computers should be less friendly

If you work with me you have already heard this rant, so might as well just skip this blog post and go back to work playing with your new tech toys.

SAP user’s of today are people that can remember a time when computers were the size of small city blocks and the idea of having one on your desk was laughable[1]. Most of them are happy enough to have a computer on their desk to run Excel and mess with their own spreadsheets. These people today control the purse strings of IT spending and are “leading” the relationship with SAP. This is bad…. why? I’ll talk about that later.
If you have a child who is less then 30 years old and you work in an IT shop that runs SAP software, you should be scared. Talking from my personal experience ( I am 27 years old ) my family got their first computer when i was 6 or 7, I can just barely remember a time Before Computers, what this means to me and everyone in my age bracket is that we have used computers forever, our expectations are different. How different can be quickly mapped as you go down generations, the younger you start to use computers the higher your expectations are. I can’t stand when Ctrl-C doesn’t work or when I can’t turn on and off toolbars or when the screen is so full of information I don’t need all I can see is a box 200px by 150px. When this happens I go find another tool — this is why you should be scared.

Thomas Otter points out that at SAP they are good at process — it sounds almost like a core value,

“at SAP we think a lot about processes. I hear it all the time in the corridors and meeting rooms in Walldorf. It is one of the main reasons for SAP’s success. It is goodness, and it is very tough to emulate… It is a significant competitive advantage.”

This is all quite true they do have that “special sauce” down to a ‘T’ however, it won’t help when folks in my generation start to take control of the purse strings.

If someone gives me a piece of software I “must use” and it is horrible, the first thing I do before using it is to see if there is another tool I can quickly use the way I want and then just plug the numbers into the horrible tool. This is a huge problem for SAP as that all the wonder process focus Thomas talks about goes out the window when people don’t use the tool in the manner it was designed. I would argue that for the next generation of people who will soon ( < 10 years ) start to get into decision making positions at Fortune 1000s UI ease and flexibility will be nearly as important as all the process stuff already boiled into SAP software.

As campy as Time’s person of the year was, it was about a change of focus on the internet. From just a push of information and goods out, to a true conversation. People creating content to be consumed by others, the internet as just another conduit for people to carry out conversations. This change of focus needs to be felt in the Enterprise too and I am concerned we might not be able to move fast enough.

[1] “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” — Ken Olson, president of Digital Equipment Corp. 1977 ( Snopes )

“Thanks” to Craig for tagging me:

1. I never left the Eastern Time zone till I was a junior in college. Pretty crazy my first foray on a plane or out of the time zone was a flight to the UK, good thing I wasn’t afraid of flying.
2. I really hate needles, not the pine ones, the ones doctors stick you with. I have a protective layer of skin for a reason please don’t poke holes in it.
3. I did gymnastics for 10 years growing up and competed all over the Eastern seaboard.
4. I was president of my fraternity in college, Sigma Alpha Mu
5. I played a lot of street hockey as a kid and will still strap on roller blades and tear about New York from time to time.

I tag Cote from RedMonk, welcome back from vacation and Ryan Lowe from the RadRails project.

Maybe a lot of people have this rule, but a quick google didn’t find anyone else talking about it. So here is my Rule of Mom.

“If you can’t explain what you are working on to your mom, then you don’t understand it.”

I’ve found this simple rule to be true over many years and many different subject areas. I can still remember my Mom asking me how college was going and what I was working on in a particular class and only being able to explain in the same lifeless math jargon it had been explained to me in. Needless to say after that conversation my Mom didn’t understand that class any better then I did and my grade certainly proved that out.

Maybe this person isn’t your Mom but, you should have them around somewhere — it’s a great check on your understanding level. You can identify this person by when they ask what appears to be an innocuous question, “How does email work?” you end up flailing around for a decent explanation that doesn’t include phrases like, SMTP, POP, sendmail, IMAP, etc. “A football team is a team of football players,” explaining something technical with more techno-babel just means you don’t know what you are talking about. Being able to explain chemistry to another chemistry person is certainly fine and well, and kudos to you as chemistry is a mystery to me, but real in depth understanding is when you can explain chemistry to someone who doesn’t know the meaning of the word titrate.

A somewhat similar idea is talked about in advertising as the “elevator pitch,” but with this it just means you are good at summarizing something down into talking points — which is a different skill distillation. This doesn’t actually mean you really understand what you’re talking about, you’re just very good at crafting a high level, 60 second sound bite, version of what the subject is.

To build a well designed well thought out system you need to have a low level knowledge of the tools and technology but, you also have to be able to stand back and decide if you’ve built a steaming pile of nothing or something truly noteworthy. They both might be technology marvels but, you have to be able to step back and have that “explain it to your Mom” view before you can tell the difference.
To explain email to someone how has no clue what SMTP or even telnet is, is truly a bottom up in-depth understanding of that subject.

I’m still working on explaining REST to my Mom.