What are we doing?? - Part Three

This is what got me thinking about "What (the %*&$) are we really doing?". Are gazillions of dollars being invested in IT, by organizations just trying to maintain their status quo? As the study shows, this is partly true.

1. Businesses require to grow for survival.
2. Growth requires accommodating more and more people and systems into your business.
3. It is very natural (and useful) to be paranoid of these new people / systems.
4. As businesses grow they have to become more or less bureaucratic.
5. Bureaucracy requires additional processing power.
6. This power can either be man OR machine
7. If the business chooses to invest in machines, we, the IT guys, make some money.

So that is what we do.

We help businesses grow...
...grow by overcoming their paranoia by automating bureaucracy...
...bureaucracy which is only bound by the stakes...
...stakes which are ever growing.

To be honest, I am still not totally convinced that this is all what software is about. What do you think?

Business Analysis and Quantum Physics

I recently read In search of Shrödinger's cat. It's a wonderful introduction to quantum mechanics; The basic (and intriguing) problem of the elusive electron acting as a wave and a particle at the same time.

Analysis is very much like observing the electron in the classic two slit experiment. The business domain is like a wave traveling through the two slits. But the moment we analyze, we make it boil down to one reality by asking it How, What, When and Who.

Waves give you a probability distribution, while particles give you one of the possibilities as a reality. Looking at a business problem, in the wave form is better since it let's you choose a reality that solves the problem well.

For Example: Let's say the business problem is "I want to let my customers know of the new offers I have so that they can take advantage of the offers and I can make money"

This is the problem in it's wave form. The reality can be one or more of email, website updates, RSS feed of offers, people going door-to-door, mobile advertisement vans and a million other options including telepathy, albeit with low probability perhaps.

The problem is that clients come and say "I want to let my customers know of the new offers I have by email so that they can take advantage of the offers and I can make money" and it takes a while to get into a mode where you challenge every reality and go back to the wave form, by asking "Why"? Why is the only question that let's you go back to the wave form.

The more we procrastinate our observation, the better will the chosen reality suit our problem. Agile takes this approach with the concept of the last responsible moment for a decision. It let's future remain future and hence full of possibilities.