What is on Your Mind?

Please, I beg you, “Stop!” Yes, stop writing scripts and instead build workflows.
Programmers, Sys-Admins, System Support, I'm talking to you.

Ok, I know in this community I'm going to get some serious backlash for my statements but I truly believe in my statement.

There was a time when writing scripts to help support IT infrastructures and changing business processes was the best option. That time is gone. Todays computing systems are rapidly growing in complexity and the need for easier integration and better automation to manage these systems is becoming paramount.

“So where do we go from scripts”?, you ask. “That is the right question”, making reference back to the movie “iRobot”.

I believe the answer is workflow and workflow automation. I don't think this is the right forum to share all the reasons for my answer so let me take another approach and talk about why script fail.

If you are an IT professional, you most certainly have written a script or two in your time. Scripts are written to automate tasks with the general objective to be more productive and reduce errors. In the early stages of an organization or while its environment is small, writing a few scripts seems to add benefit and meet its objectives. However, over time the environment changes, grows and becomes more complex. This results in more tasks, which in turn requires the need to write more scripts. Soon, the ability to manage these scripts themselves becomes overwhelming - welcome to script hell.

AND...

To put it briefly scripts:

1) Have little or no security
2) Lack of reuse
3) Not cross-platform
4) Hard to maintain