Executive Dog Whistle

By Robin Sharp
May 15, 2005

IBM's real "On-Demand" Message Will Only be Heard by a Select Few

I hadn't realised this until recently, but IBM is pushing Web Services and On Demand Business using what marketeers call "dog whistle" marketing. Dog Whistle marketing basically means they blow the whistle and anyone with dog ears hears it.

If you ever get to attend an IBM executive/leadership seminar you may find that they give free dog ear transplants. When you get this form of cosmetic surgery you don't actually walk out with fluffy ears, but if you read between the lines you do get let in on their secret, so you can hear the whistle too.

This happened to me recently when a bunch of IBMer strategic thinkers and business leadership chaps gave a seminar on Web Services in Financial Services. Their take was to quote a Thomas L. Friedman book called The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. These guys do presentations to senior executives and told us to expect CEOs to be asking their CTO for Service Oriented Architectures because they understood what they meant for business, whilst they accepted that the CEOs didn't understand the technology.

I'll give you the blurb from Thomas L.Friedman's web site:

"For Friedman, cheap, ubiquitous telecommunications have finally obliterated all impediments to international competition, and the dawning 'flat world' is a jungle pitting 'lions' and 'gazelles,' where 'economic stability is not going to be a feature' and 'the weak will fall farther behind.' Rugged, adaptable entrepreneurs, by contrast, will be empowered. The service sector (telemarketing, accounting, computer programming, engineering and scientific research, etc.), will be further outsourced to the English-spoken abroad; manufacturing, meanwhile, will continue to be off-shored to China. As anyone who reads his column knows, Friedman agrees with the transnational business executives who are his main sources that these developments are desirable and unstoppable, and that American workers should be preparing to 'create value through leadership' and 'sell personality.'"

In fact one IBMer butted in on the other - "yeah I read Friedman", and in fact almost all transnational executives and business leaders have been reading people with his message for a few years.

IBMers see him as providing a blueprint for the future business world. The IBM pitch was that business functions need to be more "geographically flexible". Incidentially I tend to agree with Friedman that globalisation is inevitable, but I think his (and his readers') vision that corporate-feudalism will outweigh democratic power probably has more to do with his readers' personal goals than software reality.

The problem with mainframes, client-server and enterprise architectures is that they are large lumps of business functionality, and can't be offshored easily. According to IBM at the seminar, the business purpose of Web Services is to enable the enterprise to deconstruct and distribute itself into more "geographically flexible" components.

So IBM tells execs that SOA means outsourcing. Only outsourcing is a dirty word, so they keep banging on about job redistribution until the penny drops for their whole audience. Okay, so now that we know what IBM strategists mean, let's read a snippet from an IBM business-enablement document [pdf]. Try to read it twice - once with your dog ears on and once with them off:

"An SOA is an application framework that supports componentized business processes, freeing functions and data from their applications so they can be accessed by and extended to whomever a company chooses."

Now read the following from the same document, it's a little more subtle:

* SOA Helps optimize the benefits of a service-oriented architecture
* Delivers services that leverage best practices to support your business objectives
* Provides access to a broad range of industry-leading solutions

Hear the whistles. Yes, Service Oriented Architecture is being promoted to senior executives as a means to more eaisly distribute business functions, whilst they are being promoted to techies as the next technical thing.

At the seminar we were asked if we knew what "business on demand" meant, but for those of us who didn't, it was explained. If you listen to IBM adverts on TV they talk about On-Demand meaning self-ordering servers. "Hey it orders itself!" However if you've attended an executive seminar, you know it means something very different. When IBM talk about "business on demand", they are blowing the executive dog whistle loudly - but I guess only a few senior executives hear it.

Here's an article on the future of banking [pdf]. IBM puts a huge amount of effort into understanding business direction, so I suggest you read it. My favourite line isn't subtle at all: "Location decisions exploit wage arbitrage opportunities," but having just written an FX arbitrage system I found it quite amusing.

There has been a recent push for On-Demand from all of IBM's senior execs, probably related to their recent 7% slump in share price following their fall in profits. The reality seems to be that since Sam Palmisano took over, his [On-Demand] strategy has not delivered the same growth as his predecessor, Lou Gerstner, who turned around the company's fortunes. The On-Demand message is a confused one with commentators describing it as hardware outsourcing, software outsourcing, business outsourcing, improving agility and distributed computing.

The software reality behind On-Demand is that it's going to be very difficult to deconstruct your business into a Service Oriented Architecture. When you devise a SOA it's very difficult deciding the practicalities of slicing your business services horizontally or vertically. The technical consequences of fragmented services is that you must have complex databases and user interfaces that can handle arbitrary fragmentation, and that is extremely difficult to engineer. If Sam Palmisano is to be judged kindly, IBM will have to come up with a lot of very impressive and revolutionary products that solve database and user interface fragmentation quickly - before IBM shareholders run out of patience.

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