BankerVision

The In-Betweeners

You know, I think I have a very good work-life balance. I spend enough hours in the office that I think we’re accomplishing things. I do lots of private work-like things (writing here, reading the right blogs and twitter, participating in the online conversation, writing books, and the evening networking schedule) that are in the middle between work and leisure. And I have plenty of free time still to relax at home, or go out.

There is a graduation in my life between what is totally work (the office) and what is totally leisure (blobbing out at home or being with friends).

Having that graduation is a vital determinant of how well I can perform in the workplace.

For example, as an innovator, I really need to know what’s going on in the mobile phone market or what people think the next big trend is going to be. As a manager, I really need to the latest thinking which comes out of various thought leaders. And as someone who is responsible for a technical architecture team, it is important that I have at least a remote clue about what’s going on in that space.

These are all things I get in the in-between that’s in the middle between real work and real leisure. I am in a competition with my peers in each of these areas to know what’s going on, and I can’t have a rational conversation with them unless I am at least as up to date as they are.

Conversely, if they know more than me, is it reasonable I should have any rights to be part of the decision making for which they are clearly more expert?

Being as up to date as possible is table stakes now.

The In-betweeners (a name i just dreamt up, by the way) seem to be way more up to date, and way more able to have a reasonable conversation about the way things are likely to turn out.

But there are lots of people who don’t have an in-between. They do work, and they do leisure. There is no fine graduation between the two. Theirs is the Work-Life balance argument. The moment the office is left, take physical steps to make sure that work can’t interrupt at all. Turn off the devices. Shut down the email. Don’t take a phone call. And under no circumstances read anything at all that might have worky-like overtones.

Let me not for one moment make judgements about that lifestyle choice, which is perfectly valid. I mean, I probably do have fewer family and other commitments than most to which I must assign time. Although, there are some colleagues of mine who have very large families and who still manage to keep up, so I don’t know why I’m making that excuse, actually.

But let us not spend 2010 pretending that there isn’t a difference in performance between those who are up to date and those who aren’t.

2010 is going to be a performance – not an experience – competition. That’s why I said the other day that I think people who are connected are going to get all the rewards this year. It’s going to be about making things happen, and that means you need an in-between.

Because making things happen is not a 9 to 5 job any more. The conversation continues 24 x 7. Some of those conversations have unusual levels of significance.

I think it is possible to find a personally appropriate in-between that lets you participate whilst continuing to live a full life in the outside world. And I also think that those who don’t are going to get marginalised as their peers step up.

Update: Shane Dillon comments on the davepress blog that I “appropriated” the term “In-Betweener”. That made me check Google, and he’s right. The term actually refers to a Marvel Comics superhero. The wiki entry makes interesting reading, and is quite apt given the subject of my post.

2010 Predictions

Last week, I wrote down some of my thoughts for 2009. There have been both lows and highs, but mostly highs. 2009 was a good year. I’m expecting that there’ll be some pretty big highs in 2010 as well. As is everyone’s want to do at this time, I thought I’d make some guesses what the year holds ahead.

No doubt, we’ll all look back at this next year and laugh. That’s the fun of it of course.

Anyway, onto my top predictions for the coming year.

1. Banks, governments and everyone will get really, really, serious about innovation

The last couple of years have seen a lot of talking about innovation, but not really all that much doing it. There are enough high profile innovation successes starting to emerge though (even though they may have happened by accident) that people can now begin to see the power of this stuff when applied properly.

I think this is going to result in a number of very big programmes starting this year. It will all be copycat, of course (“What? They’ve spent that on innovation? We have to double that…!”), and I’d expect a few very high profile programme cancellations in the next 18 months. But overall, the momentum is going to be huge in 2010.

And that is going to lead to some game changing plays from organisations we’d always thought were anything but innovative. I would not be surprised to see a bank doing something so unusual that people’s mouths drop. Like, for example, someone running a similar model to Caja Navarra’s here in the UK.

Or a government department reaching out to citizens and bringing them right inside service delivery.

Or a major corporate releasing a hit product that’s been 100% designed by customers, and which climbs the adoption curve so quickly that their large competitors go out of business.

All that will drive us to an “Innovation Frenzy” by the end of 2010, and if you are a corporate innovator, you can expect 2010 to be a very big year.

