How the pros do it

This IT veteran has been at his company for decades, and pretty much everybody appreciates him. "Everyone calls on him from time to time," says a pilot fish working there. "While he's not a specialist in any one area, his experience makes him a valuable troubleshooter.

"A few years ago, he wrote a small Visual Basic application for one of our manufacturing lines that monitored some scanners and would activate legacy conveyor belts and automated arms to divert packages to the correct place. He wrote the app pretty quickly and it worked well enough that the manager of the group wanted to make enhancements to have the app communicate with other systems."

Enter a new guy in the IT department. For some reason he doesn't seem to like the old generalist, and he really doesn't like the scan-and-divert application, which he calls "amateurish."

He wants to investigate building a real system that will properly automate the process, and he convinces his boss to let him take on the project.

Then he goes to work. He brings in vendors. He checks out products. He flies out to Florida and Colorado to visit companies with similar systems to see what they've done.

Finally, after a year of investigation, he presents his proposal.

"To make the system work well, he would rip out all the legacy (translation: paid for) equipment and replace it with new equipment that could connect to the network," fish says. "And write a new system that would require a full-time staff of three to run it.

"All at a cost of one million dollars, not counting the new staff.

"Three weeks later, the new guy was no longer with the company and the manager once again came to our co-worker and asked him to make changes to his little VB app to communicate with other systems -- which he did."

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