My G+ Profile
« February 24, 2003 | Main | February 26, 2003 »
February 25, 2003
HB 240 Update
HB 240 passed the house today 68 to 1! I'm very surprised. Many old hands thought this was going to be an uphill battle. Its not over yet; there's still the Senate and then the Governor. The word is that Sen. Valentine is the lead in the Senate and seems positive and supportive, after a number of meetings. The Governor's office has received more email on this one bill than any of the others. Send mail, faxes, and emails to your senator. And, of course, the Governor's office.
09:37 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Automation as a Competitive Advantage
I spent the last two days with a working group of people from a number of companies looking to create a product (company) that provides more automation for enterprise application integration and the programming tasks associated with it. The great paradox of automation is that it leads to productivity gains and at the same time also increases quality because of greater repeatability. This has been and will continue to be a bitter pill for IT employees to swallow.
In that sense, they're no different than workers in other industries. The automobile workers resisted automation with everything they had until the Japanese, with a heavy dose of the very thing they were fighting, started to close down their plants. Then they realized that it was a choice between automation or not having an automobile industry in the US. The Japanese used our reluctance to automate as a competitive advantage. Automation gave them productivity, but the real gain was in the quality of their product---a property largely enabled because automation created repeatable processes.
Probably the best instance of this phenomenon in IT is desktop management. It won't come as any surprise to regular readers of this blog to know that I'm a big fan of desktop management in the enterprise. The promises of desktop management are the same as EAI automation: better productivity (read "reduced costs") and increased quality. The pushback that I always got in the workplace was IT workers whispering to anyone who would listen "sure, it might costs less, but you'll never get good service." In fact, every automation example you can find shows that, properly implemented, automation leads to better quality.
To get a little more specific, I estimate that the State of Utah could save $10-20 million per year through desktop management and other reforms in the way IT is managed in the state. That's significant money. I don't espouse making the changes and then hoping the savings arrive, rather the State ought to do a third party study of how IT is organized and how service is delivered. Unfortunately, employees are so scared of the automation and what it might mean to them that they have poisoned any discussion of automation with red herring arguments about other issues. I challenge the legislature to appropriate some money for a study by a reputable group and then follow their advice. You owe it to the taxpayers of the State.
What does this mean to your business? Competitive advantage doesn't usually follow from something that anyone can go out and buy. You can get some advantage in the short term (3-5 years) however, if your enterprise is able to make the move to automation in IT early while your competitors flounder in self-doubt and angst.
06:23 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Scary
My computer scared me this morning. As I walked in my office, James Taylor suddenly started singing "Walking Man."
08:24 AM | Recommend This | Print This
eBusiness Trend Keywords
I've been thinking about what I'm going to say tomorrow in my lectures at the Rollins Center for eBusiness. My original working title was "Life as a CIO" but that didn't really capture what I wanted to say. I've put a talk together that talks about current hotspots (as I see them) in information technology and their impact on the enterprise. Here are the things I'm going to mention. Any that I'm forgetting?
- Blogging
- Instant messaging
- Digital identity
- Wireless connectivity
- Web Services and XML
- IT Hierarchy of Needs
- Virtual Networks of Demand
The idea of the talk is to not simply go over a list of cool things in IT but to talk about how these trends are all related. These trends can be described by some non-empty subset of the following keywords:
- Personalized
- Peer-based
- Decentralized
- Collaborative
- Connected
Any suggestions on other important keywords to describe current important trends in IT and eBusiness?