Margaret Thatcher: My Part in Her Downfall

The title of today's post is a parody of the Spike Milligan book "Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall" hopefully for reasons that will become clear. My first real job in IT was to implement a packaged application for a County Council. That application, COMCIS, stood for Community Charge Information System. The Community Charge is better remembered by its informal title - The Poll Tax - and it was the countrywide deep seated unpopularity of this tax that ultimately led to the Tory party deposing Margaret Thatcher. Therefore I like to think I had a hand, albeit very small, in the removal of Maggie T from power.

I'm also going to introduce a movie quote into this post, this time from the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off. "Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

The connection, tenuous though it may be, is as follows.

At the time COMCIS was the largest single system in the County Council. We used 13Gb of disk, give or take, which was enough to hold all the account information required to manage of about 300,000 people and 100,000 properties. That's less storage than I currently have in my iPhone. Okay, so times change and technology marches forward as anyone familiar with Moore's Law will tell you. Or so you’d believe.

I recently had to get an estimate from a supplier of how long it would take to develop and deploy a reasonably simple ROLAP report. Two weeks and $20,000 was the answer they came back with. The funny thing is that back in the heady days of the Poll Tax I remember I used to knock out a COBOL based report in about 3 to 4 days. If we could apply something like Moore's Law to productivity then today surely I should be able to knock the ROLAP report in minutes, maybe an hour at the outside. So what's gone wrong? We'll I have my suspicions but for now I think it's best to leave the question hanging there but in respects to Ferris’s quote I'm wondering what we've missed.