j.ello on IT – Tech Op/Ed

j.ello on IT Part 8: pWNing IT Management

April 6, 2007

by j.ello with One Comment CIO commodity IT j.ello on IT Management Technology

Yes, I could devote every article to the pervasiveness of bad IT management and it’s chilling effects on business, but it depresses me and it’s time to move on, so we’ll wrap that up today. The next article will be on how to fix IT gone bad… tips anyone can use to restore the value of an IT department.

First, a last word on bad IT management –

To sum up the shape of IT today… the old computing Director has retired along with his punchcards and VAX system. In response to the larger role of IT in the business, the need to deal with increased regulatory and legal pressure, etc… the new IT leader is a slick, middle aged MBA who has some historical experience related to computing. The primary vision is to reduce cost with fewer, cheaper employees… to commoditize every day computing. IT management functions have been distributed throughout the organization – not generally by choice – to cope with the realities of the work. The IT group “appears” to be no worse for the wear on the surface.

How it hits you in the wallet –

There’s a common economic term, “Opportunity Cost“, which is what you lose as a function of choice… i.e. if I have property and I build a condo, I can’t use the land to build something else.

A related term that everyone knows more personally is the “Hidden Cost“, or that which, by definition, is an unforeseen cost of a choice, one that often leaves you feeling like a jackass. If you’ve ever bought a device, only to find out you need several accessories to make it work, you know the feeling.

The ideal in life is to have all your choices governed by evaluating opportunities instead of dealing hidden costs. But converting what you can’t foresee to that which you can, is all about knowledge and creativity. So if you’ve read the previous IT articles, you’ll see where I’m going with this:

Those who make IT decisions based on a wide base of technical knowledge are less likely to fall prey to hidden costs.

In fact, if you didn’t understand the title of this article… you may be part of the problem.

“Commodity computing means that you spend X, with no expectation of improving Y… and that’s why it offers no value.”

“Failure is the default.” –

Currently, the most obvious source of hidden costs are in large project undertakings, where a poorly conceived request for proposal can doom a project from the start. I challenge anyone to show a multi-$Million ERP project on the planet that has NOT incurred major costs that could have been mitigated through competent technical oversight.

But the less obvious, and far more costly errors are those that occur as a response to every day questions… little decisions that have seemingly no impact, completely unnoticeable… even to a lot of IT managers. Do you spend money on extra ram for your user’s machines, or a faster processor? Do you conduct a training session on Office, or create a few screen capture videos? Do you spend time automating your systems, remove a service, or expect users to manually accomplish certain tasks?

It may seem like minutia, but you would be shocked at how much money is wasted on poor choices at the most basic levels. It’s not always easy to see this effect behind the closed doors of business, but we get an education on this *literally* every day in academia, between organizations that would otherwise be identical in terms of responsibilities, resources, personnel and cash. Over surprisingly short amounts of time, any two IT groups will wind up at two completely different levels of effectiveness, with vast repercussion on the business and culture of the organization… purely as a function of their approach to common every day IT value questions.

How much impact does it have in the business world? Enough to give thousands of consultants and outsourcing organizations a reason to exist! So don’t ignore it.

The commodity lie –

If very subtle changes to your approach to IT can have multi-$Million consequences, then how does one make the case that there is such a thing as commodity computing? Well, keep in mind that a “commodity” is a concrete term. CEO’s and CFO’s like this term because it puts a specific dollar value on a service.

But, as is made evident above. “Commodity” in IT does NOT mean that you spend X, and you get an industry-standard Y, there is no such thing – and anyone who says so is selling something. Commodity computing means that you spend X, with no expectation of improving Y… and that’s why it offers no value.

There is simply no case for the notion of “commodity computing”… as it makes the assumption that operational questions have simple answers that vary as a function of money. This is clearly not the case, but it is this mentality that defines the state of IT this decade.

In short, few organizations extract value from the IT resources they have at their disposal RIGHT NOW. Not because they wouldn’t jump at the cost savings, but because they literally don’t have the knowledge to recognize, much less evaluate these kinds of choices.

And of course, who’s responsible for evaluating such choices? The IT leader… and so we’ve full circle.

Are you an idiot? The Vendors think so! –

You can tell what advertisers think of their targets in how they advertise. For example, Apple clearly believes that their average consumer is so dim that the difference between a Mac and a PC is best when reduced to culturally stereotypical human icons engaging in inane, but amusing banter.

And of course… it’s the most effective Mac campaign in Apple’s history.

