An Old Crisis in Information Systems Development

Most people today are too young to remember the early days of Information Systems development. However, those early days were fraught with problems, cost and schedule over runs, and failed development efforts. In fact, the number often cited, at the time, was that 75% of all Information Systems development efforts ended in failure. That number can certainly be dissected and discussed at length. However, the point is that things did not go well in the early days. And one of the reasons was that most people really had no idea what they were doing.

A common response to this lack of understanding and experience was to hire a consulting firm who did have some experience to guide you. Over time consulting firms developed their own software to use as a base for their consulting (so as to avoid reinventing the wheel with each client) and this lead to the current state of application generators.

When web applications became popular this problem did not repeat, or not, at least, to the extent that it had occurred before. One of the reasons for this was that inexperienced web developers could always look at successful websites as models. And in most cases, at least in the early days, you could also look at the code if you wished. There was a lot of "Monkey See, Monkey Do" and far fewer disasters.

Now we are once again facing the "I have no idea what I am doing" problem with virtual worlds. But this time around companies are not diving into the technology because they are not under competitive pressure to do so. But the market is ripe for Development and Consulting services. A few killer apps would set off the competitive pressures and the demand for services would grow. Next time I will develop a business model for Development and Consulting services.