A sideways look at IT and IS strategy and VRM

I’ve been reading quite a bit of Umair Haque this past year. He makes me think. Take his latest post, Saving Strategy from the Strategists. You don’t have to agree with everything he says, but the following excerpt shows where his head’s at:

Perhaps the meaning of competitive advantage, when all the games have been played and the gears of the economic machine have finally stopped moving, is this: privatize benefits and socialize costs.

That might have been sustainable in a disconnected, asset-heavy industrial economy. But it cannot hold in a hyperconnected edgeconomy. When all of us can trade ten billion times a day, if everyone’s simply trying to claim benefits from everyone else, while shifting costs and risks to everyone else, the result is economic implosion.

In an edgeconomy, chasing competitive advantage is like playing a game of economic musical chairs – one where you leave a grenade on your chair every time the music starts up again. Sooner or later, everyone gets blown up.

The problem is simple. As we’re finding out the hard way – yesterday’s approaches to strategy simply cannot power the economies or businesses of the 21st century.

So the question is: how do we save strategy?

Umair then goes on to make the following points while looking at how market participants, acting “strategically” can cause serious implosion:

  • Strategy isn’t arbitrage
  • Strategy isn’t dealmaking
  • Strategy isn’t an arms race
  • Strategy is about long-term “best interests” of all stakeholders

Now that’s a ridiculously short summary because I would prefer you to read the real thing rather than any attempt at summary from me.

But in the meantime. I started mulling over what would happen if I transplanted what he was saying to a different context, IS and IT strategy. And , in trying to paraphrase while transplanting, this is what I came up with:

1. IS/IT strategy isn’t arbitrage: Don’t build applications that do nothing but “capture value” from other existing applications in your environment. Those applications are embedded within existing people and processes. Organisational immune systems will therefore kick in and push back against the value migration. Instead, build applications that create demonstrable new value; “old value” will migrate of its own accord as adoption takes place.

2. IS/IT strategy isn’t dealmaking: We’ve spent decades insisting on trying to build applications that seek to share costs between business units. Like bad deals, what tends to happen is that the “shared” piece grows bigger and bigger, until it overbalances and crashes down under its own weight and volition. As Umair says, we have to concentrate on how our resources and competencies will fit together tomorrow, not just how to share costs today. We have to move the debate from “business unit” views to those of competencies and capabilities.

3. IS/IT strategy isn’t an arms race: We have to make architectural choices that lead to sustainable differences, not just cost leadership in a me-too environment. One could argue that the reason why we keep having dominant players in the IS/IT vendor world is because we insist on this me-too-ness. Nobody got fired for buying IBM. Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft. Nobody got fired for buying Google. Whatever. Nobody got fired full stop.

Which leads me on to VRM.

Too often enterprises walk down the “arms race” aisle, consummating Stockholm-syndrome marriages. That’s not sustainable any more, at the very least because we keep creating systemic risks and monoculture weaknesses across entire market sectors as a result.

If we want to create sustainable differences within a market sector, we’re going to need to work with other market participants, work more closely with other market participants. Sometimes, when I look at what tends to happen, the only analogy that comes to mind is this: Market participants are like people living in the same neighbourhood. The lock-in vendors of old are like burglars in the neighbourhood. And what we’ve been doing is, rather than creating neighbourhood watch schemes, we’ve been trying to negotiate individually and bilaterally with the burglars. With predictable results.

I’m sad not to be able to go to the VRM workshops taking place right now. If you want to participate vicariously, like I am, check out vrm08 at twitter. Better still, start with this article by Doc and this one by Adriana.

Macarthur restaurants and gramigna alla salsiccia

I spent six days in Bologna looking for the best ragu in town. So many restaurants, so little time. It was an unscientific process. Read books, talk to people, decide where to go, order the dish, taste it, savour it, savour it some more, savour it until dish is empty, repeat cycle.

I never really expected a winner.

But there was one. Hands down. Gramigna alla salsiccia by the inimitable Gabriel at

Trattoria Meloncello, via Saragossa 240/a, Bologna 40135

This review gives you a feel for the place.

This photograph, by Alessandro Guerani, gives you a feel for what gramigna alla salsiccia looks like. [Incidentally, do visit his flickr pages and food blog. They’re worth it.]

Meloncello is a Macarthur restaurant. I’ll be back.

The New Blue?

No more Blue Screens of Death. Instead, we have these:

Contributions to the collection welcome. Just e-mail me at [email protected].

Musing lazily about library science and the web

I’ve been digging around the works of S.R. Ranganathan for some time now, triggered by reading David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous just over a year ago (as reported here).

Regular readers may remember Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science:

  1. Books are for use.
  2. Every reader his or her book.
  3. Every book its reader.
  4. Save the time of the reader.
  5. The Library is a growing organism.

Well, regular readers may have remembered them, but I didn’t. For some strange reason my mind blanked out on the first one, I could only remember four. So I did what anyone would do, and looked up Wikipedia. Found what I wanted. Loitered languorously in the area without intent. And came across this, by Alireza Noruzi:

Application of Ranganathan’s Laws to the Web: “The Five Laws of The Web”

  1. Web resources are for use.
  2. Every user his or her web resource.
  3. Every web resource its user.
  4. Save the time of the user.
  5. The Web is a growing organism.

Read the rest of Alireza’s paper, as he explains why he thinks the way he does. It’s worth it. More later.

Is being “connected” becoming a “sense”?

Over the years I’ve started to think harder about being “connected” by thinking harder about what it means not to be “connected”. By this I do not mean the traditional debate about the digital haves versus the digital have-nots, a discussion that soon goes down rabbitholes of economics-meets-education. By this I do not mean the traditional debate about net neutrality and cheap bits and expensive bits and who will pay, that’s another discussion that soon goes down the same rabbitholes, but with a twist of politics as well.

I mean something else altogether.

Today, I was sitting quietly in an exhibit that looked like a theatre in the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (known locally as MAMbo), waiting to see what happened next. I was the only person in this theatre-within-a-museum at the time. And what happened next was this. Two people, a man and a woman, started talking about their experiences of being blind. They talked about the difference between being blind from birth and becoming blind after having normal sight for a while. They talked about the role that memory played in that second instance, the memory of sight. How it became a frame of reference for many things later. How that memory decayed. How it played tricks.

And something about the way they spoke made me think of how kids today perceive being connected, particularly in the West, but increasingly in India and China as well.

You may gather from this that I think of being connected as an important thing. You’d be right. That’s why I wrote The Kernel For This Blog and About This Blog the way I did.

You see, I think connectivity, particularly ubiquitous always-on mobile connectivity, can make a real difference in terms of health, education and welfare, and that it can make a difference today. The days of “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers” and “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” are long gone. Today the BRICS have bricks in their hands, the bricks are getting smaller and they’re always on.

Too often, when people try and make this point, the objections are common and predictable. “You don’t get it, these people need food first. They’re starving.”. And so the debate about connectivity gets waylaid. Ironically, this is often done by people who then pump up the volume about the importance of biofuels in solving the energy crisis…. the same biofuels that then drive grain prices up and make staple food harder to afford for many people…..but that’s another debate.

All I was thinking was this. Is connectivity becoming like sight and hearing and speech and mobility? And if so what does that mean for the endless debates we appear to be having about what the internet and the web are?

[An aside. If I take this analogy in reverse, I land up in strange places. Told you I was confused. Like a year ago I spotted David Beckham at the Diana concert. With my bare eyes. Was I somehow trammelling over his image rights as a result? Should my eyes be cut out in order to feed the God of DRM? That’s the way a lot of DRM logic appears to me.]