Enterprise IT is not a Science Experiment

I fat fingered a reply to good point Pawel Brodzinski was making on a previous post about change. I deleted his post by mistake while trying to update my response. So here's my response

Enterprise IT is Not a Science Experiment. If we need a discovery phase for some portion of the system, plan and budget that discovery phase. Change at the code and lowest functional level is part of the development process - which is itself a science experiment. Change at the business process level is considered a “non recoverable sunk cost.” I’m speaking and will start to always make it clear – that the undesirable change I mean  is at the business process level.

The absolute problem with frequent changes at the business process level is the customer is wasting money by being lazy and engaging in sloppy thinking. Unless those changes are reviewed approved, warranted, assessed, confirmed, budgeted, ... Otherwise change is simply the churning of money with no return. When we see high - un warranted change - we see poor planning and poor thought process on the project management and business management side of the operation.

Of course "change" happens, but it absolutely must be for the right reason.

Now if it's your own money, who cares. If it's the public's money there's a public accountability issue. If it's the stock holder’s money, there’s a SOX issue.

I know many hold dear to their hearts this notion of "change is good," but as a stock holder in the firm in which someone is churning my paid in value by making changes to the corporate ERP system  to things they should have thought about before you started, I'd be selling short.

Ask ourselves this - what is the reason for the change?

1. Was the business lazy and didn't plan far enough ahead to know that the database architecture doesn’t scale?

2. Was the business bought by another firm and the database architecture doesn't scale?

3. Did the business buy a database engine from a firm that went out of busines?

The Blanket statement "change is good" without a context or domain is not very useful. I will try my best to include context and domain as well.