The state of IT decision making can likewise be seen in how vendors advertise. Ever seen a whitepaper from an ERP vendor? Ever delved deep into Dell’s pricing models? Ever negotiated a contract with Oracle? Technology vendors, from software to hardware, are in business to make money, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out which member of the herd they believe is weakest.

Conclusion –

Alright, enough on that. Our IT managers have taken enough abuse for now. I, of course, welcome any comments you might have on the subject, as I think that this aspect of the IT industry just hasn’t received much attention. I’d like to get some dialog going.

And so it blows…

j.ello on IT Part 7: Who’s dealing with your s***?

March 19, 2007

by j.ello with No Comment CIO IT j.ello on IT Management

Who da man? –

What does it matter that the top IT leaders of today are more and more akin to the Pointed-Haired Boss instead of the Pocket-Protectored Practitioners of the past? An IT department is just a commodity service provided by a collection of people needing to be supervised, so any MBA will do… right?

Well, interestingly enough, the US Dept. of Labor says that while other IT jobs evaporate, IT management continues to grow, and fast, up about 50% the last 6 years. The statistics are based on job description as opposed to title… so it’s not that there are more people carrying the manager title or above, but more people charged with – or as they may say “burdened with” – direct decision making authority within their organizations.

How is that happeing? –

There are several perspectives on why this is: Increased integration of IT within specific business units of an organization requiring management of smaller, more nimble IT groups. Increased variety and complexity of software, hardware and services requiring specialized individuals to make business decisions independently from the larger IT group. Even the effects of outsourcing resulting in an increased need to manage the outsourced relationships.

I agree that all these have impact, but if organizations recognized these roles as “Management”, and were actively delegating such authority, or had any idea that decisions being made at lower levels actually do have significant strategic impact, then the number of management titles would be increasing at the same rate, which is not what’s happening.

“…there’s a natural progression toward hiring the most qualified ineffective IT leadership money can buy.”

Leading from within –

Here’s where the last article fits in. With IT leadership becoming more and more disconnected from the collective IT knowledge base, critical decision making has to occur at lower levels, where the technical knowledge still exists. So, ultimately, it’s not that technologists are being “asked” to make the critical business decisions one would expect IT leadership to make, nor are they expected, as a result of job title, to do so. They simply find themselves in a situation where taking matters into their own hands is favorable to training the supervisor to a sufficient level to get a valid decision on the problem.

Don’t think it doesn’t happen. Good technologists have no problem making an executive decision when they are faced with an IT supervisor who isn’t technically knowledgeable.

The appropriate Ghostbusters quote is “I guess I’m just saying that shit happens
and somebody has to deal with it.”

“I’ve got a Treo, of course I know technology…” –

I think we can all agree that ideal IT leaders should be technically minded, creative, posses management skills and business savvy. But the fact is that there are far, FAR fewer people possessing all these traits than there are jobs requiring them. No matter what, an organization has to sacrifice some degree of one or all of these skill sets in order to hire a candidate for the top job. I think it’s also fair enough to say that it’s easier to “appear” technically knowledgeable than it is to show leadership qualities when it comes to interviewing with non-IT organizational leaders like CEO’s, CFO’s, COO’s… who are more sensitive to such qualities. So logically, there’s a natural progression toward hiring the most qualified ineffective IT leadership money can buy.

This isn’t intentional, and again, we’re talking about smart people being lead to a “less optimal” result by applying perfectly valid wisdom that works in other areas of their businesses. The Peter Priciple brings incompetence up from the bottom, and there is a yet to be named principle that, with the best of intentions, pushes incompetence down from the top. Up until the 80’s, there was a clear favoring of technical prowess at the expense of managerial credential, and while the smallest of today’s organizations still tend toward this persuasion out of necessity, the rest almost exclusively go in the opposite direction.

Intuitively, this seems smart. The simple truth is that if you’re the leader, you have to have leadership skills, no question there. All the bad behaviors indicative poor management apply, and it’s hard enough to find good managers independent of technical competence.

Foreshadowing –

But as I’ve said before and will say again, computing is art… and in fact, today, within our own IT departments, there’s far more existing technical capability than there is creativity, and therefore leadership, to use it… and that’s a management problem that costs big bucks.

