A couple years into my career I came to the realization that working in the tech side of a non-tech business is not necessarily about providing what the business needs. It’s about convincing the business to pay for what you want for your own reasons (resume, prestige, continued employment )

I have been on many teams that could’ve easily been in maintenance mode and not changed anything for years. The business would’ve hummed along stably and profitably. But it’s hard to justify your job in IT if you say your roadmap is to just keep doing what you’re doing. Nevermind the people in between business and IT who really contribute to neither.

So we get these pendulum swings and huge projects (move everything to cloud, move everything back, make engineering do ops, make a dedicated ops team, micro segment everything, flat network everything) just so IT management can convince the business they’re providing some value.

Gartner is the “independent” third party that allows IT folks and tech vendors to convince the business they are doing the right thing.

And yeah I’m sure some of these pendulum swings have come at great cost to the business, even halting it entirely (SAP)

Some of Gartner’s analysis can be spot on, but god some of it is so bad I can’t help but cringe. Their recent push for low code/no code everywhere and calling this the “final decade of applications” is in the later category.

There’s going to be mountain of companies going out of business in 5 years due to following Gartner’s low/no code advice.

Don't forget that the already beleaguered world of government IT also listens to Gartner. But government doesn't really go out of business when that bad advice leads to bad initiatives, it just becomes even more dysfunctional.