What Happened to Flexibility?

Peter Yared posted a very good article called "What Happened to LAMP?". He identifies the hidden cost of the new infrastructure software as one of the reasons why LAMP is not penetrating the enterprise.

I believe that it is the inability of current enterprise IT to support any change that makes any additions/replacements to infrastructure software so difficult. Last week I visited one of the largest global banks to talk about their plans for the new infrastructure software. And this bank has a policy in place that restricts the number of changes to their IT infrastructure - they can only deploy changes once a quarter and every such release breaks something and sometimes the damage is substantial. They actually showed me a report of emergency IT changes over last one year. It looked like this:



So every time they bring a new system in or change an old one the number of fixes goes dramatically up.

And until we solve the problem of sustainability of the current enterprise IT we can only dream about any new software infrastructure. And in the meantime we will be limited to four changes a year so that we have enough time to fix what broke...