Bricks and Dots with Chris Horn
Window on the World
Issue 3
Of Bricks and Dots and Digital Things…
By Jon Cook
Chris Horn, a co-founder and chairman of Iona Technologies, gave an interesting perspective of the differences between the dot-com and brick-and-mortar companies. His perspective is one of providing middleware (a term he dislikes) to either type of company, so that they can architect and build computer solutions. In these days when the media hypes the young dot-com'ers who can't envision a career past 30, Chris clearly showed his admiration of the knowledge and wisdom of seasoned brick-and-mortar IT staff who understand business processes and who aren't afraid to stick around and maintain the systems that they build.
The seasoned IT veterans are used to worrying about complex 24x7 systems that need to be secure and fail-safe, and they have existing, deployed systems with which companies like Iona must integrate their solutions. They concern themselves with how not to break an operational system, and how to integrate new features that will be robust. The dot-com'ers, while bringing the enthusiasm and energy of a youngster, do not understand business processes. They simply want to build a system quickly, worry about robustness later, and figure out how they can leave for another company before the system they built breaks.
Chris also stressed that introducing new middleware solutions into brick-and-mortar companies is an opportunity to re-engineer their legacy systems. He cautioned to "pick the low hanging fruit first", by focusing on the front end and then incrementally replacing back-end components as the need and chance arises.
Regarding staffing shortages in the software industry, Chris called for companies to be innovative in where they look for qualified staff, including taking it upon themselves to develop their own. Finally, he challenged the community with a suggestion that a paradigm shift is needed to ultimately solve the staffing problem. As an analogy, decades ago AT&T saw a crisis in the telephone switchboard operator staff as the number of phones exploded, and essentially made everyone their own operator by designing a phone people could dial themselves. Perhaps the software industry needs to find a new paradigm for the industry rather than focusing on producing more developers.
Designer
and Webmistress
Caroline Kehoe