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A few weeks ago, when the director Ingmar Bergman died, I decided to rent Fanny and Alexander, one of his more accessible works, as a way of paying tribute to a great artist. I honestly didn’t expect to start thinking about issues in software expectations.

In the film, Fanny and Alexander are brought up in a beautiful home as members of what is obviously a wealthy family complete with servants, fancy clothes and expensive Christmas gifts. All that changes when their father suddenly passes away, and their mother re-marries a local bishop, who demands that she and the children leave all their possessions behind before coming to live with him.

Despite never having gone through anything remotely as dreary as that, I find myself having the occasional Fanny and Alexander moment every time I use my current content management system. This is the one I inherited a few months ago when the company I worked for was acquired (again) and we were brought into a mix of legacy and custom-developed systems. I’m sure there’s plenty of people I work with now who could prove this new (to me) CMS is far superior to the CMS I was using. But there are at least a few processes which our system had automated, and which remain manual here. The menus of the new CMS are more complex; in some cases needlessly so.

I’ve come to accept this system, and I know we’ll eventually develop something better than either one I’ve used to date, but like Fanny and Alexander the memory of a better life – or at least, a better user experience – is difficult to abandon entirely. It strikes me that this must happen all the time to many other people. You’re working in a small, enterprising shop that has taken the bold step of upgrading to the latest version of SAP All-In-One, when you get swallowed up by a conglomerate that’s still stuck on J.D. Edwards 5. The new parent company may not be ready to take on SAP because it’s too expensive, or because their maintenance contracts aren’t up yet, or they’re still deciding whether to move over to Oracle instead. These are not brief moments of transition. They can take years, and the end result can occasionally be worse.

IT managers, whether they like it or not, are the ones in charge of this application purgatory. Unless you work in a business sector that faces no prospects of consolidation whatsoever, it’s going to happen to you, if it hasn’t already. And yet much of the planning companies do is done as though mergers and acquisitions are completely unforeseen events. They are not necessarily factored in as an element of IT risk, even though they can come without any warning and with severe integration and vulnerability issues.

I can’t see many boards of directors consulting IT departments before they make a bid on another firm, but perhaps if growth strategies were more clearly articulated technology professionals would have a better chance to prepare. This is also happening often enough that you think some clever research firm would start studying the impacts of IT heterogeneity as a result of M&As and offer guidelines for mitigating the possible pitfalls. Their insights might be kind of depressing, but hopefully not as depressing as an Ingmar Bergman movie.

sschick@itworldcanada.com

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