Death of the DouchePad

One of the finest pleasure I experience in the workplace is to witness early adopters of immature technology. They behave like kids, my therapist would say there's a transference process between the device and the owner.

When these bozos buy the latest gadget, they quickly tour the office and demo whatever crap they bought to showcase how forward-thinking they are compared to other CGI members. They won't hesitate to pay $500 with after-tax money on some piece of electronic that won't improve their personal productivity, won't help them get laid and definitely won't bring any new revenues to the corporation. When asked about how great their new gizmo is, they invariably look upward and claim that 10 years from now whatever thing they just acquired will be common yet much more powerful and will help solve all kinds of tough problems like world hunger and socialism.

Such scenes are irritating, because these assholes keep bugging you and you loose precious billable minutes to listen to something so irrelevant you have to excuse yourself to go to the bathroom to break the conversation.

The fun part though, is witnessing that same early adopter deflate slowly and painfully when "their" technology is discarded by the market.

Case in point, HP killed the TouchPad less than 2 months after its introduction and more or less announced the death of webOS, the "fantastic" technology they got from Palm. It's an epic fail, what was HP's board of directors doing all this time? Check this out, you don't want these guys sitting on YOUR board, they'll steer your company into a major ditch.

Any meth-smoking dropout living on the street would have told you the Palm acquisition and the release of the TouchPad was doomed to fail since from a strategic standpoint the product had the same price and no real benefits compared to the market leader the iPad.

Following the press release, on-line retailers started a "fire sale" to get rid of uncool TouchPads at a 80% discount.

So back to our gizmo luminaries, this was a major blow to their ego and on Monday they were acting as if their spouse had dumped them over the week-end. Long face all over, the gadget that acted a social enhancer the previous week is hidden during meetings, since owners do not want to face questions such as Oh yeah, that was the device that got axed last Friday, how does that make you feel now? How much did you pay? How about future upgrades?

Dear members, this is yet another proof that you work for the best company in the world. Since we don't invest money in - just saying the word is painful to me - R&D, you are secured from the pest of hardware and software development. Others put the shareholder's money at stake in risky ventures, and we - the service people - just harvest the mature technologies that our ultra-conservative clients pick.

If you want to impress folks in a meeting, don't use a fucking DouchePad to express your thoughts in less than 140 characters. Get your HP 12c out of your jacket and crunch numbers in RPN, that will definitely grab my attention in a positive fashion.

Quick poll on failure

My VPs convinced me recently to put up a quick poll on our Web site where we ask visitors what is the most common risk associated with managing IT projects. As if this was a mystery of some sort. I said okay, just to keep them happy and busy.

There are only 3 possible answers, you don’t get to win anything. Let's take a closer at the possible answers, shall we?

Lack of required resources and skills might mean many things. For instance the consulting firm initially proposed a team of seasoned senior guys, really top shelf, but on Day 1 they claimed some “availability issues” and sent a mismatched bunch of junior guys who happened to be on the bench the previous week. Or the firm managed to send good people to the client, only to realize internal resources had as much as brain power as a tooth brush. Either way, the project is doomed to fail.

What does inaquate oversight and communication mean? Well it might mean that the PM is a total douche bag who doesn’t care much about what happens on the floor, he’s just in for the paycheck and to add another line in his resume. Or he is a smart person who has been dropped in the middle of multiple wars raging between organizational units. He’ll just be another casualty after a few months, the firm already has a short list of mildly depressed PMs ready to replace him.

As for disconnect between business needs and technology, and it’s still the same old story, a fight for cash and glory. This is one of the shameful disease you get when you hire someone let’s say from IBM, Microsoft or HP/EDS (totally random example, don't know how those got into my head). Those guys want to make your project a relatively good success but as long as you buy their shit.

Snakeoil top salesmen come in and their first task is to identity the internal dweebs who will act as external “spokesmen” for the company. Microsoft Certified A-holes are very good at this, they can pinpoint internal employees who built their careers by spreading the Redmond gospel all over. The MS horsemen then slightly praise those employees for their “exceptional knowledge” of Windows (ahem), and next thing you know those employees will work day and night to provide reasons for the organization to purchase Microsoft products and nothing but. The project as a whole might fail, but it won’t be because the client chose a disarray of products from multiple vendors.

But in the end, keep in mind that failure is not a critical factor for an IT consulting firm. What matters is whether or not you can manage to bill top rate for whatever acts your clowns can perform, as long as possible.

Hell runs SAP

We all have some painful things we need to do from time to time to make a living, like really bend backward and go against our very nature. For me, it’s when a customer calls CGI and asks to help them deploy SAP. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and calmly answer, of course send us the requirements we’ll have some people on site tomorrow morning.

For those of you outside the trade, deploying SAP in a business is like having a colonoscopy done on a boat during a storm at night by a drunken doctor with advanced Parkinson symptoms. You won’t be the same ever again. Not even close.

You first saw the ads in the train station like “Kellogg runs SAP” with a stock picture of smiling business man, so you figured out your business is as good as Kellogg therefore this is the path to go. Serious companies run serious software, don’t they? So you trade your personal judgement for a desire to behave like your peers do in hope that it will bring you success. Like that has worked before.

SAP being German software, you then begin to associate Mercedes qualities to the product. The word “rigorous” gets seeded into your subconscious. You want your business to ride like a C-class, don’t you? Next, you see the astronomical cost of the software, so you expect that SAP must really be a nifty piece of software made by Von Brown-class programmers. At this point your mind is loaded with very high expectations, you sign a fat check to the giggling SAP sales rep and you then cross you fingers everything will be okay.

It won’t. You just torpedoed your own business.

The first reason is that humans are not pessimistic enough, they can’t believe how screwed up a project can turn. Sure, you had a contingency plan but it’s likely to be paper thin compared to the cosmic issues that you will encounter. Humans have a hard time wrapping their minds on complexity on that scale, it’s like being able to understand perfectly the organisational structure of the entire U.S. administration from the Oval office down to the smallest division of all departments. It can’t be done.

The next reason why SAP projects go down in flame is that you must deconstruct your business to the molecular level and then rebuild it completely in a SAP fashion. Yes kids, the business must adapt itself to SAP, not the other way around. It’s German, you remember? So managing a company change of that scale will generate casualties on an epic scale. Orders won’t get processed because of IT snafus, confusion will arise even if you had planned the transition down to the smallest detail. If you’re into the manufacturing industry, changes on the line will take hours if not days to get processed instead of minutes. Customers will scream at you and go shop at a competitor who has not been infected by SAP yet. You might even loose market share in the next quarter and get hammered by Wall Street. Are you having fun yet?

And then there’s the SAP software itself. If you thought IT was complex, wait until you see the SAP semi arrive at your location, loaded with boxes and boxes full of DVDs and documentation. Learning to speak Japanese, German and Klingon must be kids play compared to installing and maintaining SAP. This piece of crap is so fucking complex that nobody on Earth can claim to fully master all the components of this software. For one thing, SAP experts tend to die young, divorced and bald. When my SAP experts ask to take a day off to chill, they go manage the JFK runways on a Friday night. Man, that was easy they say to me the next Monday.

So if tomorrow the devil makes you purchase SAP and you want us to help, call me personally. If you don’t mind, I’ll first send you my therapist to understand the subconscious desires to deploy SAP. It may take a few months, billable time of course.