The perils of customization

The strong response to my recent column about enterprise IT customization and the MTV show Pimp My Ride suggests that pop culture might actually be educational in the right context. Reading through the feedback, I suspect that the yearning for customization in the MTV show might simply be a reflection of larger human tendencies that need to be monitored. Crazy customizations might be fun to watch on television, but most readers seem to agree that when it comes to IT, it’s best to stick with a nice, boring set of wheels.

Wayne Gura extends my analogy by pointing out the clear emphasis on superficial customizations in the MTV show at the expense of the core systems that actually make a car run, using the surfer’s VW bus as an example: “[They] do little or nothing to upgrade/fix the mechanicals of the vehicle. … They didn’t seem to care about anything that wasn’t seen (motor, transmission, suspension, etc.), and they only did a quick patch on the rust. Like many IT projects that go for the ‘wow’ factor, the underlying problems are not always addressed. In the case of the bus, when a few months down the road the rust that was only patched starts popping through that custom paint job — where will that surfer be then? Probably in the same losing position as the end-user and the business that are living with what looked like the perfect custom job. And the guys who wowed the user, … they’ve either been promoted or moved on to the next job, … and it becomes someone else’s problem.”

Gary Barnett, research director at analyst company Ovum, writes in to compare IT to cars in a deeper way, noting the tendency of IT to overcustomize solutions for problems that might have simple commodity solutions: “In the world of NASCAR, it’s assumed that it’ll take a pit crew of experts to keep a NASCAR racer going, and NASCAR teams expect to replace gearboxes and rebuild engines on a regular basis. But NASCAR is the exception. Very few regular folk would relish the thought of rebuilding the gearbox and resetting the suspension after every trip to Stop & Shop. In the world of IT, it is almost impossible to find a standard, uncustomized and untinkered-with business application, in part because we’ve all convinced ourselves that our need is unique — that we’re NASCAR — when in truth most of the things we do with technology are closer to Stop & Shop than they are Daytona. One of the hardest but most important things that we all need to learn is when we want something plain, reliable, and cheap and when it makes sense for us to pimp things up.”

Gary’s analogy reminded me of a situation I encountered in my earliest days at InfoWorld. I was trying to migrate our Windows desktop environment from an unmanaged mishmash of custom installs and applications to a single, centrally managed system image for the entire company, and I was encountering resistance all around. There was a lot of doubt among the end-users and even the IT staff that we could do such a thing, and the doubt generally rested on the idea that our users were so unique that boiling down our desktop stack to a single system image would be next to impossible.

Of course, it wasn’t that difficult, and in the end, it turned out to be more of an emotional attachment to a sense of being special than it was a real technical challenge. Despite what our mothers told us, most of us are really not that special —at least, not when it comes to IT.