What do I mean by that? Check in next time to find out.

j.ello on IT Part 6: Being Great at Everything But the Job

February 23, 2007

by j.ello with No Comment j.ello on IT Uncategorized

CIO Magazine has an archive of issues stretching back to 1994. If you want to know what’s been on the minds of IT leaders over the last decade, CIO Magazine is a definitive source. Notable among their works are the CIO Surveys. After a decade of unparalleled innovation in computing, one might expect that the role of the IT leader has changed quite a bit, so I found this interesting:

In 1995, CIO’s reported that their number one priority was aligning IT and business goals.
In 2005, CIO’s reported that their number one priority was aligning IT and business goals.

Allow me to illustrate the term “Alignment” for all the non-CIO’s out there. Let’s say you’re in IT professional and you’ve been told to change a hard drive. Instead, you choose to play Solitaire. Your goals are not in “alignment” with the business goals. Go ahead and extrapolate.

78% of the time, I have no sympathy for the 78% of the organizations that get absolutely zero value from their IT.

The truth is not quite so ludicrous, but certainly related. What CIO’s are really trying to say is that they often don’t know what the goals of the business are, nor are they able to influence the organization in ways that would maintain continuity for IT, so they “think” they are doing the job, only to find out that they are not. CIO’s feeling this way are either a victim of poor management, or are the poor management… and I am inclined to agree with both statements.

I return to the mantra, “IT is a reflection of the organization’s values“. If IT is not a valued component of the business, those who hire the IT leaders will favor certain aspects of an applicant over aspects that would more readily serve the organization. Once that happens, all bets are off.

In well-defined roles, it’s easier to find the best candidates. COO’s, CFO’s… etc… there are time-honored benchmarks by which one can find people who create the best value for the organization. There are no such benchmarks for hiring IT leaders, and even fewer for measuring performance. So, organizations gravitate toward “general executive qualities”, which may or may not have anything to do with the job of managing the organization’s IT group. That’s where the problem starts.

In CIO Mag’s 2006 Survey, despite the fact that 3/4 of CIO’s report an IT background, CIO’s overwhelmingly report that the skills most pivotal for their success are “Ability to communicate effectively” (70%) and “Strategic planning” (59%). On the opposite side of that is “Thorough knowledge of technology options” (22%), “Negotiation Skills” (12%) and “Technical Proficiency” (12%).

Now, keep in mind that this survey question was “choose all that apply“. Which means that 78% of the #1 technology professionals in their organizations DO NOT believe that knowledge of technology is important enough to their jobs to even check the box. Whaaaa….???

Imagine your CFO saying “Finance? Not important.”… Or a contractor saying “I don’t need to know about building houses, I’ve got people for that.”…

And yet, these CIO’s are correct… knowing about technology actually isn’t pivotal to their “success”, insofar as it relates to going up the ladder 78% of the time. This is why, 78% of the time, I have no sympathy for the 78% of the organizations that get absolutely zero value from their IT.

The CIO’s job can be summed up very briefly: “To make technology available to the organization.” This is not to say that the CIO has to be the technical god of the group. But the CIO is the person who has to make recommendations to the Executives, so if the CIO isn’t a champ at evaluating technology options, at knowing the critical questions to ask and at maintaining a relevant base of knowledge… even the best communicator, leader, planner in the world will still be a completely incompetent CIO.

I think there is at least some support for this argument based on the Survey’s 10 “Biggest Barriers to Job Effectiveness”. Among these, CIOs report above all “Overwhelming backlog of requests and projects.”… “Shortage of time for strategic planning“… “Unrealistic/Unknown expectations from the business“… “Lack of alignment of IT and business goals” and “difficulty proving the value of IT“.

So, a CIO’s #1 priority is to align IT and Business goals, but it’s the biggest problem that prevents them from being successful. That’s like someone who hangs drywall for a living saying “my biggest problem is falling drywall”… very disconcerting. 70% of CIO’s prize their ability to communicate effectively, but they find it difficult to prove the value of IT. Many value their strategic planning skills, but have no time to do it. But more importantly, with such low concern for technological competency and negotiation skills, is it any surprise that the requests and projects are out of control, and the expectations are so hard to manage?

Of course not… that’s why those things are a perpetual plague in the IT industry.

Now don’t go running to your CIO saying “this guy thinks you suck”. This isn’t the fault of the CIO. Every CIO I have met has been smart, engaging, and brimming with positive leadership qualities. Damn fine people. Many just lack very critical qualities that create big problems for an IT organization. But CIO’s are hired based on the values of the organization, and as organizations begin to value IT more, more IT-critical qualities will be used to judge those they hire.

You don’t have to be an IT professional long before you see the big disconnect between what organizations want, and what they value.

