Why do websites have to have the whole of the UN in the country drop list?

You know, as far as the global village is concerned, there’s such a thing as being too global. When the internet went mainstream in the mid-90s, the world was a pretty predictable place. Web sites implicitly targeted the home country and didn’t even bother displaying a country field on their order forms. When they eventually got round to doing so, the country drop list reflected the economic realities of the time: the major economic powers in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. So if you typed in U, you got familiar names like UK and USA, and F gave you Finland and France. And you got this warm, fuzzy feeling that the world as we knew it was still the same place we grew up in.

But then some webmaster had the brilliantly flawed idea of downloading a list of countries from the UN web site, and in one fell swoop condemned the rest of humanity to having to scroll through places they’d never heard of before, and would probably never set foot in for the rest of their lives. Subsequent webmasters not only matched this dubious feat, but also upped the ante by adding more and more obscure places on the globe, most of which probably didn’t even have a single internet connection! And with the break-up of the USSR and Eastern Europe, this was not a particularly difficult thing to do.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of this political correctness! The US is the world’s largest economy – and besides, Al Gore invented the Internet – so I say USA should be the first value in the country list when you key in a U. And our friends in Finland and France should be able to hit the F key without having to scroll through exotic places like Fiji and the Faroe Islands (is that where the ancient Egyptian kings are buried?).

After all, just what is the deal here? Why is it of such vital importance to get the country name right for Albania, Afghanistan-Bananastan, the Falklands or the Faroe Islands? What volume of e-commerce shipments are we talking about here? Will Federal Express be unable to deliver the annual book order to Uzbekistan if it is incorrectly spelt (for those who don’t know where Uzbekistan is, it’s next to Kazakhstan)? Will the volume of returned merchandise affect the balance of payments?  Will Amazon’s share price drop because of incorrect forecasting of sales to Burundi and Bhutan? Are there even more than three addresses in all of Antarctica?

No folks, I say these webmasters have got it all wrong. Just as in CRM whereby you want to differentiate between your most profitable customers, webmasters should go back to college (go to college?) to learn about the differences in GNP between Sweden and Somalia. I say we drop all these economically insignificant countries from the lists! Of course, the whole PC movement would be outraged, so I guess we’d have to settle for major countries and the rest of the world (which can be abbreviated to ROW on the screen).

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against webmasters– some of my best friends have webmaster friends. But I think it’s time we all did the electronic equivalent of shouting from our windows like in the movie Network, and send an email to all these webmasters to the effect that ‘we’re mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it any more!’

MG

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

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

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 accounting. 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

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

SHRINK-WRAPPED SOFTWARE

Office productivity? Gimme a break…

Before the advent of the PC, the very idea of inexpensive shrink-wrapped software was impossible to imagine. To start with, there was no mass market of computer users, and businesses rolled their own software. Today, of course, you can pick up thousands of software titles, on subjects ranging from business to pleasure, priced from $20 to $1 000 or more.

Today, on every PC at work, you’ll find those most ubiquitous of shrink-wrapped products, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, each loaded down with so many features that the average user gets by with less than 20% of its capabilities. It’s like having a car capable of doing 150 mph on the highway and you never average more than 30 mph in town. Even so, most of us spend hours every day using these tools to do reports, calculations, charts and presentations.

But really, what are we doing that’s so very important? How did we ever manage before these tools came along? Did we do the same stuff more slowly, or did we do less with manual methods – or did we simply do without certain things because they were not economically feasible? And the obvious question – were we any less productive in terms of what we produced for a given quantity of time and effort? The quick answer, borne out by a number of studies on the effect of the computer in the workplace, is ‘no’. There is no direct correlation between productivity and the use of computers in the workplace. And certainly your average office worker would not be in violent disagreement as he or she puts the finishing touches to a 30-slide presentation that has taken a week to prepare, and which in all probability will have an air-time of no longer than 5 minutes in front of some harried executive. And they call it office-productivity software…

But the biggest coup of all was the way in which the IT industry succeeded in getting us male, white-collar workers to accept doing work that previously was done either by assistants, or not at all.  And we’re talking deeply-ingrained stuff here, like status, office politics and male-female relationships. In order to breach these formidable defenses, the software and hardware industries teamed up and targeted the soft underbelly of male vanity and our boyhood passion for gadgetry. They brought out a never-ending stream of new hardware, software, enhancements, upgrades and features, so that while we boys were comparing the size of our toys, we didn’t notice that our use of these tools was gradually becoming institutionalized.

