The Two Paths

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BASIC PRINCIPLES:

You Should Get Information Technology from Information Technologists

The information technology sector is in the majority of cases serviced by the wrong type of company.

When you are looking for an IT provider there will be two distinct groups chasing your business: Professional IT and Reseller IT. Not understanding the difference will be the single most costly mistake you can make when selecting an IT partner. Choose the wrong type of IT services provider and you will rack up tens of thousands of dollars of unnecessary costs and take unnecessary risks that lead to the IT black holes the many projects become, often within weeks.

If an IT vendor sits down with a buyer to discuss Information Technology solutions, and neither side of the table has any fundamental knowledge of how the technologies actually work, this meeting of “open” minds will produce overpriced and underperforming solutions. The likelihood of the outright failure of any solution increases dramatically with the level of mutual ignorance (the outright lying* that will facilitate outright failure is a built in feature, but not a free one).

Yet this is the kind of partnership that most small and medium enterprises in New Zealand are locked into. There are clear reasons as to why and how this came about, as well as effective measures that managers and owners can initiate to stop the waste. Basically, NZ business needs desperately to be buying its Information Technology from Information Technologists. The NZ market, however, is dominated by Reseller IT. Before explaining why, we should first look more closely at

What are Professional IT and Reseller IT?

Two paths – Technical and Sales

There are two paths into the IT industry, the technical path and the sales path.

The technical path usually begins with at least an interest in (more commonly a fascination with) Information Technology. The motivation of these proto-technologists could be unimaginatively expressed by the following cranial telegram:

“Information technology is amazing. Imagine all that we could do with it”.

A successful technical career in IT will commonly involve 3-4 years of full time study, leading to a tertiary qualification in or relating to Information Technology. This will be followed by decades of technical work, more study and more Industry qualifications. On the technology path the limiting factor will be a person’s ability to learn and understand technology. The ability to communicate this understanding is less important and therefore frequently underestimated, and undervalued.

When those on the technical path start their own company, they naturally create an organisation centred on technology. I call these companies Professional IT, because they closely model themselves on other professional services with rigorous and mandated areas of practitioner knowledge, such as lawyers, engineers, architects and accountants. A Professional IT company’s core competency is based on

a) a clear understanding of the workings, capabilities and limitations of Information Technology, and

b) the trained ability to apply that understanding to help your business.

The Professional IT firm, in other words, is led by technical expertise, and backed by further qualification, training, and experience. Clear enough.

The sales path actually requires more initial explanation. It usually starts with the predictable attractant of products with a high demand and large margins. The motivation is concisely expressed as

“Information technology is amazing stuff. Think of the things I could sell”.

A career IT salesperson may start by selling older, established office technology like faxes or photocopiers. These are commodity products, and customers have a clear understanding of what they are buying and what they do. Take the humble, if complex, copier. A successful rep will not have to explain what they do, or how they work – and, frankly, even the most ham-fisted account (“It takes a photo and remembers it and prints it”) will, if she is ever questioned by Chance the Gardener, do.

Her job is to remember the machine’s features, and relative costs, and promote them to office staff members** who understand how this or that refinement may lead to small but measureable increases in office efficiency. More importantly, in this situation selling machines as complete catch-all solutions becomes a reflex process.

To salespeople working with the narrow margins of function and price of traditional office commodities, the extraordinary range, margins and proliferation of the IT market can seem irresistible, and the conceptual gap between a large Xerox and a small Pentium will consequently seem a small one. They now begin to sell these new machines as solutions, and any technical difficulties that might arise they see as analogous to a breakdown in an advanced copier. This is a tragically incorrect assumption.

In fact, the vast majority of IT Salespeople begin with a large gap in not only their understanding of how computers work or what they do, but also in their comprehension of what any given computer application is really going to do for the business they are pitching it to. This gap becomes canyonesque as they move up the technology/cost scale. The success of any IT seller will therefore very soon depend on how well she parries this knowledge gap with her customers. And, frequently, that success will increase depending on how well she intuits how much her customers want to parry their own knowledge gap. This leads to the achingly common spectacle of a pseudo-technological, feel-good, features swapmeet, which we’ll discuss later.

