Accidental Light

Two things reminded me that I wanted to write something about this: Sean’s post on opensource (to which I replied) and something else that this ex-boss taught me who was mentioned in the previous post.

He would draw a pyramid and we can imagine (whether he drew them or not) two arrows: one pointing up toward the apex would be labeled value and one toward the base would be labeled commoditisation. So value increases up the pyramid and commoditisation decreases. The pyramid would also have a number of layers - so it would have looked very much like the diagram below. In my own memory at least.

The idea was that survival in business was the ability to climb up this pyramid by doing more value work and doing less or no commodity work by outsourcing the layers below where you wanted to operate. There is a great deal to say about this but more of that will have to come later.

It is fairly easy to apply this model to IT (and IT in investment banking). I would imagine that many years ago when you wanted to start a project you built a computer - ok, maybe not, but you get the drift, right? Then as these puppies became commodity you bought a computer (let someone else make it for you) and you wrote an operating system before starting the real project. When you could buy these you did so - and wrote a programming language in which to write your project. When all of these were commodity you bought the boxes, OS and languages and wrote your project from scratch. Pile in with databases and all the other things we can buy now and we must be at the top of the pyramid, right?

No - the most dangerous thing to think is that you are at the top of the pyramid because then commoditisation will occur without your prior knowledge and without your participation, Other businesses will not only be adding more value per person than you are in your business but you will also be likely be locked into support and maintenance of your own proprietary tools, frameworks and code and all the costs and risks that that will entail.

If you want to continue to add value to a business you must be aggressive in the commoditisation process, you must be a leader in this game, in all aspects. This is why opensource, for me, is so, so important.

To conclude, a short story about my time in computer security . This was a very high level descriptive exercise rather than in any way practical. It involved a lot of work in denotational semantics and formal languages such as Z. I can remember little or nothing about either of these things but they look pretty sexy, right? Anyway, as a project we visited annually a conference on computer security. It became something of a running joke for us that every presentation on some aspect of computer security or another always started something like:

Today we are presenting our research into Kryptokian Sense Inversions in Security Networks. But first we would l like to take some time to present our new formal language Z++ that we had to invent because there was nothing else out there that allowed us to formalise our methods.