And for those of us who weren’t into gadgetry, they targeted our minds. They designed the software for maximum dependency, and created a sort of ‘personal relationship’ between ourselves and our computers. So today we have a whole hierarchy of little people inside our PCs to help us: drivers, assistants, managers – even wizards. Then there’s the terminology used, like clients, dependent clients, parent objects, parent-child relationships, etc. It’s like having a shrink on your desktop. Maybe that’s why we call it shrink-wrapped software…

In other words, all that skillfully marketed, PC-based techno-progress stuff by the software and hardware industries was just a scam to blind us men to the fact that for the past twenty years we’ve been doing our own typing! MG

When it comes to technology, some executives are clearly better endowed than others.

When it comes to executive photo ops in the IT press, size clearly matters. Any in-depth article on the latest and greatest project success at Acme Inc will inevitably feature a photo of the senior IT or business executive in charge. But not just any old photo: the standard 1×1.5 inch mug shot is clearly inadequate here and doesn’t convey the right message. That message is all about size and importance, which means the person must be appropriately dwarfed by some technology, the implicit message being – hey, I run all this sh*t and make it work!

Technology is the only allowable backdrop for exec photo shots. Geography, scenery and tourist attractions just don’t make the grade, which explains why you hardly ever see exec photos with backdrops of city scenes or nature.

When it comes to technology, some executives are clearly better endowed than others. For example, you can expect great photos ops for execs working in companies which manufacture or use behemoths like airplanes, submarines or cruise ships. Most of these photos are taken outdoors, with awesome technology as the ultimate prop. I remember many years ago a photo of an exec who even managed to be photographed perched atop the cockpit canopy of an attack helicopter, with the rotor blades just above his head! That was a boy with one helluva toy!

For execs that are less well endowed technology-wise, all is not lost! The standard alternative is to fall back on the computer room filled with lots of exotic hardware. With suitable tricks of lighting and focus, photographers can put together indoor pictures that tell as impressive an executive story as those depicted by the outdoor pictures of the boys with their toys. The usual shot is to have the exec with arms folded leaning against a black mainframe or a huge array of disks. He is suitably stern-faced (no smiling in the computer room), with a Clint Eastwood look that seems to be saying ‘go on, make my day!’

When choosing props in the computer room though, I think these execs are not giving technology a fair deal, so the latest gadgets are getting a bum rap. After all, if we measure technological progress in terms of the accepted criteria of miniaturization (smaller, faster, cheaper), then execs should have been posing in the seventies with minicomputers, in the eighties with PCs, in the nineties with laptops, and today with handheld devices. But no, it’s always the bloody mainframe! And when they don’t have a mainframe, then it’s server or disk arrays, the next best look-alikes (hell, they could even pose in front of the air conditioning unit and we’d be none the wiser – they all look the same anyway)!

There is at least one sector however, where execs feel they never get any justice from the IT press when it comes to photos, and that is the lingerie business. And who can blame them? For example, at that household name of US lingerie, Victoria’s Secret, whatever the IT story, project success or failure, you can be sure that the magazine is going to run a photo of a model from the latest catalogue – or worse, the exec against a background of said model! Regardless of gender, it’s an exec loser’s game – for the man because he appears too feminine, and for the lady because she appears, well… too feminine.

So no matter how technology plays out over the next decade, I think most large companies will always have at least one mainframe in the computer room – it’s the only suitable prop for executives who are not well endowed! MG

IT technology change is usually driven by organizational politics

After the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, journalists fantasized about mining colonies on the moon (never mind the monotonous scenery and the terrible economics of transporting coal across a quarter million miles). Well, similar fantasies occur within IT every time a new technology appears. Like the moon colonies, there is always a hype cycle that starts with a selling proposition that’s just too good to be true – often fuelled by journalistic flights of fancy – followed a few years later by a reality check. The script, as predictable as a Hollywood movie, runs something like this:

·         Selling proposition: New ‘good guy’ technology appears, which is invariably sexier, simpler and so much better than the old, ‘bad guy’ technology.