2. Citizens will start to deploy tools that do the things that big companies and governments used to do.

Governments and corporates are beginning to make their data available online so that citizens can do what they want with it. But I predict that if government doesn’t make its data available quickly enough, citizens will find ways to get it anyway. Screen scraping works, you know. Then they’ll build what they want, and waiting for government to provide stuff… well why?

3. Crowd-think emerges

This is the year someone senior in a large corporation is going to discover that if you put 10 Gen-Yers in a room and give them a project, the outcome is likely to better than if you put a single, experienced person with 10 years on it. The next generation of workers is quite different to what we’ve been used to, and their hyper-connection means their work operates in a parallel, and highly synergistic fashion.

Then I’d say we’ll begin to see strategic decisions being made by committees of these people. They’ll be small at first but the power of these groups of generation – Y thinkers will get more obvious. Success will breed more success.

It will be 2010 when the signs this is happening really become obvious.

In the next decade, by the way, these are the same people who will be in real management positions in their own right, and crowd-think will happen no matter what the current managers think, whether they like it or not.

And what will happen to the experienced people of today? They’ll still have a role of course, but they’ll be advisors to the decision makers rather than decision makers themselves.

Don’t believe me?

Check out your graduate programme, if you have one, and watch how those people are interacting now. Watch them work together on a project, and don’t fail to notice that no single leader emerges in overall control. Leadership moves around dynamically based on skills and competence.

Then project that forward a few years when we  starting giving them management jobs of real importance.

4. Those who don’t get “social” will never get a decent performance review again.

I’ve written about the difference between those who are connected (online) and those who aren’t, and suggested that there’s a visible performance gap between the two groups.

Well, I’m of the view that this is the year that the difference is going to make itself felt at performance review time. Oh, not everyone will likely recognise the fact that they’re being marked down because they aren’t connected enough, but it will begin to happen anyway.

Here’s why.

Those with the right connections have much superior, and much much more timely data at their fingertips. They consequently make robust decisions fast, and their pace of output goes up. Their work is not only produced more quickly, its quality rises.

One person in my team, for example, can turn around a report in a day or two, whereas everyone else quotes weeks – even a month sometimes – to do the same thing.

Now, when you’re the manager in that position, who do you give the top marks to?

This will all be bad news, of course to those who “don’t have time to read blogs”, or whatever social media tool is currently in fashion. It will also be bad news to those who think that you get to turn off the moment you leave the office.

Those days are gone.  There is a new level of performance emerging, and the bar is getting raised in 2010. People are going to have step up this year, or expect there will be personal consequences.

And not, as I said earlier, because anyone will do anything deliberate, like impose a performance improvement plan or something. It will be because all the top marks will go to those who are connected from now on.

Experience is important, but performance is the new yardstick in 2010

Welcome to 2010, everyone, and I hope you have a fantastic year.

Future leaders, and IT contradicts

Interrupting my series of Terrible Innovators for a moment, you may be interested in these recent things:

Over at Computing magazine, I write about the future of IT leadership, specifically, that in an era where the ownership of IT systems is becoming unclear, the role of technologies leaders is also becoming blurred. Do they have a role in the future? I don’t know, but what I do know is that our new managers, the ones coming up IT now, are way better rounded than their siloed predecessors. Anyway, read the article, and especially the rebuttal from one of the current generation IT leaders who says I’m wrong.

Then, over at Finextra, they are running a feature (pulled from the book, actually) on the prioritisation that CIOs have, compared with what innovators need to make change. My point, there, is that CIOs have such vastly different priorities to innovators that they are fundamentally unable to embrace innovation and keep on keeping on.

Hope you find these interesting , and I’ll be back with Terrible Innovator No. 4 – the Lone Ranger – tomorrow.

Computerisation leads to higher costs

At least in healthcare. Look at this study, which found that although there can be marginal improvements in service quality in some cases, increasing computerisation often results in higher costs.

That is an interesting result, and one that I’ve wondered about for big system processes myself. Almost two years ago I wrote on this subject, suggesting that for some big systems, paper could be a good alternative to large systems development.

This study is evidence that computerisation isn’t always the best answer.

