The Inevitability of DIY
In the course of my career I have been involved in a fair number of startups. I’ve had pretty good luck, and most of them have been successful. One, however, was a complete failure. I refer to that experience as my DIY MBA. You can learn more from failure than you can from success. It is very difficult to determine what made something succeed (apart of course from our genius, hard work, and moral virtue), but if we look at something long enough and with whatever objectivity we can muster, we can usually find a root cause for failure. If we’re smart, we won’t that make that particular mistake again.
One of my favorite books is Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America by Henry Petroski, the wonderful writer on engineering. It is a book about extraordinary success – the construction of the great bridges of America, but it is as much about failure as success. Bridges fall down throughout the book, but each failure shines light on another aspect of bridge design and the limits of the materials. The heroes (the great engineers) learn from their experience and continually build better and longer bridges. What I took from this book, beyond an appreciation of the bridge builder’s art, science, and mastery of the political (all big projects involve politics) is that that failure is something to be treasured once you get past the pain.
My one entrepreneurial failure was in a company that did desktop publishing around 1980. My partners and I bought two NBI 3000’s, very early, very expensive word processors. Businesses in and around Boulder, CO, some students and professors came to us with hand written drafts which we turned into beautiful printed documents. The machines were complicated, temperamental, and difficult to use, though they defined the state-of-the art at the time. Only trained operators could manage them. Word Processing was a task for pros.
Of course the company failed. Things went well for a year or so, but then the first practical PCs and word processing software came out. People began to do their own word processing, even on crude, small, expensive machines. When the IBM PC came out and legitimized PCs, everyone started writing on computers and doing their own desktop publishing. The stream of customers dried up and we closed the doors.
My first thought about Document Control (the company) was that our technology was simply made obsolete — that we were selling slide rules in the age of calculators. I think though, that we were really swept aside by a more fundamental imperative – the human urge to do things themselves. In the Pharaohs days literacy was regarded as something for specialists, and the leading classes hired scribes to perform that difficult task. When the telephone was invented we needed operators; when cars were invented they were often driven by mechanics. Over time in each case the difficult became simple and the rare became commonplace. For the things that count, people would rather do something themselves than have it done for them if it is within their ability and comfort zone.
This principle pertains as much in IT as in other arenas. IT was once entirely the province of the professionals operating in glass houses, who accepted data on cards from the acolytes and returned them manna in the form of green bar. It was inconceivable in those days that computing would become the province of the everyman but, of course, it has.
I am not referring to people using personal computers to access the Internet, using email, and writing newsletters for the PTA. That is really too obvious for comment. What I am referring to is the continuing trend in all sorts of organizations to empower the individual. Individuals prefer simple hosted applications like Saleforce.com to complex CRM from central IT and they use desktop tools like the Microsoft Office Suite to build very complex applications. The things they build are not tightly integrated like the applications built by professionals. Processes may still involve many manual steps that a pro could program in a few hours (after a week of committee and budgeting meetings, another week of design review, and two weeks or so of testing). We pros can do it better – complete automation, all sorts of bells and whistles the rubes would never think of, audit trails, better security, and all that good stuff, but the users prefer the stuff they build (or discover) themselves. It does what they want and they understand it. More than that, it empowers them. They feel in control. In the end, DIY always wins.
Going into word processing was not a mistake. The machines were great and they did things that simply weren’t previously possible. The mistake was in persisting even after the first personal computer showed up. The was on the wall, and it read that in the end, DIY always wins.
In building our enterprise applications we must be cognizant of this same imperative towards DIY. There will always be central IT applications for things like basic accounting – accounts payable, accounts receivable, etc., but organizations are dynamic – buying businesses and being bought in turn, reorganizing, opening and closing business lines, launching new products and dropping others, doing studies and projects. The central IT department is always running behind but the DIY community filling the gap with their jury-rigged lash ups. Giving the pros (i.e. us) a break, though, real IT is hard.
I know that this informal IT – the IT that takes place outside the purview of the IT organization – is already and important part of every business. I suspect that in many organizations these home grown applications may actually be as or more important than the official stuff. My wife who works in the accounting business, for example, is tracking the company’s backlog and progress in an Excel spreadsheet as the tax deadline approaches even though her company uses the best accounting software in the business.
As IT tools have improved, everyone has become a practitioner to some degree, just as our ancestors learned to drive cars and make calls and our ancient ancestors learned the arcane art of reading. A challenge for us as professionals is to give the non-professionals the tools they want and need so that they can define how they do their work, and then work with them, not against them, to improve these informal processes and bring them up to “professional grade.” DIY is a powerful imperative and much of the IT that we now regard as the realm of the professional will inevitably move into the hands of users. We should not resist this, but enable it. I would love to see what users could do if they could have a real-time access, with Excel as a front end, to a company’s core data in real time. What would they build? I know that they would build better tools for their personal work, but they might just go beyond that to provide new insights into the way the company operates and models for how the company’s processes can be improved.
