Working on a NetSuite Implementation recently and was met by a beast that seems to rear its ugly head all too often in systems work: Taking the old system in total and stuffing it into the new system. Ouch, that hurts. What's happening? I don't want to bore you with all of the pathetic details, but essentially the client was more hindered than helped by their current system, but we are now faced with three big challenges. First, the old system made the business conform to it and as a result the business and the system have begun to look like one. It is amazing how over time software can mold the business. Everything, from the way we talk about the business, or the customer, or the market, changes to reflect the system that we use. This is the second challenge: Changing the system starts to feel like changing the entire company in a way, and that creates a lot of pushback - don't move my cheese type of pushback. The third challenge is that there are now other systems that are dependent on how the current system is set up. If we change the current system then we are forced to change all the links to the other systems. Yeah, that's fun. Work like this requires a hardhat with a light on it, like miners wear. You have to travel down to places where nobody has gone in a very long time, and you will never know what you might find there, until you're there. For a while. It's just not easy, ever. I believe that at some point in the future there will be people who study our time and place and they will think about how we had systems to help us run things, but which eventually ran us. I know everyone thinks of Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey (a somewhat interesting, somewhat amusing take) when we mention insidious computers who take over. But that's more of a caricature of what I'm talking about. The real issue is that we have a short collective memory inside of our businesses and as a result we easily forget that the system did not reflect our reality at the time of its implementation, any more than it does at the time of its demise. What's really happened is that as the ultimate survivalists we adapted ourselves to whatever reality the computer helped to build, and at the end of the day came to believe that the system met our curious requirements right from the start. How are we ever going to get better at doing this stuff? How are our software products going to improve so that they are usable and valuable simultaneously? How are we going to fit different systems together easily? I know that there are people like Rich Sheridan at Menlo Innovations who spend a lot of time thinking about and making software usable and useful, but in the software implementation world we have a whole other set of challenges. We are not building from the ground up but are normally pushing in from the side, the bottom, the top. We have to figure out a way to help our clients avoid some of this pain. Our products need to become better, we need to do a better job of meeting the needs of companies and we have to learn to execute better in implementation. If the business people could have a better understanding of the systems and the systems people could have a better understanding of the business this would be a great place to start. The overall need is for the entire field of business software to grow up. It is and it will, but it's a painful process. | 
