IT Newsletter, May 2003

Thank you to everybody who encouraged me to continue with these newsletters: it's nice to know that you don't feel that this is spam. Procrastination almost won a total victory - it's almost a year since the previous newsletter. 

 

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In this Newsletter: -

            IT Doesn't Matter.    Is "IT Strategy" passé?

            Feedback from the previous newsletter.   The new economy, open source.

            Genetic Programming (again)

            Book Review - Feature Driven Development

            Word Technical Tip

 

I've added a discussion page to my web site: hopefully you'll feel inspired to contribute your thoughts.

 

IT Doesn't Matter.

 

CEO's routinely talk about IT's strategic value, and how they can use it to gain a strategic advantage.  In the most recent HBR(May 2003), Nicholas Carr takes aim at this view.  He argues that, while opportunities to gain enduring strategic advantage with IT existed when the technology was new, now that IT is ubiquitous this era is over.     

 

"IT is the latest in a series of broadly adopted technologies - think of the railroad or the electric generator - that have reshaped industry over the past two centuries.  For a brief time, as they were being build into the infrastructure of commerce, these technologies created powerful opportunities for forward-looking companies.  But, as their availability increased and their costs decreased, they become commodity inputs.  From a strategic standpoint they became invisible; they no longer mattered.  That's exactly what's happening to IT, and the implications are profound".

 

Most commentators have compared the boom and bust of IT investment with previous rollouts (Rail, electricity, etc), but little has been said about the way the technologies influence competition at the level of individual firms.  Carr says that it is important to distinguish between proprietary technologies (example, drug patents), which can confer lasting competitive advantage to a single company, and infrastructure technologies where maximum value requires that they be shared.  There is only a brief window for gaining advantage from an infrastructural technology: when its commercial potential is broadly appreciated huge amounts of cash are invested in it, and its buildout is very rapid.  By the end of the buildout phase, opportunities for individual advantage are largely gone.  The rush to invest leads to more competition, greater capacity, and falling prices: at the same time the technology standardises, and best practices are widely understood and emulated. 

 

Carr acknowledges the way in which the superior IT insight of companies like American Airlines (Sabre), Federal Express, Reuters, eBay have allowed them to stake out commanding positions, and others like Wal-Mart and Dell have been able to turn temporary technology advantages into enduring positioning advantages, but he argues that opportunities such as this are dwindling, believing that IT buildout is nearing completion.  Signs of this are: -

 

In this environment, Carr's rules for IT management: -

 

IT and the Internet are simply part of doing business.   Businesses cannot ignore IT, but they don’t have to be in the vanguard.  As always, IT projects should be backed by a sound business case.

 

Where does this leave "The Strategic Use of IT"?  Is this view obsolete? Not if the message is that a good understanding of the capabilities of IT, and how it can affect your business strategy, is essential.  But "Yes" if the message was that innovative IT could be a substitute for a sound business model, and that it was essential to seize the first-mover advantage. 

 

More on this subject: -

 

From last newsletter

"The New Economy was a Myth, Right?"

Harvey Lockie comments that we can learn much from previous "New Eras" (Canals, Railways, Radio, Motor Vehicles). 90% of those who invested in the new technology lost their shirts, but there were profound (and often unexpected) benefits to the economy as a whole.  I've put Harvey's comments on the discussion page.

Why companies support Open Source

Several readers considered that IBM's support for Linux was driven by a desire to hurt Microsoft as much or more than because it's a revenue opportunity.  I disagree. 

 

If IBM really wanted to attack Microsoft, they could have made OS/2 an open-source product in about 1997?  If the open source advocates are right about the power of the open source development model, then this could have provided a competitive GUI with a developer pool that could have threatened Windows' hold on the desktop.  A desktop environment backed by both IBM and the open source community could have been very attractive.

Genetic Programming (again)

 

One of the central challenges of computer science is to get a computer to do what needs to be done, without telling it how to do it. In the May 2002 newsletter I commented on a new (to me) approach to problem solving, genetic programming, which addresses this challenge by providing a method for automatically creating a working computer program from a high-level problem statement of the problem. Genetic programming achieves this goal of automatic programming (also sometimes called program synthesis or program induction) by genetically breeding a population of computer programs using the principles of Darwinian natural selection and biologically inspired operations. 

 

The approach is mentioned again in a recent HBR (May 2003) article, "Don't Trust Your Gut", where "Interactive Evolution" (where human judgment is used to guide the artificial evolution) is cited as a method of new car design. 

 

I thought that I'd better learn a little more about it. A search for "Genetic Programming" on Google found Genetic-Programming.org, which seems to be a good starting point for anybody wanting more information.

Book review - Feature-Driven Development, by Stephen R. Palmer and John M. Felsing

 

Feature-Driven Development (FDD) is a methodology that combines the benefits of small-scale agile methodologies like eXtreme Programming, with scalability and enough formality to satisfy the requirements of enterprise programming.  According to the authors: -

"FDD does enough work up front to provide a resilient conceptual framework - the domain object model (structure) and features list (requirements).  The highly iterative, self-organizing controlled chaos of the Design by Feature and Build by Feature iterations provides an agile operational framework that can quickly adapt to change.

 

"This balanced approach advocated by FDD avoids the analysis paralysis often found in teams following traditional processes with long analysis phases. However, FDD also avoids the large amounts of unnecessary reworking of code that are almost guaranteed when a team dives straight into coding without any reasonable shared understanding of the problem to be solved."

 

As in eXtreme programming (XP), there is a very strong focus in FDD on rapid iteration and incremental delivery, with both methodologies sharing the belief that work units should be kept very small and focussed on delivering function to the user. Unlike XP, FDD recognizes the role of modelling in defining the solution architecture (the methodology is derived from Coad's "Modelling in Colour") and FDD supports formal roles and responsibilities such as technical architect and project leader.  It's also more management-friendly, recognizing the traditional roles (software architect, project leader, etc), and so FDD will be more acceptable in larger organizations than XP as it fits much more comfortably with normal management structures.

 

I agree with Steve McConnell that the answer is not in any particular methodology, but in having a good toolkit of methodologies, and knowing which to apply. FDD is a good addition to the toolkit, and will be of particular interest to those wanting to get the benefits of agile methods in larger projects, or when the company culture would be antagonistic to less structured methods.

Word Hint – getting rid of the pesky expanding menus.

In Office 2000 Microsoft have allowed us to get rid of the **** paperclip, but they have introduced a new improvement that's almost as annoying - now the menus only show the recently used commands unless you click again to expand them. 

 

There is an option to have full menus, as normal - but don't expect to find it in the obvious place, under /Tools/Options (View tab).  Instead, it's under the Customize menu.  Select the Options tab, and uncheck "Menus show recently used commands first".