I’ve described in this document why having the ability to 'throw away' applications is critical to business agilization and the regeneration of competition in western world corporations.
Any artist will tell you, for every master-piece you’ll find a pile of canvases on the floor that didn’t work. The nature of creativity is that in order to learn you have to make mistakes. But until now, this iterative learning process has been a nightmare for IT people. Simply put, it’s almost impossible to be creative and not make mistakes. The thought of hard-coding a software application only to throw it away in a couple of weeks?!! That’s why we need throw-away applications.
I suspect Encanvas is the first of many software products designed to liberate the every day human being from having to become a programming geek in order to develop new ways of gathering, sharing and using information. It’s definitely one of the first commercial products to encourage the creative process of building light-weight applications - what people are now describing as ‘composites’ or ‘mash-ups’ (where information comes from several different sources and is brought together by a single application development environment).
The global market for products and services is getting ever more competitive.
Chinese and Indian companies are now producing world-class goods and services at ridiculously low prices, from $50 air flights to $2,200 cars. Most of the world’s retail banks now operate their outsourcing centres in Asia. The country with the world’s largest population now competes both with very low wages and high tech. In a survey of Chinese and U.S. manufacturers by Industry Week, 54% of Chinese companies cited innovation as one of their top objectives, compared with only 26% of U.S. respondents. Today, Chinese companies spend more on worker training and enterprise-management software than their western counterparts. Western corporations are falling behind when it comes to innovation and creativity. They need to regenerate their competitiveness.
Business markets today are in a constant state of flux. A global survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2005 of 336 senior corporate executives, one quarter of which were CEOs, found that almost fifty percent of business managers believe an uncertain business environment is the biggest obstacle to introducing successful changes to the business model. The survey also reported that forty-seven percent of respondents anticipated major changes to their business model within the next 3 years. No surprise, corporate leaders are talking up the need for greater agility.
How corporations can ‘agilize’
But how do corporate leaders regenerate competitiveness? More than anything else, leaders know they need to set the right minds free and re-awaken the creative process. But organizations do not need to ‘agilize’ every aspect of their operations. Business agility exists in tiny pockets within every organization. It’s found in ‘high performers’.
So, who are these people? They are the business development managers, strategists, marketers, researchers, new business unit heads (etc.) that are expected to source new thinking and business growth. And behind them are the energetic heads of business support departments – finance, human resources, IT – seeking better ways of working; encouraging the organization to work as one. These support departments have a thirst for new mechanisms to bridge across hard-to-reach information sources to react to new opportunities or threats on business continuity within a matter of days, even hours.
Why IT is failing to deliver competitive advantage
The faster paced commercial market reality is re-defining the role of IT in corporations. IT is under pressure to find new ways of aligning information systems with the rapidly changing requirements of the enterprise. The debate about whether investments in IT deliver a competitive edge continues to rage. When most corporations are adopting the same mix of business continuity software products – SAP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Cognos etc. – it has to be said that competitive advantage is only ever likely to result from better quality implementations of the same tools. Not a terribly convincing argument!
The pendulum of budget allocation has moved too far towards business continuity. What makes matters worse is that outmoded IT procurement procedures can take up to 6-months to qualify a new technology and conduct due diligence before allowing new software to join the business continuity systems of the enterprise. The bar for adopting new innovative tools becomes so high that vendors and purchasers are forced to shrug their shoulders and accept it can’t be done.
It’s also partly about culture and embedded ‘norms of behavior. IT departments and business managers find themselves out of sync with one another. The IT department, charged with being the corporate watchdog and ensuring business continuity by protecting business critical information systems, has its head focused on sustaining operational systems (keeping them scalable, secure, resilient, rationalized and optimized). It does not see its role as leading the charge to find new ways of helping ‘high performers’ to grow the business; to encourage creativity.
The IT department has scarce time or enthusiasm to think about how to respond to the many new ad-hoc requests. Many of these demands are for new applications coming from operational managers and directors charged with finding new ways to acquire customers, grow business in new geographies, tap into more creative circles, progress collaborative relationships with channel partners, sub-contractors and affinity groups. As soon as one part of the IT infrastructure comes into line with corporate needs, a merger or technology leap brings another series of IT challenges. The hyper-iterative requirements of the ‘front-line’ managers wait in the inbox of CIO’s until the next budget review.
Traditional hard-wired IT systems can never hope to keep in tune with business demands that change so rapidly. As soon as one part of the IT infrastructure comes into line, a merger or technology leap causes another series of challenges for IT to take care of. The hyper-iterative requirements of the ‘front-line’ managers waits in the inbox of CIO’s until the next budget review. This practical inability to respond to change in a timely and cost effective way is further hampered by aging IT procurement procedures that take 12-months to qualify a new technology to conduct due diligence before allowing new software to join the business continuity systems of the enterprise. The bar for adopting new innovation becomes so high that vendors and purchasers are forced to shrug their shoulders and accept it can’t be done.
But with the broader adoption of Service Oriented Architectures, IT professionals are better able to release the tightly-woven fibers of back-office information systems and make information available through web services to business users. The opportunity has now come to empower business users to serve themselves and to author their own formalized information flows to gather, capture, analyze and share information.
So, how is ‘the edge’ of IT being supported? In reality, few high performers have access to the information they known they need (see Accenture research findings – Schedule A). Less than 5% of IT budgets are typically focused on empowering the ‘right people’ in the right way – and yet corporate leaders know that to re-kindle competitiveness, their organizations must become Agile.
The only way to maintain a highly fluid blend of business applications that always fit the business needs of the enterprise is to give Information Workers the ability to serve themselves.
Competitive advantage comes as the result of people being empowered to do what people do best; finding new commercial opportunities, using their curiosity to dig up new opportunities, applying their experience to create new solutions to old problems. To do all of these things, people need information. But this information is today held within hard-to-reach back-office systems and in the many spreadsheets and word processing documents held within hard-drives.
These new applications have four prime characteristics:
- Self-serviced - Applications that can be authored by non technical business people with zero-footprint on IT resources dedicated to business continuity.
Low impact on business continuity. Otherwise, quite rightly, IT must have full authority over any projects. - Robust and secure for purpose - Providing Information Workers with a trusted, orderly, authoring environment for publishing composite applications that is essentially a ‘bonded’ area for the creation of role based information flows and bridging applications – ie. Secure and accessible to privileged Information Workers without harming business continuity. That means no over-engineering of applications or discussion of enterprise platforms or tools that are procured with the expectation they are meant to last forever.
- Affordable - The ability to author applications that have to be regarded as ‘throw away’ to liberate business people to develop applications to support their information needs with zero-impact on business continuity.
Why throw-away applications make sense
Giving business people tools to author their own applications that bridge across the mixed sources of information that exist in a corporate environment (and beyond it) today, means that new initiatives to acquire new customers, merge with businesses, work with affinity partners, collaborate with sub-contractors etc. can happen within a timeframe that gives organizations the possibility of a first mover advantage.
Without the potential to throw-away applications, organizations are unable to afford or risk the cost of experimentation that is essential to the process of innovation. But with software like Encanvas, the ‘leave-behind’ is always a 100% Microsoft compliant application which means that if applications do have a longer term role, they can be easily nested into corporate IT architecture.
We probably haven’t heard the last of ‘throw away’ applications.
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