This, of course, leads to questions about the characteristics of systems that should not be computerised. It is an important question, because technologists, left to their own devices, will always build systems, whether it makes sense or not to do so.

Here are the times I think it doesn’t make sense to build a big system:

1. When the prospective process is very low scale, in terms of throughput. The economics of big system development don’t work very well when you don’t have volume. Upfront costs are massive, and you rarely get payback in short time periods. Sometimes, the process has changed or ended before the system even arrives. End user computing has a chance of changing that, but don’t let big IT anywhere near something little if you want an economic result.

2. When the prospective process is at scale, but is extremely complicated. The economics of big IT don’t work for very complicated. You have to have too many people trying understand the system, then too many coders trying to make it work, then too many users trying to change things because the analysts didn’t understand the system correctly in the first place. The costs mount up, and sooner or later your business case that authorised the development in the first place collapses.

This latter case is the one that I think is exemplified by the healthcare study. The more complicated a system, the more expensive it is to build, maintain and operate. That’s if you can get it to work at all, of course. For healthcare, most systems are more expensive than the paper they replace.

So big IT can do simple processes if they are at volume, but not extremely complex systems regardless of scale.

There is an answer of course, and that is that you have to simplify complex processes before you start doing the computer bit. Its obvious, really. But I do wonder how many project failures could have been avoided if some Lean practices were applied to things before the technologists were let in.

We’re lucky that here at the Department that we have a big Lean initiative that does just this. We had a  Lean initiative at Lloyds Banking Group as well, though it was on a much smaller scale.

The trick is making sure that the Lean Machine gets to something before the IT Machine has a go at it. That’s a feat that’s way more complicated that spooling up a Lean or IT project on its own.

You can imagine the response if a technologist were to suggest it. “What? You want to change my business before you’ll computerise it for me? You think you know enough about it to change it? Not hardly”.

Unfortunately, in most organisation, IT hasn’t gained the right to tell business people that they might actually know something about their businesses. The irony is that after you’ve built a few systems that computerise a particular process, you almost certainly do know more about it than the business owners.

I see this changing rapidly, by the way, but will leave my thoughts on the evaporation of the business/IT divide for another post.

The task worker divide

I’m sitting here in London Heathrow airport, and scrolling through all last night’s Tweets on my Twitter client. I notice that, in addition to the Tweets I put up from #sdthinks, where I was speaking last night, there are lots of people I follow who were also at conferences doing live updates.

There are lots of people who are at airports in work time and clearly do their work mobile, whilst keeping in touch with everyone else.

They are lots who are arguing about Enterprise Architecture, or other professional stuff, in real-time.

There are lots who, in time-zones opposite mine, are working out whether they should, or should not, go out for Friday night cocktails with colleagues, or go home to families.

There are none at all who are process workers, or, the new term of today, task workers.

This makes me wonder: am I particularly discriminatory in who is in my list of people I follow? Or is something else at play here?

I then log into my newsreader, latch onto a presentation of technology trends, and come across the quote “In the next 10 years, everyone except task workers will be equipped with a notebook, which they will probably provide for themselves. Task workers will have fixed location PCs, stripped down to be optimised for the task at hand”.

It makes me realise something: practically everything we do today in tech is optimised for the knowledge worker. Task workers are getting shut out.

In the Department, we worry about Digital Inclusion a lot. There are many people who don’t have access to computers and the internet, so providing services to them online is difficult. The Digital Divide can be very real.

But what about the new divide? On the one hand, the whole tech industry is occupying itself in making knowledge workers more productive, more able to promote themselves, and more able to access the information and data that will make them successful. The best of them are self publishing constantly. They’re on twitter, and they have personal brands. Their future is their network.

On the other, though, there are the task workers. For task workers the normal approach is to take radical steps to make sure they can’t participate in the conversation by turning off their tools at work. Monitor their working patterns to get the maximum number of work units out of them in a given time, making sure the cost to serve are as low as possible! Deny them every opportunity to be digitally engaged, to build their own brands during the working week.

If they want to do that, they can do it on their own time, managers reason. Of course, that’s all very well when most of the influentials they might choose to connect with are at home or in bed.

Here is the problem I see. By making sure that task workers don’t have the same access to resources as knowledge workers, we ensure that they will stay task workers forever. It is a new class system that is only marginally more acceptable than the one we already worry about with the Digital Divide.

