Ken Orr

I recently came across a number of interesting articles that seemed to intersect. A recent Economist magazine issue contained a series of articles about software complexity. The point made in these articles was that software -- and, in particular, the user interfaces to software -- had reached a point at which people were beginning to revolt, and that many companies, especially consumer companies, are becoming concerned that their customers will begin to turn to other forms of product.

I was having lunch the other day with a CIO whom I've known for a long time and we started talking about some of the organization's major projects. This is a fairly departmentalized organization, so sometimes projects come up that are created by specific departments more or less independently, and the enterprise CIO has only review responsibility. A couple of these projects were running well into the tens of millions of dollars. One of them, still in an early stage, had a significant eight-digit price tag.