Enterprise IT getting easier to use is a good thing. But we have understand why to benefit fully.
Only a few years ago, the computing section in bookshops was filled with technical books helping novices and experts alike to install and manage IT systems. Their titles might have scared most back to the history section but they reminded us that before users could access new software, someone had to do specialist and often expensive work. To make matters worse, the roadblock to great IT solutions often wasn’t a vendor’s lack of innovation but an implementation team’s lack of time, knowledge or budget. Quality was variable and frustrations often exceeded.
Today, those bookshelves look very different. A city’s large bookshop commonly has over half of their computing books focused on using IT rather than implementation or operations. Dozens of books are published for each flavour of modern end user devices. There’s whole shelves dedicated to using online services like LinkedIn, Wordpress, eBay etc. All is not lost for the technical reader though. Hidden amongst the Dummies Guide to Spotify, bookshops still stock deep dive books often about programming and maintaining networks. But today, their titles put them on a pedestal amongst their more colourful printed peers. They give the impression they’re for people looking to create bigger and better things with the under-the-hood tools in front of them.
A snapshot of a modern bookshop’s shelves can be interpreted to mean almost anything. What it can’t hide though is how the focus of IT has changed from operations to using it. Massive changes in recent years to the IT systems we use at home – Facebook, Ocado, iPlayer, iPhone, Netflix – have shown technology doesn’t have to be complex. In fact, it’s made us realise how much easier our lives life can be when we inject some IT.
The consumerisation of IT is a new term that’s been bandied about in recent years to describe the shift in user expectations. People who use IT at work increasingly expect it to be as good as the IT they use at home. When it’s not they feel justified in asking why. More worryingly, today’s touchscreen champions are increasingly happy to get their credit cards out if it means they can get their hands on the latest business technologies sooner.
While it might be a relevant term, the consumerisation of IT is also a non-descriptive term. Its words hide its solutions and benefits. It’s one of IT’s most general of generalisations.
What influence then can the consumerisation of IT have on enterprise IT? How is it increasingly, and rapidly, changing the way the big enterprise IT giants approach their customers?
The first is meeting our changing expectations about how services are paid for. At home, long term financial commitments have mostly been limited to paying back borrowed money. The only common exceptions were gym memberships and mobile phone subscriptions – both industries that have had to change to stay competitive. In the business world longer term commitments are more common. Some types of services aren’t worth providing unless there’s a two or three year commitment from the customer – something especially familiar to providing and maintaining IT services.
One of the first non-technical changes the cloud era has bought reflects the consumerisation of payments. Today, both small and large business, and both novices and experts can buy enterprise IT services with very little financial commitment – and often for no cash during trial periods. When used with cloud’s pay-per-use model accessing an enterprise ERP platform can be as easy subscribing to movies from Netflix. Finance, ERP, HR and collaboration systems are starting to leave the corporate cheque books in the drawer and bringing out the metaphorical credit cards for recurring monthly payments.
Cloud providers might make it more attractive for companies to finance models that favour larger investments over longer periods – but the increasingly common change is they’re no longer mandatory. Microsoft’s Azure Services platform offers access to SAP and Oracle’s biggest enterprise technologies with an hourly billing model. The financial risk of trying before you buy with enterprise IT software can be almost zero in today’s cloud era. Try-before-you-invest has arrived.
No one really knows how many servers Facebook or iPlayer need so their services don’t become too slow to use. Likewise, no one really thinks too much about how Netflix stream HD movies from a data centre to your widescreen TV without dropping a frame, it just happens. Hiding their complexity doesn’t just make them easier to use, it broadens their appeal and therefore the number of potential customers.
Enterprise IT systems have always been known for being notoriously complex to get going. Application systems, resilient data centres and secure networks have needed armies of experts before the business can start making them theirs and getting value from them. The true cost maybe hidden if organisations already hire those skills, but the time to deploy often gets more sluggish the more complex a solution becomes.
Cloud services don’t suddenly make everything easier, in fact they can bring new problems, but they help hide significant amounts of implementation and operational complexity. No one ever asks how they would backup their Facebook pages – it’s not all photos of babies and cats, today many sole traders and small businesses can place a business value on their Facebook presence – and for some enterprise IT services the same expectations are also now being made. The devil is in the detail of service level agreements, but end users of business grade services are given contractually backed reassurances, not instruction books, about how their IT services are best implemented and operated.
Picking the perfect car has come a long way since Henry Ford allegedly offered no choice . There are dozens of colours and hundreds of optional extras to feel compelled to ponder over. Yet despite the number of possible combinations being well into the low thousands, car manufacturers are ready for more people to buy their new cars without ever setting foot into a dealership. Gone are the days of grids and matrices of compatible options, or finding out upsettingly late that a mid-life desire for red leather seats and gold paint isn’t possible. Behind all that complexity is a messy set of pre-programmed rules, options and validation processes – yet all the customer sees is the options available to them.
Enterprise IT is learning to do the same. It’s often the case that the more you outsource to a cloud service provider, the fewer technical questions you need to answer. At the same time, the wider the service’s capabilities, the more options you can pick from. Using Salesforce yet again as an example of a cloud service might get groans, but it shows how something as complex as an enterprise CRM system can be bought by organisations of almost any size in almost any industry with a credit card – although bigger companies still quite rightly want to meet someone first. The skill isn’t in making the product less flexible, it’s about about hiding the complexity of such a configurable service. The purchasing portal for Microsoft’s Azure services lets the right people using the right clicks deploy enterprise IT platforms. There maybe good reasons to use other methods, but the approach to purchasing enterprise IT has learned about simplicity from the e-commerce consumer boom.
Enterprise IT services are maybe easier to buy and get value from. After all, the IT vendors who create new services and the IT leaders who buy them are both consumers themselves, each desperate for a simpler life.
But enterprise IT still needs its experts. Architects and analysts have to define what needs buying in the first place, security staff need to ensure the perimeter is tight and technical teams have to operate and customise. Today’s technical books might not be as colourful as their consumer cousins, but we’re going to keep needing more and more of them to keep the world growing.