We visited San Diego last week, with side-trips to Palm Desert and Ventura and the Channel Islands off Los Angeles. I was in San Diego to attend a conference on various matters covering security, system virtualization and cloud computing. All areas within my job responsibilities.
One of the points of discussion was the consumerization of technology and the impact of that trend on business. There are two forces that will come to bear: one from the customer, manifest through higher expectations on self-service capabilities and enhanced service offerings all bundled in an easy to use package; the second from employees. Employees too will expect many of the same things, including ease of use. As pressures increase on employees to do more, their tools or lack thereof, will become the flashpoint.
Obviously to say that the trend is toward consumerization states that the current environment is not consumerized. The scope of automation in my business is vast and covers a full range of solutions from the Windows-based PC to the IBM zSeries Mainframes. However, many of these systems play a back-end role and are not directly exposed to customers and employees. The machine that most people will touch every single day is the Windows-based PC. These machine often play the role of “lip stick” seen by customers and employees. It is this single point where the consumerization battle will play out. The Windows-based PC has a long and venerable legacy and through the generations it has developed to provide a wide and deep range of capabilities, and some quirks. For one who has not grown up with the system, learning it can be a daunting task. The complexity of this platform is manifest in each and every interaction, each upgrade, each new patch. It is a solution for the technically savvy, but not the consumer. It requires deep knowledge to know how to use it; to maintain it; to keep it running in good order. Each fix presents a risk of failure and digging deeper into trouble. Reminiscent of the days when a car came with a driver who could also fix the machine when it broke.
In contrast a consumer-oriented system respects the customer’s time by not wasting it through endless maintenance, complex messaging, arcane procedures; distractions from getting that task at hand completed. It directs some of its capabilities to simplifying the experience. It is this latter point that will drive consumers and technically savvy people from non-consumer-oriented platforms. Today’s personal life is too busy to spend hours re-bulding operating systems; today’s business life is too busy waiting for a machine to power up, power down, sift through endless alerts of meaningless event notifications.
One morning I took a walk along the shoreline of San Diego Harbour and I came across the Midway. Commissioned in September 1945, I’m sure she was a model of the current state of her time. But to look at her now, I was impressed with the size and complexity of every detail. The Midway now rests in San Diego Harbour as a museum piece, decommissioned in the 1990’s.
On its current course this is the fate of the SS Windows.
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