Category: Four pillars

Following a recommendation from a trusted source (friend and twice-colleague Gary Casey) I went and read Visibility Is Your Friend, a post on CIO.com by Michael Hugos. Excellent post, I thoroughly recommend it, and I will be adding Michael Hugos to my regular reading stack. It also made me revisit something that’s been bothering me for a while.

Systems to me have always been about people, processes and technology bound together by culture and values. Technology, both in hardware terms as well as in software terms, is commoditising; Moore, Metcalfe and Gilder keep marching on, augmented and accentuated by democratised innovation and the opensource community. Stop there for a moment and hold that thought.

While technology has been commoditising, vendors have fought hard to differentiate via lock-in, mostly staying within the letter of competition law rather than its spirit. As a result democratised innovation has not had quite the impact it could have had, and commoditisation has been slow.

At the same time, while there has been considerable talk about process automation and business process reengineering, not much has changed since the late 1980s when these were dominant buzzphrases. Project management has always been about the management of change, but somehow we’ve managed to create a whole new discipline of change management in the meantime. After all, we needed someone to blame for all the reengineering failures we had. What better scapegoat than the change function that wasn’t there at the time?

I think there was something else going on at the same time. There was a general unwillingness to document and expose processes, particularly in the services sector. This unwillingness was natural and rooted in pure insecurity, as people worried about their jobs and consequently tried their hardest to obfuscate what they did. How was this obfuscation carried out? Usually by enshrining processes that nobody understood into ERP, SCM and CRM systems, thereby legitimising the inefficiencies. And that may be why so many people failed at many things: at using value chain analysis, at implementing project accounting, at documenting processes for quality certification or for that matter Sarbanes-Oxley, at driving value out of ERP, SCM or CRM systems.

All these things depend on processes being correctly described. And on reliable metrics for those processes. Two things that were conspicuous in their absence.

Absent because of human insecurity. Insecurity that was understandable, insecurity that had its roots in words like downsizing and outsourcing and rightsizing and rightsourcing and outsizing and downsourcing. Words that represented things that often failed. Things that often failed because they were based on the wrong information. Information that was corrupted as a result of human insecurity. All understandable, all very sad. And everyone lost. The customers, the shareholders, the employees, even the consultants. Maybe not all the consultants….

When these things were failing, we started doing something else, something very related to our assembly-line roots. We started seeking to standardise jobs. Tried to put people in boxes. Any colour you like as long as it’s red. That way, we had something else to blame when the results didn’t bear inspection.

Because the Emperor had to have his Clothes. We couldn’t actually say that we didn’t have standardised processes, that we hadn’t really documented them anyway, that we couldn’t measure them if we wanted to.

No, it was easier to say our people needed standardising. It was easier to say that while in the same breath claiming we had a War For Talent, however ludicrous that sounded.

And we had help in keeping that perception of the Emperor being Clothed. Help in the shape of meeting minutes and presentations and spreadsheets. Where all the “power” in the organisation began to vest in the people who controlled the spreadsheets, the presentation decks and the meeting minutes. The perception established by these documents became the reality of office life. And everybody lost, except for those who knew how to jockey their way into Perception Control. Maybe that’s when I started losing interest in Office, wanting a more open and collaborative environment.

People. Processes. Technology.

We can standardise technology, and continue to do so. We can and should standardise processes, see what happens when we apply opensource thinking to service processes.

After all, it’s not the technology that will differentiate us. It’s not the process either, though there might be a short-term imbalance.

What differentiates us is the quality of the customer experience, which is about people. It’s about poetry and dance and music and art. It’s about Cluetrain. It’s about markets. And conversations.

No army of monkeys will ever be able to convince me otherwise. However much Shakespeare is perceived to have been produced.

Sometimes perception isn’t reality.

So I will take a leaf out of Michael Hugo’s book, and look for ways to expose processes and their associated metrics in order to adapt and improve them. Make them truly visible, rather than susceptible to gaming by Excel and PowerPoint.

Given enough eyeballs…..

David Gumbrell brings up an interesting point while commenting on a recent post. I had asked the question why people saw iTunes as DRM but not Word. And David said:

I have a suspicion that it’s because people buy iTunes with their own money and MS Office with their employer’s.

This is not about Microsoft per se, or even about Apple. It’s about lock-ins. Now there are many reasons why enterprises buy lock-in products and services:

• The only game in town: In this instance a vendor has a real or virtual monopoly, elects to protect it, and enterprises want what that vendor offers. Lock-in wins. Victims don’t feel too good about it, but at least they understand it.
• Your problem, your solution: Here the enterprise IT decision makers elect to outsource management of the problem, whatever that problem is, and are prepared to live with lock-in provided the problem is solved. Also understandable. And not that painful either, on the surface.
• Stockholm syndrome: In this case the lock-in provider has excelled, the customer is so delighted with the product or service that he pretty much asks for the lock-in, it becomes a security blanket for him. Sometimes that security blanket helps him forget what he’s done, but most of the time he’s happy as Larry. Understandable and apparently pleasurable. Sometimes linked to the fact that decision-maker skills are deeply embedded in the architecture of the lock-in merchant.
• Because it works, stupid: This is the enterprise norm. A selection is made with clear and present lock-in, with the defence that it’s the only solution that works soup-to-nuts. Pragmatism rules OK. Exacerbated by devolved decision-making, which allows people to concentrate on the benefits without worrying about the costs.

