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by Tamerlin 5639 days ago
No, he isn't. Tools need to be a high priority, or else they end up being crap. Amazon, Disney, Northrup Grumman, SAIC... all of the big companies I've worked for had the same problem: their tools were terrible.

At most of them it just meant that HR ended up wasting time dealing with crappy tools, which is no big loss, since HR is a usually a waste of oxygen anyway. At Disney and Amazon, it meant that the people producing consumer-facing content wasted a lot of time fighting the tools that were supposed to enable their jobs, and a lot of developers had to waste a lot of time supporting the tools that weren't doing their job.

For example, just two and a half years ago, one of the buyers at Amazon showed me how she set up the relationships so that when you look at an iPod, you get a collection of compatible accessories. She had to create relationships for EVERY permutation between each accessory and for each accessory to the iPod. By hand. In a spreadsheet (Excel, I think.) Then she uploaded it to the site, and every once in a while a relationship would mysteriously fail, because of another relationship managed in another tool that she had no access to conflicted with it.

1 comments

There is actually a problem when organizations are focusing too much on tools.

In order to efficiently address a disruptive innovation, a corporations need to change their processes and since tools are connected to processes, these good tools make that change even harder.

Yes, it good to have good tools for developing the current product, but organization needs to be ready to eliminate internal tools without hesitations.

I agree -- becoming too attached to existing tools is a major drag industry-wide. Even if it's well-designed in the beginning, which from what I've seen is extremely rare, it tends to devolve into a mess given enough time.

To get maximal value out of the tools, everyone has to be willing to toss them when they start to becoming a big enough impediment. (Deciding on that isn't always easy, of course.)