BPM-EAI

Tomorrow’s IT eco-system – I mean to bring in your view the practices, culture, hypotheses, written and unwritten principles, thinking patterns and everything else that makes us do thing related to IT evolution the way we do.

Fundamentally doomed DNA – I want to bring your attention to view of things that we are doing today that will become the foundation or DNA of our “way of doing” to the extent that we will do it as most accepted norm, as a natural response to situations around us. While it happens, what lies ahead is a danger of highly inefficient and dysfunctional environment that possibly could make the future progression chaotic, complex, slow and unstable. So that’s the “doom” explained.

So both put together, it simply means that the way we are collectively responding to evolved situations (of industry) today and considering the patterns of our ‘creative forces’ (as they shape up the possibilities), it seems like a ‘bound-to-fail’ story to me. Now, this is not my pessimism. This is a genuine concern only because the only ‘remediation’ force that I can see is the realization of the problems arising from the “consequential damage”. And that’s post-facto effect so it may be too late to restore the eco-system capability before doom happens. And that’s precisely the reason why I’m not pessimistic about it because natural outcome (like any other justice of nature), nature will possibly prohibit the self-destruction and bring some ‘course of correction’ (we all like surprises, don’t we?) so that before we reach the doomed state, we start the journey back to being all right again. That’s the optimism. So let me begin with the core of this blog.

Based on my observations (of which none is extra ordinary) over a long period of time in IT industry, I have compiled 5 basic hypotheses to reflect the current state. These hypotheses are also the root causes that will cause the doom. For the easy understanding, we will refer to all entities that offer something to the market (for commercial or intellectual leadership gain) as “providers”.

Hypothesis 1 -  Problem of plenty: The moment a ‘sticky’ concern/possibility is identified in the industry, there is an extra ordinary surge of ‘me too’ solutions in the market. All in a very short time frame (notice the drastically reduced time-to-market of products and solutions today). We invariably end up having many more solution providers  and (redundant) solutions than the actual solution consumers. That’s quite skewed and unstable market place in my mind.

Hypothesis 2 – Identity crisis: All the ‘me too’ solutions (including view-points, speculations, predictions, products and everything else that can sold to clients) that spring up in no time basically lead to lot of similar looking stuff. But hang on; no one wants to be a copy cat and everyone wants to invent a piece of history, it just can’t be ‘similar’ or ‘same’. So we end up having the ‘creative forces’ re-invent the terminologies and possibly re-establish the fundamentals with different ‘twists’. In the whole deal, focus on the ‘real problem’ is actually lost and we miss many opportunities to evolve.

Hypothesis 3 – Hyper generalization: Putting first two hypotheses together, one can easily sense that pressure on the ‘provider’ community is so high while segment in which solution has to be provided (keeping the differentiation/uniqueness) is seen to be so small to accomodate everyone. So one of the ways the room is getting bigger is by expanding the horizon of the problem space to everything in the eco-system that surrounds the core of the problem. Now that gives absolutely fresh ground, fairly large space to everyone to play and try their ‘innovation/creativity’. While this helps big picture becoming bigger, I realized that it also dilutes the core problem focus because of the generalization and expansion. I’m sure one will agree that expanding the thought process to big picture happens quickly and easily but doing justice to big picture in terms of actually solving the problem with focus, details and capability takes much more (effort/time) purely because of sheer size/complexity. No one has time to solve it so devil is left to mess up the details while ‘providers’ are busy creating happiness around the ‘big picture’.

Hypothesis 4 – Running before walking: Yes, no one has time to wait and no one needs to wait today because first principle of the business today is that ‘faster is always better’ no matter what. That’s what many principles of efficiency/six sigma/JiT etc. teach. So things are getting complex to deal with but nothing can be slowed down at any cost (unless some natural disaster forces the slow down, we have seen couple of them in recent past, but doesn’t really matter). So in essence, players in the industry are forced to run when they have barely learnt how to walk. It is leading to distortion and disorientation and over-play of short-term concerns. My sense is that ‘forced intellectual progression’ (because that can happen at lightning speed as opposed to much slower real-life  progression) is causing widening of the gap between what is real and what is ‘hypothetical’. It is also increasing the stress between as-is and to-be and resulting into a constant pressure to move toward  ever-ending goals. One could argue that ever-ending goals are truly ‘long term’ but in today’s context these goals are almost ever-ending in the short timeframe in which they are supposed to be accomplished and when they are not accomplished, goals are changed. Are we going too fast and waiting for a disaster to slow us down and reconcile the gaps?

Hypothesis 5 – Missing real stuff: I think that’s the outcome of all that is described above. With many to solve your problems and infinite ways to solve your problem, most of what is around is unfortunately ‘vapor’. That’s sad because if we consider amount of ‘person days’ of effort, money and time that is going into creation of this vapor, this is extra ordinarily, astronomically high wealth being underutilized. There are very few sincere who are onto the real problem, breaking their head in dealing with the devil of the details but in the battle of commercialization, they are boxed as well. I mean, yes, while all this ‘doomed’ stuff is happening at large, my optimism is alive that few sincere brains are working hard across the globe, across the organizations who in sociological parlance are doing the human welfare work. But will they be able to neutralize the vapor community and win the battle in long term, I hope so but your guess is as good as mine.

So that's where thing stand in my mind. Unanswered, unresolved, but challenging enough to look at.

This blog turned out to be highly philosophical, far more than I planned. But I’m comfortable with it. I personally feel that there are many out there who  are thinking the same and this may be a good opportunity to confirm my hypotheses. If we recognize the problem, we may possibly have something on these lines to change the way we do thing, starting with each one of us. Hoping to see some response.