IT Must Learn to Bend or Business Will Break
The current economic climate is having a devastating effect on almost every business around. In order to adapt to changing conditions and opportunities, businesses will need to use flexible, adaptable systems to survive. The days of expensive year-long implementations of behind-the-firewall software look to be behind us.
I recently attended a Forrester Briefing and listened to comments by analyst Peter Burris, a very smart guy. The company has done a host of studies showing that technology will be a growing part of how businesses compete and differentiate themselves in the future.
While systems and software used to be very "behind the scenes" and often transaction-based, that is the case no longer. Consumers and businesses alike buy differently, consume differently, and recommend differently. Trends such as social networking, video on demand, and e-commerce will continue to force businesses to adapt to keep up with their customers. They cannot rely on systems that take years to implement, and most don't have the budgets to make large investments, at least they won't for the next couple of years.
The growing focus on SaaS, cloud computing, application platforms, etc. are all responses to this growing trend in the market. There will be other solutions in the future for mobile, etc. that we haven't even imagined. They all drive businesses to use systems that they can deploy, change, and retire quickly. In my main job, I remember meeting a venture capitalist who talked about how his firm looks for opportunities in which it sees lots of "wiggling." He couldn't describe what that really meant, or how one gets paid for wiggling. I thought he was a lunatic.
In retrospect, he does make a good point. Things happen quickly on the Internet and in this changing global economy. When a business sees wiggling (or opportunities), either positive or negative, they need agile systems to respond. One-size-fits-all software and packaging are going the way of the VCR. I think this will continue to grow in importance and focus as enterprises evaluate new systems and invest in new technology. What do you think?
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You are a little late with this statement:
That statement has been true for over 5 years.
Posted by: khurt.myopenid.com
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November 20, 2008 3:46 AM
Although @1 may be correct in theory, the reality is that *a lot* of businesses are still very much stuck in the IT paradigms of the 80's and 90's. When you get outside the circle of web 2.0 companies, the drop-off rate of adoption of these new tools and approaches seems pretty steep.
I write a blog on the adoption of technology in the marketing department, and I see this again and again in that domain. In theory, marketing is now a highly distributed and agile mission -- transformed by search marketing/SEO, social media marketing, etc. -- but many CMOs and agencies are a long way away from embracing that at a deep structural level.
The faster technology changes, the more skewed the adoption curve becomes. You'll always have some great people on the leading edge, and I'm sure a lot of them are RWW readers. But the pig in the python is still much farther behind.
This type of change is not as simple as making the case for the advantage of new technology. We can chalk that advantage up as a given. The challenges are with people's habits and ways of thinking, entrenched culture, organizational structure with deep political forces, people's skill sets, etc.
I think Jason's right, that a cataclysmic event -- such as this economic crisis -- may very well be the necessary shock to the system to overcome that inertia. Change or die is a powerful ultimatum (as Detroit may finally learn). That life-threatening pressure hasn't been there for the past 5 years.
Funnily enough, I've just blogged about this from a different perspective, quoting RWW's coverage of the Accenture report on employees using technology that isn't approved by company IT.
When employees and customers are all finding their way around the restrictions, the restrictions need to be removed.
Thing is, for a medium to large corporation or one that deals with a lot of sensative data using the cloud exclusively for your operations is commercial suicide.
Just look at the closure of a prominent professional photographers site (forget the name of which) and how it gave its users 48 hours to grab any of their data from the site - which was nonsense because the sheer amount of bandwidth needed to do so wasn't there.
Now, if you uploaded your data onto there without a copy on your side you are a fool, but this means you still have infrastructure on your side of the cloud that needs managing.
Many corporations need the in-house solution because it best fits them - I would be mortified if my doctors used google docs as their filing system.
Some require the security that self determination over their own data provides, the company I work for developes vehicle tracking systems and as a consequence deals with multi-gigabyte SQL databases (largest of which so far has been several hundred!) and mapsets. Having this in the cloud just wouldn't work, we have made use of technologies such as starteam and bugnet to control the development of our software (and our software is a webservice too).
This isn't to say that the technology being offered isn't good, but I'd like to see them license out their technology for bespoke in-house developments so they can take advantage of the functionality but also not place their critical data with a 3rd party that could shut up shop or be hacked and either out of commission for a while or incur data theft.
What would you do if your SaaS provider gets DDoS'd? You've lost not only your applications but your data for that duration.
