There are presenters and there are presenters. Simon Wardley, part academic, part strategic thinker, part open source champion delivers a brilliant talk that encapsulates in 30 minutes much of which it’s taken me more than 3,000 blog posts to express. Anyone who knows me will also know I don’t use superlatives without good reason. As the title says…if you do nothing else then please, give yourself permission to spend 30 minutes watching Simon’s presso from OSCON. There are so many takeaways.
In the talk Simon makes frequent reference to topics such as accounting, HR and CRM although regarding CRM I think he really means sales force automation. He makes the case that business and IT go through lifecycle stages that start with innovation and end up with commoditization. I have long argued that since Pacioli has been dead for more than 500 years and that there has been very little real progress in delivering innovative accounting solutions the last 30 years, the time is ripe for new innovation in this most hum drum of activities.
It should therefore be no surprise that I find the SaaS/cloud accounting providers a useful source of reference for the disruption that is impacting professionals. I am equally cheered by the fact he says that anything that has become a commodity, dependable, predictable and effectively static is something that should be innovated against in the certain knowledge that invested incumbents will protect your endeavours. Given Simon’s research background I have every reason to trust his judgment.
Disclosure: I’ve known Simon a number of years and while I don’t agree with everything he says, I always find our occasional conversations stimulating, energizing and helpful. The last time we met was at the Cloud Computing World Forum. At that time he said something that struck me as profound: “Cloud computing is nothing more than utility computing like electricity is a utility. But we’re still trying to find a way of saying it in a sexy manner. Utility computing doesn’t do it, we tried SaaS and that didn’t really stick but cloud has a nice cheery ring to it that marketers can play up.” And with that he waved a cheery goodbye. I am slightly paraphrasing but that’s pretty much it.
