Professional IT

It was with great sadness that I read this article in the BBC British teenage designer of Summly hits jackpot.  This was not sadness for this young coder, I am pleased that he has had success with his application and hope that his skills go on to benefit our industry.  My sadness was because since the 1980's our industry has struggled to live down the teenager in a garage writing computer games.

This era lead to the Non IT trained upper management having very unreal expectations of the requirements of a properly designed program.  After all if a teenager in his bedroom can make something successful imagine how easily a room full of trained professionals can achieve....  This in turn lead to a perception that young people are more in touch with computers that has also delivered an unwelcome ageism to the industry.

The increasing complexity of computer games moved them to a point where working alone anywhere you simply could not compete with a professional game producer.  The increasingly complex graphics and crafted game play meant that few people would have all the skills necessary to create such a game, however long they took.  Not only that the industry moved so quickly that if they did not deliver a game in a timely fashion it was outdated and unwanted when it was finally ready.

Now along come apps and the news companies have dragged out the myth for another airing.  The truth is that on device single purpose Apps are not that hard to create.  The kind of application integrated into other business systems that must be stable and secure are quite another matter.  These will require careful design and time and effort and it makes me sad to think that our diligent work will be met with "but if a teenage can write this in his bedroom why are you taking so long".

Cloud poison

Last week I wrote about the need to trust in cloud services and likened the need to do so to our trust of the food production industries.  Many people though worry about cloud services because of "glitches" that occur.   These may be operational failures or security vulnerabilities that are discovered.

I once sat, a couple of years ago, with an upper manager who was lambasting Googles services because they had just had a two hour outage.  He used this as an example of why cloud services would never be appropriate and we should continue to provide our own services because they were more reliable.  I pointed out that the Google issue had been just two hours in the last 5 years but that did not shake his view.  I then pointed out that once a month the company's exchange servers were shut down and restarted to ensure consistent functionality.  This shut down period added up through just one year made for a significantly greater unavailability for our services than Googles had been in the last 5.  He still was not convinced and I understood at that point this was not about logic or reality it was about personal conviction and comfort with a bought object being touchable.

The same manager and multiple others I have spoken to also delightfully point out to me every security issue that the cloud services are accused of.  Once again they use this as a reason why we should continue to do it ourselves.  Our services though were based on products that also have security issues and frequently needed patching or upgrading.  Without exception this took a long time to achieve both through lack of resources and through the complications of actually deploying the required changes.  I have seen it take years to deliver these updates, and all that time the company remains vulnerable.  With cloud services almost as soon as a vulnerability becomes known the service is patched to protect against it, in most cases without the user ever being aware.

Returning to my food metaphor these things are like the occasional food scare we see.  The event may be accidental or deliberate and they often frighten us off the particular food for a short period, however none of us return to just growing our own food.  We trust the food industry and its regulators to keep us safe and advise us on how to avoid issues.

Trusting the Cloud

Hundreds if not thousands of years ago a lesson was learnt that has allowed our species to become what they are today.  It seems though that when it comes to the cloud we find it very easy to not behave in this same manner and that could be holding us back.

Once upon a time our ancestors had to spend their entire day looking for food.  Even once they had learned to cultivate crops and animals it still pretty much took all their time to do this, and though this led to a self sufficient life it was essentially just a daily grind.  Eventually what happened was that some people concentrated on the role of providing food, allowing the others to focus on other "value add" occupations.  We suddenly had time away from the fields to learn other things and work to the good of the race as a whole.  This free time eventually lead to the development of computers and even to the Cloud.

Most of us nowadays are so used to this state of affairs we don't really think about what we still to this day trust the farmer to deliver for us.  Indeed sometimes people seem to look down on the role the farmer plays in our lives.  The truth of it is that if they stopped making the food we need available, we would all have to stop working on computers and find a way to feed ourselves.  Today trusting others is the natural way of things.  It doesn't stop with food either as we also trust other services to help to keep us alive for example removing our sewage; purifying our water; and providing power for heating.

Why then is it so difficult for us to trust in the Cloud?

Like food production, once we learn to trust the Cloud with the subsistence part of computing we will be free to explore other things, focusing on the business benefits and how we can deliver new things in effective ways.    Without this we will all still be chained to the yoke of commodity systems desperately hoping that we can find the time to add some value.