SUO: An Integrated View of Everything in SIX WEEKS!!
John,
I read with interest your recent message to SUO and CG lists. I looked at
your slides. Your claims are very reminiscent of sort of thing that we have
all seen too many times:
MAKE A MILLION DOLLARS IN JUST SIX WEEKS
On the face of it such claims are preposterous. We need illumination about
what exactly the circumstances are under which we can be confident that WE
will be the ones who MAKE THE MILLION BUCKS, or can achieve an INTEGRATED
VIEW OF EVERYTHING using the techniques you describe.
In a good-sized company with:
* 300 legacy computer systems of 77 different types.
* 1.5 million lines of COBOL (up to 40 years old).
* Several hundred JCL scripts.
* 100 megabytes of documentation (up to 40 years old); text files (in
EBCDIC and ASCII), e-mails, Lotus Notes, HTML, and some oral
communications.
* Changing terminology over the years with changing data formats
for different versions of Federal regulations.
* 8 PCs with text files that are edited by hand before going to
the mainframes.
* All systems connected in a TCP/IP network.
It would seem that in 6 weeks, you could hardly define a suite of test cases
to see if the techniques work, never mind run them, never mind create the
solution etc.
I generally ignore people who claim I can make millions in short spaces of
time, and so I would normally be inclined to ignore anyone who made the
claim you did. However, in this case, I expect that there are indeed some
useful nuggets here. Unfortunately, your presentation gives insufficient
insight as to where they might be.
There are no doubt countless assumptions and limitations of the approach you
suggest, so that should I attempt to do the same thing at Boeing, I might
expect to search for weeks or months to find just the right set of
circumstances when your particular solution fits well. Even then, it would
be worth the search, if your claim was indeed legitimate.
Can you enlighten us as to what the [possibly hidden] assumptions are? What
are the limitations of this technology? When will it work well? When will it
work not so well, Why? How can I decide where to look in my company for a
situation where I can apply this approach and get these apparently
miraculous results?
Thanks
Mike Uschold