Pieces of concept and other prototypes have always been cheap (see hackatons). The main issue is that as soon as you’re touching customer data or modifying process they’ve paid you for, you have to be really careful. No one wants to be responsible for an outage that cost the company its biggest customer.

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aspenmartin 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, but at scaled companies, where building a simple POC hooked into real systems is nowhere close to easy. To the point where it means that you might as well just do the full thing. That's where the enterprise spend and the impact is.

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skydhash 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn’t that a matter of configuration management? Or do you want to alter the real systems as well?

	▲	aspenmartin an hour ago \| parent [-]
		historically it's been a matter of an absolutely horrific amount of Kafka-esque problems. Say I want to build a feature in a product. - DS has to do a deep dive (need buy in) to opportunity size and derisk with data. That DS has to work with other DS (people may have left or moved teams) to figure out how to get the right data and figure out what the difference is between 10 different tables that have overlapping but inconsistent data. - Eng has to build up an actual simple demo (need buy in) - Design has to make it not hideous (need buy in) - Legal has to review what you're doing; POCs should involve real data where possible because otherwise no one will trust it, even if its just for user analysis on existing products This plus about 6 internal system bugs for custom tools that are flaky and who's team has long been re-orged or laid off, 8 people who won't answer you, 2 PTO's for the stakeholders, 6 weekly meetings no one did POCs, they just had ideas and tried to get PM's to put it on the roadmap so if it fell through at least it was bought into