If I Was Only in It for the Money - A Business Idea for a Startup

Cover of The Mothers of Invention album We're Only in It for the Money

If I was only in it for the money, I cannot think of a better business than taking my share of the public sector ITC projects in Finland.

Take for instance this € 90 million project that I found from the Facebook updates of my friends (Thanks for the links Ville, Vessi et al): Helsinki Region Transport (HSL) is purchasing a new ticketing and information system for € 60 million (plus € 30 million for maintenance) in a project lasting five years. It's not the only one of its kind. There are plenty of others but this is the latest future failure.

Alas, they have fixed budget, schedule and scope in the contract. As everyone in the business knows this means that it has been fixed that budget, schedule and scope will grow. They will find out from day one that some show stopper features are missing from scope and because everything else is required too they need more time and money to build it all. The vendor will not accept anything removed from the scope. Or at least from any of the monies they have been promised for the features.

I guess that the Facebook comment stating that it will cost around one guggenheim (€ 140 million w/o maintenance) to build the system is quite an accurate estimate.

The funniest thing in this particular case (if it was funny, which it is not because it is tax money, my money, they are playing with) is that during the tender process the buyer went to court with one of the vendors with a bid who claimed that they were dropped with unjustness because the buyer claimed that there cannot be SOA without ESB. So we now have a court solution that you do not need to have an ESB in your SOA! Remember this if anyone brings any of those ESB things nearby.

Market Court solution in case MAO:126/11 translated by Google

So, to get into some serious money pop up a faustian lean startup generating money from public waterfall projects. Here's the plan:

• Make an offer for some public tender, 
• Pivot in the court if you do not win,
• Pivot again using the compensation from they court to build up a new bid for another tender and
• Repeat until successful.
• Then just wait for this certain nasty dude to appear and claim your soul.

Business Process Orchestration - The Original Soundtrack

The Mad Men had their presentation. The CIO was impressed and decided to buy the Orchestration System™. After all it promised to remove the programming tasks from the organization leaving mere process configuration to do whenever changes were required. And the business changes constantly. Everyone knows that. The deal was signed and the license fee calling to mind a phone number was paid to the vendor. The system was installed from the DVD. The Business Managers configured the business processes. Everything was ready to just switch it all to production.

But the slideware promises did not quite hold. The orchestration system was just a tabula rasa: an empty development environment and a runtime engine. It was also a closed system that only a few people in the world knew how to master compared to standard open technologies like the ones behind REST interfaces.

The configuration task that was the responsibility of the Business Managers turned out to be a programming task they had no skills to handle. And a programming task to be accomplished with a visual programming language inferior not only to any contemporary development platform but also to anything from the 1970's. A development platform offering no mechanisms for proper composition to modules or layers of abstraction. And therefore there were no third party libraries of any kind whatsoever either.

The source code was saved in XML and thus was incomprehensible to any version control system around. All testing had to be done in a full blown live environment and manually as there was no support for unit testing of components. Remember: the system did not support any composition so there were no units to test. No automated tests means also no continuous integration.

But it is now the date that we have to go to production. So we can read from the Gantt Chart of the Project Manager. It is also the milestone to make the fat bonus tied to the project. So we turn on the system. And this is what we hear: Business Process Orchestration - The Original Soundtrack.

I hope that whenever anyone hears the words "Business Process Orchestration" this "Business Process Orchestration - The Original Soundtrack" starts to play in their heads. Many lives would be saved. Please help me to accomplish this altruistic task by playing this soundtrack whenever someone mentions the O word!

As A User I Want To...

User Stories, especially if used in a very formal way, are much criticized by my colleagues. One point is that the user (in any role) most probably does not want to use your system but just to get it over with. So, whenever someone says "As a (role) I want to" it has become somewhat of a meme to say:

As a user I want to drink piña colada in a swimming pool

I assumed that this was true but I wanted to be sure and made some empirical studies and it in fact is so.

Photo: Heikki Pora