The Undercover IT Correspondent

DEAD IT POETS SOCIETY

Emily Dickinson and Rudyard Kipling were already writing about IT in the 19^th century!

 

IT might have started in the mid-20^th century, but two 19^th century poets describe the trials and tribulations of the profession so well that one could be forgiven for thinking that they had somehow been caught in a time warp.

 

For example, the following stanza from Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Broken Men’ could have been written about Microsoft and Vista:

 

For things we never mention,

  For art misunderstood –

For excellent intention

  That did not turn to good …

 

Emily Dickinson’s ‘Forbidden fruit’ captures perfectly the state of mind of Windows users longing for a Macintosh to go with their iPods:

 

Heaven is what I cannot reach!

  The Apple on the tree,

Provided it do hopeless hang

  That ‘heaven’ is to me.

 

And her poem, ‘The Lost Thought’, could be the lament for a developer in intense debug:

 

I felt a clearing in my mind

  As if my brain had split;

I tried to match it, seam by seam,

  But could not make them fit.

 

The thought behind I strove to join

  Unto the thought before,

But sequence raveled out of reach

  Like balls upon a floor.

 

IT departments who still cling to the waterfall methodology for software development, despite ample evidence that it does not work, would do well to remember Kipling’s words from ‘The Power of the Dog’:

 

There is sorrow enough in the natural way

From men and women to fill our day;

And when we are certain of sorrow in store,

Why do we always arrange for more?

 

And finally, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘When Earth’s Last Picture is Painted’ could, with a few minor changes, describe the whole profession on judgement day:

 

When Earth’s last program is written

  And the tapes are twisted and dried,

When the oldest listings have faded,

  And the youngest critic has died.

We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it -

  Lie down for an aeon or two,

Till the Master of all good software

  Shall put us to work anew.

 

And only The Master shall praise us,

  And only The Master shall blame;

And no one shall work for money,

  And no one shall work for fame,

But each for the joy of the program,

  And each in his separate star,

Shall code the thing as he sees it,

  For the god of things as they are!

 

MG

USER GROUP CONFERENCES

The ultimate diversionary tactic to get clients to forget their real problems!

Now there’s this rumor doing the rounds that user group conferences are not the serious events they’re made out to be, ie sharing best practice with other clients and learning to use the product better. Instead, participants are out playing golf or sailing all day, wining and dining to great entertainment at night, emptying the mini-bar back at their five-star hotel, and generally having a good time at company expense. Well, I’m sorry to say, it’s all true!

We often hear customers complain that enterprise software vendors are out of touch with the real world and what their customers really want. I’m not so sure that’s true when it comes to user group conferences. Here’s the rationale from the vendor’s perspective. Throughout the year they’ve been having a hard time with new customers past the honeymoon stage, recent customers who are having trouble with their projects, and established customers who are wondering just how they managed to get in so deep. And in parallel, they must somehow convince all these people that the forthcoming upgrade, with its attendant headaches and disruption, is still in their best interests.

Using the classic diversionary approach favored by politicians the world over, they therefore stage an event that allows them to temporarily make their constituents forget their real problems, and to simultaneously sell them on the merits of the next version.  Enter the user group conference, a combination of theme park, expo, work and play skillfully rolled into one and billed as the annual extravaganza they just cannot afford to miss. And to top it all off, they also invite along prospective customers, who rub shoulders with real customers and benefit from all that marketing hype, thus increasing the chances of closing new deals.

About three months beforehand, back in the trenches at customer sites, key players from both IT and the business begin to jockey for position to see who will be going this time to San Francisco, San Diego, Barcelona or Cannes for a three-day break. About a month before the final countdown, internal rivalry is rife and reaches fever pitch as IT and users – who’ve been bitching all year at the vendor about that upgrade they don’t really need – all of a sudden begin to think that maybe it will deliver great business benefits after all! And the only possible place for them to reach such a decision is of course at the user group conference! Last but not least, it’s a great place to network if you’re looking to change jobs.

