Stone soup anyone? A man is traveling the tribes of Africa. Each night he walks into a village and offers to provide his special stone soup in exchange for a place to sleep. He takes a large stone from his swag and boils it in a large pot of water. After a while he asks the villagers to try it. Of course it is quite bland so he asks them to fetch various vegetables and a piece of meat. Eventually they have a lovely meal after which the man gets a place to sleep the night and in the morning picks up his stone and moves on to the next village.
The players in this story? Man: Consultants (lots of them!) Stone: Off the shelf S/W of your choice Villagers: Any large organization of your choice Veges and Meat: The customization of afore mentioned S/W :-) -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Frank Swarbrick Sent: Wednesday, 15 July 2009 10:29 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Complexity (was Re: Convert DB2 on z/OS to Oracle on z/Linux?) >>> On 7/14/2009 at 5:11 PM, in message <[email protected]>, Tony Harminc <[email protected]> wrote: > 2009/7/12 Chris Craddock <[email protected]>: > >> Pick just about >> any piece of non-core business processing (i.e. stuff other than what your >> company does to make a living) and you will find the same thing. A whole >> slew of outsiders willing to solve the problem for a buck and a half less >> than you can do it yourself. "Building your own" is pretty much guaranteed >> to take longer, cost more and be less reliable than buying it from somebody >> else who does it for a living. The outside providers get to leverage their >> work across multiple customers so their costs are lower, their quality and >> profits higher. That's why everyone and their third cousin uses packaged >> software now. That trend is only ever going to accelerate. > > I'm sure you are right. But the piece that puzzles me is that there > seem to be so many companies whose core business is really just moving > bytes from place to place, who nonetheless think outsourcing is a Good > Idea. I'm speaking most obviously of banks, but pretty much all > financial services businesses, insurance, and so on are in the same > place. Sure, it doesn't make sense for each bank to write their own > operating system, web browser, etc. etc., but the actual applications > *are* the core of their business. What they can and typically do [try > to] outsource is precisely the things that benefit least from > leveraging work across multiple customers, i.e. operations and > helpdesk. I can testify that we are one bank that has written all of our core banking applications. Not to mention our Internet banking site. We actually have our own homegrown Human Resources and General Ledger systems, but are in the process of migrating those to packaged applications since they are in need of updating and not part of our core business. In my opinion both of these are "good things". I can't imagine how our business would function if we had packaged core applications. Our users want too many special customizations, and they want them now! :-) As for outsourcing totally, we'll have none of that! Frank -- Frank Swarbrick Applications Architect - Mainframe Applications Development FirstBank Data Corporation Lakewood, CO USA P: 303-235-1403 F: 303-235-2075 The information contained in this electronic communication and any document attached hereto or transmitted herewith is confidential and intended for the exclusive use of the individual or entity named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient or the employee or agent responsible for delivering it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any examination, use, dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify the sender by reply e-mail and destroy this communication. Thank you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
