A CEO of a real estate services company came to us recently with a problem. The whole company was waiting anxiously for a new system that the technology team had been working on for over a year. The CEO lamented that the team now needed to do a complete rewrite with a different technology — pushing the project out at least another six months and putting the company further behind its competition.
I could predict the answer to my next questions, but I asked the CEO anyway:What was the IT team’s explanation for the rewrite? Why was it needed now, and what alternatives were there?
“I have no idea,” came the reply. “And I couldn’t possibly ask them — I’m a business leader, not a coder!"
The company was in trouble, and the CEO was falling into an all-too-common trap. In fact, this conversation happens so often in our consulting practice that we have a name for the pattern that underlies it: the technology walled garden.