Category: Four pillars

The kernel for this post was a comment made by Jeff Nolan (Hi Jeff!) on apparent complexity biases in enterprise software selection/development, and a follow-up by Jeff Weinberger, both relating to one of my recent posts. And before I commented further, I felt it was appropriate to link back to an earlier post of mine that new readers may not have seen.

It is within that context that I write. Sure we have complexity bias in enterprises, but it’s worse than that. We also have purveyors of complexity bias on the outside.
As the two Jeffs say, the enterprise immune system kicks in whenever something looks simple and easy to implement; it is a variant of “real projects have a zillion people working on them, cost the earth and are at least twice as long as Pinocchio’s nose”. That’s the easy bit.

The harder bit is the role played by unscrupulous consultants and vendors. I like markets. Markets have buyers and sellers and intermediaries. For seller read vendor, for intermediary read consultant. So the model’s OK in principle. What goes wrong?

Vendor lock-in is something most people understand. The subtlety, something I didn’t quite understand, was the passion with which in-house IT department staff back the vendor view, and create polarised debates about anything and everything. The classic Microsoft/Open Source debates exemplify this. Even terms like Microsoftie and Penguinista show the polarisation. It’s almost as if people define and sustain their identity within such polarisation. Once that happens the complexity issue is almost a guaranteed byproduct, as people plot ways to make implementing their bete noire as humanly difficult as possible. [And as you know, they don’t have to try very hard, such hybrid worlds are easy to mess up.]

Similarly, the classic “consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time, and keeps the watch as payment” is pretty well understood. There are consultants who prove this rule by being exceptions to the rule, but they are few and far between. I tend to think of them as belonging to one of three camps:

• Those who know the answer
• Those who know how to get to the answer
• Those who know how to put off the answer

The Know-the-Answer guys give you time-to-market and TCO savings. They know where you need to go, they know how to get you there, they’ve got the intellectual firepower as well as the experience. This type is rare, and in my book the only consultants always worth having.
The Get-to-the-Answer guys give you TCO stabilisation. You can rely on them to get you there, they are kings of process. MethodOne meets the 21st century. They have been militarised, do things by the book, always get you there, but it takes time and is like watching paint dry. You need them sometimes, as extensions to your labour force, when you have a skill or workload mismatch, or when you are prepared to fully hedge your project risk (and most of the reward). This type is less rare, and legitimises the existence of consultants.
The Put-off-the-Answer guys are the ones to watch for. Teflon types with the political nous to make sure nothing sticks, their projects never end, the “collateral damage” to in-house staff can be very high, nothing ever gets delivered, nothing ever gets stopped either. Unfortunately this type is too common. Sad but true.
And their route to doing this is classic smoke-and-mirrors. “This is complex, you won’t understand it” followed up by the careful introduction and seeding of as much low-level complexity as possible. Their goal is different. Perennial billing. Project names can change, deliverables change, timelines change. One thing stays constant: nothing of value gets delivered.

That’s why we (with the consultants’ help) spent so much time in the nineties mangling “off-the-shelf” products, customising them beyond redemption, ensuring that they reflected yesterday’s business model as faithfully as possible, then letting them come in on their white chargers (which you paid for anyway) to do the same thing with today’s business model…. that’s why implementation costs for standard enterprise software tended to be nine times the licence costs.

Once we realise the root causes of complexity bias, we can do something about it.

Mitch Ratcliffe pointed me at this letter, posted via Doc Searls, which gave unusual meanings to the word “unlimited”.

And it reminded me of an experience I had, nearly two decades ago, travelling on British Rail as it then was.

I was looking forward to a game of golf with some colleagues of mine from Data General. We were scheduled to tee off at 8am somewhere near Dorking, I think it was Gatton Manor at Ockley. I didn’t drive (I still don’t, never have done) and so we agreed that I would take a train from Windsor (where I still live) to Camberley. The others would pick me up from the railway station there, and we would drive off to Ockley.

All well and good.

Now in those days, the fare system on UK rail networks was unusual to say the least. It felt like there was an average of a dozen different fares for every journey, based on a variety of factors ranging from day through time of day through direction of travel and age and round-trip and advance booking and a slew of other factors.

[Remind you of anything?]

It was 530am when I marched up to the ticket counter at Windsor, stated my requirement politely, and was delighted to find out that I could have a “cheap day return” to Camberley. Which I bought, and was given two stubs of paper as a result.

The physical hub-and-spoke nature of rail networks in the south-east of England are laid out traditionally. That is to say all routes are based on going towards London or coming from there. So if, like me, you had the effrontery to want to travel north-south while living west of London, you had to go towards London, change, then come out again.

[Remind you of anything?]

So I resigned myself to the convoluted journey, got on the train, switched at Staines to head in the opposite direction, and was dreaming of hitting small white spheres great distances while nodding off. As one does.

Now all this was in the days before ubiquitous mobile phones. As we approached Bagshot, the stop before Camberley, I saw my colleagues waving madly from the station car park; they had decided to intercept me one stop earlier. So I got off, clubs and all.

The ticket inspector had other views. I couldn’t get off there. Apparently, despite having paid to go to the next station on the line (and to return from there later) I was not allowed to get off at Bagshot. Because Bagshot did not qualify for a Cheap Day Return from Windsor at that time of day. And Camberley did.

[Remind you of anything?]

