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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

A funny thing happened on the way to the future — it ended up looking a lot like the present, only more so.

Information technology is trend city. Those of us who write about it are always looking for the Next Big Thing. The problem is, there are far too few NBTs to fill the space we need to fill every week (about 800 words in the case of Keep the Joint Running, including ManagementSpeak).

Since I’ve been in the field, the list of NBTs that turned out to actually be big is pretty short:

  1. Personal computers and everything that runs on and attaches to them.
  2. Database management systems.
  3. Graphical user interfaces.
  4. Local Area Networks.
  5. The Internet, World Wide Web, and electronic mail.
  6. Object-oriented analysis and programming and services-oriented analysis and programming.
  7. Visual programming.
  8. Open source.
  9. Virtualization.
  10. Smartphones.

How about tablets, the cloud, big data, and social media? Maybe.

Tablets are entering the workplace but aren’t (yet) transforming it, except for a few specialty areas. Cloud computing? It’s almost entirely the same old stuff only on someone else’s servers — there’s little or nothing in the cloud that’s new and interesting.

Big data? Few organizations even have medium-sized data; fewer yet have a culture that supports the sort of data-driven decision-making that warrants big investments in data warehouses and analytics (which is why, other than “visual programming” which includes report-writers and similar technology, these don’t make the list).

How about social media? Socially, very interesting. For businesses? LinkedIn matters for recruiting. Twitter has mostly replaced the press release. But most companies that have Facebook pages more or less reproduce their corporate website there — they haven’t cracked the value code, and it isn’t at all certain there’s a value code to be cracked.

All four are, that is, potential NBTs with varying degrees of promise.

So we have ten proven Next Big Things, with roughly four years between appearances. Miss the next one and you’ve blown it. Spend too much time chasing NBTs, though, and you’ll miss something even more important — day-to-day business.

Look, Apple is known for its breakthrough innovations. Justifiably so. And yet, how many successful ones have there been since the second coming of Jobs? The iPod, iTunes Store, iPhone, iPad, and maybe the App Store.

Five at most. Everything else is incremental improvement — day-to-day business that leverages these five breakthroughs.

Follow Apple’s lead. Keep your eye out for breakthrough opportunities (which are also deadly threats if one of your competitors takes advantage of them well ahead of you) because all it takes is one to give your company an enormous advantage in the marketplace.

But spend most of your time on the fundamentals, which are:

  • Support for personal technologies: Keeping employees operational with their PCs, smartphones, and occasional tablets, and helping them become more sophisticated in their use.
  • COTS support: In most shops, IT’s bread and butter is installing, configuring, integrating, and extending commercial, off-the-shelf software.
  • Application development: While most IT departments do a lot less of this than they do working with COTS packages, they still do quite a bit of it, and yet, for some reason, no matter how many times we analyze the business, design a database, and create screens to add, delete and change records, the next time we do it, it’s still hard.
  • Project management: Whenever you’re trying to make tomorrow different from yesterday, project management is the skill you need. Without good project managers … and the project management culture they need to be successful … your company will be trapped in its current configuration, unable to adapt to anything.
  • Software quality assurance and change control: Yes, in principle, SQA is embedded in COTS support and application development. In practice, it’s a separate, independent trade within IT, with more affinity for change control than anything else. SQA and change control are how you make sure COTS and in-house-developed application changes don’t mess up …
  • Operations: The Rodney Dangerfield of information technology, operations gets no respect because the only time anyone even knows it’s there is when something goes wrong. Otherwise it’s invisible, and keeping it invisible is the single most important responsibility CIOs have. Not the most strategic, but definitely the most important, because in this day and age, when systems are down, the business is down.

These are the basics — the blocking and tackling the business needs from you, day in and day out.

Which is why I call this blog Keep the Joint Running.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Debates are pointless.

We’ve been told, you and I, that debating is the best way to understand an issue, because you get to hear both sides in an informed sort of way.

Except … at the end of a formal debate, what do the judges do (or, at the end of a presidential or vice-presidential debate, pundits (or polls) do?

They decide who won. Not which position was right. Quite the opposite — the entire premise of the debate format is that both positions are always equally right. All debates do is determine who is the better arguer. It’s intellectual relativism at its finest.

At the end of the presidential and vice-presidential debates, what have we learned? Nothing more about the issues or which of the two debaters would be better in office, unless the office they’re running for is Debater In Chief.

Welcome to my once-every-four years pre-election diatribe, built on the thin pretext that this relates to the business challenge of how you decide who to hire and retain. As with past diatribes I won’t suggest who you should vote for, just how each of us might go about deciding who to vote for.

Thought #1: Be happy. Yes, I think one of the two presidential tickets would be better for this country than the other. But. Whichever ticket is elected, we’ll end up with very smart, very qualified individuals as both president and vice president.

Like him or not, Barack Obama is very smart, and has demonstrated that he reviews evidence and listens to smart, well-informed individuals before making his decisions.

And, like him or not, Mitt Romney has demonstrated throughout his career that whatever else he might be, he’s also a very smart guy who knows how to listen, learn, and get things done.

Also, unlike many past elections, where one or both of the vice-presidential candidates were bad jokes, Joe Biden, for all his gaffes, is intensely knowledgeable, especially about foreign policy; while Paul Ryan is better known for his wonkiness than his charisma.

We have four highly qualified candidates. We should always be so lucky.

Thought #2: From a policy perspective, the election matters little. Whoever is elected, so long as either party holds more than 40% of the seats in the Senate it can block just about everything related to implementing presidential policy. Never mind which party started it. No matter who is elected president, and whichever party has a majority in the House and Senate, we can expect this dynamic to continue.

The only cure I see for this is instant run-off (aka Ranked Choice Voting). Here’s why: Instant run-off allows citizens to vote for the candidate they think is best qualified rather than the major-party candidate they think is best qualified.

In case this point isn’t clear: Voting for the third-party candidate you like best counts as a half vote against whichever major party candidate you’d prefer if your preferred third-party candidate loses.

So instant run-off is what’s needed for third-party candidates to get elected. We’d only need a few of them in the House and Senate for the third party to be the tie-breaker for every vote (and cloture vote). A viable third party might actually break the gridlock.

And no, gridlock isn’t desirable. Change is constant. We need to adapt, our government just as much as businesses and ourselves. Gridlock prevents that.

Thought #3: This time, perhaps party affiliation should be a deciding factor. I’ve never taken this position in the past. I hope I never take it in the future. But given the gridlock issue, and given that the two major parties have behaved very differently in the recent past … not that one or the other is better or worse, but that they have very different flaws … it might make sense to evaluate the candidates based on which of the two parties they’ve decided to lead and be constrained by, and why you think they made that choice.

That, in fact, is how I made my decision this time. I find one of the two parties to be far more consistently detestable than the other, far more than I feel strongly about either presidential candidate. And as the winner’s party, by directing the executive branch, gets much more power, that in itself is a major issue this year.

Thought #4: Vote. Remember, please, that as citizens we aren’t government’s customers, nor are we disinterested spectators. We’re our government’s owners, and as owners we’re responsible for it. Vote.

Enough. Thanks for indulging me. Next week it’s back to business.

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