“It’s like leaving a book in a pail of water for five years, then trying to get it out in one piece.”
– my friend Kevin Kettner, speaking with me about how some organizations ignore their IT infrastructure so completely that when they finally need to do something with it they find they have to redo it all.
Also see “tip of the iceberg” and “yak shaving.”
Yeah – Thinking about this made me think of other things that cause pain to IT folks. Staff changes come to mind as one such issue.
Some “gaps” in transfer of knowledge occur, and all of a sudden, no one in the organization knows about some system that was in place years ago. Bad part is that system probably still is doing stuff, but no one knows what or sometimes folks don’t even know about it at all, till it breaks or some analysis of some kind happens on the system it lives on.
Ah, the joys of inheriting systems, and having to find out what the heck is going on with them. Fun times.