The Con-sumerization of technology

So on flights this weekend I took along paperwork. A stack of holiday cards to write. And some expense receipts to process.

I checked for my flights on-line. I had my GPS on each flight to track our progress. And each stop I checked FlightAware to see where the in-bound flight was . I checked Weather.com to see en route  clouds.  I had my headphones on during each flight. I barely said anything to the attendants or ground staff. I had everything I needed.

Actually the staff were a bit annoying. One in particular checked every 15 minutes on my stack of greeting cards to see if I was making progress. Another told me twice - no working on weekends. Another was curious about my GPS.  And I was like - I don't need them. With all the technology in my hands I could run this airline myself. Yea, right...

And it hit me how smug all these consumer technologies have made us. We forget the folks who operate our satellites. Run the mainframes that churn our weather calculations. Run the reservations for our airlines. Run the production processes at the music studios which bring us our MP3. The enterprise stuff which does the heavy lifting so us consumers feel empowered.

Yes, today's debate about sexiness in consumer versus enterprise technologies brought that out even more. We can call enterprise technology dull and boring and  un-sexy, but the con is on us consumers if we actually believe our our iPhones, and amazon.com and our HDTVs and web services have made us hot technologists....

Update: IT World Canada on the growing issue with users who consider themselves "tech savvy". Reader Julien points to a good example of a iPhone toting, "tech savvy" passenger and the way the pilots dealt with him...

Comments

[Julien]

Hi Vinnie,

On the topic of iPhones, in-flight weather and flight information lookup by passengers, you may want to have a look at this story from the other side of the cockpit door:

http://www.ancientpelican.com/2007/11/you-can-stick-your-iphone-up-your.html

Keep those posts coming! :-)
Julien.

[vinnie mirchandani]

Julien, love it!!!

[Chui]

True, but you are an indirect consumer of a piece of enterprise software. Not many are so lucky. Occassionaly, I have to use an unfamiliar piece of CICS software and it made me (an engineer) feel dumb. I am not asking for Web 2.0 user interface, but the world has moved on from green screen apps and adopted conventions to improve usability.

Consumer apps were not always this friendly. My wife still struggles to program the VCR.

However, intense competition, short product cycles, and repeated cycle of innovation meant that consumer apps evolved quickly, compared to the glacial pace of software evolution in the enterprise space.

[vinnie mirchandani]

Chui, could the key word be "occasionally"...if you and others don't use that CICS app much the justification for a UI upgrade may not be very strong...just speculating but CIOs have so many projects clamoring for attention that he make not be ignoring us, just believes the ROI ranking is too low?

[Vincent]

Nice post, as always...

[Chui Tey]

Vinnie,

Well said about the lack of ROI. Lack of ROI is only a symptom. The underlying cause is the absence of intense competition, short product cycles, and repeated cycle of innovation.

Employee training is an expensive affair too. I wouldn't be surprised if an organisation spends $20k per employee to train them on how to use their corporate software properly.

Compare this to the likes of Amazon and Expedia, who basically have Joe Public doing data entry on their behalf without any training at all.

I'm sure Amazon and Expedia would have stayed with CICS if their business model would still have worked. Necessity drives invention.