Throwback analysis

I loved this Curt Monash update on Workday. Fittingly I saw it courtesy of Naomi Bloom, another market watcher who can talk object models and multi-tenancy architectures all day long.

They remind me of colleagues in the 90s at Gartner like Jeff Comport whose rallying cry was “Acquire an application, inherit an architecture”. The unintended corollary to that was as enterprises bought more packaged applications and reduced custom development, they had a tougher time justifying full time IT architects on their staff. As software moves to the cloud, I see enterprises even less focused on architectural discussions since the software is not being “brought in”.

And analysts like Curt have become more of an exception. As Stan Swete, CTO of Workday wrote in his guest column “It took me more than one presentation to analysts to realize that while having a multi-tenant architecture is essential to being able to do what we do, my analyst friends would rather focus on delivered value.”

Stan’s right – but blame it again on the 90s. As analysts, we collectively did not prepare clients enough in the last wave for post-software procurement – the issues around implementation, the upgrades, the operations. And as an industry we have spent hundreds of billions in excess costs as a result.

This time around, architectural discussions are hugely important. So are functional fit discussions. So are total cost and business value discussions. You know what they say about those who ignore history.