Picking the wrong thing

In this section, we will look at two anti-patterns related to picking the wrong solution based on considerations that are not technically relevant. We start by looking at what goes wrong when you ignore the wider ecosystem.

Ignoring the ecosystem

Willfully ignoring third-party options in favor of in-house solutions can become an anti-pattern.

Example

SafeCo is a major insurance company that provides a variety of policies to the mass consumer market. It has a large customer service organization for which it is in the last stages of rolling out Salesforce Service Cloud to achieve a 360-degree view of customer inquiries.

Royce is a manager within SafeCo’s IT department and has been tangentially related to the Service Cloud project. However, now he has been tasked with leading a team that has been asked to find good answers to a number of new generic requirements that have come up during the project but were left out of the initial scope, as...