International Business Meta-Machines
Let’s be brief and discrete about what IBM is doing right now for the very large enterprise employing me at the moment. IBM is trying to teach old dogs new tricks. IBM is trying to sell its concept of SOA (the big, old container for Web Services) to my management culture. When I fused what IBM is doing at my job and what Robert X. Cringely said about IBM there is almost something that makes sense here. I think that IBM is out of the business machine business and is now in the meta-business machine business.
Sure, IBM can provide your company with consultants as grunts who write code for you but what IBM is doing at my job is new (to me): they are providing us with a (middle?) management team, featuring project managers. I’ve heard rumors that IBM simply wants to be the complete IT solution for all business on earth. Does this mean that, in a perfect IBM world, the CIO of fortune-500 Company X is actually a temp from IBM?
You see, in our employee efforts to learn about SOA we have to read IBM instructional material and take tests at the IBM website. Like any commercial, for-profit, educational program the instructional materials contain IBM-centric messages. To me, some of those messages are a ‘direct response’ to the Robert X. Cringely camp:
Academic (ivory-tower) research and development (R&D) labs slow the rate of invention.
Here is another ‘response’ to Cringely:
Limited numbers of local talent slow the innovation cycles.
And one more for today:
For a business to meet the challenge of quick and cost-effective business transformations, IT must respond with incredible agility.
However, according to the “appropriate” media outlets, “Analysts squash rumors of 150,000 IBM layoffs.” But, to me, the so-called ‘responses’ above say that: IBM will never invest in any significant way in R&D again; IBM will outsource, exploiting talent from all over the globe; and IBM will have fewer and more agile employees (but ‘fewer’ is relative term). It makes sense to me because it means that IBM will practice what it is preaching/selling.
When IBM writes something like, “The corporate tendency to just make it work” is a “mess” is downright shocking and quite unexpected. I think that that such a statement is shocking because this “corporate tendency” is not going away anytime soon—the Western culture would have to transform itself out of its imperial Roman heritage before this tendency goes away. This should be great news for IBM because this means that they will be in the consulting business for years to come.
Another shocking statement from IBM is that “Architecture is a wager” or “Architecture is a calculated risk”—the opinion here is that it takes vision and courage to take these risks... My IT career is sorely lacking risk takers among management and leadership. When you have a mortgage over $5000 per month you would probably not be a risk taker either. Again, more great news for IBM. They have the clout to ‘rent’ architects (or shadow architects) to cowardly corporate managers. IBM calls this high-level IT consulting “transformative.” In case this “transformative” architectural gamble fails, IBM provides someone to blame—and our cowardly managers can still pay their mortgage.
Scoble interviews IBM’s Drew Clark in “Meeting IBM Ventures.”