Technology Companies and Tech Wrecks

I work in an IT Services company and most of you who know me personally know where I am. An open disclosure before I bruise any confidentiality clauses anyplace is in order that my chirps here are not intended to damage the reputation of my employer in any form. These are collective thoughts compiled from what I have heard from my peers managing similar and sometimes congruent wreckages across IT Service Companies.

It has occurred to me over the past years that the model of business in most Technology Services companies rooted in the developing world is one for Band Aid showcases. Any endeavor of achievement in the IT world is met with serious hindrances with respect to the one aspect you would hope would be in place – technology infrastructure. And I am talking of the wide range from the bigger MPLS connectivity to getting a replacement adapter for a notebook!

Sometime back one of my friends was describing what I have begun to call the classical Tech Wreck examples, almost common enough to become an axiom of what not to do. A CEO from one of the biggest clients they had was visiting the campus of this ITeS Provider. This company is known as one of the world’s biggest and probably the widest (in terms of types of services) telecommunication service provider. The purpose of the trip was basically to assess (let’s say) Company X in terms of feasibility to outsource.

John (name disguised) was assigned the demanding responsibility to ensure that all went according to plan with Mr. CEO feeling fine about Company X as a safe place to make sure that all shall be in good hands here and jeopardies were not in the DNA. As a usual way of life the planning and preparation was undertaken in the right zeal by factoring in two sleepless weeks of perfecting every creaking (noiseless but sometimes these are very very loud!) joint was oiled through one too many dry, soft and wet runs. A billion dollars were at stake here so every step and wrong turn must be well prepared for in such visits and the ‘anchor’ is the beaten dry, pulpy and wet (all simultaneously) in the run up to the show. It is generally comparable to the perfect staging of Macbeth, stage and costumes included.

John, our fellow victim of fate, manages to work everything to perfection, every wire and light tested and turned on, all furniture oiled (and replaced if squeaking), food warm and Mr. CXO is all happy till in the concluding hours he decides to make a presentation and pulls out a sleek shiny limited edition Apple Notebook in the CEO’s conference room equipped with everything that is predominantly Windows based. Once plugged in and turned on through the projector, not unexpectedly, the image of Mr. CXOs daughter (wallpaper) flashes grotesquely upside down! For a billion dollars at stake she is the most precious daughter in the world and to be portrayed upside down thus is blasphemous and almost confirmed by the collective gasp!

To salvage such blasphemy would be to get a techie to fix the screen settings or get another projector! And as impossible fate would have it that Company X had only one MAC OS expert who was on leave and all the other projectors in the vicinity were is a state of breakdown and portrayed fairly unacceptable images of Ms. CEO Jr. The next best solution was to get the file on to a USB drive and run it on the tested PCs (running Bill Gates), except the security policies of Company X disallowed any employee to carry removable storage devices to the campus, so obviously one could not be found. Fortunately there was a virgin printer lying (not connected or configured for Company X’s domain that was plugged and played for Mr. CXO’s Macintosh to print 16 hard copies of the presentation. And two hours later, Mr. CXO spoke, “We are lucky that there wasn’t a power outage!…”

As I said before that this was a commonplace view of how we have come to live in the patch and match model of running business from one day to the next. And in post facto there is a blast of escalations and heated debates resulting in resolutions & spend approvals but between one such incident to the next, life has a way of returning to Tech Wreck way of life. Almost as if nature is restoring balance.

So who is to blame? Everyone has an excuse and 10 fingers to point at someone else. Talk to Tech Infrastructure team and you will often hear random words like budget, poor facilities and poor training; talk to Facilities teams they will lay before you a plethora of emails that is proof of how relentlessly they have pursued Tech Infra and how the last guy who used ‘it’ must have wrecked it; then there is the common thing to hear, “it worked last time”.

Everyone believes “this is a disaster and one should plan contingencies” but the ownership of the contingent plan is as elusive as he is fictitious. There is no end to how much contingency you can plan for there is always something that will go wrong and 8 times out of 10 it will be technology infrastructure or things more fundamental like electricity or phone. And yet, no one will say ever that there is a systemic problem with the mode of operating rather than budget, maintenance or simple mishandling!

I recently met a friend at Airport Security and this man was from a competing firm headed for the same presentation as I was. And I was not very confident of the very convincing differentiators of mine. I pulled up next to him and commenced small talk, albeit boring, is a proven way to extract valuable information. And then he pulled out his laptop. This was an old generation, Out of life Dell Inspiron 9000. In its age this was a very sleek piece of equipment in spite of the then common fire related Dell recalls. What came out of my friends laptop bag was what seemed lake two laptops at first. Then I realized that this was cracked severely at the LCD hinge. On enquiry I was told that there was a budget constraint for the last 3 months and hence procurement was not buying; additionally no one was quitting their jobs so he had to slug around this tattered assembly of an LCD, some RAM and a noisy 20 GB hard drive. All aside, who uses a 20GB hard drive anymore!?

While chatting over the course of the flight I was informed that the matter had been escalated to the Business Unit head (who for the tiny entities that we are, is equivalent to the CEO of where we worked) and yet everyone, as very commonly expected, was pointing fingers and toes. How can an IT company justify a sales professional carrying a broken laptop to present to his or her client.

And after many failed projectors and laptops, we are profitable yet and I think that very often this over commitment to the sacred ‘margin’ is the elusive and fictitious criminal mind. We tell our clients how good we are at delivering value and the fine print that most inexperienced outsourcers do not see is the fact that our value is in the ability to run life at the brink of a precipice. And slipping into it would result in an endless journey through carcass of blood stained bandages of disasters we patched and made sure the Power Point presentation that the client saw was colorful and confusing enough to blindside the darkness.

But someone must take the fall and who better that poor John who is the easiest target. Like most project managers, he is the one with the least specialization and the economy being where it is, the least likely to attrite in the short run. Blame it on the guy with the least resistance. Physics applied to human interactive behavior. And life goes on till the next CXO or his/her violated daughter shows up on screen.