All Posts in Strategy and Tactics

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The ever-quotable Larry Ellison has told us that software is about to become uninteresting. Nicholas Carr has stated, in the Harvard Business Review, no less, that IT doesn’t matter anymore — that since everyone has “it,” it’s no longer a differentiator.

I don’t know which parallel dimension they live in, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t the one you and I inhabit. In their dimension, I guess, the moment a process owner in the business decides to change how something gets done, they just plug a cable into their heads and the company’s ERP system automatically and instantly reconfigures itself and all of its interfaces to the outside world to implement the new business practice.

In our world, we sit down with them, figure out the various implications of their new idea, map out the numerous inconvenient exceptions to the main process flow … the ones that take just as much coding time, even though they only occur infrequently … and develop a coding strategy.

Then we look at the interfaces.

Making software do what the business needs is difficult work. On the other hand, it’s relatively straightforward work. The seamy, sordid, ugly red-light district of IT is the collection of interfaces we’ve collected over time to make everything work together. Interfacing two software packages that weren’t designed to be compatible is intrinsically difficult. Need evidence? Synchronize your Palm PDA with Outlook.

The Outlook calendar stores each appointment using Greenwich Mean Time. The time it displays automatically adjusts the schedule to your current time zone. If you know what you’re doing, this can be mighty handy — for example, if you’re a consultant who schedules a conference call while you’re in Los Angeles that you’ll dial into when you’re in a New York hotel room.

The Palm datebook’s designers used a simpler paradigm: Your Palm simply stores whatever time you tell it to. So what happens when you synchronize it with Outlook? It fails to report a scheduling conflict between your 4pm meeting in Chicago and the call you have to make to your west-coast client at 2pm their time, unless you remember to conscientiously re-synchronize every time you change time zones.

This isn’t a solvable problem. Even were you to build a custom interface to replace the standard synchronization software, you’d have to make assumptions, because the Palm datebook schedule is semantically inconsistent with the Outlook schedule.

I’ll be the first to admit that the Palm-to-Outlook interface shouldn’t be high on anyone’s priority list. It just isn’t that big a deal.

Here’s what is a big deal: Something as trivial as synchronizing a desktop calendar with a PDA calendar has intrinsically unresolvable design ambiguities.

IT rarely deals with issues this trivial. IT deals with business applications several orders of magnitude more complex than Microsoft Outlook, let alone the Palm datebook. While IT developed some of them in-house, it licenses most of them from outside vendors — multiple outside vendors, who designed them with different and conflicting assumptions and perspectives. Building interfaces that work isn’t a trivial matter; making sure the interfaces continue to work as we change and reconfigure the systems to meet changing business needs is also a non-trivial matter.

Nor are we finished, because on top of our internal interfaces, we flow data back and forth with our business partners. Electronic Data Interchange has never been easy and inexpensive, and while many industry pundits blamed the early standards, the problem wasn’t ANSI X.12 or Edifact. Any working programmer involved in EDI could have explained this to the pundits who hyped XML as the magic bullet that would fix it all, just as they could have predicted that enterprise application integration (EAI) and Web services would be useful, but hardly a panacea that makes internal integration simple and seamless.

Carr might be right, I guess. Since the definition of “strategic” is slippery, deciding which nouns you can and can’t attach it to is debatable. I’d argue that the ability to execute is the most significant strategic advantage any company can have. That makes your ability to reconfigure the applications portfolio to support planned business change as strategic as it gets.

It’s entirely possible that Larry Ellison is right, too — that software is about to become boring. That, after all, is a matter of attitude, and software always has been boring to many business executives.

But that doesn’t mean information technology has reached either the point of diminishing returns, or a plateau where the pace of change and innovation will slow. Software, that is, isn’t about to become boring in any intrinsic way.

Nothing, in fact, has changed: Those who lack the time, patience, aptitude, or desire to understand information technology found it boring before, find it boring now, and will continue to find it boring in the future.

That’s what is really uninteresting.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

I’d like to file a missing persons report. It’s the liberal media. I can’t find them anywhere!

I keep hearing that “the media” has a liberal bias. I hear it from every radio talk-show host, every television commentator, and a lot of print columnists. So here’s my question: If every radio talk-show host and television talking head complains about the liberal media, doesn’t that mean there aren’t any liberal radio talk-show hosts or television talking heads?

I’m just asking.

If there were a liberal media, we’d have at least a few media pundits promoting the most fundamental premise of liberal political philosophy: That the government has a valid and useful role to play in modern society.

But what does this have to do with your job running an IT organization? This is, after all, Keep the Joint Running, not All Things Considered. The answer is, lots, because it turns out Larry Ellison’s bid to take over PeopleSoft, which was very funny in a dark kind of way when we thought it was a joke, is serious. The conservative philosophy of politics dictates that if Oracle can muster the money and votes, that’s all there is to it. The IT and business press apparently accept this thought process without question. There have been one or two off-hand comments speculating how “regulators” — especially European regulators — might react, but not a single opinion piece thus far has even raised a point that even ten years ago would have been central to the discussion:

Whether this attempted acquisition serves the best interests of the American public, and if not, whether the federal government should prevent it. If any liberal voices remained, they would have at least asked the question.

The American public, in this case, is you, and in your role as the leader of an IT organization, this acquisition certainly isn’t in your best interests, either individually or corporately. Here’s what will happen if it succeeds:

  • If you’re a current PeopleSoft customer, you’ll endure the cost of a conversion — a huge expense that creates no value of any kind.
  • If you’re an Oracle customer, instead of Oracle’s profits being reinvested in its products it will be reinvested buying PeopleSoft.
  • If you’re an SAP customer and are, for some reason, seriously dissatisfied, imagine the response when you threaten to take your business elsewhere. Hysterical laughter?

A decade ago, the Federal Trade Commission would probably have suggested, gently but firmly, that it would administer a fair process that took everyone’s interests into account, meaning Oracle would have a difficult case to make. Today? Does anyone really expect the FTC to do anything other than sit on one thumb, suck the other, and play switch?

The job of business is to look out for the best interests of shareholders. The job of government is to look out for the best interests of the country and its citizens — the public good — or at least that would be the position of political liberals, were there any left now that Paul Wellstone is dead.

Which leaves it up to you. If you’d prefer that Oracle win or lose in the marketplace instead of beating its competitors by buying them in order to shut them down, here’s what you can do.

If you’re an Oracle customer, call your sales representative and Larry Ellison’s office to let them know you’d prefer they spend their money fixing their product line and offering better service, and if they won’t do that, you’ll consider a conversion to SAP.

If you’re a PeopleSoft customer, call Larry Ellison’s office and explain that should Oracle buy PeopleSoft, your most likely course of action will be to convert to SAP.

If you’re CIO of a Fortune 50 corporation, contact the folks who handle your company’s lobbying efforts, and ask them to use their clout to help block this deal before it goes any further. Don’t worry — this won’t make you a liberal. Lobbying the federal government to act in favor of your company’s best interests is in the best tradition of conservative politics.

And finally, if you’re Bill Gates … drop a few hints that you’re planning a hostile takeover of Oracle.

Now that would be funny.

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