With enterprise systems we insist in having a complete oversight before building things, but then we keep cutting corners all the way and all the time. There’s a paradox there: in the frantic attempt to achieve complete and total foresight, we become short-sighted and fail to notice numerous signals.
This short-sightedness is the result of insufficient learning, which is unfortunate since we really have plenty of opportunity to learn. Take any industry or knowledge domain that we love to paraphrase in our enterprise system endeavors, they all learn and apply knowledge incrementally. We’re the only ones, the IT industry, who think that we can learn everything and apply it all in one go. We start our mistakes in our inventory phase: as we seek to segregate the invariants from the variable elements of the enterprise systems. From there we just keep compounding blind spots, until someone eventually pulls the plugs or that we collapse.