And it works every time, year in and year out. IT departments and senior user execs might not be able to nominate the deserving to tag along to the President’s Club, but they can get them short-listed to go to the next user group conference! On a good year, you’ll find five or more people from the same company in attendance, especially from global companies. ‘Oh Jill, fancy meeting you here as well!’. ‘Tom, what a surprise!’

Amazingly, it’s not even free – invitations are parsimoniously distributed, and only speakers usually have the $1,500-2,000 registration fee waived. Then there are the so-called partners (ie other vendors, consultants and integrators) with their stands in the pavilions, who foot the rest of the bill. Such partners are usually placed in categories like ‘Platinum’, ‘Gold’ or ‘Silver’, which are very aptly named, because they are indicators of how much it costs them to be on the annual user group bandwagon.

No folks, you’ve really got to hand it to them: enterprise software vendors have this particular strategy down to a fine art. So let it not be said that they are not in tune with their customers. It’s just not true! And finally, remember, during the other 11 months of the year, don’t go overboard in giving your vendor a hard time or bad-mouthing the product. Instead, schmooze, suck-up and generally play the great pretender, so you can increase your chances of going to next year’s great event! MG

ENTERPRISE  SOFTWARE

Reps and consultants are thoroughly schooled in a special language called vendor-speak

 

Enterprise software is a multi-billion dollar industry that keeps a lot of us in gainful employment. But it wasn’t always so. In the sixties and seventies, companies developed their own rudimentary and unreliable systems, even though many basic business processes were very similar, eg payroll and acacounting. Hence the idea of enterprise software, whose basic premise was ‘why should companies run multiple, unreliable systems when they could all run the same unreliable system instead?’ So one day some clever consulting firm saw the opportunity and took a complex and unreliable system – and started selling it to other companies!

 

Software vendors pack as many features as they can into each new version. The more check-boxes you can tick off, the better. Hence the mind-numbing complexity of ERP and CRM solutions, to name the main culprits. In general, these systems have shown themselves to be far from the panaceas they were initially made out to be. Companies that thought they were going to get a leg up on the competition soon found themselves stumbling with their panacea down around their knees.

 

Because of the high price tag, enterprise software is usually acquired through an RFP process, which is really an organizational joke, because behind the façade of objectivity, neutrality and integrity there usually lies a hidden agenda. The vast majority of companies have a fairly good idea of which vendor they want to go with, but because of the sums involved they have to be seen to be going through the motions of evaluating competitors, which is where the RFP comes in.  RFPs are rarely put together by the people concerned, because they are usually far too busy – or wouldn’t know how to put one together anyway.  So it is inevitably turned over to a “suitably briefed” consulting company, ie one who is knowledgeable in the solution of the pre-anointed vendor.

 

Once the RFP has been issued and vendors suitably short-listed, the next phase is the product demonstration.  Demos are like beauty contests: though the final decision is supposedly based on a wide range of objective criteria, first impressions of physical characteristics are important. An attractive user interface, a thin client and a slim footprint will usually elicit appreciable stares and comments from both men and women on the customer side.

 

Once the demo gets under way, pre-sales consultants will go out of their way to project an air of ‘aw, shucks’ honesty, trust and confidence, almost as if they were speaking from the heart. Which is of course a façade, because vendors never speak from the heart, only from the script. And the closer they stick to the script, the better they come across. Which is why they hate RFPs with a passion, because it breaks up the script and obliges them to focus on irrelevant things – like the customer’s business requirements!

 

Sales reps and pre-sales consultants are thoroughly schooled in a special language called vendor-speak, whose cardinal rule is very simple: as far as possible always answer ‘Yes’ to any question. Naïve users make this easy by asking open-ended questions like ‘can your product do this or that?’ More astute users will rather ask ‘how does your product do this or that?’. Even when there is reasonable doubt, still answer ‘Yes’. You can even get away with ‘Absolutely!’, since you can always backtrack later by saying there was a misunderstanding (most of these packages are so complex anyway…). And if you can’t answer ‘Yes’, then there is a whole variety of fallbacks, the most common of which are ‘that can easily be customized’ or ‘not in the current version’. Particularly difficult questions can be met with ‘that’s not part of our business model’.