How do you know organizations don’t value IT?

Deloitte conducts a CFO Survey. Interestingly, Controlling costs and providing better information to support the business are the two highest rated priorities, while Enhancing Information Systems barely registers on the chart. I’m not sure what accounts for those numbers… maybe they want to hire Scribes. Additionally, CFOs report that “Implementing new technology” is the least of the main challenges facing the business.

You don’t have to be an IT professional long before you see the big disconnect between what organizations want, and what they value. Over time, those two things will come more into line… until then, IT is going to have an unstable, ambiguous role in the organization… and all that implies.

Yes, that’s a bit of a downer, but I want to end this on an up note. All this instability and lack of direction can actually be a really big positive for those willing to push the organization, champion and validate new technologies, and take charge on emerging issues that will undoubtedly go unnoticed at the upper levels. You may not be thanked or paid any better now, but you’ll look a lot better as those qualities, that truly define an IT leader, become more critical in landing the big job.

j.ello on IT Part 5: Gardening with a Flamethrower.

November 28, 2006

by j.ello with One Comment CIO IT j.ello on IT Management

Mistaking good values for good values –

There are a few themes that I’ll go back to over and over again. Here is one:

“Your IT is a reflection of your organization’s values.”

That’s a good thing, right? You organization values the work it does, those it employs and those it serves, so if your IT is following suit, that’s a great thing, right? In fact, it may be the opposite. Rarely does an organization actually value good IT as a means of success, which is why we just aren’t realizing the potential.

Let’s start with the common premise that IT is about customer service.

Most businesses understand that IT can be a really great thing, transforming not only how you do what you do, but expanding what you can do, reducing the labor to do it or increasing quality. But that just not what happens when we add an IT group to our organization. Instead of putting its muscle toward building a better business model, it generally spends most of its time helping people do mail merges. An important task, to be sure, but when your primary function becomes simple “service” and your coworkers become “customers”, we no longer talk about process improvement, long range vision, or innovation. Instead, we talk about “customer service” as a primary measure of IT performance. When the conversation switches to Customer Service, the bean counters are satisfied. True services are easy to comprehend, manage, staff, and define expectations for… therefore, even easier to pay someone else to do, preferably overseas, for pennies on the dollar.

Now, don’t get me wrong, customer service is a valuable aspect of all kinds of work; there is no shortage of lessons that can be learned from customer service done right or wrong. But reducing IT to a “service” is the business failure that makes outsourcing seem attractive.

Smart CIO’s, and in fact smart CEO’s, know that IT is part of the division of labor for the business. It’s a colleague relationship, a team-based operation focused on making computing advantageous, even profitable for the organization.

Everything looks like a nail –

It’s easier to see the distinction noted above in the academic IT environment. Universities contain true customers, the students, and several types of colleagues, including the faculty and staff (though some faculty shrug the word “colleague”). With few exceptions, however, you’ll find that academia organizes IT as a service organization, where everyone is a customer. Not because that’s best, but because it meshes with academic values, one of which is the open availability of all resources. That’s a positive value, but has implications that inhibits the IT group from having any real “strategic” value for the institution beyond keeping the hard drives spinning. Putting IT in the Service role makes it a passive constituent of an environment where computing isn’t just a necessary component, but the key to moving the whole institution to new levels.

Keep in mind that these are really, really, smart people, and there’s a lot of thought that goes into building and rebuilding IT in academia. In all businesses, however, there are organizational realities that are tough to overcome.

“Service providers, as a rule, don’t particularly care if you received what you needed, rather, that you believe you got what you wanted.”

Every organization has a set of values. Those values influence all aspects of the organization, particularly those which are not well represented, understood, or integrated into the function of the business. At the same time, where something is misunderstood, the closest “understandable” model will be substituted. IT is seldom well represented as a strategic resource – even when that is the intention… and as such it seldom rises beyond that separate, passive, service organization awkwardly shoehorned into a corporate structure. Make no mistake, this is a management problem… a pervasive management problem that permeates the industry, whose ultimate expression of failure can be summed up in one word: Outsourcing (a topic for another article).

Universities, of course, don’t go extinct because the IT is so-so, or awful, or even outsourced. Other kinds of businesses, more sensitive to competition, may very well pay the price of bad IT with the bank role – but IT is seldom to blame because remember, IT is a reflection of the organization’s values.

Some relationships are more productive –

So, why shouldn’t internal IT groups be considered “service organizations”?

