Graham Chastney

A little while ago there was a video around that parodied the way that Microsoft did its marketing and packaging when compared to iPod marketing.

The new packaging for Vista and Office 2007 looks pretty good.

Centralisation is everywhere.

• Call centres are points of centralisation.
• IT is constantly trying to pull everything back to the data centre.
• Many business functions are centralised.
• Organisations outsource so they can get the benefits of centralisation.

Why? There are normally two reasons and they are the usual business reasons – cost and quality. Functions done centrally are supposed to be more cost effective than those done in a distributed fashion. Centralisation allows specialisation which should lead to an increase in quality.

If there is a quality problem, or a need to reduce costs the first mechanism that people turn to it centralisation.

The increase in quality and the reduction in cost is regarded as a certainty.

It’s almost become a business mantra – “I must centralise”.

I am personally becoming increasingly skeptical about centralisation.

I feel that I should declare my experience here. Throughout my nearly 20 years in IT I have been involved in a number of centralisation activities; centralisation to a data centre on a site, then to a data centre in a country, then to global data centres. I have also been involved in IT help desks. When I was a new graduate I would man the help desk for two afternoons a week. I watched on as the help desk went from supporting a site, then to supporting a number of sites within a country, then a country, eventually it supported a number of different customers across different time zones.

I’m not doubting that these activities reduced costs, though none of them gained the cost reductions people were hoping for. There was also a change in quality but it not dramatic and not on every measure.

So why am I skeptical?

My main area of skepticism is caused by one word – change. These centralised entities are terrible at responding to change.

They naturally become highly integrated within themselves

The help desk naturally consolidates to a single set of systems. That is how costs are reduced after all. The consolidation of the systems creates cost reduction and increases the quality. That is until something comes along which drives change. Lots of small systems, each running independently can change when they need to change. There doesn’t need to be a huge requirement to change. When a huge integrated system exists change becomes more and more difficult. Where change is difficult change will either stop, or the cost of change will be dramatic.

People forget that change is inevitable.

The same is also true for IT systems. Changing a single system that does a single role is far easier than one large system that handles lots of roles. I’m sure that some people believe that if the cost of changing one system with one role is X then the cost of changing one system with lots of roles (Y) is less than X * Y. In my experience it’s more than X * Y it’s more like X * 1.5Y.

Because change is difficult it happens rarely. When it does occur the change ends up being massive, it’s normally not possible to change a single entity. The system has coalesced and for one thing to change, lots of things have to change. It’s become a chain reaction. Between the massive changes, though, the quality of services is constantly decreasing as the service delivered becomes further and further from the service required.

I’m not suggesting that we throw out the baby with the bath water here. What I am advocating is that we approach consolidation in a more pragmatic manner. Rather than blindly following the centralisation mantra we should evaluate the centralisation option knowing that change is inevitable and plan for it. In planning for it we may discover that centralization isn’t actually the correct option.

Today Lifehacker has an article entitled “Top time-management tricks” which highlights this statement in Realtor Magazine:

“When I start to feel overwhelmed with clutter, whether it’s on my desk or in my home, I take a short block of time — 20 to 45 minutes — and I turn off all communication; I let voice mail take over. Then I just attack the pile. I’m always amazed at how much I can accomplish in this short period.”

Prior to reading this post I actually did just that. I’ve had a stack of document to review and stuff coming at me from all angles right the way through last week (and weekend). The result was a desk that was a tip and absolutely no focus on what I was doing.

Tidying through the clutter I cleared a whole load of actions off my to-do list. I did add a few extra back in, but these were ones I had been carrying in my head, getting them down on paper made me feel like I was getting rid of even more clutter. I’ve tried to be methodical and to keep my desk tidy, but I’m not that organised, particular when the pressure is on. Taking time out to tidy up makes all the difference to how I feel.

Following I tidy up I often feel the need to change my working practice a little too.

Over on Thinking Faster, Jeffrey Phillips is trying to challenge some of our thinking about change.

I have long puzzled why some change is easy and some change is more difficult, particularly corporate change. Previously I thought the issue was communication and understanding. If we communicate well enough to people they will understand why the change needs to happen and then it will go more easily. I then  discovered how difficult communication is. Even when vast amounts of effort were expended on communication, the change still wasn’t easy.

Jeffrey suggests that the issue is really choice and control:

“I think this is driven by choice.  I can choose to change my diet or route to work.  I can even choose to change my career.  However, I want some control when change is forced upon me, and I suspect that many other people feel the same way.  The reason people resist change in organizations is not because they can’t change, and really not because they fear change, but because the individuals don’t control what’s happening.”

My experience is that choice and control are part of the story, but that they feed into a bigger issue – felt need. To put it more specifically – do I feel like I need what this change gives me. I’ve deliberately used the word “feel” here, it’s not whether I actually need the thing that this change is giving me, it’s whether I feel that I need this thing. A child feels the need for the favourite toy as much as the need for a glass of water, but they don’t actually need the favourite toy. Adults aren’t too different.

Asking people to take control and to give them a choice about when and how increases their feeling of need. They’ve put something of themselves into something, so they must need it. Giving a child more than one favourite toy is one way of removing their reliance upon one.

Communication is difficult because people will only engage with the communication if they feel they are going to need it. Most people read communications from the Tax Man because the likelihood of need is quite high, fewer people read the leaflet selling double glazing unless you feel like you have a need for new glazing.

Talking of double glazing, a great example of felt need is one of my neighbours who replaced all of the glazing in his house (at significant cost) because he said that the house looked “tired”. He didn’t even try to convince me that it would save him money in the long-run (the usual way of justify a felt need). He felt that he needed to change the glazing, so did.

Quite often, though, the felt need and the actual need are blended together into a complex matrix. Clothes are probably the most interesting example of this. We change our clothes with the seasons (in the UK we do anyway), and we change them because they get worn out. We also change our clothes because fashions change, what we regard as looking good changes. Because of this merged set of actual needs and felt needs there is a whole industry desperately helping us to change. They’re not telling us (directly) that we need to change, we are because we feel the need. One of the actual needs to change our clothes is that they get worn out – but there is very little information from the clothes industry on how long a piece of clothing will last. The reason for this is that one of our felt needs for change normally kicks in before the clothing has actually become worn out. We even see clothing that doesn’t fulfil the actual need, but the felt need is so strong that people wear it.

I’ve been involved in a lot of IT change. Most of this change has been very painful. In most cases we have focussed 100% of our effort on the actual need, and spent a minimal amount of time trying to understand the felt needs. I remember the commotion that one particular lady created by insisting on keeping her current monitor during a desktop refresh programme. Why? Because this monitor had all sorts of stickers on it that this lady felt she needed. The was an actual need to replace the monitor, it was worn out and probably hurting her eyes, but the felt need was far stronger.

We need to get smarter at trying to create a felt need; choice and control seem like good tools to use in this quest.

I decided that my experience with IE7 on Vista was sufficiently positive that today I upgraded my main machine to Windows Internet Explorer 7.0 for Windows XP SP2 or IE7 as it will be known .