 

Finally, after using the new software for a couple of years, customers have to go through an upgrade, at which time they usually learn that a lot of their so-called configuration and customization – which was implicitly encouraged by the vendor and the consultants during the sales cycle as the answer to any missing requirements – are not automatically upgraded. Which therefore has to be revisited at their own cost – inevitably with the help of the vendor or the same consultants (hmmm…).

 

But let’s not get negative here. Upgrades are not always unwelcome or expensive. Even the most cynical and hardened users of enterprise software will readily acknowledge the value of one upgrade – the one that bumps you up to business class! MG

IT IN THE MOVIES

If we don’t have enough women in IT, blame it on Hollywood!

 

Every so often we see hand-wringing in the press lamenting the fact that we don’t have enough women in IT.  For some recent examples check out “What is it about girls and IT?” (Financial Times) and “Making IT work for women” (Computerworld). Well, for one of the main culprits, look no further than the silver screen, whose role models help to shape our kids’ career choices.

 

Of all the professions misrepresented in Hollywood – which is just about all of them – IT clearly gets the worst treatment. Never mind the computers, which display the ultimate in technological contradictions: fantastic graphics, super-computing processing power and universal networking capabilities – combined with such poor security that anyone can break in simply by typing conversational English and guessing the right password. No, one can forgive Hollywood its hardware fantasies – it’s the people and the profession that are the problem.

 

Despite job simplification on the silver screen, some semblance of reality usually manages to find its way into most scripts. For example, we’ve all got at least a vague idea of what to expect in fields like law, the police, journalism and finance (which, by the way, constitutes 95% of the working population of Scriptville). However, when it comes to IT, we are asked to totally suspend all belief.

 

The scriptwriting rules for IT are really very simple:

 

• There is no such thing as an IT profession, with its developers, analysts, ops staff, project managers and CIOs. There are only hard-core techies, period. This wouldn’t be so bad if the techies were normal people, but they’re anything but that (next point).
• There are two categories of techie: (1) the brilliant, techno-geek rebel/social misfit in his late teens, who’s got a bone to pick with some corporation – or with society as a whole (2) the sassy ten year school kid who has total mastery over whatever computer system he or she comes into contact with.
• Whatever the scale of the undertaking – space-launched lasers for James Bond villains, or the complete infrastructure and security systems for Jurassic Park – you never need more than one person!  Two would be a crowd. As for a team, fuhgettaboutit…

 

Take James Bond movies, for example, with their complex mix of systems and technology needed to menace democracy and dominate Earth. What should normally be a multi-billion dollar effort involving at least 5 000 IT staff and systems integrators is all effortlessly achieved by a single individual! Actually, there are 5 000 people in Spectre or whatever the evil organization is now called, but 4 997 of them work in security. The remaining three are the villain, his sidekick and the resident IT expert. In the only exception to the teen rule, this person is always a man in his forties (never a woman – what happened to equality of the sexes here?), whose final reward is always to die with his scheming boss in a ball of fire or a hail of bullets in the final scene.

 

Jurassic Park is another example of the rules of IT scriptwriting – and a disappointing one, because whereas James Bond films by definition defy belief, one would at least have expected an icon like Steven Spielberg to put some effort into it. But what does he throw at us instead? The archetype geek! A fat slob developer in a Bermuda shirt and nerd-specs, pushing 280-300 lbs, with his ass hanging out of his pants, and the social skills of the very dinosaurs his systems are supposed to keep in check. This moronic whiz-kid is supposed to deliver the complex systems that control, amongst other things, fully automated guided tours, security gates, motion-detector sensors, and high-voltage fences which will protect humans from man-eating dinosaurs. Shame on you, Steven, you could have done better! (At least when Seinfeld created Newman using the same actor, he had the good sense to cast him as a postal worker).

 

Before Harrison Ford in Firewall (2006), Hollywood had yet to feature a single IT executive or manager, or indeed any white-collar worker hero. This has probably gone a long way towards dissuading women from seeking a career in the profession. Until scriptwriters realize that IT is about so much more than the laptop environments on which they churn out their techno-geek disbelief, women will continue to head towards the better portrayed professions such as law, journalism or finance.

 

MG