When is a kudge not a kludge?

There is a certain snobbery in many business IT depertments that I'm sure didn't used to be there. Perhaps the efforts of SIs and Consultants over the years to "talk up" the "right approach" has rubbed off. Applications development has to go through a number of steps (mostly linear - although every now and again a "fast path" iterative approach makes a bid for respectability. The effect of this is that lots of simple functionality simply doesn't get delivered - there is too great a design, deploy server, test etc overhead.

In my very first job we'd design important systems properly - but frequently would deliver new functionality to people that asked for it on the same day!!

I was thinking these thoughts last week during a very impressive "hands on" presentation by Francis Carden, the CEO of OpenSpan. They produce an excellent tool for creating composite applications that run on a users desktop! I can hear lots of IT Architects saying "NO!" - but, but tools like this really do have a role to play.