Remember the days of Proof of Concepts?

I mentioned proof of concepts last week and got to wondering where they went?

I think they have disappeared into the annals of history along with all the other things we used to do to make sure things worked before they were installed.

"So what is a proof of concept?" I hear you in-touch Gen Y'ers cry. Well the idea was that if there was a solution that was thought to be able to add value to an organisation it was tried out in controlled circumstances. What that meant was carrying out a defined piece of work to discover the following:

• Does the solution work?
• What impact does the solution have on the current environment?
• Do the users of the system like it? (Hey that's a scary concept!)
• What will it take to deliver this solution into production?
• How much will it really cost to deploy?

I always thought the most important outcome was that if something either didn't work or was unfeasible this was a valid outcome.

In other words "let's not do it" is a valuable result. Primarily because we would have only spent a few thousand dollars proving it!

The PoC was always a really strategic component of the "design phase" which was where clever people sat around with bits of paper and whiteboards working through what the final solution was going to look like and mapping out how it was arrived at.

Of course there's no need for that kind of stuff today is there - or is there?

So what happens now?

Well there is always a lemming-like assumption that whatever has been proposed WILL work, otherwise why would we do it? So we don't need to test its ability to be installed - that's a given!The most important thing lost is an ability to truly understand the potential cost of implementing a solution.

By testing it in a PoC the ability to determine what will need to be dealt with is far more tangible.Without that we are left dealing with a process that is one stop up from licking your finger and holding up in the wind.

And of course once that multi-million dollar leviathan has set off there isn't any stopping it is there?