As a customer, the relationship you have with an electric company is entirely different than the relationship you have with, say, a gardener. Both provide service to you, but the model is different. Everyone knows what to expect from the electric company. You want the electric on, all the time. You want to pay as little as possible, and you don’t want any lip. It doesn’t take a lot of research to know, accurately, whether your electric company is good or bad. With a gardener, however, it’s not quite that simple. They may share your taste, they may not. You may like them, personally, trust them, but they don’t stand out as a gardener. They may be the most innovative gardener out there, and you may even like their work, but your lack of comprehension of the skills involved may have you saying “Why don’t I just pay someone else less to do this?”. A lot of people can claim to be a gardener, and you probably don’t know the difference. You may not notice the gradual decline of your landscape due to a poor gardener because you may simply have no idea what you should be expecting, and you may not want to take a chance with someone else.

From the Service provider’s perspective, the relationship with a customer is adversarial by nature. A provider defines the service, the customer pays for such service, and theoretically they make adjustments based on your measurements of the customer’s satisfaction. The idea is to charge as much as possible, minimize the expenses and do the least amount of work, while keeping the customer’s confidence.

Service providers, as a rule, don’t particularly care if you received what you needed, rather, that you believe you got what you wanted. Burn that sentence into your head.

Like IT, there’s no way to really “measure” gardening, most of the values are arbitrary. But experience does teach at least one valuable lesson – If you try to buy gardening services like you buy electric services, you are guaranteed a crappy garden.

How to lose with Customer Service –

So you create an IT group, and you tell them to service the other employees. The other employees call and ask for service. Only, you don’t charge them because, well, you’d be charging yourself. You also don’t have any explicit service agreement because, well, why would you limit yourself on a service you own? So the users can, technically, ask for anything, and do, whether the requests are valid or not. When IT says no, they become unhappy. But you value customer service, so you measure customer satisfaction, which is a measure of the customer’s belief that they received what they wanted. The only problem is, the customers are employees, and what they want isn’t necessarily what they need, or in the best interest of the business.

In an organization like this, in fact, the more satisfied the customers, the more likely it is that your IT group is mired in work with no strategic value. Your other employees are not IT professionals… so why put them in the role of creating work for the IT group?

To make matters worse, what happens when, for example, a sales employee does have a reasonable, strategic idea that requires change on the part of the IT group? Few, if any, organizations have an “institutionalized” way to assure such recommendations are considered – leaving few options but complaints or negative campaigning.

The moral of the story – Don’t garden with a flamethrower

Most businesses (…maybe not gardeners) would benefit from the strategic integration of, and perpetual evolution of, computing resources as a means to corporate success. Yet, that is not the measuring stick by which IT is judged nor IT leadership is hired. Introducing the adversarial Customer Service relationship internally is precisely what leads to the marginalization of IT as a whole. This is the core misunderstanding from which failure in IT flows. This is also the misconception that makes outsourcing seem like a reasonable option.

It’s not good enough for the organization to have “positive” values, it has to have “strategic” values.

“But j.ello, we spend a lot of money on IT, our CIO is a VP, we have committee on top of committee… what could we possibly be doing better? How can you possibly structure an IT group in any other way than as a service?”

It starts with hiring. We’ll talk about that next time.

j.ello on IT Part 4: What Color Is Your Anchor?

September 10, 2006

by j.ello with No Comment j.ello on IT Uncategorized

Before we look at IT as a whole, let’s take a look at a more obvious example. It’s pretty easy to define the job of a programmer. They take a set of requirements and write code that meets the requirements. It’s also easy to make that case that programmers can be used to generate value… and they run for days on twinkies alone. Yet, no matter the skills of the programmers, the value of programming is in what it automates for those using the software. It’s not enough to simply give a user a number of tools, the tools must be logically presented for the task at hand, and they have to have the *appropriate* level of automation.

The “appropriate level of automation” is key. Allow me to oversimplify. It requires a certain number of actions to make text bold in a typical word processor. We could reduce the amount of work programmatically by making an assumption – such as automatically bolding a whole paragraph with a click. That’s quicker, but I no longer have the capability to bold individual words, which is too limiting. On the other hand, if we had to bold each letter individually, it would be a cumbersome process… one that used to be a reality, not too many years ago.

Intentionally or not, this specific scenario is played for every feature that goes into an application… and for every feature that seems obvious, there are 10 that require a deep understanding of how the end user works, what they are trying to accomplish, what they expect to see, how they’ll screw it up… and you can go on and on. As far as the programmers are concerned, doing it right or wrong usually takes the same amount of work… but the value of the application literally hinges on knowing what the application is supposed to do, up front. All users who open an application have a certain task they want to perform, and they will gravitate towards applications that do the “right” job in the “right” way.

