The Back Door
Tim Bray just posted an excellent essay about how to survive as a forward thinking technology company.
The Front Door and the CIO Ive dealt with quite a few CIOs, and they dont think about technology, they think in business terms and those are the only terms they think in. When the SAP salesman says a company can cut acquisition and logistics costs, or the IBM salesman says Notes can get people working together better, nobody thinks much about what the architecture is or how it works or whether programmers like working with it. Both those salesmen came in through the front door.
I think it’s fair to say that most ERP vendors are front door technology companies. Regarding the back door:
When I say back-door technology I mean what the matrix called Happy Programmers. The idea is, if the back-room geeks like something, and find that its useful, theyll start using it whether management thinks its a good idea or not.
A company running entirely on a back door strategy may not be very focused on the one thing that matters in business, customers. So, it’s easy to see that back door companies might have happy R&D teams, but can’t keep profits up.
Building Back-door Tech First off, theres no point trying to do corporate planning on this, you leave the geeks to themselves and it either happens or it doesnt.
For Sun (or at least Tim Bray), the back door is about three things:
# Get serious about dynamic languages — that is, better adoption of some of the leading open source languages or geek toys, Perl, PHP, Python, etc. Makes a ton of sense. If the geeks like the tools they have to use, they’re more inclined to build better software, and more of it.
# “Be the first with the most on syndication technology”
# Capitalize on all of the WS-* standards emerging
I think all companies, big or small, should be thinking about how to bridge their front and back door strategies. The alternative is not an option.
The Alternative That would be to ignore the back door and decide that if CIOs dont want it today, our engineers shouldnt be working on it. Wait, Ive seen that movie before… it was at a computer company, second-largest in the world when I worked there, called Digital Equipment Corporation. R.I.P. That approach would not only be fatal, it would be boring. Lets not do it.