Looking askance 1
Looking askance 1
June 2003
Re-entry, Planet Process
I touched down on 7 May at the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington, homing in on a strong, repetitive signal. "BPM BPM BPM" went the beacon. "What on earth's that?" went my Biotic Randomness Attenuator and Input Normaliser, as we banked over the tractor cutting the grass in Kensington Gardens. I was soon to find out.
Rapidly assuming (vaguely) human form, I walked down to the assembly point. I was pleased to see there several members of SOFA. Using the secret passphrase - "Hello, you old sod. How are you?" - I engaged them in talk and started getting back up to speed.
I had been out of the world of workflow for a while and wanted to find out what I had missed. Not much, it seemed. Apart from various freshly minted acronyms, a couple of dozen extra standards bodies and some new suppliers, the main change was the level of ambition. No longer content with running office workflows, we now are intending to run the entire processes of an organization. Business Process Management is the name for this - the source of "BPM" signal I had followed in. Wow! Stafford Beer's Brain of the Firm made flesh, as it were - or at least C++.
I looked at the programme to see the most efficient way to get more detail on this new message. And there it was, a panel on standards. Panel sessions always present information flows in parallel, whatever the chairperson may intend.
This particular session was based on The Balloon Game, a BBC TV programme from the 1950s. In that, three historically famous people were imagined to be in a hot-air balloon plummeting towards earth. Panellists had to pick one person to throw out to save the other two. It was the ancestor of such modern televisual treats as Big Bruvva and I'm a nonentity… how did my agent get me here? The difference then was that contestants had to know something or, indeed, anything.
BPMG varied the formula, making the panel pick a fellow panellist for immolation. The assembled representatives consisted mainly of Old Geeks, where one might have hoped for Young Turks, but that is the nature of standards groups. In the role of pilot was Katy Ring of Ovum, there to egg people on. Katy was beta-testing her Balloon Panel Elevation Language but it was clearly buggy. One panellist even offered to throw himself out.
The session otherwise went much as expected. There was some Unruly Monopolising of Listeners and several panellists Waffled for Minutes Continuously. Speakers from organizations which were - putting it delicately - Undergoing Diminished Democratic Interest were prone to this.
No detail was spared in the presentations. I've always felt that Complexity Ordinarily Repels Business Audiences but here the speakers were banking on Egregiously Acute Intelligence among their listeners. It was a risk that largely paid off.
To nobody's surprise, every member of the panel Blithely Promised Maximum Litheness through using their standards. They were, to a man, Singularly Optimistic About Processes. I worried that the Wider Significance of Defining Management Logically was passing one or two of them by but that is another debate.
After the presentations, there was reaction from the audience, one or two of whom agreed with one or two of the panellists. I thought of asking a question myself, on pi-calculus, but feared a tart response.
We ran out of time in the end, which always signals a successful session. Katy finally managed to lay her hands on the eXtrovert Management Levers and drew matters to an orderly close.
I had learned plenty and enjoyed myself. A good conference, like a good conversation, does as much idea provoking as it does information passing. On that basis, this was indeed a good conference, a Bountifully Productive Members' Gathering.
Setting the Standard
An American venture capitalist once remarked that monopolies are like newborn children. They are all ugly, unless, of course, they happen to be your own.
Monopolies in the computer software industry are no less unattractive to the neutral onlooker. However, if you happen to have one of these mewling and puking monsters, life can be sweet. There are all sorts of things you can do because of your size that smaller and possibly smarter competitors could not get away with. It is unfair but, as the saying goes, it's the winners who write the history.
One of the privileges open to monopoly suppliers is the extended pre-announcement, which works like this. First you gain a position of dominance in a particular sector, creating de facto technical standards on the way.
Next, you find out if there are any related areas of activity where your competitors are making too much money. They are not necessarily doing so at your expense; it's just that, like a tax gatherer, you simply dislike other people doing well.
Your third step, therefore, is to create a vague but impressive-sounding scheme for capturing that part of the market. It doesn't have to be fully, or even well, thought-out, so long as it vaguely aligns with your existing product range. The fact that it probably fits like mail-order false teeth is neither here nor there at this stage.
Finally, you peddle your 'marketecture' around the computer press, the financial press, your resellers and your customers, existing and prospective. All of them will then work to make your scheme a success.
The computer press, especially in America, will be your storm troopers. They will lavish admiration on anything you propose to do. They do so on the good old Yankee principle that the output of any company that makes lot of money must, of itself, be good.
It is not that these journalists are dishonest, it's simply that they usually know nothing outside the world you have created. They lack the experience to see matters in a wider frame of reference. Many do not have the proper journalistic instinct to question the basis on which you run.
As Humbert Wolfe pointed out in his poem, Over the Fire:
You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.
For "British", these days read "computer".
The financial press - your cavalry - also works for you. It is similarly uncaring about the moral value or utility of what you do. Its sole concern is its effect on your share price. Also, most financial journalists lack the technical background to understand the deficiencies in your plan.
Your resellers, who are your poor bloody infantry, will all see the opportunity to make money out of your planned product. They will therefore stifle any doubts they may have about its practicality or the likelihood of its delivery in the planned time frame.
Saddest of all, your existing customers will become your collaborators, publicly supporting your new product or architecture. They will seemingly forget your history of broken promises, your inadequate support arrangements and the ever-increasing cost of using your products. Instead, they will pay you to become beta testers of the product and allow their names to be used in your press releases.
In the crowning act of self-deception, they will also stand up and be (dis)counted at your seminars and press conferences. It's the corporate equivalent of the Stockholm syndrome, in which kidnap victims form close emotional attachments to their captors.
While all this is going on, a planning blight will descend on the buying intentions of your competitors' users. Your announcements and pre-announcements will cause them to put on hold their planned future purchases of other suppliers' products. Some will even cancel them, to your delight and your competitors' dismay.
Eventually, you begin shipments of the new product. It will be late, of course, but you don't mind. Your existing customers were hooked months ago, your competitors' ex-customers will be relieved the waiting is over and the press will proclaim it a triumph. Ah, the joys of a level playing field.
Many years ago, a BBC television programme about tourism in the Channel Islands interviewed one of the islands' councillors. This grand old gentleman said that he and his fellow councillors had no wish for the islands to get rich "by selling junk to mugs". Such gentlemen, such sentiments and such scruples are of a vanished age. They are surplus to requirements in the software industry.
This is an edited version of an article that appeared in Roger's online magazine, eComWatch, in August 1999. It shows how little change there has been meanwhile. Roger and his colleague, Chris Ogg, published ECW until 2002. You can read all the issues at http://www.office-futures.com/ecwarchive.htm.
Roger Whitehead
Note: SOFA is the Same Old Faces Association