Tag Archives: scalability

The Cloud is like a teenage driver

Nobody is shocked when they hear the teenager just learning to drive got into an accident. After all, even with the safest car on the block, the kid just lacks the depth of experience.

Maybe that’s the same growing pain we’re seeing from some of the recent outages at many major tech providers over the last few weeks. Maybe we simply lack the depth of experience? We think we know what to do but aren’t really prepared for situations that occur just 1% of the time.

Developing processes, buying hardware, staffing up, increasing complexity…. Making those significant investments just for something that just happens 1% of the time. Tough to get 20x return on that stuff. Tough to justify when the “accidents” just hurt you.

Now imagine that teenager is driving a bus full of people. Those 1% situations switch from potentially doing harm to just a few to endangering many. After all, they are providing a transportation platform for anyone willing to pay.

Isn’t this the same for our cloud providers that supply many others with platform-as-a-service? Now when Amazon or Google hits a rough patch, the thousands of others riding on their platforms get tossed around too.

I’m confident that our teenage drivers will get better. They will gain more experience, plan better, get help, and most importantly realize their actions (or lack of action) can and does impact others.

Let’s hope the leadership of the new guard for cloud computing are brave enough to fight for funding to take today’s platform offerings from ‘good enough’ to ‘great’ since we are all now getting on the bus.

Is Moore’s Chasm theory telling intraprenaurs something? Are we listening?

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Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is written with a specific focus of marketing high tech products to mainstream consumers. It cautions how many high tech new ventures fail in reaching mainstream adoption primarily because those companies don’t evolve their marketing strategies to cater to the tastes and preferences of a the very pragmatic early majority audience whose motivations and risk tolerance differ significantly from their existing visionary/early adopter clients.

I believe there is some wisdom in Moore’s pages for internal innovation teams as well. Complementing Andrew Chen’s recent blog, it seems we largely lack a consistent process or approach with respect to stimulating demand with more pragmatic and conservative user communities inside the firewall. Some firms have great internal programs for gaining early adopters and refining some of their technical innovations. But what happens we the pilot ends? Where is the graduate program that guides those early successes into more mainstream audiences?

Don’t get me wrong… being successful with innovator and early adopter types accounts for nearly 16% of the user population. In a firm with 300,000+ employees, 16% represents nearly 50,000 users. Reaching 50,000 internal users is remarkable and should be celebrated as an incredible success in and of itself.

BUT if we can break through to the early majority types, that is where the significant economies of scale and ROI really kick in. By gaining traction in the early majority, the usage would grow from 50k to 150k users. That is 3 times the value at nearly the same cost to support just 50,000 users.

Sure there are some internal innovations that have made it to the “big show” primarily through viral growth inside the firewall. But there are many other promising capabilities that seem to plateau and don’t quite make it to the more mainstream internal user. I believe we can overcome this adoption challenge through marketing innovation rather than technical innovation.

Goverance – Good news & bad news

I recently heard a very telling story about Lou Gerstner, the executive largely credited with turning IBM around in the mid-1990s. When he joined IBM he commissioned a benchmarking study on payroll systems used by large enterprises. When the group presented their findings, they told Lou they had some good news and some bad news. The good news was that the firm had the best payroll system they had ever come across. The bad news was that the firm also had the 4th, 8th, 23rd and 28th payroll systems. The message was clear and Lou took aggressive action.

My experience tells me this overlap and redundency is a frequent and widespread occurance in large firms where there are substantial business units that either had the autonomy to build infrastructure to support their activities or they were acquired with little integration with the “mother ship” of the acquirer. I’ve seen this silo-driven culture saturate many critical enterprise efforts ranging from simple web site management to corporate strategic planning. Why is this so prevalent and what is being done to prevent making the same mistakes again and again?

Seems to me this is clearly a question of governance (or lack of governance) and the expense of poor/weak governance grows steeper with each new application and business unit that gets created rather than brought into the fold. There don’t seem to be many hard-liners who are willing to say “this is when the madness stops” followed by swift and meaningful action that includes going after legacy efforts.

I guess I just wish there were more big game hunters in corporate America. There’s plenty of productivity and cost savings to be had if you can fell a few elephants. I’ve often seen many who are willing to pounce on fledgling efforts to make them join the flock but few want to try going after the bigger legacy items. The hard and unglamorous decisions to effectively govern internal processes and systems (that aren’t necessarily broken) seem to be inevitably delayed until the firm is in dire trouble. Why wait until its nearly too late?