of plywood and corrugated metal of the software shanty town). Then, after the shininess has worn off, the application represents a one-off island of technology that the enterprise has to deal with. And deal with. And deal with. It is absolutely amazing that in the ‘Challenges of SAs’ portion of the article that cost is never identified – increased cost to support, maintain and (hopefully) decommission the errant development.

Overall, the SA approach sounds like a noble effort for a lab setting to see what benefits can be gleaned from the endeavor. Unfortunately, in many cases, the ‘lab’ will be the enterprise production environment. I have a feeling that SA will improve IT about as much as shanty construction enhances modern building techniques.

And please remember, the fastest path to the wrong answer is still the wrong answer.

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