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Technology Paradise Lost
The dust cover blurb summarizes Keller's position: "...American corporations let IT grow until it reached one half of all corporate capital spending by the year 2000. Now, chastened by their spending failures, IT managers are converging on a new consensus: to exploit IT competitively they must use their smarts over big money. ... Counterintuitively, companies that spend less in order to get more from information technology will likely be the big winners." That's quite a claim, and a thorough reading of the book finds that Keller only supports half of that thesis.
The thought is reiterated early in the book: "...companies can move ahead over the next few years without large increases in their IT budgets. The only thing a company needs is a different perspective." (page xii). That prescription sounds suspiciously similar to the oversimplistic advice found in positive thinking self-help books. Keller does not yet make explicit what the different perspective will do for business. Perhaps it should be taken at face value, in that it will allow companies to move ahead without increasing their IT budgets. But is continued progress without budget increases such a massive gain? More significantly, how does that address the larger issues of failed IT projects, to which he alludes earlier? In my opinion, that issue is of much greater consequence.
Keller correctly points to some of the reasons why the heady e-commerce binges are not about to return: increasing scrutiny of IT budgets, greater demand for return on investment (ROI), cheaper and simpler solutions, offshoring of software development, lower wages to American programmers, abandonment of failing projects, Internet-based architecture, and adoption of open source software (OSS), such as Linux. Addressing these changes at a more strategic level, Keller notes that, "After years of questionable returns, cost overruns, and increased complexity, companies are pushing financial rigor to IT groups." (page 6).
The book's first seven chapters discuss the primary factors in leading to reduced IT expenditures, at least within the U.S. business community. But the last four chapters go over previous ground, with more variations on the theme of reduced IT spending, interspersed with several examples from various corporations. The reader may get the sense that not much new information or recommendations are being offered, but instead that these four chapters are serving as filler, to beef up the size of the book. Otherwise, it would be more obvious that the book's usable contents could be boiled down into one meaty article.
Keller's primary thesis, that American IT could in the future produce more returns for less investment, has two primary components. The near-term and likely long-term trend for declining corporate spending on IT, is well established in his book. In fact, one could argue that reduced IT spending is not something that American companies will adopt by choice, but instead will be forced upon them due to deflationary pressures, increased costs for natural resources, and declining ability to pass along cost increases to U.S. consumers falling further behind financially. But the flip side of his thesis, that companies will get even more results despite spending less money, is not nearly as well substantiated. Not a single one of the chapters in the book is devoted to demonstrating that this is happening, or will happen. Companies may be able to maintain current levels of service despite reduced funding; but greater results per dollar invested (i.e., efficiency) does not imply greater results on an absolute basis. As such, Keller's big claim noted earlier, is only half fulfilled.
The critical questions -- concerning the proper role and funding of IT -- are presented in the book couched in the language used by high-level business managers, who speak in vague terms about "technology" and "infrastructure," and yet have little or no real understanding of how it truly works, having spent their earlier years pursuing MBAs rather than programming computers. It could be argued that such general terminology must necessarily be used when discussing information technology among business managers. That may be true, but it does not lessen the dangers of fuzzy thinking and overly broad conclusions found in Keller's book and in the typical articles discussing IT purpose, strategy, and utilization. In particular, such excessively broad strokes, in my experience, not only mask the ignorance of the IT manager demanding miracles from their staff, but invariably increases the odds that upper management will be seduced by the handwaving consulting firms -- and thus fall prey to the mistakes delineated by Keller.
Of all the inapt analogies in the book, its title is perhaps the most egregious. Alluding to John Milton's famous narrative poem, "technology paradise lost" implies that there was a time when IT resource usage was idyllic, if not perfect. Yet by Keller's own account, the misspending and failed projects, followed by financial discipline imposed by the outside world, are anything but heaven-sent. One cannot lose what has never been found.
Weighing in at 243 pages, Technology Paradise Lost is a quicker read than many other business books. Part of that is due to the unfortunate repetition of a few core ideas. Fortunately, the book has just enough tables, charts, and breakouts, to add some visual variety to the text.
The book benefits from the author's clear writing style, no doubt honed from over two decades of creating articles, documents, and presentations intended for business managers. Keller does a solid job of utilizing real world statistics and examples to back up his assessments.
Despite the repetition, sloppy analogies, and business-speak generality, Technology Paradise Lost offers a valid discussion of changes currently being experienced by the American IT industry as it grudgingly recovers from the Internet boom and bust. The book may be of value to IT managers who, for whatever reason, are ignorant of the obvious transformations that are taking place. Yet, any IT industry participant who devotes even a modicum of time to monitoring the latest developments and trends, should be well aware of IT budget trimming, offshoring, open source software, and other cost-saving methods. Otherwise, to be so out of touch with reality would be inexcusable. On the other hand, that was one of the primary symptoms before and during the widespread dot-com insanity, and could easily account for any beliefs in its imminent return.
Michael J. Ross is a freelance writer, computer consultant, and the editor of PristinePlanet.com's free newsletter." You can purchase Technology Paradise Lost from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I remember those days - sure it was a time of great promise and flowing capital but the products royally sucked - most didn't live up to the hype and the futurama aura and many a flawed device pissed off customers with the poor service after the sale. Lately, I've been buying a lot of stuff and have had a great success rate, I've been real happy with stuff recently.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
"Yet apparently many believe that the sector will regain its past glory and blistering growth rates." I must say that I can't recall anyone ever intimating that such a thing would happen.
Probably the most obvious way this is reflected in code production is the attention paid to lines of code as a metric of productivity without constraints on how poorly factored the code is.
Good factoring is simply another way of saying "good theorizing". Ockham's Razor works for a lot of reasons and is the basis for the best measure of code quality: algorithmic information which is computer science's Ockham's Razor.
