Writing my first mobile app

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I’ve decided to try my hand at coding a Mobile App.  I sit on the board of a non-profit and I see a need for them to connect with their users, and there’s no better way than to do it via a mobile app.    It’s been a while since I’ve coded – in my college years, I wrote code for my CS courses in C++ and then dabbled in HTML for some personal and work related web pages I built.   In my career, I’ve mostly focused on writing utilities or other automation scripts using vbscript.  I’ve also done some basic SQL programming.

My initial research shows that I should write my app in JScript.  I don’t know this language, so I’ll probably start by familiarizing myself with the syntax.  I think the best way to do that is to just practice on Codecademy.   I might also take a course on General Assembly.  I’m still not sure how to actually get started though, so I’ll have to do a bit more research.
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I will start off with writing the app for the Android OS.  I understand there’s segmentation issues here, but since I have an Android, and I am running KitKat on it, I think it only makes sense to start there.   If I have any success, I consider porting it over to IOS.  I think that would be a good problem to have.

The Future of IT Personnel in the Enterprise

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McKinsey’s Business Technology Office published it’s latest global survey on IT trends today. It is an interesting read and I suggest checking it out if you have a few minutes to spare. The summary of the results are as follows:

  • Firms are recognizing the importance of strategic value that IT brings to making the overall organization more efficient.
  • Most organizations do not feel that their IT current staff is capable of capturing that value. This thought is driven primarily by the IT executives in the organization, followed by the business leaders.
  • Organizations envision shifting their IT spending away from infrastructure and more toward analytics and innovation.

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I found these points contradictory. Although I believe there is a sentiment that there is a strategic purpose in IT, IT departments are still looked at as a cost center, and rampant cost cutting in IT departments continues on a yearly basis. This cost cutting isn’t necessarily due to the movement to the cloud as the survey suggests – in fact it’s quite the opposite. Moving data into the cloud still requires heavy infrastructure. As a firm consolidates their hardware, they are just buying more complex and thus more expensive hardware to support it. Furthermore, the data explosion that continues to happen as firms keep most of their data electronic, coupled with the compliance laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley which require data to be kept for a certain number of years is only increasing infrastructure costs.

Yet, businesses still aim to cut IT as much as possible. Most of the large financial institutions are cutting their annual IT spending budget anywhere between 10%-15%. Unfortunately, when these firm’s can’t cut out the infrastructure, they instead cut their personnel. It is quite easy to cut IT personnel. There hasn’t been a major disruption in IT since the introduction of virtualization technology, and instead, the technologies that are used heavily have become mature to the point where they are very simplistic to implement. Couple that with the proliferation of knowledge on the internet, where one can just Google for any issue they are trying to solve, and it has made supporting IT infrastructure very easy. It’s essentially commoditized IT.

This commoditization of IT has naturally led to downward pressure on salary. Companies are also not investing in their IT personnel by giving them training, even though the survey alludes to the fact that organizations believe they should. Even if the company does invest in them, they only send those employees to courses/seminars which teach administrative tasks. As these employees gain seniority, their salaries increase, but their skill sets didn’t match the salary. That’s when the companies realize their IT budgets are too large and look to outsource. This is especially true in the operational roles within the IT department (e.g. server admins, database admins, helpdesk, etc.). These roles are then being increasingly outsourced to India where firms like Wipro and Genpact have been the main beneficiaries. The downside to the outsourcing is that roles will never bring added value to the organization – they are there to perform the operational tasks and that is it.

So in short, firms see the value of IT, yet are not investing in it, are outsourcing their staff, and then complaining that IT is not brining strategic value to the enterprise.

This actually leaves the IT personnel in today’s global businesses in dire straits. With those employees now out of a job, they are stuck in a very difficult position – they don’t have the skill set that current IT firms are looking for, and they are too expensive. This, unfortunately is the ugly side of “growing up” within IT – at some point, you become too old and too expensive and don’t have a specialized trait. There will always be someone younger, and willing to work much harder for a cheaper salary. Companies know this, even if they don’t publicly speak about it.

How do we solve this problem? Well, we already know that operational roles will no longer be necessary in the future. Either technology will evolve to automate those tasks, or they will just be outsourced to the lowest bidder. Instead, what can’t be outsourced is the design of these infrastructures, along with the architecting of solutions. McKinsey’s survey alludes to this also, as demonstrated in the following chart:

 

image

*Exhibit 6 from McKinsey’s Global IT survey

 All of the roles mentioned in the chart above point to the same thing – creating solutions that help the business become more profitable. Of particular interest is the the “Joint business and IT expertise” category. Companies will need IT executives with MBA’s or other strong business experience. Sending IT personnel to business oriented classes, instead of the pure technical classes is one way to address this. If the firm won’t do it, then I suggest that IT employees take the initiative to start learning basic business principles and applying them to their work.