I mean, everyone knows that the best jobs go to those that know how to network into them, or have sufficient profiles they get noticed independently of their network.

The thing is, I’m not even sure how you would go about fixing this. Its not enough to say that our task workers need better training, when they aren’t allowed the the liberty to grow and flourish because of the press of work. And, on the other hand, I can’t see a solution which lets the cost of service rise all that dramatically either because of “declining productivity”.

I think there is indeed a new digital divide, and it is not one of the have-technology versus the have-nots. Its worse than that. Its the divide about those who are allowed to use it and those who aren’t.

Everything for nothing part 2

I seemed to have caused some heat a few days ago when I suggested the future of corporate IT was “everything for nothing”. My point was that commoditisation of technology inputs would reduce their price to a point where they would, effectively, be “too cheap to meter”.

Since then, many people have written to me privately saying they “don’t get” the argument I’m making, though most have been polite enough to stop short of telling me I’m wrong.

So I thought I’d better explain myself a bit better, perhaps with the aid of some of the public comments on this blog.

Let me start with the basic refutation of free from Anon, who reduces the argument to economics:

…until food, clothing and shelter are free how people who make the free stuff for others to consume can make a living. Nothing is free to make for others to use. The Internet is not 100% free as someone needs to be paid to keep it up and running and they use this payment to buy food, clothing and shelter.

OK, so I admit at this point some dramatic licence when describing the price as “nothing”. Quite clearly, someone is going to pay for stuff, particularly the stuff that uses atoms. Perhaps I’d have been better off using the “too cheap to meter” phrase instead.

Now this is a world we’re already in. I buy an internet connection today, and pay about ten pounds a month. Every year or two, the width of my pipe has doubled without much in the way of a price increase. The trend is obvious, and is the same for the computers I’m using, and everything else in my life that depends on IT. My bandwidth, anyway, is too cheap to meter. So is all the rest of the technology around me.

I mean, there is a CPU in my light switch now. It knows how to do the dimming and switch-on things when I point a remote at it. Those are cycles that are too cheap to meter.

But Thomas Barker, regular commenter here says this:

Focusing on CPU cycles is a red herring. They aren't the bottle-neck in business systems. Most systems spend all their time on I/O, so if anything, you'd expect massive consolidation *within* datacentres to economise on disk activity and storage. Not processing being dynamically relocated across continents. The bandwidth to push the data around is more expensive. CPUs are cheap.

Now, this may be true today. But the inexorable price decline in bandwidth on public networks is irrefutable. Its easy to see when bandwidth will be cheaper than cycles.

Anyway, Thomas has missed the point, I think, when it comes to cycles. Its not the chips which are going to be expensive, its the power. There is going to be an energy shock sooner or later, just like the oil shock on 1973. That had the result of hugely inflating the price of crude, with the result that everyone suddenly had to be concerned about fuel efficiency.

It is not hard to imagine a carbon tax on datacentres in the next decade. What would that do to the price of your processing?

Most countries are inefficient producers of cycles. When you can’t get enough power into your datacentre no matter what you do, you’re going to be forced into running your workloads virtually elsewhere. I’ll not make any predictions about storage, except to say that if you have virtual workloads moving around, I’d expect the storage to move with it. Thomas correctly identifies that having the data with the workload is usually a good thing.

But on to the desktop. Internally, I got an email from someone that reminded me that “the cost of a desktop isn’t the hardware, its the support to make it all go”. I paraphrase, but the point, really, was that bodies have to sit around to fix things that stop working.

The fact of that matter, though, is that there is a growing population of people in enterprises who are able to fix things themselves, and who, actually, have better skills at doing so than the corporate helpdesk. When you let them get on with managing their own tools, they’ll be much more productive that that big lumbering corporate helpdesk would have let them be.

That’s not everyone, today. But it is a growing body of people, and sooner or later, its going to be a majority.

I want to close with another point from Thomas’s comment:

As for people hacking their own business programs, it can help, it is how most useful things start, but scaling, or integrating, stuff like that... eeek!

I know you all know my argument here is going to be obvious: Open Source does all of these things perfectly well. Software that evolves from the bottom up works, even in a business context. Having your end users do it rather than coders is a question of waiting for the right tools, not any lack of motivation or capability.