Let me clamber off the horse for a second, and swing from a standing position. In my more than 20 years in the industry almost every IT salesman I have encountered selling computer support services has had little or no idea about such basics as how email works, how the World Wide Web works, how the Internet works, that the Internet and WWW are different, how the Windows operating system works, how Ethernet works, how Citrix works. The exceptions were that almost crypto-zoological breed of ex-technologists who have moved to sales.

Reseller Begins

When those on the sales path start their own company they naturally create an organisation centred on Sales systems. I call this type of company Reseller IT because it closely models other reselling organisations – FMCG, office suppliers, or car dealers, for example. The core competency of a Reseller IT company is in bundling up the feature/benefit list of a group of products, and presenting/promoting this list to customers to select based on their own assessment of needs. In cases where customers can not accurately assess their own needs (they may be unaware of this), promotion can unashamedly be replaced by prescription.

A Reseller IT company’s rep will arrive with a well-rehearsed pre-dinner speech extolling a features and benefits list as a placebo for actual understanding. His actual knowledge will be little more (or a little less) than a Brand name rehash of the knowledge that you have managed to acquire as a computer user. His skill is in getting agreement on features and benefits, doing this by inferring knowledge that he (and often the customer) doesn’t have.

Crucially, this Sales-based solution will often circumlocute the fact that even a Customer with no technical knowledge at all will still have vital information about how the business in question works, information that a Professional IT company will treat as a primary source for an eventual recommended application. For a Sales-based rep, this is an unnecessary and potentially embarrassing diversion, akin to asking a business what font they commonly use in the documents his copier will have to photocopy. His job is to ease customer concerns, direct them to the literature, and above all promote or prescribe a complete package that will cover all their needs in advance. Early in this phase of his career, he may actually have no idea that 50% of his “Yes” answers are worse than placebos.

In other words, Reseller IT is fundamentally led by sales expertise, and focuses, in its advertising, websites and sales techniques, on ease of approach, pre-packaged solutions, and likeability. Technical knowledge is secondary, a fact often expressed explicitly in these companies’ own self-promotion.*** Technical expertise is something to be catalogued and resold with the rest of the product list, or brought in on an ad-hoc basis as a highly bruited (and highly expensive) “high-tech” solution.

* Basically, variations on “Yes, it can/we will do this.”

** This example assumes a competent office staff/purchasing structure.

***To quote one example, NZ Telecom’s euphemistic spinoff Gen-i promotes itself in this marvellously vacuous fashion:

“We’re all about outcomes. We just happen to use technology to bring them about.”

Note the equivocatory masterstroke of “outcome”, now spreading like gorse through Reseller literature. Remember that absolute catastrophe when your { Insert Personal Business IT Catastrophe here } for 6 months?

Quite an outcome, eh?

 

Interface and interact

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Interact and Interface

Before listing the categories and subcategories of so much vendor illiteracy, it’s worth confronting the no longer elephantine object in the room: the sheer intrinsic differentness of IT, in both hardware and software development.

The Information-Technological world, as it confronts most people and most businesses, really is unique, even in an age when protons rotating in a magnetic field daily map out the four dimensions of human bodies, or when taxi drivers gaze tiredly at mechanisms calibrated for relativistic time dilation and the curvature of space-time in order to find a street in Te Atatu. Put simply, computers communicating with each other through digital information constitute a far greater challenge to us in our every day less everyday lives. Is this just because people don’t understand this high technology? In part – but it’s also because people don’t often understand the concept of “high” technology itself.

To explain that, let’s look at two technological achievements that have provoked what might glibly be called the bookend conspiracies of the last 5500 years of human history: “Who (really) built the Pyramids?” and “Did the USA (really) land on the Moon?” A clear majority would very likely respond “The Egyptians” and “Yup.” — as would I. But almost all of them would at least have heard of both conspiracies, and perhaps given a sympathetic eyebrow to one or other. Moreover, if they were to share a half hour in the presence of an impassioned proselytizer they might walk away thinking there was “something to it.”

My purpose here isn’t to debunk every quasi-religious claim on the two subjects, but to focus on their shared root. There are differences in their respective places in popular culture: New-age romanticism about the hazy ancient world as opposed to X-filed paranoia about the inevitability of government lies. Both however originate in a very human reaction to the sheer size of both achievements: “How could we/they have created such an awesome thing given how primitive/un-advanced they/we were?”

