Playing with the Band

I'm not sure I've ever seen Avery Lyford out of a suit. Even at casual industry events, he's always in business drag. Or maybe that's just the way I think of him. I mean, maybe my brain puts him in a suit no matter what he wears, figuring he spent too many years at IBM not to look the part.

Between IBM and his current gig (a stealth venture he wasn't ready to talk about the last time we spoke), Avery was a consultant with McKinsey and President & CEO of Linuxcare. So he's knows some stuff.

I always enjoy talking with Avery because he's thoughtful and original. Especially for a Suit. Whenever I come up with some idea and run it past Avery, he listens closely and adds value to it. Unless he thinks it's lame, in which case he'll kindly give me a better idea. He has lots of those.

Recently we talked about DIY-IT: Do-It-Yourself IT. I've been exploring the subject for the last year and a half -- especially in those areas where Linux and open source are involved. I have this idea that DIY-IT happens in relatively free and open IT environments, and was going on about it when he told me the variable that mattered most was expertise.

"You can’t have DIY-IT without internal expertise. You can’t ask a brass band to bone up on their violin."

I asked him to explain.Avery Lyford spent many years as an IBM executive before taking over as President and CEO of LinuxCare, a provider of support and software for deploying and maintaining Linux [do I have this right?]. He left this spring to join a stealth startup venture. Lyford has spent his career studying the strengths and weaknesses of IT departments, and compares DIY to playing music:

"Nobody lacks for weaknesses. The very essence of strength is weakness at something else. Anybody who builds a team on lack of weaknesses is doomed to failure. So you put together strengths. A good IT leader has a team that's like a band, or an orchestra. They play well together. Their strengths comprise a whole that's more than the sum of their parts. And they're all good at different things."

I wondered: Is the IT manager (whatever the title might be -- there are many variations) a conductor?

No: a composer. "When it comes to building internal solutions of any kind, you say 'I want to compose something this orchestra can play.'" You take all the surrounding conditions into account: "You might have different operating environments. You might have a database running on a mainframe. You might have Linux running the Web tier, which may be on a mainframe as well if you're running in an IBM mainframe environment. And you're bound to have Windows running on desktops."

I asked for a more specific example.

"Let's say you want to save money and leverage investments by looking for ways to convert Windows desktops to Linux. That might make sense where you've got dedicated workers who don't need the Office suite, or even a browser. There's no shortage of terminals in the world today that are Windows boxes doing exactly one thing that may not depend on Windows running anywhere else. Customer support. Point of sale. But how to make the change? First thing is, you need the staff that can make it happen."

So let's say you don't have the staff. Let's say your build vs. buy choices are narrow in the personnel department. By Avery's metaphor, you're a few musicians short of a band. So you look to buy. What's your environment then?

"What vendors want is acount control. When you buy a vendor, you're buying the luxury not to worry about a certain class of problem. Oracle would have account control in cases where the first place a customer turns is to Oracle. Account control is not winning competitor bake-offs. It's being involved with your customer. It's being able to handle problems. It takes skill and knowledge to take on somebody else's problems and solve them. And we're talking about very big problems here. That's what built IGS -- IBM Global Services. IGS has account control. Account control is a vendor-side ideal; but it may also be a customer-side ideal too."

Back at the other extreme, what about free agency? Seems to me companies are often opeating at the grace of their employees, rather than vice versa. How do you factor IT workers who can pick up their instruments and go play with any band they like?

Avery said, "There are transaction costs under each interaction between people. As transaction costs go down, you expect things to disaggregate more. Where do you stand between high and low transaction costs? This applies to corporations just as it applies to any system. What's the logical grouping of any system? How atomic should it be? Should you deal with each atom? Do you want to deal with things on a molecular basis, or as objects? The question is, at what level of aggregation do you want to start dealing with things? These may seem like strategic decisions always made at the top, but the issues are felt at every level. And everybody is free to take initiative, to come up with solutions." A good composer, a good band leader.

Much DIY work involves asking questions, he said. "How open do you want to be? How much do you want to expose your processes, to engage your customers? Amazon doesn't try to expose every API of every program, except at a pretty chunky level -- but an appropriately chunky level because they're chunks that people care about."

That's in reference to Amazon Web Services, which is how Amazon gets to serve partners without acting like a whole platform. It's a new thing, Web services. We'll talk about it later.

Anyway, Avery believes mixed technical environments (which most IT shops are) require paying attention to mixed political environments as well. Not just because they're so different, but because they're changing.

"Eric Raymond's cathedral and bazaar analogy still applies," he says. "Windows is still a cathedral and Linux is still a bazaar. Most companies now have both. In the church of Windows, the canons are very strict and controlled. To Microsoft, Windows is the one true faith; and they're out to burn away the heretics. There's a lot you can do that's canonical, and not much that isn't. But it's all highly controlled by a system of dependencies in terms of both commercial relationships and developmental environments." He went on to explain how licensing of a very controlling commercial sort is taken for granted. So is the closed and controlled nature of vendor-owned development environments from Visual Basic to .Net. Meanwhile, out in the bazaar, you can do pretty much whatever you want, including participate in the development of the very platforms and applications on which your solutions will have dependencies. And lots of people are doing that, which is why the total population of technologists putting Linux to use is now quite large. The newcomers may not understand and comply with the cultural norms of the old core Linux crowd, but they operate at the grace of its long-held value system, and understand it intuitively. So, while the Linux cult adapts to the real world that has lots of Microsoft in it, Microsoft is adapting to the real world that not only has lots of Linux in it, but a value system that is useful and has real depth.

Avery even thinks the SCO mess may have some positive effects. Unpleasant as FUD may be, it does encourage legal departments of large customers to start visiting subjects they barely cared about before, such as open source licensing. So, while the FUD succeeded as FUD, it has also achieved the unintended effect of enlarging the conversation around those licenses, making more technologists aware of the agreements involved in open forms of software — and also more aware of the benefits that arise from those agreements as well. The result: more of what you might call "mindful deployments."

Mindful of what?

"The surrounding world," Avery says. " When you look at the cathedral surrounded by the bazaar, you see that Linux and the LAMP suite really do work well with things outside themselves, in the open marketplace. Then, the pull-quote: "IT always places a high value on interoperability, and not just interdependency."

So he has advice: "You start by taking existing variables into account." Any company that’s been around has a large portfolio of incumbent technology, he says. Some of it is current, some of it is legacy. Some of it has depreciated, some of it hasn't. Some of it sits in protected political fiefs, some of it nobody cares about. It's the rare company where everything Windows gets ripped out and replaced by Linux. Not only is it politically impossible in most cases, but the technologies aren't all swappable, by a long shot.

"Take the case of Exchange. There is no Linux equivalent. Not yet, and not likely soon. What do you do? Here's the real assessment you need to make: Skills. What are the musicians in your orchestra good at playing? Unix skills transfer very easily from Solaris to AIX to HP-UX to BSD to Linux. Most common Unix commands work on all of them. Many programs aren't that hard to port. That's why Linux hurts Sun and HP more than it does Microsoft. If you're an all-Microsoft shop, however, where you have few technologists with any Unix skills, you're not going to make a transition to Linux very easily, and it might not be a good idea at all. Moves from Unix to Windows are even less likely. That's like telling everybody in a brass band to bone up on their violin. Sure, you can hire people in, but how is that going to sit with the people you have? You always think first about the people you have and second about the people you might get."

So maybe your first step is around actionable policy. "From now on, for example, you insist on interoperability, even in the cases where you're locked in. Merely having choice about this gives customers much more leverage with vendors."

And skilled musicians a lot more tunes to play.