Perception of the Internet by Companies

In my experience one of the most continuous and contentious battles happens to be what based on what I call the perception of the Internet by companies. Sadly in almost all companies that I have participated in, very few actually are comfortable with inventing and innovating in their technology infrastructure.

Firstly I want to point out that from a business perspective there are good reasons not to do so. If it is not a core competency or business imperative, technology like any other resource should be managed in such a way as to provide what is necessary to the business.

However, by the same token technology can be a significant competitive advantage for almost any business if properly engaged.

For many businesses, trust has been by and large given to proprietary partners such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, HP, CA and the like. These companies have risen because of their ability to meet business needs, have long histories of serving various businesses, and providing solutions that are considered acceptable by many businesses. Many companies have relationships with many of these vendors that spans decades. It is these relationships that have created an atmosphere of trust in which businesses feel comfortable dealing with and using vendor solutions.

Enter in the era of the Internet and Open Source. These companies have grown due to a need to address problems from a different perspective. While admittedly not as veteran as even some of the oldest of vendors, these technologies and their philosophies have sprung up to create their own solutions to problems facing many businesses. Companies such as Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, RedHat, Facebook, Twitter, MySQL and others are the result of taking these different approaches and views and addressing issues with different solutions.

Having worked in both sets of companies the mentality could not be more different between what I call legacy and internet companies. While both sides do have their extremes in which they denounce the other, the vast majority have common issues and problems but tackle them in entirely different manners. What I call internet-thinkers see problems in very different lights than their counterparts. And as a result implement solutions that are different. Yet a key differentiator is their willingness to look a problem with an attitude of how to solve it. The greater the challenge, the more that it has not been done before, the more appealing and the more energy is put into trying to solve it. Internet companies are formed around their specific culture on how they want to harness this driving force.

In legacy companies the attitude is markedly different. The vast majority of company employees are trained to look at risk. The more a problem leaves what they comfortably know, the more risk is involved. This risk is not simply business risk but political risk as well. More often than not a solution is not something that is offered without some political benefit. This is due to the nature of the companies involved where individual reward is held in higher regard than business objectives or customers. This is not always the case, however it is common enough to find. Deep relationships with vendors is one of the best ways to manage risk. While it is often times more costly, vendors provide many different safety nets in terms of reputation, business acceptance, and political saavy. Ultimately the vendors act as technology middlemen for businesses where they do the hard work of figuring out the changing landscape and work with company professionals to implement what solutions they can to address the needs of the company.

This sort of relationship often enough greatly influences how businesses address problems. For example, in internet companies it is not uncommon for most to install the standard LAMP architecture stack to create and deliver solutions. Yet in large companies even the adoption of LAMP and it's components is fraught with problems. Many internal policies and procedures, especially those pertaining to technology governance, see components of the LAMP stack as "risky". Apache for example while being the leading solution (51% or so according to Netcraft) on many servers out in the internet, it is still considered by many companies to be far too risky to actually run mission-critical company applications. Rather more acceptable solutions such as IBM WebSphere or Oracle's BEA WebLogic are much more acceptable than Apache or JBoss. Even programming languages are subject to this legacy corporate thinking in that only Java is considered. Other languages that may in fact be more appropriate in providing a solution are usually not even considered. Similar views are seen in even in the evaluation of database products such as Oracle or MySQL.

The arguments are pretty much the same even after over 20 years when I first encountered them. They typically include:

• "Is that <insert any non-vendor technology here> proven to work?"
• "Does that <insert any non-vendor technology here> have a track record within a company?"
• "That <insert any non-vendor technology here> is just a toy more than a business tool."
• "<Insert any non-vendor technology here> does not have any support that we can rely on."

And the list goes on. Admittedly some businesses have valid arguments based on meeting specific requirements such as those working on government contracts or having high security needs. However, the vast majority of arguments are based on what I consider groundless concerns.

More importantly I look at how problems have been dealt with in my professional experience and it boils down to consistency of attitude. Case in point. I had been working on a project where due to a missed requirement, an issue occurred where a sizable amount of business transactions were incorrectly processed. After managing to find a corrective procedure management decided it was better for the technical professionals to work 7x24 in three 8-hour shifts to manually correct hundreds of thousands of these business transactions. Even with the assistance of business personnel and technical personnel, the effort would take weeks. At this point I and several other key technical staff came together to create a rapidly deployable automated solution since we were all aghast at the manual effort facing everyone. In less than a day, a solution had been prototyped, developed and implemented that addressed the issue saving dozens of personnel weeks worth of efforts. The solution had corrected all the business transactions within a few days. The difference in this effort was the use of what was considered non-traditional thinking and using technology that was not approved by the company at the time.

This mentality is far too common in many companies. It is also, in my opinion, one of the main reasons why many technology groups within companies face growing stress and smaller budgets. By not being flexible as their customers expect and looking at problems in new ways and synthesizing appropriate solutions, many technology groups in large companies are instead stubbornly clinging to old mannerisms that are woefully inadequate. From an organizational perspective this kind of action is also doing additional harm not only in lost opportunities, revenues and cost savings, but in creating a reputation among younger technology professionals that the company does not hold their new ideas and values in any type of regard. This reputation drives talent away from a company robbing it of the necessary new vitality it needs to address challenges in it's future.

I hope that as the economy improves, that companies start to actively address how to best use technology to their benefit and change many of their age-old perceptions with ones more appropriate to the changing competitive landscape.