This I think stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between improved (often massively improved) engineering/design and genuine technological breakthrough. The great pyramids of Kufu and Kafra were the products of centuries of accumulated Egyptian knowledge of stone shaping, building techniques, architecture – and a lot of trial and error (one after all fell down, prompting a swift, still visible change in gradient in another under construction). The moon landings too were an extraordinary triumph of mathematics, materials science, and design/engineering, with the trial and error visible to anyone who has seen video of the early launch tests of the Mercury program. Both required massive civil organization and Government funding – but neither represented a profound technological breakthrough. The basic principles of what popular culture would embrace as “rocket science” had been in existence for half a century, and demonstrated clearly a quarter of a century earlier. The problem was simply (simply!) one of size and purpose. Similarly, the monolithic and magnificent pyramids remain Neolithic products; the copper chisels used to smooth the huge stone blocks were a far more important achievement, just as children listening to a liftoff on a transistor radio were carrying a revolution in miniature.

A key indicator of this is how little either achievement changed subsequent human history. The Saturn 5 Rocket and the Great Stone Pyramid very quickly became not just obsolete, but gloriously irrelevant, in a way that copper and the transistor did not, or, for that matter, in a way that the columnar architecture of Karnak or the incredibly weak electronic information storage devices that the scientists at Houston used (when they weren’t reaching for their slide rules) did not. The ugly truth, which will offend a conspiracist as much as anyone, is that the Pyramids and the Moon Landings, while unique and extraordinary, are not “amazing” in the sense that they were barely imaginable (as opposed to hardly achievable) mere years earlier.*

Rocket Science

The issue is confused sometimes by the mystique that can build up around a technology which people rarely interact with, let alone interface with (in terms of building, operating or altering/adapting). To place this in context, let’s consider three well known engines of the last century: The liquid-fueled rocket engine, the turbofan jet engine, and the gasoline powered internal combustion engine. All three are “old” technologies, which have reached end-forms that have changed little.* *

The rocket engine remains a paradigmatic symbol of science, yet in its solid fuel forms it is by far the oldest and simplest of these technologies, and the one that has had the least impact on society. Outside of small sections of the military or space-science communities, no one regularly interacts (let alone interfaces) with it. The turbofan, the ‘newest’ technology, has had by comparison a huge impact on society, and every year large numbers of people interact with it. Again, however, only small numbers of highly trained people in very specific industries interface with this technology.

The gasoline powered internal combustion engine has had by far the most profound impact on society of the three: its extra-seminal effect is arguably greater than that of the external combustion of the steam engine a century earlier. All but the most isolated human populations are based on daily interaction with this technology, and even average users have a high degree of interface with it, in terms of its operation and even its maintenance and alteration. Our use of this technology would therefore seem to be analogous with our daily use of Information Technology.

This analogy, however, almost immediately wobbles, because the average car user knows far more about the machine parked in the garage than the machine that sits on a desk. That is, an average consumer usually knows something about the former and next to nothing about the latter. As you take umbrage at that statement, consider how you would respond if a garage mechanic told you that you knew next to nothing about cars. A proud petrolhead would likely protest until he/she had proved impressive or embarrassing, but the vast majority of us, I suspect, would shrug an (at most slightly qualified) agreement. Yet there are few high school educated people who, if pressed on the subject, couldn’t run through the basic series of events that makes a car start, and go, and speed up, and stop. A quick glance at the Net would fill in any gaps in five minutes. Now, this would not give anyone comprehensive knowledge of every part of a car, or of the different specifications of brand or model. It would not provide manual training, or the dexterity of practice. It would not make these readers good auto-diagnosticians, or frankly even a good judge of a car. But in 5 minutes, they could come to clearly understand why the car engine is, fundamentally, a 19th Century technology.

The above 5 minute Beginner’s tutorial is impossible in IT. No? Nine beginner questions then:

  1. Can you describe, in even the simplest terms, how the Ethernet protocol works?
  2. Can you describe, in even the simplest terms, how the Internet Protocol works?
  3. What is the difference between Ethernet and IP?
  4. What is the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web?
  5. How does Google find and present, out of 60 billion plus pages from around the world, the ten most relevant pages, in less than a second?
  6. What is the actual functioning difference between a PC and a Mac?
  7. Do you have any idea, beyond an abstract URL name, where my web server is?
  8. How do the words from this blog you are reading get to your computer’s screen from my web server?
  9. When you send me an email how does that message get from your Inbox to mine?

