Somehow both my previous car and my current car have occasional electric problems. Luckily, there’s Christos, my car electrician, whom I trust 100%.
If he says we need a 2k spare part, it means we really can’t do without it, and that all efforts to find a used one have failed. If he decides to get an imitation part (he usually doesn’t), it means he somehow knows it’s not inferior in quality. If he decides to make some clever unconventional trick to fix something, it means it’s going to be better than the original design, without compromise on reliability, and without any electrical hazard.
I can say “fix my car and give me the bill; I don’t want to know anything else”.
Imagine if you had an IT consultant to whom you could say that. “Fix my company and give me the bill”. That would pretty much solve your automation needs. The problem is that, most likely, you don’t have such a person, because such people are very hard to find. It can take years or forever. You don’t have forever.
All this looks trivial, but it’s the crux of automation. The problem of automation is a problem of trust, and IT has some peculiarities. One is that mediocre work can look impressive until it breaks, and it can take some time to break. When it breaks the cost of fixing it can be very high. Another peculiarity is that IT and management often go together.
More on that tomorrow.