An Exercise in Futility (or Welcome to Banking Technology Consulting)

I’m just feeling a bit reflective, and I feel the need to express my feelings about the last few months of my career.  I’m going to do it in an analogy.

Let’s say you have a couple of friends – Friend A, we’ll call him T-Dawg, comes up to you and says, “It would be really, really great if you had an X-box so we could play games.  Here’s $500.”

At that point, the logical thing to do is to go out and buy and X-box, right?

Friend B, our good friend Frank, overhears the conversation and says, “Hey.  I have a old Wii you can have.”  Ok.  That’s interesting, but since it’s T-Dawg’s money, and Frank’s Wii, you have two choices.  You can spend the money on a brand new X-box, or you can spend the money trying to make the Wii play X-box games.  Still a no-brainer, right?  You go out and buy the X-box.

So.  Here’s how this relates to my career.  6 month ago, there was a conversation at my place of employment where there was a decision made to try and make a new, off-the-shelf software system perform the same as the old software system.  I thought at the time that the decision was to try to make the Wii play X-box games.  In reality, the past 6 months has been much, much worse.  We went out and bought the X-box.  And now we’re trying to make the X-box play old Wii games.  Yep.  We’ve spent the money TWICE.

And somehow, people are surprised that they aren’t getting good results.