“The corporate mindset is that if a computer can boot, run Office and access the internet… well… that’s all they do, right?”

Programming is treated as a commodity in organizations that view the task of automation as a means to an end, as opposed to an integral portion of the business model. “We are now required to keep records of transactions for X years, we think it would be better to do this with an online database… hey programmers, build on online database to do that.” These projects are usually successful in their scope, but organizations eventually wind up with a hundred different systems that were all built with the same narrow focus, none of which talk to each other and ultimately create unnecessary inefficiencies or duplication. These same organizations realize at some point that their business is out of control, so naturally, they come to the conclusion that they need to literally rebuild their whole way of doing business from scratch and take a massive technological leap with an aggressive “ERP” project. Millions of dollar and several years later, they scratch their heads when they wind up with a solution that is far more reminiscent of the old process, than the process the technology should have allowed. Large scale ($Millions plus) ERP projects have a massive failure rate. Failure doesn’t mean the ERP was scrapped, failure may be indicated by being overbudget, overtime, underutilized, ROIs much smaller than anticipated, etc… anything that diverges significantly negatively from the original project goals.

Small programming projects tend to be successful because it’s easy to define the processes the programmers are going to automate, the goal usually being to evolve a process with a more efficient mechanism rather than replace a process with something unknown. Large ERP projects fail for dozens of reasons… it’s almost impossible for any large organization to fully document all of their existing processes, much less envision how all of those processes can be improved with automation on the whole, and how those changes will impact everything else. These are seen as capital projects, requiring every employee, every executive, every business office representative to come together as a collective whole to rebuild the business rules from the ground up with technology no one has any experience with. These projects fail because they expect the organization to function in an unnatural state, rather than using the organizations strengths to drive the development. In fact, there’s no better way to show how little an organization knows about its own business than to mention the letters “ERP”.

Having to undergo a *large* ($Millions plus) ERP project means, quite literally, that the company has seriously missed the boat on technology – probably for decades. However, ERP implementations are both inexpensive and successful when it is simply next logical step of an existing, successful, cohesive business development platform. Surprise surprise, companies that have a successful history of using IT to automate their business processes are more successful in large scale process automation projects. Duh!

The ERP debacle, and the fact that so many organizations expect a different result from the same plan, is a symptom of a much larger dysfunction. If we fail to get value from a cash cow like programming resources, how in the world do we get value out of less-easy to define IT roles in the enterprise, like the help desk, or the systems group, or the software group… etc? Simple answer is, we don’t. The corporate mindset is that if a computer can boot, run Office and access the internet… well… that’s all they do, right? How do you know your large organization has failed to leverage the most basic benefits an IT department can offer? They use the word “outsource”… a lot.

We’ll talk about that next time….

— By the way, if you’re enjoying these articles… please let others know about them! Digg this article, mail it, quote it, del.icio.us it, whatever… just spread the word! Feel free to drop me a line as well!

j.ello on IT Part 3: I’ve Got No Strings…

September 2, 2006

by j.ello with No Comment j.ello on IT Uncategorized

It’s the boss’ fault. There… I said it. But that’s not important right now. First, a lesson in macro-economics, innovation and human nature.

Is computing a commodity?

A commodity is a bulk product that has no differentiation among vendors. Commodities are bought and sold almost exclusively based on price as opposed to quality or other unique values and features.

As I mentioned, it is frequently predicted that “computing” and “IT” in general will progress from an individualized endeavor taken on by many, to a commoditized good available on demand from a service provider… like electricity. Makes sense, who wouldn’t use Enron if they could?

Electricity was not always the poster child of commoditization it is today. Many companies produced it themselves; they had Vice President level members of the organization to manage it’s production and delivery, and all of it went the way of the lesser known VP of Healthcare (heh… think about it). Electricity is clearly a commodity today. The cost and effort associated with producing it makes it infeasible for most… though it’s not entirely unheard of. The organization I work for produces energy at a significant savings over buying it from a utility, for example. But electric is all the same for most, so it doesn’t matter who makes it or how it’s made, as long as it’s cheap and always on. You know what you’re buying and you know what you’re paying.

