Slashdot Mirror
So, HP, What Exactly Are You Trying To Sell Us?
billtom writes "There's an article over at c|net news where the normally fawning technology business press actually takes an HP VP to task for the extremely vague statements that usually surround enterprise software 'products.' With some gems like 'That could be boilerplate applying to any company,' and 'But again, how does that differ from what's been around?' and 'But hasn't that always been the goal?'" I'd like to see Charles Cooper interview whoever came up with .Net, too.
I think the companies that bought into the Internet era blitz in the 90's, all thought there was a magic bullet that could rocket them to the future. The problem is, that they, like everyone else, were duped into buying hype that was based around nothing more than shallow promises of a better today.
The jargon coming from HP, is to try and market to company types with buying power, to give them a new slogan or saying that could be used to grab onto and use in the office, so that they don't have to do any work.
Scott Adams' Dilbert cartoon captures the reality of what's going on today. Executives would rather appear to be working, than actually working, so they invent new descriptions of what they are doing that sound really busy!
I think the best slogan is hard work, but nobody likes hard work, unless someone else is doing it.
From the article: "I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business."
Translation: We know your business operates in something called time. Time is money. We want money, so therefore we will trade you your own time for money. We accomplish this by selling you your own time back, but we change it to something called real-time. Or ideally I have no idea what those geeks in research have come up with and it's not my job to know, so I'll just make something up and hope you bite. Besides, none of the marketing based people will understand what they came up with anyway, so who cares?
Every software company is guilty of this. A program that does general ledger and billing sounds much sexier when called a "best-of-breed integrated calculation solution, designed to drive your business into the 21st century and beyond." And a server-monitoring tool sounds better when you call it a "proactive fault-finding and troubleshooting environment, making your data center fully autonomic and self-healing."
It's kind of wierd for the press to actually start asking hard questions. Think tanks like Gartner et al live and die by techno-hype. The latest thing going around in CIO-land is Utility Computing, so we'll see what comes of that.
Q: Stripped of all the jargon and market-speak, can you succinctly define what Adaptive Enterprise is supposed to be about?
A: We proudly adapt to the needs of our enterprise: namely, the CEO, the CIO, and our board members. Screw the rest of the employees and the customers. Aside from that, we really have no idea what the heck we're talking about. We need to make up big words in long sententces to justify our existence in the company. This is the same mindset that allowed us to have fantastic ideas like merging with Compaq, laying off thousands of employees, while giving Capellas the goodbye gift that one can only dream about.
Q: That could be boilerplate applying to any company. What's the special sauce?
A: The special sauce is no different than what you find in Burger King. We sit around all day long whacking off in an effort to come up with this sh--.
Q: Can't you get that by going to any reputable company out there? Sun, IBM--that's what they're about. Am I missing something here?
A: Nope. They're all the same formula. Same sauce. Right down to the last drop.
Disclaimer: I was recently laid off as my position was outsourced to HP.
First, I don't think that the VP ever really answered the questions that were asked. I think the whole point behind trying to sell the Adaptive Enterprise is that it is not something you can clearly define. I'd hate to actually do contract negotiations with them as I'm sure both parties will have different thoughts on what is covered under HP services.
The whole line about being able to dynamically restructure your IT resources to me means HP can help you figure out how to axe 1/3rd of your workforce and still "adapt" to your business needs. As the interviewer pointed out, aligning IT with your business it nothing new. Hiring outside consultants to help do it is nothing new.
It begs the question, what is new about adaptive enterprise? Answer: Nothing. I don't see any proof that it is anything more than another marketing strategy designed to sell billable hours and support/consulting contracts.
I hate to spring to the defense of Big Corporations, but it's really not that hard to interpret Marketsp'aek positively:
:)
"I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business."
My translation: AE is (an expensive product which helps companies setup) a business strategy under which trends trigger actions. The use of 'business strategy' sounds meaningless, but it's actually two words which imply two paragraphs. 'Strategy' in this case is an overloaded term referring to a collection of tools, policies, and proceedures.
The use of 'real time' in business means something very different from its meaning in computer science. It means 'today' instead of 'eventually'. I work for a large media company with an animal for a mascot, and it takes us years to respond to changes in the marketplace. Most of our innertia is rooted in size, conservative management, and fear of risk. However, if we had a system of automation which identified potentially interesting changes in the marketplace, especially in merchandising, it could save us a lot of money.
For example, how much should we invest in online sales, and how much in more traditional sales? We make money from both, now, so it's a very serious question. A missed sale is a lost sale, but there's no point in trying to extract blood from a turnip. We have people who try to figure out where the tastiest blood is, but they are limited by their tools and proceedures. This AE might actually be just the thing they need.
I don't know if AE is any good, or if it's what it claims to be, but I do know that marketing speak CAN have a real meaning in a marketing context. When we geeks ridicule the suits for talking gibberish, it's no better than when they ridicule us for our acronyms, l33t, tech talk and other not-quite-english that we use. "We aggregate packet-based transactions, over-selling a large pipe to small nodes who could collectively saturate that pipe, but in practice don't" would mean nothing to a marketing type, but to an ISP sysadmin it's her raison d'etre.
If we hope to make any progress in the things that really matter (digital freedom), we need to learn to communicate with these people. Their protocols may be bad, but it works for them, and marketing types don't have firmware upgrades, so we need to learn to speak their protocols if we hope to route any traffic through them, or to comandeer them for our noble purposes.