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AS OF 8/20/2008 9:38AM EST

IT's All Part of Doing Business
By Systems Management News Team

June 1, 2008 — “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us.”

This was a U.S. advertising jingle for fast-food chain Burger King back in the 1970s, to show that if you ate in their restaurants, you could have your hamburger made just the way you like it. Want it rare? You got it. No ketchup? No problem!

During that time, manufacturing had matured to the point that it became economically feasible to allow mass customization, and a market for third-party dealers exploded. No longer did you have to accept the weak tuner and speakers that came in your car. A private installer could offer more wattage and bigger woofers. If you didn’t like the shrubs the builder put around your house, nurseries were springing up like weeds to offer different, more exotic landscaping options. People were making a statement: “Look at me! I’m DIFFERENT.”

Thirty years later, we’re in a time, again, when computer users are demanding uniqueness in their interactions with retailers and news organizations—and even with their desktops. This message was repeated time and again at Interop 2008 in Las Vegas last month.

People want what they want, and they don’t necessarily care where it comes from. So, suppliers don’t need to own what they sell; they only need to aggregate it from a variety of places to serve their customers. Even in the early days of automobiles, Henry Ford bought the car bodies from Fisher and the tires from Firestone and aggregated them. But the customer could only buy a finished car from Ford. He couldn’t go directly to Fisher and buy a body. Fast-forward to Amazon. You can go to their Web site and buy books, CDs, CD players, calendars and a lot more. And Amazon produces absolutely none of it.

There’s even differentiation on the desktops at your workplace. Unless IT has locked things down, I’ll bet no two people have the same screen background, instant-messenger icon or applications launching at startup. One might stream in weather and certain RSS feeds, while another might have stock quotes or sports scores running at all times.

Giving computer users a unique experience should be the goal of companies in the 21st century. C.K. Prahalad and Mark Templeton, keynote speakers at Interop, made the same basic point: Services, coming out of some kind of cloud architecture that allows users to pick and choose what they want, from any available source, are the way to provide that level of individuality for users.

This is not simply an application development challenge, nor an IT challenge. It’s a business challenge, and it will redefine how businesses think of their relationships with suppliers, customers and even their competitors.

It also has created an opportunity for organizations to unite their business and IT units—a goal that’s been clamored about for years but hasn’t been fully realized. We encourage business analysts, software development managers and IT managers to meet regularly, and often, to ensure they each are serving the other’s interests.

Finally, organizations can create a holistic view of their business, achieve agility to respond to changing markets and give their customers and partners the ability to help themselves to the information they need.

The old mantra for new times is, “Have it your way.”

Related Search Term(s): Desktop management, ITIL, software development

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