X vs. Y

I came across the following link, and while it's on a pro-Apple site it makes a pretty good point about IT debates in general.

http://www.tuaw.com/2014/03/12/why-the-mac-vs-pc-marketshare-debate-is-outdated/

Most of my IT career has been spent supporting Apple products - let's say 18 or the past 20 years. I got tired of the Mac v. PC debate after, oh, year 2. After that it was more of a parlour game, till, say, year 6. After that - really, I have better things to do with my time that argue que es mas macho, Apple or Microsoft, Macintosh or Windows.

Most products have certain strengths and weaknesses; that's how they compete. There are certain things they have to be able to do - but how well, how interoperable they are, what sort of network effects they burnish - all competition. In my current role, I see this playing out against numerous requirements:

Lync v. Jabber
Jive v. Sharepoint
iOS v. Android
Mozy v. CrahsPlan
Cloud v. On-premise

Even outside IT, you'll find people arguing Ford v. Chevy, stick v. automatic, hybrids v. SUV maybe. Do we still even have SUVs?

Putting on my MBA hat, all we should care about is how much does it cost and what service am  getting out of it. Most large organizations have multiple platforms, and supporting them all raises costs. Yet, to drop a platform may mean shuttering a process or service that someone, somewhere, considers to be vital.

Information Technology: Who is the Customer?

If you have ever worked for a large company, you probably fall into one of two sides to the following scenario: you are either a user of Information Technology (IT) services, or an administrator. You're either powerless, or all-powerful.

With the consumerization of IT, that model has begun to change. The "users" consume IT services in their personal lives, and have questioned why IT can't provide better service. Furthermore they react to IT the way they might against a service monopoly or duopoly, and jump at any chance to subvert or work around the system.

Meanwhile, IT professionals have been faced with fewer resources, with various functions outsourced, offshore, and with few dollars all around, all while being told to treat "users" as "customers", to hear the "voice of the customer", and be more "responsive" to "customer needs".

This begets the question: who is the customer?

Typically, in any business, the customer is the one who pays the bills. You order a sandwich, you're the customer. You buy a car, you're the customer. Being a customer is great in service economies, where firms compete on who can provide the best service. The customer is King (or Queen).

However, in a large company, the consumer of these services is not necessarily the customer. Services are provided to these consumers in order for them to perform their jobs. Services such as email, network access, and software distribution are consumed by employees but ultimately paid for by the company - which in turn ultimately means the shareholders.

Whether publicly or privately held, a company exists to increase shareholder value (more broadly stakeholders, if you lean European).

Why is this an important distinction? The consumers of IT and the customers of IT amy conflict, or have different priorities. Often this results in IT getting caught in the middle, enforcing the requirements of one at the expense of the other. I'll give two examples.

One example would be a group of product developers who need to collaborate with external teams, ether as part of a joint venture or a contractual relationship. The technology consumers want to share files easily, perhaps through a third party cloud solution such as DropBox. However, the customers - the owners - have very clear concerns about intellectual property and other sensitive data being stored, and have explicit policies against storing data on external solutions. The result is additional administrivia for the consumers to work through in order to get their external teams access to commonly shared data. Curse you IT for making life so hard!

Another example would be cost modeling for a product platform - let's say some sort of database the company will sell access to. This will be a revenue-generating product. A hosting center offers a solution for $3,000 a year. The internal IT group, after months of review, says they can do it for $24,000 a year. On that basis clearly the first option is the better one, but are these apples-to-apples comparisons? The consumers are the only ones who see both offerings, and the first excludes things they can do without - backups, monitoring solutions, and so on. The customer - the owners - do not want any service outages for this product. Without these additional services, any outage could go on for hours, even days.

The customer model in IT is similar to the insurance industry: the consumer of services does not pay for them, or pays for them indirectly. I is easy to ask for better service when it isn't coming out of your pocket. It's also easy to be led astray by lower prices that do not offer the same level of service. Technology aside, I expect this will be the next transformation of IT: how to clarify costs and facilitate communication between the consumers and the customers of services.

Months Later

How did a year and a half go by since my last post? I chalk it up to a slew of developments at work, and to being pretty well out of business school. However, after months of tumult (I would say, tumultuous doldrums, ie hurry up and wait), I figure it's time to re-start this blog to talk about some of he business problems I'm confronted with these days.

First, to set the scene: In 2012, my employer opted to outsource nearly all of its IT engineering and operations. About 90% of my colleagues were given (and took) the option to continue in their roles under the outsource provider; a smaller number of us were retained within the new IT organizations within the companies.

