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IT Departments Try To Avoid Getting "Ubered"
StewBeans writes: Fortune 500 companies and longstanding corporate giants are losing to startups that are born digital because they can't keep up or they refuse to acknowledge the ways that technology is changing both business and consumer preferences. Getting "Ubered" is now one of the biggest threats to traditional IT departments as the growing number of unicorns like Airbnb, Spotify, Square, and others take over the economy and win the hearts and minds of increasingly mobile, always-on consumers. In this article, nine tech leaders from large companies talk about how they have had to change their approach in order to keep pace and avoid getting disrupted by the next big thing around the corner.
Please, "Ubered", no. Not only no, and also no, but it sounds like a noise I once made in between too many bratwursts with too much mustard and too much sauerkraut, and way way way too much beer. I think the beer was lagered, which would make a sort of onomatopoetic sense, if it led to ubering.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Your company name gets verbed ONLY when it's both appropriate and a new word is necessary. You get verbed by popular consent. I'm not saying a massive advertising campaign won't do it, but it's damn hard to force a meme. Xerox. Jeep. Scotch tape. They were verbed because they offered something new. Google. Skype. They were verbed because so many people used their products. But even a massive advertising agency couldn't do it for, say, Bing. So what has Uber done to justify verbing? Sure it's shorter than, say, "out-innovated". But "Ubered"? It just sticks in my craw. No thanks. And take your viral marketing with you.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
The problem of traditional IT departments in large corporation is not getting "Ubered"; it's just a matter of having a large organization with all the bureaucracy that comes with it. Even Google struggles with that, as Sergei Brin lamented the other day. Also, I fail to see how Uber, Spotify and AirBnB are eating those IT departments' lunches. The businesses they serve, perhaps, but not those departments.
And those tips from that Enterpriseprojects.com article? Empty buzzwords. "Leverage relationships with decision-makers", "Move at the speed of trust" (Really? Really?! What does that even mean), "If it ain’t broken, consider fixing it", "Use process as business accelerator". These are copied verbatim from the article, and if this is what the best and brightest CIOs in the bunsiess have to offer us, it is small wonder that the IT profession is in such a shite state. I've seen similar statements on a great many powerpoints, and they all failed to make one iota of difference. Yes, you CIO's are going to have to "shift the culture" in your departments, as you like to say. And yes, most of you are woefully unequipped for the task.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Baring all the corporate jargon, the next big thing more often than not is quite simply a scam managed by venture capitalists and hedge fund managers to create the illusion of the 'next big internet company', pump it up to the biggest bubble possible and then sell it to gullible investors and pension funds (investment managers paid commissions to buy) and 'KABOOM', time for the 'next big thing' (they are not fucking around at all, those bubbles are at minimum hundreds of millions of dollars in size and quite a few end up in the billions range - all bullshit public relations and marketing). Seriously how many more of the dot bombs have to fail before people and investigatory agencies wake up and realise it is all mostly just a well orchestrated scam.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
What I think the article (really more of a short, buzzword-filled list) fails to address is that IT workers aren't leaving major, established corporations for "unicorns" for no reason. Most workers aren't going to give up seniority (and the perks that come with it like better pay and benefits) at a big company for a job at a startup for no reason other than because they can. In reality, it's probably that the startups are offering higher pay and better working conditions, thus giving workers a reason to leave.
This honestly reminds me of where I work right now, where the management is stumped at why they keep having people quit when they have managers going around every night telling people how much they want to fire them and how at risk they are of losing their jobs.
The issue is that monopolies like taxis get so focused on profits or whatever, that they forget they only get income from customers. With no competition, why should I treat my customers well?
Also most companies are middle-men, so finding a way to cut out the middle man for a middle man company doesn't seem to make sense. Gas stations sell you fuel someone else refined, that someone else dug up. They "add value" in the middle, but are all middle men. So "Ubering" in the sense of more directly connecting the customer to the service or product is the opposite of the goal of most companies. Personally, I'd love it if the manufacturers were to make their products available directly. Order monthly subscriptions to Coca Cola and get what you want delivered directly to your house monthly. For a price near the wholesale price for the store. That's the ideal. Any store marking up 50% or 500% will never compete with that. But it doesn't happen.
That's where Ubering comes in. When a company sees a need, and refuses to meet it.
Don't be dicks, and you won't get Ubered.
Learn to love Alaska
Come on.... I've worked in I.T. for almost 30 years now and the changes tend to happen incrementally, at a pace largely dependent on the release schedules of the vendors involved.
I don't know of a single person in corporate I.T. who feels threatened by the potential of some "upstart" business model appearing out of nowhere and wiping out their job.
If there's a single trend I would say "upset the apple cart" more than anything else for I.T. -- it would be cloud services. But even there, I.T. quickly got a handle on the concept and embraced it selectively in most cases, applying it where it added real value and ignoring it where it was just hype and buzzwords. It probably shifted the number of people doing server support towards the large data centers to an extent not seen since the microcomputer took off in the 80's -- but people with those skills still found places to work using those skills. And more recently, I've seen the cloud technologies begin to get "rolled back" into in-house solutions. For example, our company tried out CrashPlan for backups and put all of our mobile workers on cloud based backup with them. Worked well, but we eventually shifted to the "Enterprise" version of the product, where we run the CrashPlan servers internally and people back up to them over the Internet or any office LAN or wi-fi connection. Saves us money paying someone else for the storage space and gives us the ability to do a restore much more quickly, if needed.
I know several pro photography people doing a similar thing with DropBox. They liked the service but when they really started using it heavily, realized uploads of huge batches of RAW photos was SLOW (partially because upload speeds to DropBox in the cloud are throttled). Now they're looking at alternatives like Transporter, where again, your mass storage is local, on site -- but it works like the cloud in the sense you can upload to it from anywhere.
"solidarity" is just part of the game. What you "leftist bashing" types miss is that when you're playing a game you should use every advantage you have. Forming unions, and creating solidarity between a group of players increases bargaining power, and allows you to make sure that you get the outcome you desire from the market.