TABLE OF CONTENTS System development has been an area of great interest for IT researchers and managers for decades. It is part of the core and roots of IT. Various methodologies and software tools have come and gone. There was structured programming and design now gone. Today, it is components and object libraries. At the time all of these seemed like good ideas.
Why all of the interest in the area? Why have so many techniques emerged and vanished? The answer to the first question is twofold: importance and issues. The same is true for the second question. The same issues, including those in this chapter, have been around a long, long time.
This is not uncommon across IT. The IT group is small or thinly spread. The IT group cannot afford to have multiple people understand the same things. It is the same in an automobile dealership: Some mechanics are trained to deal with one specific car model or engine. In networks there may be a single highly technical troubleshooter. In applications software there may be only one programmer who supports an old system.
The dependence is not restricted to experience. The individual also has a great deal of specialized knowledge, and may have excellent and unique relationships with specific users or vendor staff. It is not easy and sometimes impossible to duplicate this in another person.
The impact can start with uneven workloads. If nothing is going on with a particular application, the...
