Through the fog...Think Instant Value

Instant wins are driving IT decisions but sometimes you need to think tactical, says Quocirca's Jon Collins...

IT industry pundits spend plenty of time discussing the bigger picture, strategic solutions – the CRM rollouts that save millions of pounds (allegedly), or the consolidation projects that reduce the number of servers from three hundred to ten. Strategic solutions require to be architected at every level of the IT stack, deliver whole business processes and recognisable value to the customer.

At Quocirca, to ensure we cover the tangibles and the intangibles, we define the Total Value Proposition (TVP) to be the sum of the benefits minus the costs of having something, compared to the benefits minus the costs of not having it. This works well for those major, structural projects but there exist more tactical solutions. These are equally valuable, and also require top-to-bottom integration but they differ significantly in approach and result from their strategic brethren.

Tactical solutions act in support of specific activities. An example of a tactical solution is the lowly-yet-powerful pager: you call a number, the pager beeps, and the owner of the pager knows to call you back. Other examples include mobile telephony, video conferencing, voicemail, email and scheduling – indeed many tactical solutions exist to enable communications between individuals; many others help support quick decision making. They operate, as Lawrence Webb, director of human-oriented software reseller M-Urge would say, “in the human layer of the IT stack.”

Tactical solutions such are highly commoditised human-enablers, characterised by a mini-stack that uses established standards from top to bottom. Most tactical applications, if not all of them, are delivered off the shelf – people aren't developing these things in-house.

There is nothing to stop tactical solutions from being integrated as part of strategic solutions, but their strength is that they can be delivered to operate stand alone. As they exist in the same, recognisable form for multiple people in multiple domains, this means that:

Tactical solutions require very solid vertical integration. They can be considered as a thin slice down the stack, in which every layer has been highly optimised to deliver the specific function.

Tactical solutions should have a consistent look and feel wherever they are found. For example, retrieval of an email should be the same experience whatever the device that is being accessed, or whether the email is being accessed from within a strategic solution.

Tactical solutions do not deliver business value as such, and there is little merit in reporting on their success upwards into the business. However, their existence can make or break a business process, particularly when the process needs to adapt to an unexpected circumstance. Because they are human enablers, their success or failure is determined almost entirely on the basis of human factors.

One mechanism to determine the value of a tactical solution is the concept of instant value. Just like the value of a strategic solution equates to benefits minus costs, instant value equals instant benefits minus instant costs, and is a calculation performed directly and subconsciously by the more primitive lobes of the human brain. At every moment, networks of neurones are calculating the most efficient way to achieve instant value.

These make us drink the cold cup of coffee beside us rather than sending us to go and boil the kettle, or they prevent us from running to catch a bus (remember them) as there will be another one along in a minute. They’re not foolproof – it is instant value that causes us to drive on, lost, rather than stopping to check the map or ask for directions.

A tactical solution is functioning successfully if it is able to deliver instant value in a given scenario. At the moment when the power cut comes, all the servers go down and there isn’t a support engineer in sight, it is the trusty telephone and paper directory that we reach for. There’s nothing wrong with that. The upside is that, when they are deployed successfully, good tactical solutions have enormous benefit within strategic solutions. Conversely, if the criteria of instant value are not achieved, the tactical solution concerned will be worthless or even counterproductive.

Instant value may seem trivial but it is of fundamental importance, particularly for new technologies. Product managers and early adopters can concoct plausible uses of the latest gadgets, products and packages. However, these artificial scenarios are not the final markets for such goods. Out there, on the streets, in the machine rooms and on the shop floors, the true value of the tactical solution will become apparent, both at the moment of purchase and when the product is used in anger.

Recent gizmos, such as USB memory sticks, have tangible instant value. More complex functionality in office applications, such as the Microsoft Binder, fail the test and are unused despite their usefulness. We can apply this to the old chestnut WAP, for example – why did it fail? “Because it was unusable” is the standard response.

This may be true but it doesn’t help anyone understand what should have been done differently. WAP is not rubbish – it merely fails the instant value test. The benefits of WAP – information anywhere – were outweighed by the time it took to make a GSM connection, combined with the number of key clicks required and the quality of the information it presented. Now, with GPRS providing a more usable connection (and repackaged as Vodafone Live!), WAP starts to offer benefits in certain scenarios. E-mail checking, for example, using WAP is good enough to be usable.

Instant value also puts paid to the idea of the killer application. What has made the web successful has not been (as much mooted) a killer app in any shape or form, but the fact there were sufficient successful applications of instant value to a variety of scenarios, to make it tip the balance. As we have all seen, web sites that don’t provide instant value are passed over. We go to websites we know, rather than looking for something cheaper or better.

Instant value is all around us. Consider SMS and instant custard, MP3 players and toasters, and think how it applies to the technologies you are considering purchasing, or the products you have on the roadmap. To see what has failed the test, you only have to look in the cupboard for discarded gadgets, or software packages that never made it to their first upgrade.

Of course, it may be that the costs of the things that fail, are outweighed by the benefits of those that succeed – as a colleague pointed out, it might be that "buying Instant Custard makes up for the woolly bobble remover, the electric carving knife, the CD polisher, the TENS device, the device to make your Sky box work with your video when you are not there, the teddy bear that also acts as a pyjama case, the original 640x320 digital camera bought when they first came out, the Video2000 recorder from 1992 and the Satellite mobile phone that I bought to replace the Rabbit mobile I had..." But then again it might not, and this is hardly a good way to do, or to run, a business. No instant value, no cigar.