http://blogs.gartner.com/frank_kenney/2008/12/04/you-need-people-like-me-say-hello-to-the-bad-guy/ A Member of The Gartner Blog Network Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:42:29 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 http://blogs.gartner.com/frank_kenney/2008/12/04/you-need-people-like-me-say-hello-to-the-bad-guy/comment-page-1/#comment-32 Daryl Plummer Tue, 09 Dec 2008 04:57:58 +0000 http://blogs.gartner.com/frank_kenney/?p=38#comment-32 At the risk of my sanity and peace and quiet, I will enter the fray here. The IT industry has always had at least one constant. That is, the tendency for people who either sell products in it, or who implement solutions, or who talk about it - that gets the vendors, users, and analysts - all to try to rationalize why the industry almost never seems to get what it expects out of a technology. My guess would be that about 80 percent of what IT tries to implement falls significantly short of its promise. Now note I said promise, not hype. The promise is for things that can indeed be acheived, not things that were always out of reach. We generally don't reach the promise, let alone the hype. And we all tend to blame the technology or those who advised us about it. People will often seek someone else to blame when things do not go well. We seldom look in a mirror. I do it every day at Gartner and so do many of my peers. We are not without fault, but we do try to provide insights to get to the promise and advice about how to do it and what to avoid. If we can all do a little more of that, then perhaops one day that 80 percent that falls short will become 20 - and on that day, Frank's post on SOA will be smiling at us - and he will still be right. At the risk of my sanity and peace and quiet, I will enter the fray here. The IT industry has always had at least one constant. That is, the tendency for people who either sell products in it, or who implement solutions, or who talk about it – that gets the vendors, users, and analysts – all to try to rationalize why the industry almost never seems to get what it expects out of a technology. My guess would be that about 80 percent of what IT tries to implement falls significantly short of its promise. Now note I said promise, not hype. The promise is for things that can indeed be acheived, not things that were always out of reach. We generally don’t reach the promise, let alone the hype. And we all tend to blame the technology or those who advised us about it. People will often seek someone else to blame when things do not go well. We seldom look in a mirror. I do it every day at Gartner and so do many of my peers. We are not without fault, but we do try to provide insights to get to the promise and advice about how to do it and what to avoid. If we can all do a little more of that, then perhaops one day that 80 percent that falls short will become 20 – and on that day, Frank’s post on SOA will be smiling at us – and he will still be right.

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