All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

I keep reading about the dangers of big tech. As is so often the case when I read about the dangers of some social hazard or other, I get stuck on the dangers of questionable lexicography.

Like, for example, the poorly defined “big tech.”

The view from here is that, a tech company is a company that makes its money by selling technology. My logic: If a company simply makes its living using technology internally, every company of any size in the world would be classified as a tech company.

So here’s a list of what are popularly thought of as tech companies:

1. Amazon: A chunk of Amazon is, unquestioningly, a tech company. Maybe 5% of it. That’s AWS’s contribution to its revenue. From a where-does-its-money-come-from perspective, though, Amazon is more retailer, third-party-logistics provider, publisher, and ad agency than it is a tech company.

2. Apple: According to some metrics Apple is the world’s biggest of the big. Certainly, I won’t quibble that it’s pretty sizeable.

My question is whether it’s a tech company. No, let me take that back, because it shoves me into the trap I’m trying to avoid. Apple is, by revenue, about 80% tech company. The rest of it is, more or less, in the entertainment business.

Also, interestingly enough from internal IT’s perspective, Apple just isn’t that important. As a technology company, Apple mostly sells to consumers, which means for IT it matters as a platform for consumer-facing mobile apps and for BYOD use. And for consumer-facing mobile apps, much of its platform-ness is directed at app curation, which isn’t really a tech function at all.

3. Alphabet: This, Google’s parent company, is the poster child for bad categorization. Yes, it’s a cloud technology provider. That generates maybe a tenth of its total revenues. It’s mostly a media company that makes its money selling access to and information about its users to advertisers.

4. Microsoft: Yep. It’s a tech company.

5. Samsung: Okay, I’ll buy classifying Samsung as a tech company. Not a U.S.-based tech company, which complicates the public-policy we-have-to-reign-in-big-tech debate, but a tech company nonetheless.

Next?

6. Meta Platforms: This, the home of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, might look like a tech company, but it isn’t. It makes its living selling access to and information about users of these platforms to advertisers. That makes it a media company, just like your average daily newspaper, cable channel, and Google.

7. Cisco: Another tech company. It makes its money selling its tech. No quibbles or questions about it.

8. Oracle: Like Microsoft and Cisco it makes its money selling its technology to companies that need it.

9. Broadcom: Another tech provider.

10. SAP: And one more.

That’s enough, I think. What to me is most interesting about this breakdown, quick and dirty as it is, is that whenever you read about the need to “reign in big tech” (which discussions often also include other no-they-aren’t-tech-companies like Twitter and Uber), few of the companies that need reigning in are tech companies. For those that are supposed to need reigning in, the need is based on the non-tech-company parts of their business and how they do business.

No actual tech companies seem to need reigning in.

Bob’s last word: When the subject is persuasion, the golden rule is to sell the problem, not the solution. Consider the above an object lesson: The solution we’re being sold is “reign in big tech.” The problem we’re being sold that this is supposed to solve

has little or nothing to do with companies that actually are in the technology business.

Which leads to a piece of actual professional advice, namely, whenever you’re asked to evaluate a business proposal of any kind, begin your analysis by making sure the proposal clearly states the problem (or opportunity) it purports to solve.

If it starts with a solution, toss it.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

You say you want to be a CIO, but the CIO you report to isn’t going anywhere?

You say you’re tired of big-corporation politics, but being good at big corporation politics is the most important skill you have?

You say the only difference between you and God is that when God created the world, he/she/it/they didn’t have a pre-existing universe to have to integrate Earth into?

Is that what’s troubling you, Bunky?

If so, you might consider moving from where you are to become the IT department of an ultra-small business.

Not IT’s head. The IT department – just you.

Being IT for a small organization can be rewarding. Not financially, but if you’re looking for appreciation of what IT does, small is a better bet than big.

But it isn’t an unmixed blessing – there are some gotchas for you to look out for should you become small-business IT. Some examples:

Politics: Most small organizations are either family businesses or extensions of their CEO – their personality, biases, areas of expertise, and blind spots.

Or both.

If it’s a family business, politics and family politics are the same. Your influence would be limited both genetically and by the basic good sense that tells most of us to stay out of another family’s business.

If it’s a CEO-centric organization, persuasion depends entirely on the CEO’s personality. Evidence and logic might work. Or, it might be even less effective than when trying to persuade a big-company governance committee.

Often, that is, IT governance means sucking up to the CEO.

This might or might not be an improvement.

The Cloud: Large enterprise IT has a whole department to keep IT’s platforms and infrastructure running. As one-person IT it’s just you. If you don’t move everything you can to the cloud, weekends and vacations will be vicarious.

But beware: In most situations, moving IT stuff to the cloud will call for a bigger IT budget, reducing your popularity – see “Politics,” above. Not to mention the increased vulnerability to network outages that comes with the cloud territory.

Excel-based application integration: When business users need to combine data from multiple applications, big-company IT creates custom views that combine them.

One-person IT can provide Excel extracts from each of the applications, and help users figure out how to create unified views from those extracts.

Not to mention what they can accomplish if they master mail merge.

In big companies, helping end-users achieve IT proficiency is a good investment. When you’re the entire company’s IT, it’s essential.

Outsourcing: Even very large organizations have been known to outsource part or all of the IT function. Whether it’s a good idea or not, it can work.

In a small business, outsourcing IT is just another way to increase IT staffing, something the CEO isn’t likely to want. Don’t even try suggesting it.

Instead, build what we genarians call a Rolodex – of contractors competent to fix something if it breaks. That’s contractors, not outsourcers. The difference? You only pay contractors when you need them.

What shouldn’t be a difference is that, outsourcer or contractor, you must pay them to familiarize themselves with whatever it is they should be ready to support.

Mobility: In a big business, career-minded employees want promotions. In the absence of promotions they’ll want lateral transfers that put them in a better position to receive a future promotion.

A small-business one-person IT organization, in contrast, has nowhere to be promoted to. You can put yourself in a position to move laterally to a position in business management should another manager leave, but that doesn’t happen all that often.

Depending on how long you want your work week to be, you can take on non-IT responsibilities along with your one-person-IT-department role.

The good mobility news about the bad news is that if the company you support does well, it will grow. As it does, business growth can put you in a position to hire a few additional IT staff.

Documentation: No, it isn’t any fun, but even beyond helping your successor survive you can count on forgetting how you did something and why. So every time you do anything, document it. You’ll thank yourself when the future shows up and you have to fiddle with stuff you did a few years back and don’t remember any of it.

Bob’s last word: Being a one-person IT department can be a lot of fun, assuming you find IT a lot of fun … and if you don’t, why on earth aren’t you finding something you like better to do?

And in case you’re wondering, yes, once, in my notorious past, one-quarter of my job was being one-person IT.

The best part.

Now on CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “7 ways CIOs get themselves fired.” What it’s about: Keeping your job as CIO is tough, even when you do everything right. Here are seven ways unwary CIOs make their jobs even riskier.

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