The AppsLab

I’ll admit that I haven’t worked for a 20 person company in decades, but I’m not sure that I buy the article’s basic premise:

“Dealing with technology has gone from something only for the techy geeks to something more mainstream. Younger generations get it. Computer savvyness is no longer just for the geek squad.”

While many in the younger generation exhibit savvy regarding the use of a single computer, that does not necessarily translate into savvy regarding the implementation of a system. Perhaps some system tasks, such as email, can be effectively outsourced to an outside service, but you still need some sort of internal coordinator to help out when Peter (using Word 2003) has to incorporate inputs from Emily (using Word 2007) and me (using OpenOffice).

In addition, the enforcement capabilities of an IT department, though irritating, do provide benefits. For example, if all of the people in a corporation suddenly obtained administrator privileges over the anti-virus software installed on their computers, I wonder how many of them would just turn the danged thing off.

Again, I have no recent experience in smaller firms, so my observations may be off-base in that arena.

As a company grows, there are fundamental differences in how it is organized. If people are thinking a help desk is an IT department, well yeah, that can go away. But when people need to collaborate, when they need to have an infrastructure to communicate, there needs to be structure. As with any other outsourcing, it seems like a good idea until the implicit costs express themselves. Users doing email? Admin fail. Using google instead of your own infrastructure? I won’t even bother to google those fails. It’s amazing how shortsighted those who should know better are.

As a db geek, of course my view is skewed, but a companies data is its lifeblood. Someone has to write the reports for the muckety-mucks, someone has to back up the data, someone has to figure out how much taxes to pay, someone has to project revenue, someone has to engineer video chats, someone has to plan the infrastructure, someone has to run the webserver. Far from letting a bunch of tech-savvy kids do whatever they want, such authority has risen to upper management level. The actual skills involved in IT operations has widened enormously, and it is just too expensive and risky to pay some unknown cloudy entity to do it. Users circumventing policy to get their work done eventually gets a better policy, normally when some disaster results. Better not to manage by crisis, but there you go.

I’ve been watching a phone installation, it’s obvious to me a normal company doesn’t want to depend on everyone’s cell.

There are “virtual companies” in the biotech field in San Diego, contracting everything out until there’s only a few employees. Will they ever grow into real companies? A crapshoot. But biotech companies come and go anyways.

Yes, I do. Remember, google is an advertising company. Any cloud business contained in there is a minor service company, subject to all the economic imperatives that implies. Of course I’m an IT guy, but remember that I’ve been involved as internal IT, independent db consultant, and worker for several service organizations. What have I seen? External services are more expensive. They have to pay for all the expenses the IT department has to, plus be profitable, plus marketing. Doing things “right” is expensive, and in a competitive market, that means compromises must be made. In an internal IT, management can make those decisions (often without really understanding the risks), but when outside, there is an expectation that things will be done “right.” Marketing and support management’s jobs are often to fluff over the compromises. So customers have to trust that the supplier isn’t going to go away. And guess what – most of them go away. The ones that don’t go away are always under severe pressure to cut costs, sometimes noticeably (Oracle’s support organization has a reputation for getting worse over time, for the twenty+ years I’ve been watching it…!).

The first startup I was involved in started by a guy who worked for one of those organizations. They promoted him to VP, leased him a new Nissan ZX, and two weeks later went bust (and took back the car). So he grabbed half the accounts and eventually hired me to head a rewrite of the ERP. Meanwhile a bunch of other similar organizations went bust and he would cherry-pick those guys as they came available. Being a small, mostly contractor company, he was able to turn on a dime to product development when it became obvious how difficult it is to keep a service organization going over time. Little has changed since then. You can’t even argue basic infrastructure has changed, I’ve been watching AT&T trucks all week fixing the half-dozen boxes on the street (of corporate buildings) that blew after a power surge resulting from the recent rains. Happens every year.

And every year you hear about how some new paradigm is going to change everything, when it’s just a variant on the same old service organization. Timesharing, outsourcing, offshoring, cloudifying. The irony is, it pushes towards standardizing at a lowest common denominator, the opposite of empowering users. IT manager from virtual hell there. Steve Jobs app lock-in has nothing on that guy.

