Dear Bob ...This week's Keep the Joint Running ("Seven warning signs of bad architecture," June 5, 2006) was soooo timely! I did a presentation yesterday to a group of IT execs in our company where I recommended fixing a fundamental flaw in our data model, equivalent to the customer definition issues you described in your article. The question I got from the CIO was as follows: (Imagine him with a perplexed, pol Dear Bob …This week’s Keep the Joint Running (“Seven warning signs of bad architecture,” June 5, 2006) was soooo timely! I did a presentation yesterday to a group of IT execs in our company where I recommended fixing a fundamental flaw in our data model, equivalent to the customer definition issues you described in your article. The question I got from the CIO was as follows: (Imagine him with a perplexed, pole axed look on his face when he asked): “Just how big an effort do you think it would be to implement these ideas? It seems to me it would be quite an undertaking.”The reason is because of all the “kludges” (your word, new to me, and I like it!) in our system today. For exercise and fun, I copied your example of the on-line clothing store, turned on revision tracking in Word and redlined in just one of the many examples of this kind of kludgy design we’ve got. I could hear my co-worker chuckling from the next office as she read my personalized version (which I doubt I’ll share with the CIO)! So, now for my question–What kind of wake-up call is necessary to change the “build a kludge fragile workaround” mentality to do the sometimes major redesign that will be required to fix all the old “solutions”? How does your advice play in the world of IT budgeting where there’s almost always an incentive to “pay it later”? Will “later” ever come?– De-kludgerDear Dee … Very often, excess kludge accumulation (dare we coin the acronym “EKA”?) is one of the driving forces behind replacing legacy systems with an ERP suite. It’s a chance to start clean – or at least as clean as the ERP suite’s internal architecture; some are better than others.It is relatively rare that a company decides to remediate its legacy systems once they suffer from EKA. Usually, by the time anyone is willing to acknowledge the problem, the hole is too deep to climb out of without a full system replacement. So the company either bites the bullet and does it, or it limps along as long as it can.Or, it builds a data warehouse to provide a clean source of reporting truth. This doesn’t fix anything in the transaction systems, of course, but at least managers can get reports without killing themselves. So far as wake-up calls … there are CIOs who recognize the importance of architecture and those who don’t (usually the latter are the ones who bought the “CIOs need to be business people, not technology people” line). If yours were one of the former, your presentation would have been a wake-up call had one been needed. If yours isn’t, several whacks by a 2×4 would be a minimum starting point.At the risk of sounding like I’m trying to sell business, sometimes an outside consulting review can help get everyone’s attention. This can only work, though, if someone with appropriate clout – usually either the CIO or someone the CIO reports to – wants an objective third-party to bring credibility to the issue. Otherwise it’s just a waste of everyone’s time and the company’s money.– Bob Technology Industry