I am sure there are many other reasons that people buy lock-in products. Why am I so hung up about these products? I guess I just don’t like having to pay tons of money to try and free up my own information, to move it around, to manipulate it, change it, enrich it, whatever. Especially if the end result is that nothing works anyway.

That’s what DRM 1.0, otherwise called EAI, felt like. Maybe David Gumbrell’s right. If the decision makers don’t feel the pain of their decisions, they will continue to make strange decisions. Incentive misalignment.

I still live in hope, though. Even if my generation puts up with this nonsense, I cannot see Generation M doing it.

Dominic raised the issue of legacy documents while commenting on my previous post, on the disaggregation of the desktop.

Ric followed up with some comments relating to weaning enterprises off Microsoft Office.

This is something that has been bothering me for some years now, and the deja vu sensations weren’t enjoyable. And it got me thinking. Somewhere inside my head, there is no difference between my buying a song via the iTunes store and my creating a spreadsheet via Microsoft Excel.

With iTunes, everyone’s up in arms. Everyone understands that DRM of that sort is not a good thing. And people find ways of unlocking the music.

How come people don’t feel the same way about Office documents? Isn’t that a form of DRM? How come nobody objects? How come we don’t have clever people finding ways of freeing up such documents from their lock-ins? After all, there is a tangible measurable market for such migration tools. A huge market.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Doc Searls asks Can Apple clear the way for the Linux desktop? Along the way, he refers to two other articles that should be read as well, RoughDrafted’s Can Apple Take Microsoft in the Battle for the Desktop and Glyn Moody’s A Modest GNU/Linux Proposal for Michael Dell.

I don’t think it’s about Apple versus Microsoft versus Linux (choose your distro) any more, although Apple and Microsoft may prefer it was. Made life simpler for them, but not for us.

The A versus B versus C battles were still vendor battles. Battles about vendor platforms. Platforms defined by the particular breeds of software that were attracted to a given operating system, platforms that provided us with closed choices. Any colour you like as long as it’s theirs.

In the name of customer choice (Hobson must be turning in his grave hearing that barefaced lie) we had to choose. Vendors forced us into an A or B choice, leaving them happy and us not.

Now, the games are different. Especially since Apple went Intel, itself riding on the iPod effect. Now vendors can’t force us into an OR choice with mutual exclusivity. Now we have ANDs.

Why ANDs? Because the platform went and died in front of us. The platforms no longer seem to attract software on an exclusive basis. Much of what we see as software today gets released for Windows and OSX and Linux in parallel or near-parallel, so the operating system cannot define the platform any more. The bonding effect that was felt at platform level is now felt at platform-independent ecosystem level, making the community much more powerful. Mozilla is a community. Firefox is a community. Even StumbleUpon is a community. So is Netvibes. So for that matter is YouTube. Or Facebook. Or Skype. Or eBay. All communities.

The desktop was a platform. It’s disaggregated now, and the lock-ins of the past have shifted to freer ecosystems. The communities reflecting today’s realities aren’t like yesterday’s, which were non-overlapping mutually-exclusive walled-garden whatevers.

Snake oil doesn’t scale. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Today’s communities are open. They overlap, they nest, they merge and they split. They adapt, they mutate. They evolve. They are alive. Today it’s not about the desktop any more, it’s about the desktop and the laptop and the palmtop and the fingertip and the TV screen and the cinema and the phone and the PDA and the whatchamacallit.

Today’s ecosystems are open. Products and services migrate to where the action is, wherever there are conversations. The cost of migration is low, so low that you can see Say’s Law operate reasonably often. The dynamic of supply creating its own demand is something that gets quite exciting, when you couple it with democratised innovation and open feedback loops.

I think this is all good. When customer choice moves from OR to AND, when the customer has to sacrifice nothing to make this move, then good it is. [Well actually the customer has sacrificed a lot, it’s just been a different generation of customer doing the sacrificing…]

Which brings me back to Doc Searls. And VRM. Which is what will make lock-in disappear, and, not surprisingly, something that will really take off only when lock-in starts disappearing.

I’m going to enjoy watching that dam burst.

It’s been a long time coming.

I started this blog a year ago today. Seems a long time ago. Is that good? No idea. You tell me.

Last night, I re-read About This Blog and The Kernel For This Blog, just to see what I’d learnt as a result of doing this.

I’ve learnt a lot. Particularly about Identity, about Intellectual Property Management and about the Internet.

I’ve learnt a lot about the grey areas around these Three I’s, largely as a result of your comments and suggestions.

The Three I’s that define what we can do with Information.

Which is what this blog is about.

So thank you everyone.

Also thanks to Matt Groening for making sure my sense of humour has an overlap with that of my children.

Which brings me on to Blinky.

The Three-Eyed Fish.

I think we all need to be like Blinky, three-eyed in our approach to information. Making sure we do the right thing about Identity, Intellectual Property and the Internet.