“the goal of active technological innovation is to simplify, add or improve capability, and create independence”

But is that what people want? Do you *want* to be tied to a utility for electric? Let’s look at the phone company over the last decade. What we’ve found is that people don’t want to be at the end of a leash, hence the cell phone, and people don’t want to be tied to a phone company, hence telephone number portability, the attack on carrier contract practices, and at the ultimate, non-carrier-specific VOIP – all the function of phone service, without the phone company… sorta. Telephone service has all but lost commodity status, all because of innovative new ways to do the old thing. It’s happening fast, too, despite every effort of the industry to push against the tide. Would the baby bells really have survived this long without the rampant corporate protectionism in congressional and regulatory bodies?

The next few years should be interesting. The cable company will provide data, phone, TV… and so will the phone company. The electric company is getting in on that action too, finally defiling our virgin electrical outlets with your choice of smut, Ok Go videos and cold calls from your local newspaper. But the forthcoming wireless technologies put into question whether “tethered” information services will be able to survive at all. You may get your information from a local ISP over WiMax. And here’s the very real possibility – a completely non-corporate, community-based wireless mesh. You buy a box, that box talks to as many other boxes it can find, wirelessly, and we all become one seamless, unowned service provider. Unlimited data for all, anytime, all the time, with limitless redundancy.

I hold out little hope for that last option. I think it will be regulated out of existence or lost in the standards committees or fail miserably in proprietary-ville. The technology to do it exists today, and several companys could make a mint off of supplying the gear, but too many existing companies will feel they need to be protected from such a democratization of service, and there’s no shortage of lawmakers willing to comply, quid pro quo.

So, back to electricity. If electricity was able to be produced in large quantities easily, safely, cheaply, and reliably, even redundantly… using a device that fits in with your air conditioner and water heater… would you use an electric company? Of course not, people don’t *desire* utility service, they simply endure it as a matter of cost (including time, risk, reliability, etc).

I say all this to illustrate a simple truth. In practice, the goal of active technological innovation is to simplify, add or improve capability, and create independence – “Hey, look what *you* can do now.”

It takes no great leap of wisdom to say that something, sometime down the road, might become a commodity. Everything has that potential. All it requires is that a something is either so unwieldy that it can’t be done/produced independently, or so stagnant and common that there is no way to get an advantage through independence – “Hey, we’ll do that for you faster/cheaper/better than you can do it yourself.”.

It’s that second part that forms the basis of the outsourcing debate. There is a corporate belief that IT is stagnant. There is a belief that there is no differentiation between IT services…. and that for a specific amount of money, you get a specific amount of service. Is that true? Or has IT has simply been so misaligned with business, its strengths so under-utilized, its impact so poorly measured, that no one has a $*%(#_@ clue if the power is on?

So is computing, and therefore IT, a commodity? Does treating it as such have merit? We’ll find out in the next article… and I’ll blame the boss – again.

j.ello on IT Part 2: IT’s About Automation, Stupid.

September 1, 2006

by j.ello with No Comment CIO IT j.ello on IT Management Technology

What’s IT? For a complete, clear and detailed explanation, we turn to Wikipedia. Well, ok, so I jest… it’s woefully vague, probably inaccurate, though not entirely indefensible. The current entry just doesn’t annoy anyone enough to bother changing it – it’s a “democratic truth”. Fact is, IT used to mean something, but misuse, time and evolution have diluted the definition such that it means everything and nothing – like a common 4-letter expletive beginning with “F”… which ironically, is the word that most commonly precedes a call to an IT professional. I’ll give you my definition. “IT is the space that exists between you and digital information.” Nuff said. When people ask what I do, I generally just say “computer sh*#”. It’s universally communicative.

In most organizations, “IT” simply means “The Help Desk” or the “Techies”… or paraphrasing a colleague of mine, “they who tend the garden”. “IS”, on the other hand, refers to those who program applications that manage data. Also inaccurate, but there is usually such a big difference between the goals of these two groups, that they naturally divide along that line. The hardest part about speaking intelligently on IT issues is the lack of a concrete definition…. and anyone in the biz can tell ya, that tidbit alone causes a great deal of consternation.

The point is, if we can’t define the word which defines the job, how do we know that we’re doing the job? THAT, above all, is why so few organizations have a handle on IT.

“Automation is the most important aspect of computing, and always has been.”

So what is IT *supposed* to do? To answer that, you need to know what a computer does. If you turn on the lights and poke a Computer Science grad with a stick, they’ll tell you, “a computer does math”. But it’s not the fact that a computer does math that has ever made it useful. It’s the fact that a computer AUTOMATES math that’s important. It’s not particularly interesting to add 1 and 1… unless you can do it a hundred billion times a second and then manipulate that activity to play the latest home video of someone doing the dance from Napoleon Dynamite. Automation is the most important aspect of computing, and always has been. Computing IS automation.

