Navigating Complex Environments: Challenges of Migrations in Large Organizations

I basically agree with you, but you can say that now, but you do that without looking at the historical situation. Furthermore, I doubt you have much experience with migrations in large and complex environments.

If you look at simpler companies/groups that are smaller, for example, migration is often manageable.

The tax authorities (Netherlands) have ~25,000 employees and from what I understand it’s a very complex environment. The issue with complex environments, especially with financial software, is dependencies and links to other packages that are linked to others, etc.

If you’re lucky enough to have the infrastructure properly documented and up-to-date, which is often the current situation, you really have to dig deep into each package to see what the limitations are. at each package / service. The documentation is often not complete, up-to-date or centrally available, which is not really something that only affects the government.

So change X requires 200 other changes in other systems/teams/vendors before you can implement change X. As a simple example, email migration, things I did in a (small) SME in a couple of weeks, took almost 2 years at a large complex Enterprise, not because there were so many more users now, that would have taken. a few weeks at most costs extra. But only because there were dozens of systems connected to it, and not all of them could work with the new system. That in turn was under the direction of other teams/suppliers, who also wanted to do other things first, etc. almost 2 years.

Condition A works, B works, but does A+B work? The biggest topic in IT. And with something like the tax authorities you have to think more about A+B+C+D+E+F+etc.

The current situation is the result of decisions and guidance over the last few decades by a government elected by you and your parents (and me). Did not make a budget available to keep things viable in the long term, but only used the lowest bidder to push a poorly designed design as quickly as possible. If everything is in order enough at the tax authorities in 2027 to implement many changes, I think that is a great achievement by the IT staff at the tax authorities. But, I doubt that will come to pass…