I cannot imagine that end-user computing tools a decade from now won’t routinely be capable of doing big systems.

I have one final point to make. Most of the communication I got on this post came from IT professionals, all of whom said that none of this could happen for various reasons. The discussion I got from non-IT colleagues, though, was along the lines of “but isn’t this obvious?”

What conclusions would you draw from that? Here are mine: big IT will be over in the next decade or so, and all those professionals who manage the commodity inputs had better get themselves up the foodchain quick smart. Those that fail to recognise that they’re not that special any more will be out.

And if you sell the commodity inputs, be prepared for your nice premiums to crash. Our needs aren’t so special that you can charge us over the odds. You too, will be out unless you can dream up something that makes you special again.

Everything for nothing

I was once in Egypt, and got harangued by all these street vendors selling stuff. “Everything for nothing!” one cried, in an attempt to get me to approach his stall. Highly humorous, and I laughed with the vendor and bought something I-don’t-even-know-what-it-is just because I liked his approach

“Everything for nothing” is clearly a joke in the real world of atoms, but it isn’t in the IT world of bits.  Sooner or later, all the commodity technology stuff we use is going to be free, or so nearly so it won’t matter.

The question going through my brain now, though, is whether the enterprise IT folk really believe it.

Most people I know believe their organisations are so special, so unique, that they can’t rely on free stuff. No, they have to have proprietary systems, dedicated networks, and piles and piles of hardware devoted to their super-special workloads.

But in the next decade or so, I can’t see why you would build a private corporate network at all. The internet will be way cheaper and more reliable as well as ubiquitous. Why not just use that instead? Oh, I know all the network specialists will be going on right now about latency blah blah, reliability more blah, and oh yes, security big blah blah blah.

These are all problems which future technology generations will resolve. Its impossible to imagine, for example, that applications won’t protect their own data and users robustly rather than relying on the network to do it for them. They’ll need to do so, because they won’t be able to predict what network they’ll be running on.

Why do I think that? Because they’ll be running in virtualised systems, on hardware that won’t belong to anyone that’s vetted them in advance. I’m seeing that as pretty much inevitable, really. The thing is, datacentres are such hungry beasts, gobbling up all that power and wasting most of it to do cooling. I think it will take one small island nation to drown - which could happen in the next decade, I believe - before real economic measures will be taken to expose the costs of all these cycles in countries not well suited to producing cycles.

That’s every country, by the way, that doesn’t have renewable energy supplying most of its needs and lacking environments where nature can cool the servers rather than aircon.

Countries well suited to cycle production will export them, the price will fluctuate with supply and demand, and large organisations will secure compute capacity on a futures exchange to guarantee their future costs.  As more countries become net exporters of cycles, and they get better at producing those cycles for less money, the cost of compute for corporations will tend towards nothing.

So organisations will be out of the network business, and they’ll be out of the datacentre business, and this will happen whether their IT folk like it or not. Its hard to justify any other  position when the competition is free and the CIO is expected to produce year on year cost reductions.

By the way, if that continues - the cost reductions I mean - the CIO will be needing to get to a price of nothing way sooner than a decade.

But I digress, because there are other parts of the IT estate that are certainly not free right now. What about all those end user devices that employees have to have, for example?

Well, consumerisation is well and truly king these days, and those employees will be bringing their own devices and using them. Walk around your staff and count how many people have their own laptops at work besides the one the IT folk have issued. You’ll be surprised at the percentage.What most people have at home is better than what they have at work.

If there is a way to use their at home-better stuff at work, employees will find it. Whether or not it is sanctioned.

Organisations are going to get this soon, and make it easier for this to happen. Then we’ll be seeing allowances being paid to employees to help them get the technology they want, and finally, employees will just be expected to show up with their own stuff if they want to work at all.

Tradesmen and women have been in this world for some time. They bring their own tools. Knowledge workers are about to be doing the same.

Anyway, this consumerisation is already happening in some organisations. And for those where it isn’t, it is happening underground, From a corporate perspective then, the desktop estate is going to be practically free.

What’s left?

Oh yes development. The biggest cost of any IT project. The people stuff, the code writing and so forth. Well, clearly the costs of that are in decline as well, driven mainly by the ease one can now contract labour offshore. That’s not free though.

