DailyPost 1580
PROJECT INTEROPERABILITY
Interoperability by consensus can completely revolutionise the digital world and take the life of each one of us to a totally different seamless level. How will that interoperability happen is a trillion dollar question? Will it happen or is it just a mirage which is being marketed? The current business and finance model does not support interoperability, the lack of it is a big time business, the fruits of which you can see is the prosperity of the IT industry. Interoperability will be allowed only till the level it makes business to the company or it being forced to be a part of their technical digital world, without which they can neither be born, grow or function. What gets impacted the most are the projects!
With projects having various nuts and bolts and IT systems and processes which do not talk to each other or talk only when being paid for it, it has turned out to be the biggest nightmare one can imagine of. Large numbers of utilities and features of a project not working is quite a normal phenomenon in this country. It is next to impossible to create a complex detailed project report which on the face of it looks 100% doable but as you move further, things start getting unstuck. It can also happen that the effort to be made to make it happen and the cost incurred is not commensurate to the benefits delivered.
If something really plays with the cost of the project it is interoperability. Solving the technical riddle of interoperability is in itself a project. You have to be technically brilliant to understand, appreciate and put into action an extremely delicate fine tuning of gadgets, licenses, processes and output. This is real life engineering. One feature of one gadget or software can become a show stopper at least temporarily. There are times when even software patch cannot be deployed as desired in an already proven IT ecosystem. End of life, COTS products, nature / duration of licensing, use of open source softwares, variety / versions of the same product et al can take the life out of you.
IT is not the Midas touch it is made out to be, you have to the Midas techie to make it happen. It does not happen on its own for sure, the larger than life technologist can only make it happen. We see simple services breaking down on a regular basis whereas IT behemoths doing it endlessly, relentlessly and perfectly. It is because of their organic tech growth, the engineers ironing out the technical discrepancies as a matter of routine, same / similar teams working lifelong, software development – creation / upgrade are made a natural process to name a few. The vision and tech leadership ties them neatly. The company is itself an ongoing IT Project, being improved upon in a continuous manner. The cost is also pretty steep. Lots of their software products are their own. In this way, they beat the interoperability handicap.
THE COST AND EFFORT OF INTEROPERABILITY IS HUGE.