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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Talk about the end of an era …

The big news in business circles this week is Bill Gates’ decision to leave Microsoft. His decision will result in a lot of fallout in the industry, not the least of which will be the inevitable flood of opinion pieces dissecting the decision itself; its impact on the future of Microsoft; and Gates’ impact on life, the universe, and everything.

Why should Keep the Joint Running be the exception? Here’s what comes to mind:

The decision itself: Very smart. Others have pointed this out, too — Gates has nothing left to accomplish at Microsoft and would have gone stale had he stayed. By focusing on the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation he’ll have whatever new frontiers he wants for the rest of his life.

Impact on Microsoft: In the short term, very little — the transition will take two years, and he’s done an exemplary job of succession planning. In the long term, Microsoft will become a very different company, because corporate culture always reflects the personality of the company’s leader in some way, shape or form.

Gates’ impact on life, the universe, and everything: The personal computer would have happened with or without Bill Gates. The IBM PC architecture would have trounced both the Apple and generic CP/M architectures, too, for a very simple reason: IBM wanted to dominate the business use of personal computers, while Steve Jobs wanted to dominate being very cool with technology, Steve Wozniak wanted to play, and Gary Kildall wanted to fly.

But the personal computer wouldn’t have happened the way it did without Gates and his merry band of renegades. Because of them, the computer that invaded corporate desktops was fundamentally personal — an empowering technology that flattened corporate hierarchies and increased the ability of individual knowledge workers to influence business strategy, direction and outcomes. Had IBM maintained control of the architecture … OS/2 was its attempt to regain it … there’s little doubt that the PC would have been a very different animal.

Microsoft’s mission was to put a computer on every desk and Microsoft software in every computer. Give them credit — from a virtual green field, they accomplished what they set out to accomplish.

A few other thoughts: Start with this — Bill Gates gets a kick out of the technology itself. Anyone who has seen him demo new Microsoft products comes away with the same impression. He personally finds this stuff to be very cool. He’s like a kid in a toy store, except that he owns the toy store, and the toy factory too.

I just wish more CIOs got the same kick out of the technology they manage.

One other point: Gates and company achieved something mind-boggling in the annals of business history. They started as a garage business and continued to run it … successfully … as it grew through the $100 million, $1 billion, and $10 billion business breakpoints. It’s been done before, but it’s a rare achievement. Usually, founders have to turn over control to professional business managers because they don’t know how to run an organization beyond a certain size.

Gates, in contrast, adapted Microsoft to constantly changing business trends, at least three major technical watersheds, and its own stupendous increase in size without it ever losing its focus. Microsoft is about winning, has been from the beginning, and is to this day.

Compare that to the company you work for and ask yourself this basic question: Is “winning” in your company defined in Microsoft’s terms — winning customer mindshare, from that marketshare, and from that profits and shareholder value? If so, you’re lucky.

Probably, you work for a small business, too. In most corporate giants, “winning” is defined in terms of internal politics and rivalries, and corporate success is measured by the price of a share of stock, not by the health, success, and impact of the business.

I’ve read many times that Bill Gates turned a lot of people into millionaires, as if that was of any consequence. Bill Gates and his company changed how companies conduct business. That matters.

So here’s what you can learn from Bill Gates: Focus your attention on accomplishing something important. If you do, you and everyone who works for you will find their work less stressful and more rewarding.

You, and they, will probably manage to earn a pretty good living while you’re all at it, too.

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|In: Architecture|Last Updated:

“Technical architecture” is one of those phrases that’s easy to use and hard to define with any precision. I’ve read a number of definitions and have drafted a few myself. Here’s the best I’ve been able to come up with:

Technical Architecture is the discipline of organizing a company’s suite of applications, information repositories, and technical infrastructure so as to encourage coherent design of the entire computing environment rather than dealing with the design or selection of each component in isolation.

Architecture is the highest of the three levels at which technology can be described, the other two being engineering (also called “specifications”), and as-built documentation.

Managing technical architecture (or “enterprise architecture” — a semantic escalation that takes the so-called “business architecture” into account) is a tricky business, because architecture teams can easily degenerate into either academic white-paper factories or bureaucratic barriers to project progress. Even if you avoid these pitfalls, you’re left with the challenge of explaining to project sponsors and the executive committee why investments in architecture … which usually take the form of more-expensive, longer projects than would otherwise be budgeted … are necessary.

Most explanations are eye-glazing, ear-numbing accounts of data redundancy, operating system incompatibilities, or the need for more business logic re-use. These are abstractions, and business managers justifiably lose patience when they hear them, because they don’t pass the So-What Test. As a better conversation starter, here are Seven Warning Signs of Bad Architecture — signs they can understand at a glance. They are:

  • Manual re-keying: End-users spend time and effort either re-keying data from printed reports into data-entry screens, or cut-and-pasting data from one data-entry screen to another. You don’t have to connect the dots for business managers to understand that this costs them time and ensures that bad data will creep into the company’s databases.
  • Collections of point solutions: When it comes to getting their work done, employees are almost always better off using one mediocre application than five separate, really terrific ones. With one client, the sales force had to consult five separate systems before making one sales call — a process that required a half hour and that illustrates the business impact nicely.
  • Redundant applications: Especially among companies that have grown through acquisitions, it’s very common to end up with more than one system that does the same exact work. Supporting them all diverts time and effort from value-creating activity, wastes money on software licenses, and often creates need for manual re-keying. And, it usually means IT has to maintain redundant platforms to run them all.
  • Redundant data: Often a consequence of using a collection of point solutions, redundant data means synchronizing data across multiple databases. This is difficult and error-prone. It leads to effort wasted in reconciliation activities, and to getting different answers to the same question depending which database is queried.
  • Too many interfaces: It’s called the spiderweb, the spaghetti diagram, or the hairball (when it’s entirely out of hand). It means you’re connecting point solutions, redundant applications and redundant data through a passel of custom-coded (usually batch overnight) programs. The result? An increasing fraction of project effort goes to maintaining interfaces and regression testing to make sure nothing breaks, while an increasingly tiny fraction goes to creating new features and functionality.
  • Kludges and workarounds: A kludge is when you solve a problem through the use of band-aids, chewing gum and duct tape. It works, but it makes everything more fragile and harder to maintain than would have been the case had you used a welding torch or stainless steel bolts. Kludges and workarounds are ugly inside and out.
  • Obsolete technology: Yes, I know people who still lament the demise of the original VW bug. Some readers of this column undoubtedly wish they were still programming in MUMPS or relying on PICK. Business executives don’t always grasp the hidden costs of relying on (I’m not making this up) systems built on dBaseV for DOS. If that’s the case, explain … patiently … how much it costs to write a custom printer driver for dBaseV for DOS so your programs can, for example, send reports to laser printers you can actually buy.

Be careful in using this list, though. Once you walk your company’s business executives through it, they’re likely to ask you what you can do to fix things.Before you prod them into asking the question, make sure you know the answer.

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