Free development comes from your employees at the edge of organisations, however. Just as they’ll bring their own tools to work to get the job done, they’ll make new tools to help themselves get more productive. They’ll share their tools, and sooner or later you have pretty big systems that do real work.

Now, these systems may evolved without a substantive design, but if they do the job, does it really matter? I can assure you it won’t matter to the people that are doing the real work, only to the IT people whose jobs evolving systems displaces.

What’s left? Oh. Nothing.

Which brings me back to my initial question. If all this comes to pass - and it seems to me there’s every economic indication that it will - the vision needs to be sketched out now.

Planning to do more of the same for the next decade isn’t going to cut it, because that stuff is going to be over. Technological objections won’t fly, because, considering the historical pace of improvement, can anyone really think progress is going to stop in the next 10 years?

The problem here is not one of technology. It is of planners that won’t plan for anything they can’t see and touch right now. My argument is that what we need is a bit of faith in IT. Faith which is completely justified, given the track record, by the way.

We also need some acceptance of the fact that if your solution costs more than nothing, your customers will find a solution that does cost nothing. The next decade will truly bring “everything for nothing”, but not unless we get cracking now.

Or, more particularly, not unless the IT folk get cracking now. If they fail to do so, the only thing that will be free is the headcount they used to occupy before free displaced them.

The two prices of everything

The last few days in the gym, I've been listening to Chris Anderson's Free on my iPhone. Most people will likely be familiar with the work of Chris, who also wrote The Long Tail. Free is available free for download from iTunes.

Anyway, so I've been listening to this book, and a key insight jumps out at me: there are only two prices worth considering for any product or service - something or nothing.

When you charge a price, even 1p, the behaviour of a consumer is different from what you get when the product is free. On the other hand, when you charge 5p, the behaviour isn't that different from 1p. The behaviour then tends towards classical equilibrium depending on price elasticity of the consumer as the price goes up.

Free, on the other hand, is a singularity. You get behaviours that you can't get in any other way, and it isn't always excess consumption.

The insight that there are only two prices - not an infinite range - is obvious in retrospect. I don't know why I didn't realise it for myself.

The connected versus the not

I’ve found there are two types of people in organisations. Firstly, there are those who are connected and therefore have a bit of a clue what is going on. And secondly, there are those who aren’t, who parrot what they’ve heard from the connected.

Although this stratification seems to work across interest-boundaries, it seems most pronounced for technologists. I suppose that’s because things tend to move so fast in that industry.

Anyway, the connected always have a good grasp on the latest trends, the latest thinking, and the latest work going on in their specific area. They get so up to date because they have built networks of like-minded people with whom they are constantly in touch. This network acts like a big net, filtering an ocean of data and providing them with highly targeted, relevant items for absorption.

Building such a network is a big time commitment, because you have to contribute to the network as well as suck from it. Then, too, there is the initial effort of building it in the first place, and the time spent keeping it active after. For technologists, this tends to manifest itself in constant communication (probably on multiple devices), membership in multiple social networks, and never-ending content-creation using, for example, blogs and twitter.

When you work with the connected in your particular interest area, there is almost never any need to explain fundamentals, and its reasonable to assume that everyone will know everything that’s current at present. Consequently, discussion immediately moves to applications, to what can be done with the current state of the art.

When dealing with the connected, things just happen more quickly. They need to, because with all that connection going on, the pace of change is fast, fast, fast.

I’d contrast that experience with what you get when you involve someone who doesn’t do connection. These are people locked firmly in the dark ages of the spoon-fed. They digest analyst reports, use Google to read what companies and (sometimes) other thought leaders have said, and, based on this, will likely parrot some amalgamated view of the current state of play. You get a synthesis of what everyone else was thinking yesterday.

You almost never get originality from those without connection. They don’t have time you see, to be up to date enough to be original.

Now, of course, there is a finite upper limit to how much of this connecting stuff you can do before you have no time for anything else, such as your actual job. Or your home life.  I’ve previously written about this, actually, when I posted on declining returns in social media.

But my frustration comes when you have senior people, whose jobs it is to know the current state of play, who fail to invest some of their time in getting right at the front and centre of the current state of the art. For example, I hate it when someone puts a Gartner report in front of me and says “this is what we should do now”.

