Integration? Neurosurgery? Both?

For those of you who did not take an hour to listen to Paul Strassmann presentation, that I advocated here, this is a great opportunity that you really should not miss.

There were a lot of great ideas in the presentation. One that hooked me was when Strassmann referred to system integration as "neurosurgery." What an apt metaphor. I've have partaken of the pain of this exercise and it's not recommended. Of course, I'm stating the obvious to anyone who has done any integration projects. How many interfaces, that cost millions, nay billions, are there just lying dead in corporate servers and old mainframes? Man, what a sewer of human talent, not to mention cash.

But businesses do it every day. I speak to a business a day that thinks they'll find the silver bullet that will link two unknown systems together in perfect harmony. It's less painful to just throw cash off the roof and onto the interstate. There is an entire movement dedicated to figuring out some way of stopping 'interface bleeding'; it's called SOA for Service Oriented Architecture. It might be a good advance in time. But right now most of this work is still being done by amatuer neurosurgeons.

The big question is "Why are so many businesses still inclined to take such painful steps in IT?" I don't have the answer, but I can tell you that they do it everyday.