·         Reality check: New technology doesn’t take over the world after all, and the old technology sticks around for a long time still because: (i) the new technology has yet to acquire the economics of usage and the reliability of the old technology (ii) we wrongly assume that the old technology is standing still and not getting any better or cheaper.

A 19^th century economist of no uncertain notoriety once drafted a manifesto whose opening words were: ‘The history of all past society is the history of the struggle between classes’. Well, if this person were around today and applied his observations to the world of IT, all he’d have to do is change a few words and he’d have a new manifesto which this time round he’d have gotten right, and for which he’d get full Marx: ‘The history of all IT innovation is the history of the struggle between classes’.

Most IT innovations are of the ‘revolutionary’ kind, often accompanied by ‘holy wars’, in which a new technology is embraced as much for reasons of organizational politics as for addressing actual business requirements. There is invariably a struggle between some parts of the organization, or between some vendors. Fuelled by a passion generated by some ongoing conflict, one of these classes seizes upon a new technology to advance its particular organizational aims (eg decentralization) or commercial aims (eg crushing a competitor). It then raises high the banner emblazoned with the new technology, and basically tells some other class, as Woody Allen so eloquently put it, to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ – though not in those words. This enables a lot of people to make money publishing magazines, newspapers and books to cater to the faithful and play the various groups against each other, as we shall now see.

MAINFRAMES – THE GREAT DICTATOR

When mainframes first appeared in the fifties, their size, weight and floor space were so impressive that science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov actually predicted that most of their bulk would eventually have to be placed in space (otherwise where on earth would you put it?). Mainframes were therefore associated with a technical caste of high priests who spoke in terms of bits, bytes, MIPS and FLOPS, and saw themselves as the enlightened pioneers of a new age which only they could really understand. They consequently favored heavy-handed central control of both the technical and business environments. By the sixties therefore, the bubble was ready to burst and the time was ripe for a revolt, which came in the form of the minicomputer.

MINICOMPUTERS – GOING IT ALONE

By the mid-sixties, a new company called DEC (Decentralized Entry-level Computers) had firmly established itself as the leader in a new class of machines called minicomputers. The ascent of this new class of machine had as much to do with organizational politics as with technology (it boasted technological improvements like transistors instead of vacuum tubes –  and a novelty called a video monitor).

When decentralized business units analyzed their internal allocations or charge-backs to central IT, they found that they compared very favorably with the price of low-cost minicomputers from DEC. On a purely hardware purchase-price basis therefore, they found they could easily justify the creation of their own IT departments, which began to spring up left, right and center. Minicomputers thus ushered in a new information age, suitably ‘liberated’ from the yoke of central IT, whose mainframe-based monopoly began to crumble.

Over time, however, the decentralized IT departments running minicomputers became victims of their success. Though they rightly viewed themselves as far more responsive to the business than the original mainframe dictatorships, they also found it difficult to cope with the huge increase in demand for their services.  Financial reality also caught up with them, as it gradually became clear that computing costs went far beyond the initial price tag on the hardware. So even the decentralized computer departments found themselves suffering a fate similar to that of their previous central masters, albeit on a much smaller scale.

So by the mid-seventies, another bubble was ready to burst. The time was ripe for yet another revolt, which came with the arrival of the microcomputer or PC.

MICROCOMPUTERS – RAISING THE MIDDLE FINGER

In 1976 Apple was created in a garage –  thereby ensuring for posterity the mythical status of the garage as a great place to start a business. And when it brought out its first microcomputers in the mid-seventies, users for the first time in history were able to use computers on a purely individual basis. And once microcomputers could be networked together, the stage was set for another round of ‘liberation’ from the IT Department ‘oppressors’.

When IBM itself eventually joined the fray in 1981 with its PC, the momentum snowballed.  Dealers took orders for 250,000 units on the first day, whereas IBM had expected to sell 275,000 units over the product’s entire lifetime of five years – talk about giving forecasting a bad name.

Whereas the previous minicomputer revolution was pure organizational politics between centralized and decentralized cultures, the new microcomputer revolution went further and added an ideological dimension. It was not enough to want better computing services in the enterprise; one also had to take a stance in favor of the individualism and freedom that microcomputers supposedly embodied. This implied the overthrow of the central IT dictatorships with their mainframes and minicomputers, symbolized by the oppressive Darth Vader and his evil empire, a.k.a. IBM. One newspaper even proclaimed itself ‘The Voice of Personal Computing in the Enterprise’, and in 1991 its editor-in-chief went as far as predicting that the last mainframe would be unplugged in 1995! This prediction was all the more misplaced given that around this time, both Microsoft and Apple were using very large IBM minicomputers to run their own businesses, and showed absolutely no signs of wanting to unplug them!

