Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
to staff specialists—good technicians who have neither the operation
experience to know the jobs that need doing nor the authority to get
them done right.”
56
The secret to “unlocking the computer's profi t poten-
tial,” according to the McKinsey report, was to restore the proper
balance between managers and programmers: “Only managers can
manage the computer in the best interests of the business. The companies
that take this lesson to heart today will be the computer profi t leaders
of tomorrow.”
57
The combination of new software development meth-
odologies and stricter administrative controls promised to eliminate
management's dangerous dependency on individual programmers.
By accusing computer specialists of being self-interested peddlers of
“whiz-bang” technologies, or referring to electronic data processing as
“the biggest rip-off that has been perpetrated on business, industry, and
government over the past 20 years,” managers were as much playing
organizational politics as they were responding to any real crisis.
58
In
their representation of programmers as shortsighted, self-serving techni-
cians, managers reinforced the notion that they were ill equipped to
handle big picture, mission-critical responsibilities. By redefi ning contem-
porary understandings of the nature and causes of the software crisis,
turning the focus of debate away from “fi nding and caring for good
programmers,” and squarely toward the problem of programmer man-
agement, the McKinsey report (among many others) also relocated the
focus of its solution, removing it from the domain of the computer spe-
cialist and placing it fi rmly in the hands of traditional managers.
59
The growing management frustration with software systems cannot,
of course, be attributed solely to organizational politics. There is no
question that in this same period the costs of software increased dramati-
cally. In the internal language of the discipline, an “inversion in the
hardware-software cost ratio curve” occurred in the mid-1960s that
clearly demanded a managerial response.
60
Put more simply, the cost of
the actual computers went down at the same time that the cost of using
them (developing and maintaining software) went up. By the middle of
the decade the expenses associated with commercial data processing were
dominated by software maintenance and programmer labor rather than
equipment purchases. And since the management of labor fell under the
traditional domain of the midlevel manager, these managers quickly
developed a deep interest in the art of software development.
At the same time that the costs of software were visibly rising, a series
of highly public software disasters—the software-related destruction of
the Mariner I spacecraft, the IBM OS/360 debacle, and a devastating