As warned of by Tacitus:
The same goes for scientific theory, business rules and software quality.
Too many cheap programmers spells death -- not life -- for IT.
Seastead this.
Huh? It strikes me as, if anything, utterly obvious.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Perhaps, in your experience, you haven't seen the whole picture. Lots of things IT departments do that seem wasteful actually make sound economic sense.
For instance, it's often better to trash/donate/garage-sale computers once they start to get old than to try to coax them into working for you, since you'll spend more in personnel costs to keep them limping along. It's often better to order new hardware for new services, even if the old hardware could handle them, since that means one service outage won't affect the other. It's often better to spend thousands on off-the-shelf software that mostly meets your needs than months of man-hours developing it in house.
American corporations let IT grow until it reached one half of all corporate capital spending by the year 2000
Remember, that small thing called Y2K? Yeah, companies spent a lot of money, but much of it was directed at fixing Y2K issues and ensuring that all systems were compliant. At least in my company. Maybe smaller companies were fiscally irresponsible, but I think most large corporations have so much bureaucracy that increasing spending for any reason is difficult.
In my IT department, we heard many people leaving and joining startups, buying aeron chairs and having foosball tables in their offices, but those of us who stuck around didn't see any increases in spending.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
I'm not sure why he says that the glorious e-commerce days wont return. Hey - there where no glorious days. Surely, a lot of sites spawned all over the net, hoping to grasp some of those millions just waiting to be earned, but there weren't much actual buying taking place on the net. The e-commerce market is much bigger today than it was then. The ammount of credit card transactions on the net peaked christmas 2004.
In my experience, the only "successful" IT departments I've seen these days are the ones who obey, like good little slaves, the lawyers who actually run the show.
people do
That is why until organizations learn to ignore their big huge engineering-based waterfall processes and start focusing on developing their people both individually and as teams, they will not see any significant improvements in their ability to use IT more effectively. Agile methods are really great because they turn the focus away from the process (use the minimum process that can possibly work), to the people (teamwork, communication, collaboration, mentoring, etc.). That isn't to say that agile methods are easy... far from it. In many cases it takes a huge cultural shift for an organization to adopt agile methods. However, the effort is worth it because suddenly projects that used to take 18 calendar months are being finished in 4 or 6 calendar months... simply by eliminating the worst wastes in the corporate system, amplifying the team's learning, and allowing them to make decisions about how they do their work.
Check out:The Agile Software Manifesto
The Scrum Methodology
And my blog, Agile Advice (couldn't help but put in a little self promotion
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
The tech bubble(s) of the 90s wasn't caused by IT departments. It was caused by venture capitalist, who had major investments in tech companies, bullshitting every other company CxO in the world into thinking they too had to have an "Internet Strategy" or that they had to buy into the latest and greatest thingamabob or they would go the way of the dinosaurs. Then after they got other suckers to buy into their IPO's they bailed and brought the tech industry back to earth. Now they are telling CxOs they must have an "Offshoring Strategy" or their company will go the way of the dinosaurs. Wanna guess where the VCs have their money invested these days...
Remember how crappy it used to be? Catalog pages didn't match the shopping cart, credit card processing involved ICVerify emulating a 1200 baud card swipe terminal, and half the time you had to call up to find out where your order went. On the merchant side, banks didn't have good online integration, half the transactions were bogus, and there was no way to get UPS and FedEx directly connected to your own systems. There were days when the Internet backbones would choke, and you'd go online to read the Internet weather report and see that MAE-WEST was dropping more than half its packets. And you needed an army of semi-competent people to glue it all together.
The on-line businesses that are still around have all this stuff working smoothly now. (Many of the ones that couldn't make it work are listed here.)
For most businesses, once you have all the basics working, you've achieved most of the benefits IT can provide. There's endless stuff you can waste money on. There's "data mining" and "profiling" and "customer relationship management" and "personalization", but it turns out that what works is telling existing customers of products related to stuff they already bought. Which isn't hard. Microsoft is pushing "synchronization", or "change the spreadsheet and your PowerPoint presentation changes to match", but most those bells and whistles don't really help productivity.
If you're a user of IT, this is great. If you're an "IT guru", this can be bad news.
Once I built a railroad, made it run,
made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad, now it's done.
Brother, can you spare a dime?
I enjoyed working in the software buisiness in the 90s. 80 hour weeks and I enjoyed what I was doing. These days, its all about how low can you go.
If there is one thing I learned its this:
If you enjoy what you are doing and where you live, then someone is going to sell it. Thus, don't hype what you enjoy doing.
Unionize.
The power of the IT community rivals the trucking industry. If we had a union, we would have a stronger voice in the government.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
THat is all just a bunch of neoliberal, free-traitor doublespeak. High quality of life for the most people is what is best in life. A country is a machine, and like all machines, good design pays off. The Social Democracy model is a superior design. Proof, meet pudding....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
"The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government."
What's interesting to me about this tidbit is that it the numerous laws are both a cause and effect of corruption. Whenever a straightforward, simple law is passed, someone will find a way to scam around it. If they are devious enough, they can't be charged under current law, so a new law has to be written to cover it. This is what happens with campaign finance reform every few years.
Conversely, people always want to get loopholes, exceptions, special funding or other benefits from the government. A lot of these actually end up as laws, especially if you contribute liberally to party leaders...
We are the 198 proof..
Not really. Unions only work for jobs that can't otherwise be outsourced. Construction on buildings has to be done here, the police have to patrol our streets, teachers have to work in our schools, boats need to be unloaded at our docks. But there's no reason that our software has to be written locally or that our server farms have to be located in this country. Unionization would kill the IT industry.