Apple had the GUI field to itself for six whole years, from 1984 to 1990, which gave Bill Gates every reason to be mad at Steve Jobs for threatening his dreams of world domination. Bill’s take on this was ‘don’t get mad, get Steven’, so he quietly went away and prepared his revenge. When Microsoft came out with a workable version of Windows in 1990, Apple’s fate was sealed as far as corporate IT was concerned. It also lost the ill-conceived lawsuit against Microsoft for copying its GUI, since Apple itself had copied the idea from Xerox (itself a copier company…).

WEB 2.0  - HERE WE GO AGAIN?

It would be nice to think that the organizational ‘holy wars’ and ‘class struggles’ ended with the mainframe-mini-micro technology battles above, but this was not to be the case. Organizational politics by technology proxy continued with NCs (that’s Network Computers for the newbies) vs PCs, Navigator vs Explorer, client/server vs host computing and OS/2 vs NT. All of these battles were always about more than just technology; they were also about ‘good guys’ vs ‘bad guys’. Adopting them would not just enable you to better resolve your business or technical problems; they would also ‘liberate’ you from some ‘undesirable’ part of the organization, or from some ‘undesirable’ vendor.

And with Web 2.0 we’re coming full circle again. Many articles on this new wave of computing are already evoking the apparent inability of the traditional IT department to come to grips with it. Now throw in some ‘digital generation’ stuff for good measure, and one part of the organization will soon be seeking 2.0 ‘liberation’ and telling some other part of the organization to go ‘be fruitful and multiply’ – though not in those words. MG

Bring back the good old days, when the longest job title was ‘Director of Operations’

Ever wonder why it is that when you choose software product ABC for your local organization, you’re just a project manager working in the IT department, but if you do the very same job on an international scale, you’re suddenly the Director of Transnational Systems in the Department for Global Technology Deployment and Systems Optimization ?

Here are some tongue-in-cheek examples of outrageous job titles and departments that make us hark back to the good old days when the longest job title was ‘Director of Operations.’

·         Strategic ‘anything’ Director: a politically acceptable staging post for executives with no real work to do, or for those whose posts have been rationalized during the recent merger.

·         Director of X-wide Systems: a person whose mandate it is to put in as many ‘standard’ systems as possible in geographical area X, whether or not they have a business case or actually correspond to country requirements.

·         Infrastructure and Planning Department: what you call an infrastructure department to ensure credibility and an annual budget.

·         Global ‘anything’ Department: a group whose mandate is unclear and whose existence is more or less ignored by subsidiaries around the world.

·         Global Products and Technology Department: a body of technical weenies whose job it is to spend vast amounts of time and money defining ‘strategic’ technical standards from a market of ‘me-too’ products. Their toughest mission to date? Choosing between Navigator and Explorer as the worldwide browser standard.

·         Virtually Integrated Planning Committee: runs the whole shooting match. Staffed by dignified 40-something execs with awesome-sounding titles, this body inspires security, confidence and vision. It can get the CEO to write million-dollar cheques for strategic projects without batting an eyelid. Known in inner circles as the VIP-committee.

·         Macro Business and Management Analyst: IT’s concession to user representation. Usually an ex-user whose ability with technology personifies the saying ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’ Work procedures known in inner circles as MBMA (Management by Magazine Article).

·         Area/Regional: options available for ‘line extension’ to existing director positions when the market for such posts is saturated. Instructions for use: simply append level identifier to original title, as in ‘Area Director for …’

·         Director of Enterprise Process Strategy: a new post created when all line extension options have been exhausted (see above), and a company can no longer create any more Strategic Director positions without raising suspicion.

·         VP for Global Best Practices: head of a department that unilaterally decides which practices are ‘best’ for subsidiaries without their consent and without identifying any ‘worst’ practices.

·         VP for Technology Deployment and Systems Optimization: post reserved for someone who can work the words ‘strategy,’ ‘process’ and ‘architecture’ into the same sentence and manage to keep a straight face.

