Commonsense for Dummies

IT Tribes

The other day, being the plain-spoken person I like to think I am, I was reading a book, “SOA Adoption for Dummies” with the intention of unlocking the mysteries of Service Oriented implementation in words that even a dummy like me could understand.

Apart from the lucidity of the prose, I was taken by the analogy of Information Technology teams to primitive tribes with their jealous tribal unity pitted against the other warring tribes.

The authors Miko Matsumura, Bjoern Brauel and Jignesh Shah state: “The result of all these fragmented groups within enterprise IT is the formation of IT tribes. Each tribe could represent a vendor solution, geography, a business unit, a consulting company, or any of the distinctions that divide IT into competing groups.”

“The desire for each tribe to succeed by dominating the other tribes is a natural and yet unfortunate reality of large scale enterprise IT. Without understanding and overcoming the organizational impulses that create and maintain silos, slabs and spaghetti, any technological approach will be doomed to failure.”

How true!

All of us gray haired ones (with the little hair we have), with more than 30 years under the belt in the IT war fighting theater have experienced the tribal effect and more than once, have been guilty of practicing it ourselves. “We have met the enemy and he is us." And unless we decide to federate our tribes in the pursuit of the greater good and the bigger big, we are doomed.

IT Sprawl

The authors, likened the spread of IT systems in an un-architected and uncontrolled manner to urban sprawl: “City planners refer to haphazard and disorderly urban development as sprawl.”

Once, again, how aptly described!

I have travelled to the city of my youth – Bangalore India – many times since my original departure in 1979 after living in the United States these many years. Every year I see the sprawl get worse. The roads that were built in the early 1900s are still the roads that carry the main traffic. Any short term attempts of converting roads into one-way streets to try to distribute and dilute the traffic have been overtaken by traffic volumes where even those solutions do not work anymore. It appears that the architecture of the city laid out before the mid-1900s to serve a population of 450,000 souls is now serving a population of more than 10 Million.

The sewers, the electricity supply, the water supply also followed the same story as urban Bangalore outgrew the four boundaries that the original founder – Kempe Gowda had deemed as the limits of growth.

Today we have India’s Silicon City with a worldwide reputation for technology excellence mired in the urban sprawl and lack of infrastructure that is crippling its growth and quality of life.

How long do we have to wait until our IT sprawl reduces us to the same state? Is there a way for us to innovate new systems “under the radar” that is architected as the sprawl continues?

The other day my in-laws and wife presented me with an iPhone. What a marvelous device! As an avid but measured promoter of technology and advanced thinking at work, I am a reluctant embracer of technology and its consequent expense at home. The iPhone came in like a tornado into the Rao household and swept me into 2009 overnight. As I launched application after application, as I seamlessly dived from a calendar event to the players, then the contact information in my address book to the GPS coordinates of their homes and automatic driving instructions to get there, I was wonderstruck by the seamlessness, the absolute accuracy, the leveraging the work of several hundreds of thousands of people and the aesthetic beauty of the interface and access methods built into that small 5 inch device.

I wonder whether “small is beautiful” and the iPhone represents the pinnacle of that philosophy – that as we build larger and larger systems we tend to run out of understanding or are overwhelmed by the complexity of the job or are beset by sloppy work ethics, laziness and a profound ignorance and limited awareness of the context in which we build these hyper large systems..

I wonder whether we have built large dinosaur systems with bailing wire and jute thread and whether we should start from the ground up and layer on incremental function from wherever it comes, all playing a part in an orchestrated “whole” – sort of like the iPod.