Second, the Education division was going to be divested from the larger company, either on its own or sold to another party. Ultimately, McGraw Hill Education (MHE) was sold to a private equity firm in 2013, and it is with MHE that I now ply my trade.

Most of 2013 and 2014 have been and continue to be filled with divestiture and re-organization: spinning work off to the new provider, and separating our infrastructure from the former parent company. I've led efforts in both tracks for endpoint computing, which is essentially all workstations, mobile devices, and the services to support them. It's plumbing, but vital plumbing.

So what are this year's challenges:

Create an an IT support organization that provides forward guidance on emerging technologies as well as support for existing technologies.

Finish the creation and migration of endpoint services for a global enterprise of 6000+ employees and contractors, without disrupting existing services.

That's it. these are broad buckets, and the details will follow - to list them all now would beggar anyone's attention span. Some details I'll have to be coy about, but the larger processes I expect will be lessons applicable anywhere.

Bring Your Own Device

This article breaks down a lot of the issues with BYOD - Bring Your own Device.

If you haven't heard of this, you will. It's the policy of allowing (or requiring) employees to bring their own computing or messaging device for use at work. Whether it's an iPhone, or  Mabook Air, or their Dell laptop from home, it's a bit of a craze, one that attempts to capitalize on the consumerization of IT.

It's not a bad idea, and one I generally favor, but there are a lot of non-technology caveats. Who is responsible for the device, or the data on it? For securing it? Does BYOD mean your employees are always on the clock? How does it affect collective bargaining agreements?

For more on this topic, read the article at JD Supra.


 http://www.jdsupra.com/post/documentViewer.aspx?fid=b270f08b-f0e7-4458-89e3-72d6aef750bb&utm_source=JFB&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=businesslaw

A Year

Crikey. It's been a year since I graduated, and still no MBA-class job.

It's disappointing. It's mildly surprising. I'm glad I have a job, but even that is one that I need to get away from. My company is splitting in half, and while there is a lot of talk about opportunities ahead and each side of the split, it's such a prolonged process that it's not really worth counting on.

I did interview with some consulting firms last fall, but didn't make the cut. One in particular, I thought I had in the bag. Well, actually I didn't think that. I was afraid to think that, but five interviews in seven weeks made me think I had a shot.

Since then, I've fallen back to pursuing technical jobs. BA roles, PM roles, even pure engineering roles. I can't complain, but it's telling that there is a stronger market for computer engineers than, say, bond or equity valuations.

Later

Three months on, and where am I at?

We continue to consolidate changes where I work. That translates into multiple openings in my group and at the segment level. A couple of them I even have a shot at.

I've been networking as well. As people leave and come in, hopefully I get some new opportunities.

Meantime, the recent Market "correction" (really? seems a bit more) has been fascinating to watch in the wake of S&P's downgrade of the US credit rating. What's maddening is to watch the market's movements as a direct response to the downgrade, when in fact most of it is being driven by the Eurozone's inability to adequately restructure Greece and other distressed sovereign debts. Furthermore, the downgrade isn't based on Congress having increased the debt ceiling; far from it, the downgrade is based on the fact that an influential group of congressional leaders openly stated that default on our debts was an option they were willing to accede to rather than come to an agreement over spending.

When you tell people upfront that you're willing to not pay your debts, they will lower your credit rating. it's that simple.

Globalization

I was on the train early this morning with a friend from out of town. She was here for my convocation ceremony, and we got to talking about the frequent mention of globalization. There was a lot of talk about being a global school, preparing for global leaders in a global community fully globalized global global global. I was surprised when she expressed wariness.

I asked her what her concerns were, and as she described them, along with anecdotes about people she knows, it became clear that she equates globalization with offshoring - jobs leaving the country. She isn't ignorant, but she didn't mention new markets, growing a market, or expanding wealth through trade.

We talked some more, and exchanged ideas. I tend to focus on markets due to my degree, and in particular, the idea that overall job growth can be achieved through trade. She has her doubts. "What about factory workers, in their fifties, really, how retrainable are they?"

To that point, I said it was the role of education to prepare people to continue learning. It does know good to learn a trade and just work that trade for life. People have to know how to learn. Either their trades will change so much that they are unrecognizable, or they will switch trades.

For me, it was a glimpse of the fears so many people have. I've generally always supported globalization. I haven't understood fully why people fear it. Yes, it is disruptive, but it is for the greater good. I believe so, anyway.