April 29, 2005
“a wobbly tower of empty beer crates”
Sig continues the cultural v technological debate:
So makeshift solutions were invented, revived and refined to get back a certain air of balance. Marketing, distribution, retail, inventories, selling, push, push — and yes, management and hierarchies.
All makeshift solutions. Empty beer crates on top of each other.
And, tata, we now have the much needed ‘interaction technology’ aka IT!
But the makeshift solutions will not budge. Hmm.
There you are, in my mind: We elevated temporary solutions into truths and we use IT as duct tape to prop up the rickety tower of empty beer crates.
We all know it’s shit but our boss tells us we still have x-units to sell by year’s end. Lucky us.
[HAMISH IN THE COMMENTS:]
Answer: get longer term management, or make the solutions much easier to change.
The issue with the second is not the IT itself in general, but returning to the cultural debate in the earlier posts, the internal friction in making these changes in the organisation is the biggest barrier.
As long as I got to help empty them, I am fine.
Seriously though, one of the issues here is that the time to change of these kind of solutions has come to exceed the lifecycle of the management responsible for making the change.
Answer: get longer term management, or make the solutions much easier to change.
The issue with the second is not the IT itself in general, but returning to the cultural debate in the earlier posts, the internal friction in making these changes in the organisation is the biggest barrier.
Hamish, glad you did not hint that I had just emptied them, and then wrote the post
Still, what about not giving up on IT based, or rather driven solutions… it has happened before — e-mail, internal newsgroups (have a post on that from my own experience), blogs (Scoble comes to mind), Lotus Notes. Funny though, seems they all came in under the radar, untouched by top management, not touted as fix-anything, still with some interesting effects on how business operate, small or big. Under the radar = no defense kicking in.
But at the end of the day — if a cultural change also leads to great leaps forward in competitiveness (have to assume that), then the followers follows. Need only one converter then.
IT driven solutions are fine as long as the IT folks are thinking like everybody else in the organization when they dream them up and not just like one another.
You know what I mean. Having some great whiz-bang technology around makes IT want to deploy it, right? Lots of times this means IT starts looking for a way to use the technology, putting the proverbial recepticle on the wrong end of the wagon train (or some such metaphor.) Now we’ve got a solution in search of a problem.
But if IT folks are thinking, “it sucks not to know what those marketing folks are working on, ’cause I might actually be able to help,” then, voila, as you say, Lotus Notes.
All I can say is I’m am sooooo glad I’m getting out of tech.
Thinking about this on the drive from SAP (Heidelberg) to Geneva where I live, tonight. (Slow. Virtual traffic jam. 75 minutes stuck in a trubulent flow problem, gaah.)
Technology and cultural are two friction surfaces. Culture would like live on the meme of the moment, but Sig is onto something when he talks about the concrete of ERP and enterprise wide models.
We used to have a joke about SAP, and ERP in general in the mid 1990’s. “It’s a three phase career. Five years selling it, five years installing it, and the rest of a long and profitable life trying to get rid of it.”
Only, like the IBM mainframe, and the MS PC, the end game never came. Nothing came to replace it. the money that might have allowed someone to be a competitor had already been spent. So, SAP is the standard, and the Oracle deals kinda confirm it.
Think on this. Screws and spanners were workshop specific until the mid 18th century (?) and then there were standards that meant they all worked together.
So, I would offer the analogy, the data formats for the rest of commercial processing, for the remainder of the civilised world will be a combination of SAP and MS.
And, of course you laugh! But take the example of railways. Why are the rails as far apart as they are, no more and no less, in many countries?
Because the Romans decided a standard width for an axle so that all the Roman carts would use the same ruts in the road. And this persisted in the Dark Ages, because a rut is a rut, and so why be different?
Then when the first railways were built, the creators wanted to adopt a passenger carrying model that was acceptable. A carriage! A horse carriage, that became a railway carriage, because people knew how to make them, so that moved the standard to a new area, the railways.
Geniuses like Isambard Kingdom Brunel militated in favour of what he thought were more logical standards, but basically, the economics say that you cannot fight the intalled base until you have a new technology.
Do cars or aieroplanes respect the dimensions of a Roman Chariot? No. But then they had the luxury of innovation, and that inflection point is a rare thing.
Yes, Hamish, we’ve been paving over the cow paths for millennia. I think this speaks to the seductive power of efficiency over effectiveness for the human imagination. It’s easier to pave over the cow paths, even though they might not be the best way to get from point A to B (might be ugly, for example). Think about how many awful workflows have been automated (those cows long ago decided how to get a check cut from accounts payable), rather than trying to change them BEFORE automating them. Of course, some cultures allow you to start over, cows be damned, but others are just into, “can’t think about it, just do it” mode.
Then the innovation comes along, and suddenly: no more cows or paths!