Re: Assistance needed with creating tables in oracle.

Daniel,
Halleluiah! Fantastic.

Concentrating on the next BSO (bright shiny object) technology as the savior for all the current problems. (unless it is Oracle of course... :-) ) I worked for an actuarial consulting firm at one point and we were going gang busters developing pension administration systems (defined benefit plans - a bit more complex than 401K plans, due to a host of government regulations - PBGC, DOL, IRS, etc.) for companies. (eg BASF, NMB, Johnson Controls, Dow Corning, etc.) We had invented a toolset to do the GUI and application development - similar to Smalltalk with a C++ flavor - and it connected to something like 9 commercial RDBMSs. Toolset was developed in house and very powerful. When the toolset was developed - on MS Windows 3.0 - and delivered Pension systems, VB was not a commercial product. (yes, that long ago) At some point of course, due to political BS, the answer became If we just changed toolsets "we could do all of this for under $25,000 per system for spec and development costs." The white Knight phenom. became rampant. No one in management would listen to why the systems were costly to produce - they knew the answer - change toolsets because MS told them that would solve all their problems. The real reason is that it took a lot of experience to develop these things. The domain knowledge was much different than most programmers had (not many had actuarial experience) and the things were very difficult to define. In addition, there was the inevitable scope creep in a project, but no one wanted to charge the client more for scope creep - that would jeopardize the actuarial consulting side! So these projects became complex systems that were sold for very little in order to retain the pension consulting business. Not bad as long as you agreed that was the purpose and as a company you were willing to do that. (One system cost the client $85K and cost $ 2,000,000 development and the client had a budget cut and decided to throw the system away.) So I would say reading Brooks's "No Silver Bullet" would be a good one.
http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~maratb/readings/NoSilverBullet.html Also one can chase the never ending BSO.

Also claims of "no programming needed" or all visual or not necessarily good. To accomplish some sort of task there must be inputs of some sort some where. The information must be specified or assumed in some manner. If it looks like magic - the end user doesn't have to do much for this complex system to work - then either the vendor is a liar or they are talking about some other task.(or making huge assumptions about the information or inputs) The information has to come from somewhere it does not just magically appear. Granted good systems try NOT to ask the same questions again and again needlessly, but complex programs that install and magically run with no configuration I am leery of. Same goes for "visual programming" no programming knowledge needed. Gee, pass the bong on that one. Sure it can be "visual" with cure blocks etc, but as it gets more complex it is programming and it may be a nightmare if it is only visual.

Just some thoughts. Probably things you already thought of. Jim

"Daniel A. Morgan" <damorgan_at_exesolutions.com> wrote in message news:3CDEA762.43A86E69_at_exesolutions.com... <snip for space only>
> Perhaps you will all be pleased to know that the University of Washington,
> Winter Quarter 2003, has agreed to a course for mid-level managers, on how
to
> manage technology projects.
>
> I plan to pull no punches.
>
> So if you, or anyone else here on the board, have examples you think might
be
> instructive on how managers who don't understand technology can set up a
project
> for failure I would be interested in receiving them.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Daniel Morgan
>
Received on Sun May 12 2002 - 22:28:55 CDT