IBM and Sun have been trying to push the idea of the network being the computer for several decades now, yet time and time again the corporate world points out that it may work for some, but not all. And refusal to place your company into the hands of someone else for your most critical of properties is not laggard/head in sand behaviour or refusal to adapt.
And something I forgot to mention.
What if you want to move service providers? What if you get a SaaS or cloud company that suddenly doesn't want to answer your calls (I've had this with a domain hosting company and our german domain address).
How portable have they made the data from one SaaS to another?
I like the ‘wiggling’ metaphor that your venture capitalist used as his investment ‘divining rod’. I’m not a venture capitalist (perhaps an ‘adventurous technologist’) but that particular VC seems to approach his craft with a great deal of creativity and intuition.
That seems to be the essence of what you’re saying in this post. Solving problems requires creativity. Deep problems require deep creativity. Terminal problems require radically new ways of looking at the situation. I read a great line on Chris Brogan’s blog today:
"I do want GM to get into the transportation business, not the car business."
He was speaking about the ability to bend brands without breaking them – especially when they are likely to break anyway if they can’t adapt to new market conditions.
I design user interface systems which means I guide my hard technical knowledge with a strong sense of intuition. My background is Fine Arts – a great all-purpose foundation for creative problem solving. In that discipline, one learns to consciously destroy one’s own work in order to progress and evolve a better product. It is all about evolution as a creative process (with its implicit ‘self-destructiveness’).
Your venture capitalist couldn’t find words to explain his ‘lunatic’ approach. But it sounds very much like a search for the ‘genetic’ diversity required for any evolutionary process. Smart guy.
Much of the IT mindset is summed up with "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Pretty conservative really, and far from the creative mindset that is required to fix the very deep problems that are hitting the economy today. This is an evolutionary opportunity.
Lastly, @Scott – I’m glad I stumbled upon your comment today. Great post on your site discussing this very topic from a creative, multi-disciplinary approach.
@6 How much corporate IT experience do you have?
It isn't just about habit and old practices, the cloud is not a one stop shop that everyone should be moving to else you're a luddite trying to avoid change.
There are many reasons why keeping control of your applications, data and connectivity trump wholesale outsourcing to cloud companies and many cases where use of the cloud could even be detrimental to a company.
As I said, I think there would be a massive market for licensing out web 2.0 technologies to companies for in-house solutions that integrate into already existing infrastructre or for hosting at a trusted ASP.
The key to this are control, security (both of the data and of service) and ownership.
Nice discussion. Scott Brinker's comment is dead on target - especially this:
"I think Jason's right, that a cataclysmic event -- such as this economic crisis -- may very well be the necessary shock to the system to overcome that inertia."
Think simple on the cloud notion *first* - collaborative cloud INSIDE the company first, I think.
Many (lots!) of companies do not even do that, with collaboration being solely too-many-meetings with only-in-the-air thoughts, email threads of inherent visibility challenge, hoarded in-expert(s)-head-only information, etc. etc. - all instead of being written down and shared visibly in WIKIs and collaborative and accountable issue tracking systems that should be core not only in engineering (SW dev), but also all the way across the business.
Or many that do the WIKIs or other issue/task tracking systems expect IT to install the systems, and magically they work beautifully (in effectiveness) too. Not typically!
They need adoption and priority from the top, outside of IT too, through active and continual participation (especially by Execs and Srs. to set examples), as well as internal driver personnel (good process promoters)...
In all, not rocket science - proof all over the place of these things working *very* effectively - by the smartest companies. But breaking old habits in companies resisting good change is simply a tough row - always has been.
Let's hope that indeed this is the "cataclysmic event" so many in Corp America have been wishing for, for sane good productive reasons.
I'd say that's at least a pretty nice silver-lining to this economic mess in the world of today.
All,
Great comments. I suspect that the cloud computing platforms offered by Amazon, Microsoft, SalesForce, will continue to grow as ways to help IT departments bend. The benefits of using a cloud platform for storage, computing, etc. are manifest provided they are secure and reliable per one of the comments above. I believe some of these computing services will become as easy to consume as electricity is in your home; you just plug in, put in your account, and off you go. It will be a very interesting trend to watch.
Your venture capitalist couldn’t find words to explain his ‘lunatic’ approach. But it sounds very much like a search for the ‘genetic’ diversity required for any evolutionary process. Smart guy.