Is it about users? Yeah, but my point is, all they think about is their files, they don’t have any strategic or tactical view for the company and its data and the magic stuff. So they put their files out on google, then wonder how someone redirected their password from their old AOL account they haven’t used in years. Can 20 people sort of work through it anyways? Possibly, though I’d point out that US worker laws push towards a centralized environment with fewer. Which means, IT isn’t going anywhere, it’s just morphing a bit. And not much.

It would be better for everybody if everything was slow, steady growth, but that’s unrealistic. It’s grow or die, and fast. As companies grow, they need to make fundamental changes. A $500K company is fundamentally different than a $50M company is fundamentally different than a $5B company. Even the multi-billion dollar companies running around buying the multi-million dollar companies realize they need to integrate, not just add them on as copies. And of course, gut.

I’m not convinced younger people will replace IT, but I believe IT must evolve.

1. The ability to use FB does not mean you are technically savvy.
2. Same goes for Twitter or any other social media tool.
3. I’m reminded of an old Star Trek (TNG) episode, where the place they visit became so technically advanced, that it essentially ran itself. After some long period of time, no one knew the underpinnings of said technological innovation…they were out painting or finding self enlightenment. When it started to break down, they were hosed.

As for IT evolving, most definitely. If not a software company, we are support staff. Support Staff!. Just like secretaries, only more technical and with a lot more attitude. That attitude, possibly, drives much of the push into the Cloud or the circumvention of many IT policies (I can still hack into most Oracle databases on site, but I don’t; that would allow me to get around the DBAs, right?). We need to change. We need to know our place. It certainly isn’t a bad place, but the Business is King, period.

The point about younger people is that they have grown up in an internet-connected world with readily available tools to use it. They are highly comfortable figuring out how to make hardware and software work. So, in a way, using Facebook and Twitter does make them savvy.

I’m not sure how I got interpreted as saying that IT services in the cloud is search, but you can’t say that search is normally an IT department function. Access to the wider network is. Oh, I said any cloud business, and search is a cloud business. Shoot, my mistake. That should have been “any IT services cloud business.” Then it should make sense to claim that eventually all those google docs etc. eventually will have to support themselves or be put down.

It’s only cheaper to outsource when in-house has a high cost-of-entry. For a smaller business, this can be difficult to calculate. There are companies advertising on the local radio for remote backups, fix-your-pc and stuff like that, those are the ones I’m really suspicious of. The critical person example is quite relevant – hey, I’m one of those! – but it emphasizes how hard it is to evaluate people, which is worse when they aren’t around every day. One of the main reasons I’m a critical person is both Oracle and the app vendor screwed the customer. At least the app vendor tried to make amends after the lawsuits. Oracle keeps poking with things like some heavily accented salescritter calling to tell us our support costs will be surcharged if we don’t upgrade the database. Unfreakingbelievable. See oracle-l for auditing scaries. A rule of thumb that has seemed to be consistent over time is, about one dba per ten developers, about one developer per $10M sales. Allocate hats proportionally. Companies with no sales divide by 0.

Large service providers come and go just like anyone else. You can’t evaluate their turnover or the quality of who’s left. Jeez, I worked for one national company, then when I had a question for my boss and couldn’t get a call back for several days, eventually I called the HQ and discovered he left the company and I had had a new boss for several weeks and no one told me. They had sort of forgotten about me, because I’d quietly submit my reports weekly, and the rest of the group was at Boeing in Seattle and they all got gonered after 9/11. Soon after what was left of the company was sold elsewhere, eventually some other unrelated company in Europe wound up with their website. Another company I worked for, rated as one of the best companies to work for in San Diego, their help-desk people were all lined up in a row with their manager staring at them, and they had to raise their hands to go to the bathroom… When I was an independent contractor at where I am now, another company had several servers torn down by a couple of guys from Kansas, then one day they didn’t show up. A call by the IT manager got the story – when they got back to their hotel, they got the message they were laid off. The international company closed up shop and went back to New Zealand or wherever. And there are worse stories than what I’ve seen personally. I still like the two different stories about “computer consultants” getting busted driving around with dead marines in front seat of their cars.

No argument that IT has to evolve – but 37signals is a joke, to judge by this article. As one of the comments there pointed out, college students these days don’t know how to make a blog, all they know is twitter. Charlie Sheen is your new IT department. Winning!

And what Sheeri said.