The Great Generation Was Really Good At Enterprise Systems — Today We Suck
In January 1936 the United States congress voted to pay out the First World War bonuses that had been promised to veterans. Its passage was not guaranteed as it had to overcome a veto by President Roosevelt.
It was a last-minute decision that suddenly required the U.S. Treasury to pay out around $1.7 billion dollars (about $31 billion in today’s dollars) to some five million veterans before the end of 1937. The money owed was based on a calculation based on army records of days served, when those days occurred, and how much of that was overseas service. There were special provisions for veterans who had died earlier and compound interest was applied. More than half of the money was paid out before the end of 1936.
What is interesting to us in the IT business today is that no one back then questioned the ability of the government to undertake such a massive set of complicated calculations and payouts with such short notice. There was no indication of any major problems and the payout was essentially flawlessly executed.
Today you wouldn’t even get a requirements analysis done in that time let alone a system for calculating amounts owed and printing out the required checks. The Obamacare rollout debacle and thousands of stories of failed systems show what would probably happen in today’s world.
We are the computer generation, the children of the information world. When it comes to enterprise systems our performance is a shameful embarrassment.
What would happen today is pretty predictable. Government suppliers would rush in with claims that they could build the system in just months using really cool technologies. That is, technologies that were half-baked and still under development. Either custom code would be written to input data from current army computer systems that are largely broken and undocumented, or the recipients would be asked to do the work of entering their own information online using websites that had endlessly spinning wait indicators and that continually crashed. Deadline after deadline would be missed. When the checks started arriving there would be recipients underpaid, recipients overpaid, and recipients not paid at all.
Then, similar to the Obamacare implementation mess, there would be teams of experts rushing in to try to rescue the project.
The whole thing would end up costing hundreds of millions and leave a bitter taste in the mouth of everyone involved.
When it comes to efficient and effective use of the technology of the era it is clear that the pre-computer generation — the great generation — was much more capable than we are— the following generations.
When it comes to enterprise systems let’s be honest — we totally suck.