You can easily move away from being a “cost” to a business to becoming a valued asset, once you can show the business how you can help it improve, and thus make more money.

Key Takeaways:

  • Companies are beginning to understand the strategic value of IT, but have not found a way to capture this strategic value.
  • Even so, IT is still looked at as a cost center. Firms are not cutting cost on infrastructure and instead cutting cost on personnel.
  • The IT employee has become commoditized; operational roles will continue to diminish to the point of obsolescence.
  • IT personnel must begin understanding business principles and applying it to their jobs to become an asset instead of a liability.

Technology: Outsourcing vs. Keeping it“in house”

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Deciding between outsourcing your IT organization vs. keeping it in house is not as straightforward as deciding which method will save a company the most money.  It is a very unique decision to each organization that revolves around the the culture of the organization itself.   I recently performed a technology audit for a firm to help them determine whether they should outsource their IT organization (infrastructure and support personnel), or continue supporting it “in house”.     Here are some things to consider when deciding whether to outsource or insource:

  • Size of Firm – We always believe with starting with a hypothesis and then gathering data to either support or refute our hypothesis.  In this case, we looked at what our client’s peer firms of similar size were doing.  Some questions we asked to help us form our hypothesis:
    • Were this company’s peers outsourcing?
    • If so, were they successful? 
    • Did these companies outsource their entire technology organization or just a portion of it?

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Based on this data, we formed a hypothesis that our client should outsource their entire technology organization.

Next we moved to the data gathering stage of our engagement.  Our goal here was speak to various stakeholders of the organization to get their views on the business and the role IT plays within the enterprise.  We also reviewed the current state of the technology infrastructure to determine how proprietary the data and applications were, and how current the state of the technology infrastructure was:

  • Feedback from key stakeholders in the business  – We conducted interviews with both business executives, IT executives and end users.  These interviews focused on the following areas:
    • Business executives – our interviews focused on the current strategy of the business.  Some questions that were asked:
      • Is the firm planning to expand?    Is the expansion going to be national or international?  
      • Are there any major initiatives the firm is undertaking that will require heavy involved from the technology organization?
      • Is the firm trying to cut costs?  
    • IT executives  – The interview with the IT executives focused on how the business used technology.   Some questions that were asked:
      •   Is IT in the organization highly specialized? 
      • Are there many home grown apps that are critical to the organization that cannot be supported outside of the organization?  
      • How complex is the IT environment?  
      • How large is the IT budget and how efficiently is the budget used?  
    • End Users  – The interviews with the end users focused on how they leverage IT.  Some questions that were asked:
      • Are users very demanding and require personal attention?  
      • Are their IT systems stable?  
      • What are their opinions of the current state of IT and the support they receive?

We then performed the technical audit of their current technology infrastructure.  Some key areas we focused on were:

  • IT infrastructure 
    • Is the technology infrastructure up to date?   
    • How well documented are the processes surrounding  mission critical applications?  How often are they updated and by whom?
    • When are hardware warranties expiring?  
    • How often are software upgrades performed?

 

Summary of Results – Here is a summary of our findings from this audit:

  • Our client was not planning on expanding – in fact they had a strong directive to cut costs as much as possible.
  • Although there were some applications that were home grown, the vast majority of their infrastructure was running on well known systems (i.e. Microsoft, Oracle, etc.)
  • The end user was pretty self sufficient when it came to their IT needs and most were able to work without the assistance from the technology organization.
  • The technology infrastructure was a bit outdated.  The firm typically does not upgrade their infrastructure unless the hardware is out of warranty or of software has reached end of support and/or end of life.

Based on those findings, we recommended that the firm outsource their entire technology organization (infrastructure and personnel).

The information that I’ve listed here is just a small subset of the data gathering and analysis we performed.   My point for providing this information is to discourage companies from making this type of decision based solely on financials.  In fact, a common  misconception of outsourcing is that it ultimately saves the firm money.   We have found this to not be completely accurate.   Instead, we have found that firms who only outsource to save money, ultimately bring their IT support back in house. This is because they did not consider other factors that we mentioned above, which led to the transition being quite disastrous.    So, while the firm may have saved money in the interim the cost of transitioning to an outsourced environment and transitioning back to in-house usually wipe out those cost savings.  In these scenarios, the saying “you get what you pay for” holds very true.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • IT outsourcing is a decision that is unique to every firm.
  • Areas besides cost should be considered when determining if a firm should outsource.
  • Firms that outsource solely because of cost savings usually wind up bringing IT back in house.