About 25 years ago, “Word Processor” was a job title, not software. A company would dedicate cavernous rooms with rows upon rows of desks for each stenographer. The reason the term “stenographer” was used is that the pool members would use stenography, or shorthand, to take dictation. Anyone needing a letter written would have the stenographer bring a pad to their office and dictate the letter.
In a world that started at 9 and ended at 5, moving at this sort of glacial pace was more than acceptable. Fast forward to today’s 24 hour business day and downtime measured in milliseconds, the very idea of a steno pool is as ludicrous as bloodletting to cure a sinus infection. With computers on every desk, there is simply no reason to have an employee provide stenography services when we can all just type our correspondence ourselves. Moreover, we don’t even need printers or stamps or even a fax machine with email and wiki’s and IM. Just as the life insurance salesman has become a relic of an age dominated by middlemen, we have eliminated job tasks that are not core to our business.
We see the same shift in other business roles. Take the role of Office Manager, as an example. For a decades, the Office Manager mainly handled payroll. Today, with the rise of ADP, that role has diminished to the point that an Office Manager is a relic, albeit one from five years ago. Fortunately, we can expect that same marginalization of the Software Consultant role.
The Software Consultant, most often bundled with Professional Services, is another relic that should be eliminated. The very idea of Software Consulting means one thing: the software doesn’t work out of the box.
There are few situations where out-of-the-box productivity is not a requirement. These products are typically middleware that are so robust and feature-rich that the idea of them supporting your specific business processes is silly. After all, no one expects SAP to work out of the box. At the very least, you have to enter some employee data, customers, etc.
I expect better from my development and IT tools. Development and IT are well understood processes. As such, we’ve come to expect tools to support these processes out-of-the-box. For example, I certainly don’t require a Software Consultant to use Toad nor do I need one to help me with InstallAnywhere. The same can be said for Ant, CruiseControl and Eclipse. In today’s world, we expect the tools to Just Work, just like we expect people to type their own correspondence.
When you purchase software that requires Professional Services, typically, you are purchasing a framework. In turn, the Software Consultant will customize the implementation of the framework. Before you can say “billable hour”, the framework becomes a “bespoke framework”, and you are now a software development shop with outsourced labor costs. And you just thought you purchased some software…
Here is a handy test to see if you are purchasing software or a framework: Ask your account rep to provide a full accounting of your costs over the next five years, including upgrades and support for your infrastructure upgrades(OS, middleware, etc.) If the answer isn’t a number and instead results in days of answering questions about your internal process, then you’re buying a framework. Good luck.
In Software, Services
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