Cogitatio

A combination of my interest in philosophy, my background in IT and a general dissatisfaction and continual disappointment with the ability for IT suppliers and customers to deliver an end product together has led me to start thinking what can be done about it. The key for me is in the thinking. My entire career has been in IT and yet, without exception, I have not touched a computer or done a design for a system myself for a single customer. When I put it in that way, 12 years in IT never actually getting my hands dirty seems a strange statement. So what the hell have I been doing?

The majority of my professional life has been spent teaching customers how to be good customers and suppliers how to do their job properly. The former on the whole being harder than the later. I have been lucky enough to see the practical birth of the internet (I helped install the TCP/IP client into Citibank PCs when I first started so they could use something called Netscape to look at the web. How far have we come since then? Well, no far. Although the IP stack now comes with the OS ready loaded. But I have also been unlucky enough to witness a burn out. A burn out of vision.

As new technologies promising new beginnings came to the market people gasped with wonder at what the new world would be for them as a result. PCs in every home, broadband, online banking, IPods, streaming video, online poker to name a few. While it would not be fair to say that these technology promises were not fulfilled and certainly have resulted in change we have not stopped to consider whether the change was improvement or just different.

Our expectations for IT were high. While we moved from a world of no IT to a world of widespread IT we had an expectation of a better life. Nowadays people are more sceptical. We have seen the future and the promises and we have been let down too many times before. The future is not bright, it is not orange. In fact, in many cases it is worse. The technology not only failed to deliver the change we expected, it made our lives worse.

Let’s look at the internet first. As a business I could set up a web site and trade. It was almost the American dream of opportunity. This is true. But is it better? My experience of internet business is simply that the problems are different but no less significant. In the good old days if I wanted to sell things I would open shop. I would pick my location to get the best footfall and I would do some, normally local, marketing. It is interesting to note that to get a professionally hosted and built web site (not talking cheap and nasty software) costs more than it does to open small shop and you still need the warehouse and product processing space. I hear you shout ‘but yes, you can trade throughout the world from the internet but only locally from a shop’. Sort of. And this is the problem. The problem of marketing your internet site to the world is not trivial and in fact no easier than marketing your shop to the world. Opening an online store to sell cameras for example is just like opening a camera shop on the moon. In fact it is worse than that. It is like opening a camera shop on the moon next door to ten thousand other camera shops. It’s not easier to set up online, it’s just different.

For the consumer, the world appears a more convenient place. You can go online and buy a camera. But for the majority of us we will trot off to the camera shop in the high street to have a look first and then save twenty pounds ordering online. We find the online supermarkets regularly deliver old product and the online travel companies all seem to offer the same flights for the same cost. There is only so much you can shave off a holiday and everyone can see everyone else’s prices. The number of middlemen in travel has exploded.

It is certainly a different place to live but I am not sure it is better. Meanwhile at work we spend gzillions on new IT to make us more efficient. More efficient than what? Than we were? If we look at government we note that there are more people working for the public sector now than ever before. One could argue that they deliver more but how much more? And is more better? With knee jerk reaction policies from ministers are we a demand led policy government or a supply led. Are we reacting to the ills of society with sticking plasters or do we have a vision for a future society, one which can be delivered over time.

For me, what it is coming down to is a lack of vision. Ill thought out policy or no policy at all is rife across government and the private sector. Where is the vision? We are on a treadmill of continuous change which is mistaken for the treadmill of continuous improvement. Where have all the thinkers gone? In IT terms we hear the old adage that we want business led IT but the business do not understand the art of the possible and the IT folk rarely understand the business. This leaves a significant dissatisfaction with the IT on the businesses’ behalf and a great deal of frustration on the IT folks behalf. Policy blames delivery, delivery blames policy.

We need the thought leaders back again. The social networking revolution was a damp squib in my view. Not that many did not make money at it but the real value is of significant question. Digital TV now gives us more channels of utter dross than ever. Now you can get your dross in high definition and surround sound. What is next? Where is IT going and what is it going to do for us? Are these even the right questions to ask?

The model for IT has to change. This will require a significant amount of education of the business and a new set of visionaries. The old ones have done their job and are retiring now. There is nobody in this space to do the job.

Any volunteers?