What would Gartner (or any analysts firm, to be fair) know anyway? Their analysts rarely have the kinds of real world experience that comes from recent doing. Of course, if what you want is reporting of what other people are doing, by all means call an analyst. But wouldn’t it be better to have the leading players in your network in the first place so you can just ask direct?

No, give me a strategist, or an innovator, or an architect that’s connected any day. Sometimes, you don’t get the safe answer when you ask the question, but what you do get is original thinking.

And we should all be clear about this: anyone can do research. What commands a premium these days is the quality of your original output. Research, and any one of the thousands of other commodity tasks routinely done by those without connection, can almost always be done cheaper and quicker by someone else.

End user computing

If you give a large enough end-user community a tool, sooner or later, it is going to get used. Even if you don’t tell them you’ve given it to them.

In so many large organisations, this has resulted in a very large number – thousands upon thousands in some cases – of specialised little applications that have been built by users for themselves. They might not be very complicated, or do all that much, but they make the job easier. The best of them get shared around, often spreading virally.

The big IT reaction to this, often, is that all this “unauthorised” development is going on which must be contained, controlled, and centralised. Big IT, you see, thinks any system not under its control must be inherently risky. They worry about the potential risks to data, to security, and to the integrity of their business processes. They see end user computing as a problem that must be managed into elimination.

I have a different view. I see it as a huge opportunity. All these employees working around the clock building free IT systems to do their jobs better. Yes, they may not be as robust as the massive IT systems more normally employed, but the fact is they are often good enough. End User Computing, in other words, shifts the burden of systematisation away from the centre and out to the edge where it belongs.

Moving design and implementation tasks away from the centre to the edge is something I’ve talked about before. This is what you do whenever you employ crowds of people and hope you get emergent behaviour.

Crowds have been shown to produce very big, important outcomes without much in the way of centralised control. Linux is a great example. So are the various BarCamp type conferences that have been going on around the world. T-Shirt designs. Encyclopaedias.

Distributing work to the edge and waiting for big outcomes to emerge works. And that’s the real reason to do end-user-computing. It is the opportunity to do harness the power of distributed design and implementation to do far more than you could from the centre.

My observation is that a particular piece of functionality in an EUC environment is quite like social media. It is either popular, in which case it will be used by greater and greater numbers of people, or it is not, in which case it dies.

Now, you may initially get 10 different ways to create a parking space booking tool, but sooner or later, one will emerge which is better than all the others. It swiftly becomes the “one true way” to do parking booking and all the others get dropped by their authors as their audiences dissolve. The best tool “emerges” by itself without anything much in the way of design, other than that dictated by satisfying the greatest number of users.

That’s quite different to the dictates of big IT,which does development at the centre, of course. In that case, what you’re getting is a system that satisfies the needs of system owners, which may be important, but don’t represent  the whole picture. Especially if those system owners are remote from the front line of the business problem they are solving, which is often the case.

End user computing is a big strategic play, actually. It may not be ready for big system prime time right now, but the writing is on the wall. Sooner or later, I believe, all major systems development will be distributed to the edge and will emerge without much in the way of centralised design. People will work with people to build tools to make their jobs easier, and in so doing, will create a framework that helps everyone else.

In the meantime, those entrusted with managing Big IT have a challenge on their hands, because EUC is actually a disruptive innovation. It enables individuals to build systems which are too small for Big IT to bother about initially, which quickly become big enough to be threatening to Big IT the more they are used. The natural reaction – completely understandable - is to try to kill them off. Doing anything truly new always has risks and consequences, and IT people are trained early to take as few as possible.

The big challenge here is to find those IT managers who can read the writing on the wall, and nurture the nascent EUC capability in their organisations. The ones that can see the advantage, and make a measured judgement on the actual level of risk. The ones, actually, that will support emergence as the key principal that makes their IT organisations more, rather than less valuable to their business colleagues.

They will not have an easy time of it though. Big shifts in the dynamics of the ways things are done are never comfortable.

But, as in so many other fields that have already been through such technology driven change, there will be winners and losers. The winners are those invariably who spot the trend and get on the bandwagon early. Even if getting on it initially is painful and results in a few cuts and bruises.