All Posts in Policies and Procedures

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Somewhere in the business you support is a manager who needs to do things more effectively. The alternatives:

  • Shovel a request into the IT request queue.
  • Ask Clyde, who’s “good with PCs” to do something magical with Excel.
  • Bring in a local IT services company to build a system that helps do things more effectively.
  • Find some inexpensive off-the-shelf software that will help do things more effectively, then badger IT into allowing its installation.
  • Contract with a SaaS vendor whose software will help do things more effectively and don’t tell IT anything about it.
  • Sigh a great sigh and give up on making things happen more effectively.

The first bullet is The Right Way To Do Things.

The remaining bullets are all some form of end-user computing (EUC) or the dreaded shadow IT.

Except for the last bullet, that is. The Great Sigh is a key reason entrepreneurships are able to beat, or at least hold their own against their giant competitors.

Let’s add a dimension to this mess exciting array of alternatives: The backbone and hub of your enterprise technical architecture is one of the major commercial ERP suites. What the manager needs would, most logically, be implemented as a customization to one of the ERP suite’s modules.

Nope. Can’t have that. So option #1 — the right way to do things — is off the table, leaving only end-user computing (EUC), Shadow IT, or sighing deep sighs on the table for our sadly un-mythical manager to choose from.

Compared to the rest of the population, KJR’s readers are, disproportionately, metrics nerds, so let’s add a nerdy metrical dimension as well.

The metrics your average business manager cares about in this situation are, in descending order of importance:
1. Cycle time: Start the stopwatch the moment the manager first develops a reasonably clear idea of what’s needed. Stop it when the software is in production and the manager’s employees are doing things the new way. More than anything else, managers want this cycle time to be short.
2. Quality: No, not being bug free, although that’s nice too. Quality isn’t just the absence of defects. It’s also adherence to specifications – whether the software does what the manager needs it to do. By this definition, the plain-vanilla version of the ERP suite’s module is a low-quality solution. It doesn’t do what the manager needs it to do, because if it did, the manager wouldn’t be submitting the request. Q.E.D.
3. Fixed cost: This is the initial spend – how much the manager will have to pay for the solution. This matters because above a certain amount the software becomes a capital acquisition, which means the manager would have to go through the company’s CapEx approval process … a governance process that makes the IT request queue seem downright friendly and inviting in comparison.
IT’s priorities, presumably reflected in your company’s IT request governance, are quite different, usually along the lines of:

1. Financial Value: Amortize the fixed project costs over some reasonable number of useful years of software service. Add the expected cost of ongoing maintenance. Subtract from the business benefits that will come from doing things the new way. Divide by total cost to turn the result into a percentage. (Yes, yes, multiply by 100. Don’t be pedantic. Oh, I forgot — you’re a metrics nerd too. Okay.)

If the result is a positive number, rank it against all the other requests that have to compete for IT’s time and attention.

2. Political Value: Don’t be shocked. Also, don’t be outraged. The Financial Value undervalues a lot of what are, in polite company, called “intangible benefits.” (In less polite company they’re called “warm fuzzies”; also, “Don’t be ridiculous!”)

As minor matters like customer satisfaction usually fall into the intangibles bucket, there’s often value in political value — for someone standing up for what matters most, even if it’s hard to put a number to it.

3. Strategic Value: Some projects are part of the strategic plan — they advance the strategy. Others aren’t part of the plan but they are consistent with strategic intent. There are no others — any manager worth his or her salt knows how to write the obligatory two-paragraph account of how their pet project fits into the company strategy.

Compare the two sets of priorities and it should be clear why, for most managers, and especially for smaller efforts, EUC and shadow IT are the preferred ways to go.

Doing things the so-called right way might make a manager a good corporate citizen.

But EUC and shadow IT are what get the annual bonus.

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|In: Cloud|Last Updated:

In the beginning there was dBase II.

Yes, II. There was no dBase I, and shortly after dBaseIV there was 0, as superior products eclipsed this, the original end-user app dev tool.

Fast forward thirty years to the present and it appears the entire EUC (end-user computing) category is failing. This makes no sense.

No, it isn’t extinct yet. There is, for example, the venerable Microsoft Access, although anyone who thinks Microsoft is giving it much attention isn’t paying much attention. If Microsoft had any interest in the product, it long ago would have become a highly publicized Azure development environment.

At least it’s economical: $110 buys you a license.

There’s QuickBase. I know little about the product other than that from a features and functionality perspective it looks promising. And it’s cloud-based. But it costs a user-unfriendly $180 per client per year.

Also, an alarm bell: Intuit recently sold QuickBase off to a private equity firm. For the most part private equity firms buy companies, starve the P&L of investments, and flip the company before revenues crash.

Draw your own conclusions.

Apple’s FileMaker Pro is reportedly a strong product, as it should be for $330 per user license. There’s also a cloud version, priced at, as one reseller, amusingly puts it, “from $1.63/day.” Let’s see … carry the 1 … that’s $595 per year, per user. I thought the cloud was supposed to be cheap.

These are three of the more prominent EUC products. Like I say, this makes no sense, given what we’re hearing from the trend-meisters: (1) Everything is moving to the cloud; and (2) IT is going the way of the dodo: Infrastructure is leaving the data center in favor of the cloud, while app dev is leaving the IT organization to become shadow IT, embedded in the business and out of control.

If shadow IT in the cloud is supposed to be a Next Big Thing, why aren’t the big cloud players — in particular Microsoft, Amazon, and Google — fielding products to cash in on the trend?

What’s particularly strange about this situation is that we are, for the first time, in a position to field application development environments that truly could make business managers independent of IT — that could take care of just about every detail of application design.

It’s now technologically possible to create:

  • Wizards that provide a dialog that results in a normalized data design (I’m old-fashioned) — one that makes use of IT’s APIs to provide meaningful integration and avoid the creation of duplicate data fields.
  • Automated form generation for PCs, tablet, and smartphones that flow naturally from the data design.
  • Visual workflow design tools, so systems can let users know there are forms to be opened and work to be done.

IT won’t be irrelevant in this new shadow/cloud universe we’re imagineering. But it probably does need to recognize the need to get out of the app dev business and into the integration business.

So far, this is just me grousing about the sorry state of the world — less an occupational hazard than a chronological one, but a hazard nonetheless.

What’s in it for you as an IT leader?

First and foremost, take integration seriously. It’s mostly a matter of solving a problem once instead of over and over again.

The key: Especially for IT shops that mostly license COTS and SaaS software and integrate it rather than building their own, build an architecture that makes systems of record and sources of truth separate and distinct.

Systems of record are maintained and managed by IT, which keeps track of which system is the central repository of what information and which systems have to be kept synchronized to the central repository.

Sources of truth are SOAP or REST-based APIs. When shadow IT efforts … and for that matter, formal IT efforts … need to retrieve or update information from the company’s official databases, they consult the sources of truth, not the underlying systems of record.

Next: if you want to do everyone a favor and not force them to make Excel perform unnatural acts, settle on a suitable end-user computing tool in spite of the state of the market, connect it to your APIs, and actively promote its use, both inside and outside IT.

You’ll be amazed at just how much more automation your company achieves, and how much more satisfactory it is as well.

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