LiveCode Player for 5.5

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Fri Mar 23 10:55:31 EDT 2012


Ray Horsley wrote:

 > Thanks Richard for these thoughts.  I believe I fall into a variant
 > of the "camp A" which you've mentioned, working with organizations
 > run by really dumb and most of all lazy IT staff.  Not all of our
 > clients are like this, but frequently we'll run into IT guys who
 > are simply too lazy too download anything to all the machines in
 > their schools.

I've seen that too.  And my brother, who's an IT admin at a hospital and 
he sees that all the time, his peers reusing requests from the 
stakeholders they're supposed to be servicing, using a wide range of 
irrational claims to justify inaction.  It's (in)famous throughout the 
IT world, but stakeholders don't have the technical background to argue 
back, so IT rules the roost however they want.

And it's even worse than you may imagine:  I've worked with one very 
large institution (who shall remain nameless here) who is still 
standardized on IE6 to this day.  Yes, even after Microsoft themselves 
has been spending millions trying to educate their customers to move on 
to any more recent version and get away from that bug-riddled security 
nightmare (see <http://www.ie6countdown.com/> as one example of MS's 
attempts), this org's IT director refuses to budge, exposing all of 
their users to thousands of known exploits every day.

I see stories like that all the time: doctors, educators, and members of 
many other orgs held back from getting the tools they need to improve 
organizational performance while being exposed to security risks along 
the way by IT staff who either don't understand their job or have other 
reasons to hinder the org from fulfilling its mission.

A contractor like you or me is in a tough position in those 
environments:  with a rational discussion of benefits and risk exposures 
it's possible to close a sale and deliver exactly what the client wants, 
but doing so may cost an IT person's job along the way.  Such IT staff 
will fight it tooth and nail, and unless the org has a good CTO and that 
person is involved in the discussion, middle managers won't have the 
technical background to understand that their IT staffers are being 
irrational.

IMNSHO, that's a sale worth losing:  working for dysfunctional orgs just 
makes a long workday longer, and ultimately any project with them will 
become mired in other unnecessary difficulties.

There are too many smart orgs to work for to waste time like that.

The trend for orgs to add the position of CTO was originally merely 
fashionable, but in recent years as tech become both more diverse and 
more pervasive that role can be invaluable as a mediator between 
stakeholders and tech staff.

When a CTO takes a hands-on role in vendor negotiations, I find many of 
these sorts of roadblocks disappear.

But unfortunately, some orgs don't understand why they have a CTO 
position, and don't fully utilize that resource.


 > I couldn't agree more with the technical case you've made here but
 > who was that shoe salesman in New York who made the famous comment
 > "Give the lady what she wants"?  We've got to make sales and if
 > the client wants software that runs in a browser we can either
 > argue with her or make the sale and move on.  Obviously the latter
 > of these is by far preferable.

The core question here is:  "What exactly does the client want?"

In many cases, when a vendor says "We have a web deployment solution" 
the customer hears "native HTML and JavaScript", and they're not at all 
imagining needing to download and maintain a browser plugin.

When the practical implications of a plugin are known to the client, 
many of these discussions stop right there.  It's not really what they 
had in mind, and doesn't really solve the problem they were hoping to 
solve though the simplicity and ubiquity of native browser implementations.

Some of those who hear that it's a plugin and still say they want it 
will become frustrated down the road when deployment actually happens. 
No blame there; they're just not technical people and have probably 
never used any plugin that wasn't pre-installed, so the implications of 
requiring that every machine in their org be set up to be 
user-modifiable to allow compiled executables like a browser plugin are 
unknown to them.

So this leaves us with the relatively slender subset of potential users 
who fully understand what using a plugin means and still want it.

For that small subset, a conversation about the benefits of other forms 
of executables can often get buy-in - provided they have a good hands-on 
CTO (see above). ;)

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com





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