NB This particular Beginner quiz does not actually test your “internal combustion” knowledge of the basics of how computers work. We do not refer to microscopic electrical components inlaid on silicon, or ask how a maelstrom of ones and zeros instantaneously recompose your shots of the view from the Eiffel Tower. The questions simply refer to casual, everyday aspects of your interface experience.

If your answers ranged from “I should know that…” to “There’s a difference?”, don’t feel bad. But do feel worried. Because many of the people who are now selling, or reselling, or even “servicing” your information technology don’t know either. Or, to be expensively generous to them, they have or have had only a vague understanding of it. Recall the car mechanic: whatever your reticence in detailing your rough 50% comprehension of the workings of your internal combustion engine, you would be infuriated to learn that the mechanic you were paying had anything less than 99%, let alone the mere equal of yours. You will, of course, be paying the mechanic far, far less than an IT person, and you can take your car somewhere else if she fails you. For reasons known to many businesses, which we will explore later, it is much more difficult to simply move on with IT, and rare even when it is possible, profitable and advantageous to do so.

What I have been detailing is not exactly rocket science, but it does require reiteration: The Computer revolution, based squarely on the most amazing predictions of 20th Century Quantum and Particle physics, and encased in a series of the most amazing breakthroughs (transistors, silicon based printed circuits, mouse/touch-screen interface, CERN’s Internet etc) in history, has no modern analogue. Were it not for its extra-seminal, unparalleled and (to any 60’s rocket scientist) preposterous usefulness to the average human being, it would be as remote from everyday life as a supercollider (and its experts would not have to work hard to keep it that way). But it is that useful, despite its unparalleled complexity, and every genuine advance in its technology (coupled with the ludicrously swift improvements in engineering predicted by Moore’s Law) only make it more useful, even as it becomes more complex. This huge and widening interface gap between user and technology has created the world’s most profitable industry, an industry largely unregulated, without disinterested codes of professional conduct or up-to-date learning, populated by three distinct categories of go-betweens – or, if you prefer, entrepreneurs.

These three Primary Categories we will call Technologist, Artisan and Reseller. In the first category are numbered many, many people for whom this industry is a career that engenders and requires fascination – in other words, a true profession. For many of these also the changing nature of the industry is the essence of its fascination; the second category however includes not a few whose expertise is a slowly eroding island. Some of them view this sedimentary obsolescence quite cheerfully – fish off this pier while you can, then move on. Others view the shrinking enclosure of their expertise with defensive bitterness, but both share an intractable reluctance to upgrade their skills. The final category deals with those who have an ignorance they are either blithely ignorant of, cynically indifferent to, or something in between. Unsurprisingly, it is this category that the bulk of this blog will focus on. ***

*This definition is admittedly imperfect. The search for fusion energy, for example, has been on-going for decades, with the earliest predictions of success suggesting decades more wait, yet no one would consider a final discovery anything less than a stunning breakthrough. The search is still, however, to a large degree an incredibly sophisticated grope in the dark, and the eventual impact of success is still largely unexplored by non-physicists (as is the ever-growing possibility that some other discovery will turn fusion into one of history’s most poignant and expensive dead ends).

**The Saturn 5 remains the largest rocket in history over 40 years after its first launch, while the 747 held the passenger capacity record for 37 years, and modifications of its base form still dominate commercial aviation.

*** A quick note here – we’ll indulge in no coy truisms about “Gosh, which is worse, the ones who know they’re shafting you or the ones who don’t?” Conscious theft is always more disgusting. And the people who commit it will disappointingly often collapse into a vituperative defensiveness at the first revelation that you are a) aware of it and b) prepared to confront them directly about it (the vituperation, to be fair, will often be behind your back). Identifying them can be surprisingly easy, even with a little learning. Being rid of them…

.

 

 

We Do Linux

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I am not, as I have yet to prove, an argumentative person. Not in a sales presentation/meeting anyway. Counterproductive – customers don’t want to be confronted by confrontation. It was simply that I had heard this particular assertion, and its tone, several hundred times before.

