Strategy and Tactics – Page 165 – IS Survivor Publishing

New Year’s non-predictions (first appeared in InfoWorld)

Draw your own conclusions.

In my December 18th column I asserted that Bush and Gore should both be embarrassed about their total lack of leadership during the Florida election fiasco. Quite a few angry readers, all politically conservative supporters of our new president, complained. Every one accused me of being partisan on the subject. Most of them were unpleasant. Many repeated almost verbatim the most anti-factual of Republican propaganda. (A distinction: Much of the Republican propaganda was in direct opposition to the facts, and vitriolic besides. The Democratic propaganda was simply preposterous. Chalk it up to a difference in style.)

No Gore supporters griped about my being a Republican partisan. Go figure.

Other correspondents expressed concern that I inappropriately strayed into political commentary in an IT publication. Fear not. Leadership is a frequent topic in this column, and while I’ll continue to draw on current events to illustrate leadership issues, I’ll also continue to be bipartisan when I disparage our political so-called leadership. In other words, I won’t ever mention that more than $40 million worth of investigation successfully proved Bill Clinton cheated on his wife and lied about it in court without also mentioning that his two predecessors — Reagan and Bush Sr. — sanctioned the sale of illicit drugs to American citizens to finance an illegal war against the legitimate government of Nicaragua.

American values being what they are, most appear to consider Clinton’s crime the more deplorable of the two.

Which is relevant to this week’s prediction. But first …

I’d originally planned to make a bunch of New Year’s predictions this week. It’s something of a January tradition after all.

Sadly, I don’t have anything interesting to predict. The trends that will play out this year started awhile ago. 2001 will see the continuing e-enablement of business, not a transformation to something unrecognizable. Radically new business models won’t flourish: ASPs won’t enjoy triple-digit growth; auctions won’t become the dominant means for setting price in either the B2B or B2C world; digital exchanges will mostly find success by scaling back to become transaction clearinghouses.

2001 will be a year of consolidation and incremental improvement. In part, this will be the result of economic jitters. It’s also due to simple fatigue — there’s a limit to the amount of radical change society can eat before it has to stop and do some digesting.

My one new prediction is social, although it will affect the world of business: The Bobby Knight syndrome will start to recede.

You recall Bobby Knight, Indiana’s dear departed basketball coach. Knight behaved as if winning absolved all sins. He threw chairs, abused office staff, and assaulted those who made him angry (not a difficult task), attributing all criticism to jealousy. If it were just Knight we could chalk this up to a psychological case study. Sadly, Knight enjoys a huge coterie of supporters who agree with his philosophy that results are all that matter.

Every time you hear someone say, “We do whatever it takes,” you’re hearing an echo of Bobby Knight, because sometimes, “whatever it takes” is (or should be) completely unacceptable. I’m guessing Americans have reached their limit and are ready to say, “We don’t want you do to whatever it takes. We insist that you respect some boundaries, and only win if you can stay inside them.”

Or maybe it’s just a hope.

Trend overload (first appeared in InfoWorld)

We need more women in IT.

Now that I’m skating on thin ice, let me explain. When I was a lad, women’s fashions were a big deal. If the designers declared hem lengths were up, most women wore short skirts, acting as if the fashion police would pay a visit.

I still see articles about fashion trends in the paper, but women respond differently now, mostly dressing as they like. We need more women in IT, because while women have learned to ignore fashion trends, I’m not so sure IT has. For example, I just read that while MSPs are becoming a popular strategy, alternatives are cropping up.

MSP, in case you haven’t encountered the term, stands for “Management Service Provider”. It’s a company that will monitor your systems and network for you, fixing problems or at least alerting you to them.

I first ran across the term no more than three months ago. Assume most IT shops ran across it around the same time, from a sales representative sitting in front of the CIO. I doubt many CIOs stood right up and said, “Great idea! I want one, and I want to buy it from you.”

I figure, right about now the early adopters are plowing through responses to their MSP RFPs while they search their souls, making sure they really want to go through with this.

Yet according to someone in the trade press, undoubtedly quoting some analyst or other from one of the research services, MSPs are becoming a popular strategy, yet alternatives are cropping up.

ASPs preceded MSPs in the trend-mill. The original application service providers could only have appealed to small startups. Yet like a weather balloon, with very little mass but a big cross-section, ASPs were huge blobs on the IT radar screen. Most CIOs I talk to on the subject snort, pointing out that (1) IT has been integrated into the heart of their companies’ processes and culture; (2) their systems are heavily customized for their particular situations; (3) increasingly, they’re depending on tight integration of their systems to accomplish their companies’ business strategies; and (4) what happens if the ASP … generally a venture-backed startup with negative earnings … goes away?

(This last one is a big issue: One CEO recounted an 11-week SAP implementation — the result of Pandesic’s undignified withdrawal from the fray. You’d think that between them Intel and SAP could have managed to keep Pandesic running long enough to protect their customers, wouldn’t you?)

It isn’t just ASPs and MSPs either. Thin clients (which really are fat networks, as has been pointed out in this space many times) preceded them as a trend declared in advance of market acceptance. In fact, pundits now proclaim us to be in the post-PC era despite the PC’s near ubiquity on the desktop and growing … not shrinking … penetration of the home market.

This is the current trend in trends: It’s a trend when a market analyst, desperate to be the first to spot the Next Big Thing, declares it to be a trend, not when the market follows along. Market analysts have become prescriptive rather than descriptive — a dangerous practice that pollutes the discipline, putting them on a par with fashion designers. But women have learned to ignore the designers and wear what’s comfortable and looks good on them.

We need more women in IT.