Improving Microsoft Dynamics AX The Right Way: The Role of The Community

"Oops!"

We have all heard this strange little word, but why have our computers turned to it for so many reasons? It sounds like a child that did something wrong and is trying to apologize. Again and again, as part of the effort to personalize the feedback from a computer to the user, we see this word.

"Dear user, I am doing a lot of things for you now. Please wait, it will be worth waiting for"...
"oops something went wrong, please try again".

You try again and if you succeed, you are happy. But if not, where did the oops and nice language bring you as an end user?

Yes, you're correct, it brought you nowhere.

So how is it that we in the IT business are allowed to make the same mistakes over and over again?

I know this article might seem a little controversial considering that I actually butter my bread by working in this business. But ask yourself, what if construction engineers delivered skyscrapers with the same rate of failure as we do in the IT business.

I am not saying that all IT implementations fail, or that an issue in a software system is exactly like an engineering failure, but there are so many examples that if you projected the failure rate onto one of those other industries, it would be a scary scenario.

Technology is still best considered as a product more than a law of nature. My father, now retired, was a physicist and mathematical lecturer at a university. Whenever he and his colleagues discovered something new, they could not wait to tell the world. They wanted to share. They wanted these findings ...