I did what you would expect. Gave him my card, told him “So sue me and find this story in the Sun tomorrow”, clambered past him and went to meet my friends. I could not believe the guy. How could someone possibly tell me that I did not have the right to terminate my journey one stop short of where I’d paid to be, a stop that the train stopped at anyway? Insanity.
Not much happened later. No fines, no appearance in court, no nothing. But there was a letter. A letter that reminded me of the Laws and Bye-Laws of travelling on British Rail. Which, when summarised, stated:

• They didn’t promise that trains would be on time.
• They didn’t promise you would get a seat.
• They didn’t even promise that there would be a train at all.
• And, to top it all, the two stubs of cardboard they gave you, your “tickets”, were actually their property as well. To be returned on demand.

Remind you of anything?

So Mitch, that’s what I think of the letter. Doomed to failure. British Rail had to morph and change, but they too have a long way to go.

David N Wallace makes a very important point. It is much more than a coda to Doc’s piece and my follow-up post, and deserves its own space, not just on his blog, but on mine as well. So I reproduce it here:

Now I know about the edge, I live there. On the edge, the fringe of society. Maybe not as near as some, maybe further out than others. As a general statement, most people living with disability live there, as do other marginalised groups of individuals.

Marginalisation occurs when something on the edge is unconnected.

This can be seen in the area of housing and disability. Institutions versus community living. It is simply human decentralisation. Where rather than data moved out and siloed, people are. People living in the community without the freedom of connection to the ‘network’ of other human beings living around them become cut off, isolated – marginalised. What should be a clear path is blocked by barriers.

Institutionalisation is not a state of place, but a state of disconnection.

On the fringe you need to be adaptable. My whole life is one of intense adaption – a life-kludge.

That’s essentially why Lifekludger exists, to remove barriers to connection – to connect around the idea that technology is a great way to get people living with disability, even though they may be living on the edge, that they might be connected and not marginalised.

Thanks for opening my eyes, David.

For me at least, this opens up a completely different perspective and frame of reference.

Thanks to Pete Shaw who pointed me at this WSJ article while commenting on one of my recent posts on iTunes. It’s headlined Free, Legal and Ignored.

Just shows what happens when people think Free means Gratis and plan accordingly. There are probably people in Generation M who don’t know who Richard Stallman is.

But they do know what Free as in Freedom is. In a strange kind of way, they don’t even mind lock-ins. Provided it’s their choice. What they have been used to is lock-ins by stealth, and this they refuse point-blank. So they will buy iTunes for their iPod, and refuse tracks that won’t play on iPods. Because that’s the way they see it. This track won’t play on iPod. I have an iPod. I like my iPod. What good is that track to me?

As stated previously, I still hope and wish that Apple will do the right thing with FairPlay. But they seem to understand Generation M better than the competition, and will probably time the move right.

Today’s Economist carries comment and analysis of the iTunes business model following the recent attempts by France to prise open iTunes. You can find the entire article here, thankfully weedless i.e. not DRMed to submission.

I’ve never bought anything from the iTunes store; my children have, by the clickload. I am different from them; I’d already invested considerable sums in acquiring more than a thousand CDs, and what iTunes gave me was a simple, convenient way of unlocking the physical assets I’d already paid for and making them available for mobile use.

And an excuse to buy another Mac (or three) and pretty much every iPod ever released. As if I needed an excuse.
So, for people like me, ITunes represents something quite different. It represents freeing up music I already had. It represents a powerful way of managing the music I already had, in terms of finding tracks, creating playlists, transferring them to mobile devices, listening to the music, sharing it all with my kids.

Think of it as Four Pillars all at once. In ITunes I have syndication, I can publish the music to devices and people around my household. In ITunes I have search, for tracks, artists, albums, whatever, however. In ITunes I have fulfilment, in terms of the capacity to acquire the music and videos. And via iTunes ecosystem pieces like last.fm, I can sustain conversation about all of this. Soon I expect to see presence and IM and videochat more seamlessly integrated into the iTunes experience, either directly by Apple or via last.fm and pandora and members of that ilk. Soon I expect to see more seamless mashing capabilities as well.

And for the present, I’m prepared to pay the price of lock-in, where I can only listen to these tracks via an iPod. Yes it is a jail, but at least it’s an elegant one.

And I have the belief, possibly benighted, that Apple will do the right thing on FairPlay. Within the next two years. And guess what? I’ll probably go buy another iPod to celebrate. It’s about freedom to choose; you don’t have to exercise the freedom, you just need to have it. And if the product is good enough, you will keep buying it.

The Economist article asserts that the music store is a “loss leader” that serves only to boost sales of the iPod. I would make one more assertion. That there is a high correlation between tracks sold via iTunes and physical CD sales. Maybe the music industry needs to understand this as well, that, for certain market segments, iTunes extends and augments hard CD sales rather than substitute and depress such sales.

A related topic. I read what Malc had to say today, about the framing problem with taking Apple head-on in this space. He’s absolutely right. His stance reminded me of this article on The Transition Away from Microsoftness, from the Linux Journal.

Nobody in his right mind will try and compete with Microsoft Office head-on, it has a dominant position in the market, its users swear by it the same way drug users swear by their drugs, they don’t care about the lock-in, etc etc. What Nicholas Petreley has to say makes complete sense. If the opensource world wants to take Microsoft Office on, it will not be by making a cheaper/faster/better Office, but by providing something completely different. Something so different that people will buy it for new reasons, and land up reducing their commitment to Office almost as a byproduct.

I see the syndication/search/fulfilment/conversation tools doing just that. Today. Office is more likely to die by a million small cuts than by a NetScape/Internet Explorer war.

If nobody in his right mind will take on Microsoft Office, it begs the question why people think iTunes can be taken on that way.

Not within their frame of reference. Not around their anchor-points. Not on their battlegrounds and playing by their rules. iTunes cannot be beaten by jTunes or MTunes, that is madness. Breaking wind in the face of rolling thunder.
Spot on, Malc. Hope you enjoy the Linux Journal analogy.