Todd Biske: Outside the Box

I’ve been meaning to post on this subject for some time, so it’s good that I got to the airport a little earlier than normal today. There’s nothing like blogging at 5:30 in the morning.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I just finished listening to a podcast from IT Conversations on the drive to the airport which was a discussion on user experience with Irene Au, Director of User Experience for Google. One of the questions she took from the audience dealt with the notion of having a centralized group for User Experience, or whether it should be a decentralized activity. This question is one that frequently comes up in SOA discussions, as well. Should you have a centralized service development, or should your efforts be decentralized? There’s no right or wrong answer to this question, however, it’s certainly true that your choices can impact your success. In the podcast, Irene discussed the matrixed approach at Yahoo, and how everything would up being funded by business units. This made it difficult to do activities for the greater good, such as style guides, etc. The business unit wanted to maximize their investment and have those resources focused on their activities, not someone else’s. Putting this same topic in the context of SOA, this would be the same as having user-facing application teams developing services. The challenge is that the business unit wants that user-facing application, and they want it yesterday. How do we create services that aren’t solely of value to just that application. At the opposite extreme, things can be centralized. Irene discussed the culture of open office hours at Google, and how she’ll have a line of people outside her office with their user experience questions in hand. While this may allow her to maintain a greater level of consistency, resource management can be a big challenge, as you are being pulled in multiple directions. Again, putting this in the SOA context, the risk is that in the quest for the perfect enterprise service, you can put individual project schedules at risk as they wait for the service they are dependent on. These are both extreme positions, and seldom is an organization at one extreme or the other, but usually somewhere in the middle.

In trying to tackle this problem, it’s useful to think of things as either horizontal or vertical. Horizontal concepts are ones where breadth is the more important concern. For example, infrastructure is most frequently presented as a horizontal concern. I can take a four CPU server and run just about anything I’d like on it these days, meaning it provides broad coverage across a variety of functional domains. A term frequently used these days is commodity hardware, and the notion of commoditization is a characteristic of horizontal domains. When breadth becomes more important that depth, there’s usually not many opportunities for innovation. Largely, activities become more focused on reducing the cost by leveraging economies of scale. Commoditization and standardization go hand in hand, as it’s difficult to classify something as a commodity that doesn’t meet some standard criteria. In the business world, these horizontal areas are also ones that are frequently outsourced, as all companies typically do it the same way meaning there is little room for competitive differentiation.

Vertical concepts are ones where depth is the more important concern. In contrast to the commoditization associated with horizontal concerns, vertical items are ones where innovation can occur and where companies can set themselves apart from their competitors. User experience is still an area where significant differentiation can occur, so most user-facing applications fall into this category. Business knowledge, customer experience (preferably at a partnership level to have them involved in the process), are keys at this level.

By nature, vertical and horizontal concerns are orthogonal and can create tension. I have a friend who works as a user experience consultant and he once asked me about how to balance the concerns that may come from a user experience focus, clearly rooted in the vertical domains with the concerns of SOA, which are arguably focused on more horizontal concerns. There’s no easy answer to this. Just as the business must make decisions over time on where to commoditize and where to specialize, the same holds true for IT. Apple is a great example to look at, as their decision to not commoditize in their early days clearly resulted in them being relegated to niche (but still relevant) status in computer sales. Those same principles, however, to remain more vertically-focused with tight top-to-bottom controls have now resulted in their successes with their computers, iTunes, Apple TV, the iPod, and the forthcoming iPhone. There are a number of ways to be successful, although far fewer ways than there are to be unsuccessful.

When trying to slice up your functional domains into domains of services, you must certainly align it with the business goals. If there is an area of the business where they are trying to create competitive differentiation, this is probably not the best area to look for services that will have broad enterprise reuse, although it is very dependent on whether technology plays a direct role in that differentiation or an indirect role, such as whether the business to consumer interaction is solely through a website, or if it is through a company representative (e.g. a financial advisor). These areas that are closest to the end user are likely to require some degree of verticality to allow for tighter controls and differentiation. That’s not to say they own the entire solution, top to bottom, however, which would be a monolith.

As we go deeper into the stack, you should look for areas where commoditization and standardization outweighs the benefits of customization. It may begin at a domain level, such as integration across a suite of applications for a single business unit, with each successive level increasing the breadth of coverage. There is no point where the vertical solutions stop, and everything beneath it has enterprise breadth. Rather, it is a continuum of decreasing emphasis on depth and increasing emphasis on breadth. A Internet company may try to differentiate themselves in their end-user facing systems that the users interact with, allowing a large degree of autonomy for each product line. The supporting services behind those user interfaces will increase in the breadth of their scope, but still may require some degree of specialization, such as having to deal with a particular region of a country or even the world for global organizations. We then bleed into the area of “applistructure” and solutions that fall more into the support arena. A CRM system will have close ties to the end-user facing sales portal. The breadth of CRM coverage may need to span multiple lines of business, unlike the sales portal, where specialization could occur. Going deeper, we have applications that may have no ties to the end-user facing systems, but are still necessary to run a business, such as Human Resources. Interestingly, if you’re following my logic you may be thinking that these things should all be outsourced, but the truth is that many of these areas are still far from being commoditized. That’s because they involve user facing components, which brings us back to those vertical domains where customization can add value. An organization that outsources the technology side of HR, but doesn’t have an associated reduction in HR staff may have a potential conflict when they want to have specialized HR processes, but are dealing with commodity interfaces and systems. Put simply, you can’t have it both ways.

The trend continues on down the stack to the infrastructure and the world of the individual developer. If you’re truly wanting to adopt SOA from top to bottom, there should be a high degree of commoditization and standardization at this level. Organizations where solutions are still built top-to-bottom, with customized hardware platforms, source code management, programming languages, etc. are going to struggle with SOA, because their culture is vertically-oriented to an extreme.

While the speed of change, business decisions on what things are core competencies and what things are not do not change overnight. Taking an organization where each product group had its own staff (vertically-oriented) and switching it to a centralized sales organization (horizontally-oriented) is a significant cultural change, and often doesn’t go smoothly. You only need to look at the number of mergers and acquisitions that have been deemed successful (less than 50%) to understand the difficulty. Switching from vertically-focused IT solutions to horizontally-focused IT solutions is just as difficult, if not more difficult. Humans are significantly more adaptable than technology solutions, which at the core, are binary, yes/no environments. The important thing is to recognize when misalignment is occurring and take action to fix it. That’s all about governance. If users are trying to apply significant customization to a technology area that has been deemed as a commodity by the business, push back needs to occur to emphasis that the greater good takes precedence over individual needs. If IT is taking far too long to deliver a solution in an area where time to market and competitive differentiation is critical, remove the barriers and give that group more control over the solution, at the expense of broader applicability. If you don’t know what your priorities and principles are, however, for each domain, you’ll end up in and endless sequence of meetings that are rooted in opinions, rather than documented principles and behaviors desired by the organization.

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