Everything, and I mean everything, one does with a computer is an exercise in automation… no matter how hidden the automation may seem. Even the act of typing is, at its simplest, push-button automated writing. One finger stroke is converted to what would otherwise take a hand-gesture to accomplish with a pen. Copy and Paste functions can automate with two strokes what might take a thousand to retype. Print a thousand copies… you get the idea. Every function of every program ever written is simply an automated version of something that is already accomplishable, but not as efficiently. To expand that further, every popular technology is an automated mechanism for something that could be done a less efficient way… it’s the reason for moving to the latest version of your office suite. From BBS’s to MySpace. From e-mail notifications to RSS feeds to feed aggregation tools like Digg.com. Even moving from cash to checks to debit cards to PayPal to the natural eventuality of sub-dermal chips that can withdraw from your account for making a deposit in a city bathroom. Digital technologies do not truly progress until the available capabilities are automated in a desirable fashion.

The value of all digital technology comes from the automation of processes. We can therefore make the leap and say that an IT organization is at its most valuable when it enables the automation of processes.

And then a lone voice from the peanut gallery shouts, “Ya, programmers are more important than techies!” Well… no… In fact, it’s the natural split between the technical and programming sides of the typical IT organization – or even the absence of one or the other – that that underscores how poorly the purpose of computing is understood… and by the same token, why we struggle to understand the value of IT as a whole.

Read the next article, where I blame the boss.

j.ello on IT Part 1: The New Old Thing

August 30, 2006

by j.ello with No Comment computers IT j.ello on IT Technology Users

I have been in the so-called “IT” profession for more than half my life. I am shocked to find how little has changed in that time… and how much everyone thinks it has.

I was pleased to find a lovingly-written article on the perennially reborn, long-beloved operating system called GEOS. If you haven’t heard of it, it provided a Mac/Windows-like interface on a Commodore 64/128… in 1986. Think about that for a moment. There was a mouse and a friendly, visual operating system for a computer that couldn’t even hold a candle to an average cell phone. In fact, the “Start Menu”, so synonymous with Windows, was a concept introduced years earlier in GEOS. A WYSIWYG word processor, a spreadsheet application, a database, and a whole lot more. All the fundamentals of a full fledged office suite, and while no, GEOS wasn’t the first to do these things, GEOS did them all in 64k, 20 years ago. That says something about us, about technology, and about the Information Technology industry.

Back to 2006, it seems we’ve come so far. But after 20 some-odd years of windowed-interface development, what are the primary activities of a typical person at work in front of a computer? Office applications. CPU speed, RAM, storage, all multiplied thousands of times over 20 years, and we do office applications.

“…why, oh why, do people still work at the same speed no matter how fast their computers are?”

And you’ll say, “but we do so much in addition to that”. Do we? I could send email in 1986. We had the equivalent of your typical websites, and while they weren’t all interconnected or particularly pretty, they did have daily content, forums, some even had multi-user chat rooms. We had downloads such as midi-like renditions of music (illegally created and distributed, just like today), software (freeware, shareware and pirated, just like today), and such teen favorites as porn and the “Anarchist Cookbook“.

Truth is that the desires of casual computing haven’t changed, neither has the amount of knowledge necessary to do the things we want to do. Entertainment *STILL* almost single-handedly drives the economics of computing, with no end in sight. All we’ve been doing for 20 years is applying new capabilities to make the old ideas more attractive, more intelligent, more “2.0”. 2.0… oh yes… I’ll come back to this “2.0” crap… just you wait.

So, if all we’re doing is the same old thing, why isn’t it any easier? Why are our IT staffs inundated with seemingly basic questions… better yet, why do we still have IT? Many technology analysts have been predicting for at least as long as I’ve been alive that all of this will simply become black-box and push-button, akin to electricity. And yet here we are, with an ever diverging technology base, and an ever more complicated set of scenarios for the IT staff… and an ever developing understanding of how inadequate our infrastructure is to handle the “same old things” that we’ve always done. Why do we insource, then outsource, then insource again? And why, oh why, do people still work at the same speed no matter how fast their computers are?

These answers and more will be revealed over the next few days, including why all the experts preaching “computing is commodity” are wrong… and why I say “Computing is art.”