Friday, November 20, 2009

Memories of IT - 90's - why did we stop using IEF?

Why did IEF development stop at Crown? It was the move; the majority of middle management and a lot of senior management did not move to Regina. As I have said, this gave the company a chance to downsize, so the number of staff after the move was 20 or 25% less than before the move…but that still meant a lot of people had to be hired. So, all the original stakeholders who had supported IEF were gone, and the new management had no stake in its continued use.

And IEF was really susceptible to this situation, because overall it was used in support of strategic redevelopment of all our systems, the original business case pictured this happening over the course of seven years, that’s a strategy.

But if you are a new manager in a new job in a new company, you don’t want to fall in line with a seven year strategy created by people who are now longer around, you want to deliver quick success, show that you are worth having around. That’s OK, and is acceptable in normal turn-over at a company; but with 60 to 70% of the managers all new at the same time, the IEM/IEF strategy (no matter how worthwhile) was dead.

I made a last stab at keeping it alive, writing a white-paper and doing presentations and such. I received great compliments on the white-paper -- I wish I had kept a copy --- but the response overall was “I can’t do that now”. I even presented how to use IEF on a more tactical level, just doing any project without an overall architecture. Jams Martin had figured out people wanted this and developed a one-project-only version of IEM called RAD (Rapid Application Development), and the promise of this version had helped sell IEM in the first place.

Unfortunately(!), this was the point in IT history when Client-Server development tools appeared, especially 2-tier tools that had you paint a screen, run it on a PC and it went directly against a database on a server. These tools did a whole lot less than IEF, but that also made them a whole lot cheaper, so when I would meet with a Project Manager about IEF, he or she would say SQLWindows was cheaper (and they had used it in their last job), so that’s what I am using, sorry.

And so ended the real saga of IEF at Crown. We kept our hands in it because of the Canada Pensions system, and I did get to go to some IEF user conferences. Such conferences are always in nice places, like Disneyworld or Vegas etc., so you take those perks when you can…but it was at one of those conferences, as described earlier, that TI announced it was selling IEF …and that was the real end.

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About Me

Ontario, Canada
I have been an IT Business Analyst for 25 years, so I must have learned something. Also been on a lot of projects, which I have distilled into the book "Cascade": follow the link to the right to see more.