Challenges of Design

There is only one true designer in the world today and that is Steve Jobs. I have never met him and missed him at the Las Vegas electronics show. It just gets too crowded and then he has so many idol-worshipping fans at these shows that it gets a little hard to get a commonsense perspective. But I've read his speeches as well as some books about him that are critical and no so critical. One of those books is iCon, an unauthorized biography. This book was actually initially rolled out at Apple stores. But as soon as Steve Jobs read that book, he had all the copies pulled out of Apple stores and thrown into dumpsters. I guess someone must have picked up one such hardbound copy, which I bought from Amazon.com for two dollars. Steve Jobs fretted for hours about each screw on iPod. Finally, he decided that iPod won't have a screw, since screws looked ugly. This meant that people won't be able to open the iPod and replace batteries. So be it. As a result programmers had to work another six-months to figure out how to conserve battery and make it last longer. Steve Jobs is all about form and flow. So does he give up on functions? Yes, he does. He tightly guards his hardware and software. He decides and limits functionality. He is a revolutionary, who sacrifices the scope of his inventions at the altar of form and flow.

Computer revolution was created not by Apple but by a mistake by IBM, when they decided to buy an operating system for their IBM-PC from Bill Gates for $50K without seeking full ownership and distribution rights on the operating system. This was such a small deal that IBM's lawyers decided to ignore it. As is well known this is what caused emergence of IBM clones using Microsoft operating system and revolutionized the industry.

Microsoft continues to have much wider acceptance. Apple continues to lag behind the functionality offered by PCs, whether using Microsoft OS or using Linux, partly due to cussedness of Steve Jobs. This cussedness comes as a package with his extraordinary strengths in design. His weakness only enhances his strengths and Steve does not give a damn to his weakness. Now the question is did Steve Jobs borrow for building what he is unwilling to share? I'm afraid that the answer again may be in affirmative. Steve's NeXT was based on Carnegie-Mellon's object-oriented Unix kernel. In fact, it is NeXT that powers Apple computers these days.

Most of these issues are well known in the industry but Steve Jobs is still the king of design. The likes of Sony, Ford and Toyota with their deep pockets continue to come out with ugly electronics and cars. Clearly, money doesn't a designer make.

Who started this race for the design of the ugliest car? Was it Pontiac Aztek? Toyota joined it with Prius and FJ Cruiser. Ford did not want to be left behind and they decided to release Flex. Why should Nissan be left behind in this race for ugly cars? So they released Cube. All of them have their own excuses. Toyota wanted to make a fuel-efficient car, Ford wanted to have a specious retro vehicle for families and Nissan wanted to create more space for less money.

Here are some stock pictures of these cars. Compare these to the design of iPod and think about the trade-offs that the designers refused to make. Car industry needs a Steve Jobs.

Chief Information Officer (CIO) sans Chief Utilities Officer

A couple of weeks back I had joined a discussion with a few senior business strategy consultants. Our discussion veered in the direction of the role of CIO. I got a sense that several strategy consultants still think that the role of the CIO is to manage thousands of laptops and desktops spread across the enterprise. Nothing could be farther from truth.

If CIO's job were to be managing desktops, enterprises would have to hire a Chief Power Supply Officer and possibly a Chief Water Supply Officer too. Well, electricity and water are as ubiquitous across the modern enterprises as desktops.

It is surprising that even the best and brightest of strategy consultants from top firms think of a CIO as a Chief Utilities Officer. Agreed, that to a certain extent the fault lies with the CIOs that they have not been able to guarantee business applications availability, which will be at par with the availability of utilities. Why? The reasons are not far to seek. Many CIOs are so gullible that they are taken in by the hype created by technology vendors that technology renewal cycles of less than a year will give them "competitive advantage" or "reduce costs" and bring in operational efficiencies. Investment in people and processes lags investment in technology. Each technology vendor spends countless hours preparing models that show that their newest versions of technology will either require lower level of skills or lower number of people. More time is spent by the sales team on preparing these models and other marketing collateral than on fixing the technology bugs, which can always be fixed in the next technology refresh cycle. Strategy consultants and CIOs are impressed by these quantitative models and a new cycle of destabilization begins.

Businesses need CIOs not Chief Utilities Officers. If tens of thousands of desktops or laptops have to be managed, there are several desktop and laptop vendors to choose from. Dell, IBM, HP are just some of the big ones. They provide IT utility services. Similarly, same vendors or a different set of vendora can provide IT utility infrastructure services. In addition, there are co-location services, if you don't want to have a 100% outsourcing of data centers.

In addition, I believe there is some confusion about scalability. Let me use the same analogy. No one talks about how electricity supply will be scaled for millions of users. The issues of scalability of IT services has already been resolved in a proven manner. Though, rarely anyone stops CIOs from reinventing the wheel. No doubt that scalability is the most important part of the services but establishment of scalability of technology from a purely "technology" point of view is at least one level below the level of the CIO. Therefore, when strategy consultants say that issue of management of thousands of desktops is one of scalability, they are confusing business scalability with technology scalability.

In fact, my strategy consultant friends are going to be confused that now CIOs are going to compete with them. But that is correct, the right role of CIO is to coordinate aggressively with business partners to design and execute business strategy, establish a quantitative culture of facts-driven decision making by providing high-quality data and metrics for strategic decisions and make sure that the investment in people and processes does not lag behind investments in technology.