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by blitzar 1311 days ago
The bit I never understand, and these projects crop up all the time - for 250mil ... seed a company that you 100% own to build the solution.

Or if you have to pay 100mil for the drop in already complete solution (which sounds insanely expensive).
2 comments
mjburgess 1311 days ago
When you outsource dev, you also outsource responsibility.

Much of what board members do is play games to keep themselves in power.

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blitzar 1311 days ago
Major IT projects are a graveyard for executives, anyone who could reasonably succeed knows they are destined to fail, and they fail so often that big co's now have so much legacy chewing-gum holding together their systems that implementing any system is destined to fail.

The most likely to work solution - rip out everything in the company and start from scratch. Short of that you are looking at - $50mil to modernise with a drop in (fully functioning) component in a 2 week install + 5 years and $100mil to write translation layers to all the other systems which will still fail on edge cases.

Every now and then the executive that believes in sunshine, rainbows and unicorns comes along, slaps down a stupid budget and tries, with good intentions I might add. They however, are predisposed to buy into the people and vendor that sell magic beans. And they cycle continues...

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mrjin 1311 days ago
It was never about outsourcing.
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mrjin 1311 days ago
If you interpret it from a different angle, it would be much clearer.

1. Those made the decisions are smart, really really smart people. If they were dumb, there is no way they can get to where they are now. So if the decisions look questionable, they probably are indeed questionable. But that does not mean they made a mistake. Smart people don't do obvious stupid moves, if they do, there must be some reasons we don't know.

2. If the budget is not used, at best it lapses or worse will be used by someone else. So do whatever they can if they have nothing better to do with it.

3. If you do something for someone-else with someone-else's money, neither the price nor the quality would be much of your concern.

4. After handling meat, you know, there is oil on your hands.

Put all that together...

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