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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

We humans like to look at the world through a Good-Guys/Bad-Guys lens (the GG/BG lens, available in Canon, Nikon and Micro Four Thirds camera mounts). It’s a bad lens.

Consider the cases of Apple Pay for iOS and only iOS, and MS Office for iOS and Android as well as for Windows.

There are those among us who, looking through our GG/BG lenses, will applaud Apple for its innovation while excoriating Microsoft for … well, I’m not sure what, exactly, but because Microsoft is the Bad Guy, there will be a reason.

Forget your GG/BG lens, and focus (sorry) with your Business Strategy lens instead (no, no acronym for that, and if the reason isn’t clear, figure it out).

On the surface (as opposed to the Surface™), “strategy” might appear to be the decision as to which platforms to support. Apple’s is to use Apple Pay to further differentiate iOS from Android, while Microsoft’s is to finally support non-Windows platforms, presumably out of desperation.

The view from here: Despite their superficial similarity, the two decisions have nothing to do with each other.

Start with Apple. Its Apple Pay decision looks more like applying old habits to a new situation than like a strategy.

Start with what made the iPhone so wildly successful in the first place. It wasn’t a case of the King Kong syndrome (“It was beauty killed the beast”) although compared to the Blackberry and Treo smartphones it competed with, the iPhone was quite pretty.

No, the big, big deal about the iPhone was that it wasn’t just a product. It was a platform (and Open/Closed Platform Strategies: How, When & Why,” Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne, which explores this subject, is well worth your time).

Apple’s App Store is what made the iPhone a platform, which is what drove the marketshare of Blackberry’s mere products to ever-more miniscule levels.

Apple Pay looks like a replay of Steve Jobs’ legendary argument with his executive team about whether to release a Windows version of iTunes. Only in the replay it’s Android not Windows, Jobs wins, and there is no Android Apple Pay.

Understand, Apple Pay is just a way to pay at the register by pulling out your iPhone instead of a credit card. I guess that’s more convenient(?)

So Apple Pay makes consumers’ iPhones a smidgeon more valuable; Apple makes its money by capturing a smidgeon of the credit-card processing fee; and the banks are willing to give it this slice because Apple Pay is, in principle, a smidgeon more secure than a standard credit card.

Merchants? They mostly care about the expense they’ll incur by equipping themselves to support Apple Pay, if they decide to support it, which depends how many customers they expect will have an iPhone but no credit cards with them.

Off topic: Smelling opportunity, Google has announced Android Pay, which has no user interface, only an API. It’s a platform. In principle there’s no reason Android Pay Apps can’t be written for iOS. Sure, Apple could return the favor, but right now an Apple Pay App for Android seems farfetched.

On topic: Microsoft’s decision to release iOS and Android versions of MS Office.

Once upon a time, MS Office was, for Microsoft, what Apple Pay is supposed to be for Apple right now: A way to increase the value of a platform, in this case Windows, by providing a valuable application that isn’t available on any other platform.

From both a consumer and enterprise perspective, if you want word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software that renders reliably no matter who you send your documents to or receive them from … if that’s what you want, your only choice is MS Office, and if you make that choice you’re going to run Windows on your PCs.

Or, to be fair, on a Mac, but for the budget-conscious Macs cost more than Windows machines.

It’s a strategy that’s worked for a couple of decades. It’s still working. But it’s had an unfortunate downside: It’s made Microsoft’s desktop Windows team fat, dumb and happy.

No more. Astonishingly, Nadella is the one who has broken Windows’ de facto monopoly on MS Office.

Which leaves the Windows team little choice: It has to start designing an OS and user experience users actually prefer.

From Nadella’s perspective this has to be a gamble. The guess from here: Not taking this step was even riskier.

Your take-homes from all this (you knew there’d be one, didn’t you?): (1) applying old mental habits to new situations is dodgy at best; and (2) few risks are bigger than a culture of fat, dumb and happy.

Plan accordingly.

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|In: Architecture|Last Updated:

Old, old, theological IT joke:

Question: If God could create the entire universe in just six days, why does IT take so long to implement a new system?

Answer: God didn’t have an installed base.

What’s this have to do with keeping the joint running? At the risk of pointing out the obvious, in modern business, speed matters. If your company doesn’t continually improve its products, services, and practices as fast or faster than your competitors, pretty soon your customers won’t be your customers anymore because why would they?

The more sophisticated version starts with Colonel John Boyd’s OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act). Very short explanation: If your OODA cycles are shorter than your opponents’, every time you Act you re-set them to Observe, effectively paralyzing them.

In business, speed matters. And in the 21st century, no matter what a business decides to do, it will need new or changed information technology to do it.

And yet, for the past few decades not only have a lot of business and IT executives actively slowed down IT, but many of their slow-down practices have been enshrined as “best practice,” while much of what’s required to speed things up is deemed too troublesome and expensive.

Three examples among many:

  • IT Governance: Governance is about is making decisions. But when the term “governance” enters the conversation, the subject is really preventing bad decisions and the preferred mechanism is a committee.

But preventing bad decisions means requiring everyone to ask permission before, for example, sneezing. And even the most efficient committee mostly makes decisions when it meets, not when someone asks for a decision. Committees can’t avoid causing delays.

Instead …

A faster and more-effective form of governance is educating everyone about the organization’s goals and priorities and making sure they’ve bought into them; keeping managers and supervisors in the loop; establishing a “culture of discipline”; and then entrusting most decisions to those closest to the action.

More effective? Yes. Most committees consist of people who represent constituencies, legitimizing constituency interests as a factor in making decisions (read “the silos win”). Decisions are political compromises — not a bad thing, but decisions and actions rooted in shared purpose and goals are usually better.

  • System integration: So many IT shops interconnect applications and databases with a spiderweb of custom-programmed batch point-to-point interfaces.

In one extreme case I worked with, IT Operations had more than a thousand interface jobs that had to run in strict sequence each night. Another client estimated that 80% of the total effort in most of its applications projects was invested in not breaking the interfaces.

No argument, uttering the words “federated architecture” makes it sound easy when it’s anything but easy. But in the long run the alternative to implementing some form of planned and engineered integration isn’t saving money. It’s wading through molasses.

Federate your architecture, or else achieve equivalent integration through some other means (two alternatives: use an ERP system as the architectural hub and primary access point; or build and rely on an operational data store for the same purpose).

  • Shadow IT: Who can get more done — 10 teams, or 100 teams?

This isn’t, for a change of pace, a trick question. The answer is inescapable, and yet most IT organizations, instead of being grateful for the help, do their best to stamp out shadow IT.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term and the phrase isn’t self-explanatory, shadow IT is information technology implemented without the IT organization’s involvement or permission. You’ll find the case for encouraging it in “Stop stomping out shadow IT” (KJR, 9/4/2012); no point making the exact same points again here.

Let’s connect the dots.

Dot #1: In addition to adding to IT’s bandwidth, shadow IT adds speed for another reason: It’s beyond the reach of IT governance.

Keep it that way.

Dot #2: One disadvantage of shadow IT is that it produces “islands of automation” — un-integrated systems that usually make someone somewhere re-key data from the shadow IT system into existing systems and vice versa. Re-keying is error-prone and expensive.

Dot #3: As part of IT’s efforts to support shadow IT, it should change its role, and name. Maybe “Integration Systems” (IS)? IS can and should take its now-well-engineered system integration to the next level: Its new job is to provide APIs to shadow IT groups throughout the enterprise.

Far from adding risk, the impact is the exact opposite: By pushing all access through well-defined APIs, integration won’t just be easier.

You can make it as safe as you want.

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