Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had it right and they actually didn’t even know it. I think that today they’d still probably be embarrassed if someone called them “computer geeks” or said that they had perfectly articulated the newest and smartest solution we’ve seen in some time for the legacy and enterprise-wide computer system problems that continue to plague many of the country’s largest businesses. But the fact is that they said it all in a song.
The correct solutions today (and the enormous set of opportunities they create for smart young businesses) for a great deal of the legacy leftovers, remnant and orphaned protocols, and general “spaghetti code” confusion that continues to impede important process improvements, speed and efficiency enhancements, and any amount of material innovation in these big businesses are actually pretty simple. Some of these things are sitting there in plain sight, but they’re overlooked by the guys who’ve been staring at the same stale whiteboards for years and retreading the same tired paths. Rehashing the same old stew isn’t going to help anyone get ahead.
The simple answer - as the boys used to sing in the 70’s – is all about building a “bridge over troubled water”. It’s not about trying to implement the latest desperate attempt (in a long, sad series of stop-gap measures and bulked-up bandages) which simply adds complexity to the current code base and postpones the necessary progress to the ultimate solution. You can’t save your way to these kinds of radical solutions and you can’t do it on the cheap either. But you won’t get anywhere at all if you don’t have a new and clear vision of where you’re headed.
Here’s the hard truth: the guys that got them there and built the problems that these companies are living with today aren’t gonna get them to the next level of solutions. They’re committed to their code with their embedded approaches and they’re stuck trying to drag those ancient albatrosses forward into the future. It’s a heavy load; it’s the wrong strategy; and it’s doomed to be more of the same under the best of circumstances. There’s only one way you’re headed if you’re looking through the rear view mirror and that’s backwards.
Frankly, to solve these kinds of problems, these companies need to get help and a fresh set of uninvested eyes from the outside and they need a strategy that builds a new, streamlined and simply sufficient solution right over the top of the problems (a “bridge”) rather than another massive rewriting project that takes forever, costs a fortune, moves the same deck chairs around, and basically repaints the flagpole. Even the best Band-Aid is no bargain in the long run.
And what is very interesting is that these aren’t cases where the new kids on the block are going to be suggesting new things to be doing or even new ways to do them – they’re creating bypasses, express lanes and other new streamlined and fast channels to get the work done. They know the inputs; they know the desired outputs and results; and they’re free to determine the least costly and most efficient ways to connect them. It’s as easy as that once you get over the old news.
It all comes down to a simple realization, but it’s one that’s very difficult for the folks whose history is closely tied to what’s been built in the past to admit. They need to acknowledge that their hard work and voluminous body of code can be readily and easily replicated and, in fact, efficiently superseded by simpler and more straightforward solutions. Today it’s not about the size of the effort and the lines of code created; it’s about speed and throughput and – as often as not – the simpler and more elegant the code, the faster the results generated and the happier the end users.
The trick for the old guys is not to take this stuff personally. No one said that life was fair or that anything lasted forever. And the trick for good managers is to acknowledge that the rules of the game have changed and – while it’s not exactly fair – it’s something that needs to be recognized and lived with.
The best approach (and it’s still not an easy one) is to recognize and appreciate that the guys who built the ships that got us to this point were the explorers and the trailblazers and the real inventors in many cases, but their path was long and hard and costly and full of false starts, wrong paths, broken code, etc. along with plenty of do-overs. But they still got there and that’s a true accomplishment and something to be respected.
Unfortunately now for them, whether it’s fair or not, the new guys with the new eyes get the easy job – they already know where the goal line is and they know what works and what the users need and now they have a much easier job – they simply need to build a bridge that spans the old code and connects the past with the future as quickly and inexpensively as possible. And that’s all about execution rather than exploration and that’s what it’s going to take to finally break out of the restrictions and legacies of the past in order to build the paths to the future.
The way forward isn’t through the morass; it’s over the top.
