Your shiny new wreck

One of my favorite TV shows at the moment is MTV’s Pimp My Ride. The premise of each episode is the same: An MTV viewer with an incredibly broken-down car is surprised with a complete car makeover from the crew of West Coast Customs . We’re not talking just new seats, a paint job, and a better stereo, either. The crew ups the ante with add-ons such as three Xbox game systems with six flat-screen monitors (yes, six) inside a small 1989 Nissan 240SX and, in another case, a 40-inch plasma TV and a clothes dryer in the back of a surfer’s Volkswagen bus. Of course, the car owners are ecstatic at the end of the half-hour when they drive their highly customized cars away from the shop.

As much as I love Pimp My Ride, I think the more interesting show would be Pimp My Ride: Five Years Later. I suspect we would see the surfer using his once-functioning in-car clothes dryer as an overpriced garbage can and a Nissan owner underwhelming his friends with old Xbox games and a couple of busted monitors courtesy of an errant two-by-four carelessly jammed into the back seat after a trip to Home Depot. Yes, the customizations are cool when they’re new, but where do you go to fix them when they break? Not the commodity parts counter at Pep Boys, but back to West Coast Customs -- where this time you will most definitely pay, and probably enough to consider abandoning your once pimped-out ride altogether.

IT customizations tend to have similar story arcs. You could easily make a series called Fix My IT and watch a parallel chain of events unfold. A crew of roving salespeople and consultants from an enterprise software company could surprise IT departments that labor under broken down legacy systems -- and customize those systems to perfection, sending a horde of skilled developers to fulfill every desire. The VP of sales wants the CRM system to do something the current CRM system has never done before? It’s all about customization, so it’s done. The CFO wants to operate accounts payable from a Wi-Fi enabled Pocket PC? No problem -- you want it, it can be done, so presto, it’s done.

In the heat of the moment, no one thinks about what these one-of-a-kind customizations are going to mean down the road. More often than not, they end in frustration. The consultants finish their custom work, and, to maintain the system, existing staff must fully understand the customizations -- which is difficult and rare -- or else the consulting sun never sets. When the customizations get really close to the software metal, even worse things can happen. I’ve seen cases in which enterprise solutions have undergone such intense customization that the vendor who sold the original software can’t even upgrade the system without consulting engagements that are more expensive than the initial purchase.

Software expert Robert L. Glass notes in his excellent book Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering that every 25-percent increase in problem complexity results in a 100-percent increase in the complexity of the solution. Smart IT shops should limit unneeded complexity at every turn, choose their customizations carefully, and turn a deaf ear to the siren song of the perfectly customized solution.

Remember, when a solution is truly “yours,” it can end up being “yours” in the worst way possible: Your problem.