“We do Linux.”

The tone was not that of a politician plaintively convincing himself that “[I] do care.” It was not Terry’s half whine, half assertion: “I can do Paella y’know Mr Fawlty.” Nor was it the (much rarer) snort of an IT pro who, well, really does. It was a polite Dagg-declaration of feel-good mutuality: “Oh yes, don’t you worry about Linux!” (sub-tone: “you don’t want to worry about that, do you?”)

Well, uh – no, we don’t. Can’t hang a man for his pre-programmed patter. Plenty of time later to plumb for shallow. Except – except on Occasion #237 I suddenly felt the urge to switch on the sonar.

“So – “

“hmm?”

“You do Linux?”

                “Yes.”

“What is Linux?”

                “…sorry?”

“What is Linux?”

                “ ’What is Linux?’?”

“Yes.”

                “Linux?”

“Linux.”

Silence. A reasonable tactic, given a brief silence has swallowed many an embarrassing question.

         

                                                                “What is Linux?”

 

He didn’t know. He averred that it wasn’t Microsoft, and looked hopefully up at the scoreboard, but, beyond that — nothing. He did however feel fully entitled to radiate annoyance at the question. He had done his job, memorized his Features List, seen the word LINUX there, registered its five Klingon letters, and duly deployed them.

His annoyance may have yours for company.  So what – does a car vendor have to know the exact difference between an alternator and a distributor? No, she doesn’t. However, to extend the first of many analogies we will make use of in this blog, she is in one specific section of a regulated chain of sections producing a century-old technology that is well (if basically) understood by the public: exploding petrol-pushes piston-pushes wheel-push/pulls car. Moreover, since the decline of the Communist bloc and the British automotive industry, it is a very rare new car that ceases to function the moment it leaves the showroom. When Business buys Information Technology, however, this is not rare, and the consequences for many customers are often unimaginable (if always very, very billable).

This blog intends to look at this phenomenon, the near inevitable product of a unique combination of cynical charlatanism and hopeful, often amiable ignorance. The “technological” homeopathy that results we will call Technopathy, and we will examine its causes, categories, permutations and solutions. We will start at the basic dichotomy, blurred in IT as in no other genuine industry, between Sales and Technical knowledge.

Last year I attended an excellent seminar on Selling from Paul Kenny where he identified and analysed two key aspects of the selling process: “Likeability” and “Storytelling.” All things being equal, or even a little unequal, where a buyer does not understand the technology on offer, he will base a purchase decision on his sense of which salesperson he likes best, and not the product. Conversely, the customer will be slower to blame a well liked sales professional if something later goes wrong with the product. Kenny identifies a key connector in the “likeability” process as the ability to tell stories that both link the buyer and seller, and normalize the process of purchase (“I’ve been here too”) in a way that animates the product and makes its seller more a collaborator than antagonist. The ability to match personal narratives is a key component of trust, and most customers want not just to feel, but also to talk of, trust in a product (and by extension its seller).

I accept both of Kenny’s points, but my reaction to them is diametric. The “likeability” quotient I believe to be one of the banes of my industry, for reasons I will explain later. I will, however, be making use of many anecdotes to detail and flesh out my points. Their purpose will be primarily inoculation, but if any reader can actually recognize his or her experience in any incident I describe, my sympathies. I hope it does not strike any such reader as too arrogant that my secondary purpose is to explain to you how and why what happened to you happened to you. And, frankly, to explain what happened to you.

A belated correction is perhaps necessary – I can be argumentative. However, I’m simply not naturally argumentative about IT. I love IT. Virtually every human who has ever created (startlingly often for free) any mechanism that you use wittingly or unwittingly every day loves it. Loves it. And loves to explain it, in part because (like any advanced technology and any science) it needs explanation, deserves it, and becomes more wonderful with it. I am forced primarily to argue with the many who make small or large amounts of money in the industry while understanding little or (with the barest hyperbole) next to nothing about it*. In this blog, I’ll try to explain how, and why, this could possibly be so.

I’ll also explain what Linux is.

 

*Many sellers might bridle at this phrase, but in an industry of immense complexity, growth and innovation, which literally has a law dictating the rate at which processing capacity will grow, “next to nothing” is always re-achievable.