·         Strategic Director of Advanced Technology: head of a department of one. Post reserved since the dawn of computing for nerds with beards who are best left alone to explore solutions-in-search-of-a-problem.

·         IT Project Manager: what kind of job title is that? Somebody get that weirdo outta here!MG

Copyright 1996 by Computerworld Inc., One Speen Street, Framingham, Mass. 01701.  Reprinted by permission of Computerworld.  All rights reserved.

Just watch the Delta and Northwest IT staff slug it out behind the scenes!

With the Delta  and Northwest mega-merger now imminent, journalists have already conducted in-depth analyses of what it’s going to mean from a business perspective. But what’s it going to mean from an IT perspective? Nobody talks about that – and yet, this where a lot of organizational battles, turf wars and power plays are going to take place, as frightened IT staff wonder whose systems will win out, and whose will be relegated to oblivion.

What happens to IT departments after a merger offers a fantastic insight into organizational politics. But first, let’s start out by saying that in reality there are no mergers, only acquisitions. Even in the very rare case of a ‘merger of equals’ (ha!), with complementary products or services contributing to a better overall portfolio, there will still be a dominant player calling the shots: one of the parties must have a greater ‘need’ to be acquired than the other. So merger is really a politically correct term which is bandied about for press consumption to placate employees and shareholders.  For example, have you ever heard of Scopus? You haven’t? Well, you’ve just dated yourself as an IT rookie – they ‘merged’ with Siebel in 1998 (at least Larry Ellison had the good grace to call Peoplesoft  an acquisition).  Daimler-Chrysler 10 years ago might have been a ‘merger of equals’, but is was clear to everyone in Detroit that merger was spelled a-c-q-u-i-s-i-t-i-o-n.

So what awaits the new CIO after a merger? Well, to start with, both companies will in all probability have different infrastructures, architectures and technical standards. They will also be running different types of applications in terms of ERP, CRM, billing, etc, and probably using different vendors such as SAP, Oracle, etc. The term driving a square peg into a round hole does not even begin to describe the complexity of the task at hand. And this already tall order must in addition be accomplished without disruption to existing operations, and without upsetting any customers.

With this firmly in mind, let’s try and answer the following question: ‘ which of the following criteria should be used when deciding which systems to keep and which to phase out? ’

(a)   cost-effectiveness

(b)   customer satisfaction

(c)    total cost of ownership

(d)   reliability

(e)    scalability

(f)     ease of integration

(g)   process effectiveness

(h)   level of ROI to date

(i)     some of the above

(j)     all of the above

(k)   none of the above.

The correct answer is of course (k) – none of the above.

After the official merger announcement, a photo op of the two CEOs back-slapping and high-fiving in front of the cameras appears on CNN and in the press, and great care is taken to achieve a politically acceptable balance at board level, for employee and shareholder reasons. However, there is no such requirement for IT – who the new CIO is and which company’s architecture and systems are going to dominate is of absolutely no interest to CNN and the Wall Street Journal. Which essentially means that the rules of engagement are not very different from those of the animal kingdom, ie the instinct for survival and protection of the herd decides the outcome.

So what should in reality be a fairly complex process of identifying the ‘best’ systems based on a set of rational and objective criteria actually turns out to  be fairly straightforward. The dominant company puts its key people in place, makes some token concessions, then  essentially tells its team to take what they think is useful from the other side and phase out the rest. Period. It’s as simple as that. Oh sure, some mega-mergers put on a show of actually going through an objective selection and consolidation process, but the end result is rarely in doubt. Which is just as well, because it is questionable whether a consultative, democratic and rational approach could ever work. After all, a systems manager from company A is hardly going to tell his counterpart from company B, ‘You know Jim, your CRM system and underlying architecture are really much better than ours. We should definitely standardize on yours. I therefore agree to trash our system and phase myself out of existence.’

Objectively merging the IT departments of two large companies is an impossible task, from a technological, organizational, political and cultural perspective. Key people will understandably seek survival by protecting the herd that constitutes their power base, and that power base comes with a number of systems attached. So by definition there’s going to be a painful transition period in which you’re going to have to phase out both people and systems, and you want to try and keep that period as short as possible. And in a perverse way, this pre-historic approach is probably the best answer amongst a host of bad choices. MG