I’m interested in music, but I’m not much of a musician.  My original plan was just to go online and buy something based on customer ratings and features. The kids’ piano teacher’s husband was horrified by this approach.  He offered to try out the various pianos himself and help me choose. We agreed a budget and off we went. After a couple of weeks, we settled on deciding between two models.Throughout the sales process, I kept being told that is is about the quality of the sound and the feel of the keys. It has lots of clever features too, but these don’t overwhelm. The fellow selling the piano didn’t really know how the electronics worked under the skin. He didn’t care either. “Listen to the sound; let that be the judge.” I saw the happiness that he got from playing, and that is what sold me. The whole process was without jargon.  It was all about the music.

photo via pixelbunny thanks!

Enterprise software marketing tends to talk too much about the technology for the technology’s sake.If it had been a software salesman I would have had an hour’s presentation before I actually heard the instrument. I’d see detailed specs of ohm and decibels, and about all the neat extras.  And the salesman wouldn’t have actually been able to play the instrument.

As an aside I now understand what virtualisation is, because I have heard it. This thing sounds like a grand piano because the patient folks at Yamaha have sampled thousands and thousands of grand piano notes.

5 hours north east of Johannesburg there is a Game Reserve. You can see giraffe, zebra, wildebeest, many birds, and lots of buck. Lions laze under the trees. You drive your car slowly by, counting off the animals you see.

Now, speak with a gentle but excited whisper, “Every now and again the lioness gets up and chases a zebra. The zebra must run fast or die; the hunter and hunted. Darwinian. “

I’m no David Attenborough, but you get the point. The game reserve is bigger than Wales and Denmark. The animals are totally wild. It can cruel and wicked.

At the Safari Park, things are a bit different. The Lions are fenced into an enclosure, about size of 5 football fields, and after a while you forget the fence is there. Once you leave, the lions get fed by the safari park staff. The other animals live a comfy existence in their own zone.  Yet it all looks realistic, if you haven’t seen the real thing. If you only have an hour it is great, because it can take a week to find that tree that the lions are lazing under if you are in the Game Reserve.

Checking software references is an important part of evaluating software.  Just remember the difference between the Safari Park and the Game Reserve. Is the vendor feeding them through the fence, or are they chasing their own dinner?  Don’t just ask the lion, ask the other animals too.

image via Sam and Ian on cc flickr.  Thanks!!

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change:
Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight.
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old;
And rather make them born to our desire
Than think that we before have heard them told.
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wondering at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.
This I do vow and this shall ever be;
I will be true despite thy scythe and thee.

Sonnet 123

thanks again to the sonnet a day.

(photo via cc attribution licence. ms4jah thanks.

Most of my working career encouraged me to chant the mantra, “we are integrated.”  I have spent the last year or so thinking about integration in a more objective light. Integration for me has undergone a de-reification process.

I was doing a presentation about HR technology recently, and I was talking about the impressive growth of niche vendors in various HCM areas, such as recruitment, learning, performance management and succession planning. One of the IT folks in the audience was getting a bit agitated, this was chaffing against his integration faith.

My new view is integration is like weather. The statement, we have weather today, is accurate but not particularly useful. This is similar to the statement our system is integrated.

What is integrated with what? What is the purpose of the integration? What value does the integration bring? What overhead does the integration create?

Once you know what is integrated, you can rationally assess the value of integration. Integration can be of significant value, it can help break silos, reduce data capture and improve data quality.

But integration can be an excuse not to move quickly, it can hinder innovation and create overhead, it can be a reason not to do something new.

Sometimes retyping stuff is okay. Tracking 50 top executives in a succession planning application doesn’t require real time integration with 20 separate global HR systems. In this case, typing is probably the correct integration approach. If you are doing performance appraisals for 300,000 employees then you had better have a plan on how to handle organization unit changes. This will involve a sophisticated integration framework with your system of record. Both of these are forms of integration.

When evaluating software view integration rationally, don’t put it on a pedestal, but don’t dismiss it. Understand clearly what is being integrated, and what the value of that integration is. Integration doesn’t trump functionality. Without the right functionality, integration is not worth much.

But also beware of those that say integration is easy to do.

photo via wikipedia. thanks!

This weekend we did some camping, just across the border into France, and very close to part of Maginot Line. Next time I visit that area I’m going to take some time and actually visit a couple of Ouvrages, go inside and see the working railway and the logistics of the thing. It is fascinating engineering and architecture, made all the more impressive by its absolute failure to deliver on its promise.

I normally dislike using military similes and metaphors in business language. It belittles the horror of war. I’m not in the trenches, in the line of fire, or going over the top, luckily. But there was something about the Maginot line that made me think about the enterprise software industry.

I suppose one could use the Maginot metaphor to describe neo-client/server architectures, but I couldn’t help thinking about software maintenance. The assumptions about maintenance made 10 years ago don’t necessarily hold today. While leaders of large software companies crow about their maintenance margins, images of the Maginot line keep coming into my head.