I’ve been struck of late by a tendency in enterprise telecom technology towards a bell curve representing complexity over time.
When products first launch, they often have few features and are simple for the customer to manage. Think of the first cellphones (and the second and third too, for that matter). These were basic devices used only for voice. Companies merely had to decide whether they were going to pay for these devices for their employees, and if so, up to what amount. There was no real management required as such - simply a binary decision and a second only marginally more complex decision.
But then smartphones came along, and promised far more features. Unfortunately, they also provided many more potential headaches for employers, who now had to worry about security risks, deploying software to devices, troubleshooting and helpdesk services and so on. We are now at the point where simplification (both in the form of managed services, which really just remove this complexity one step from the customer, and in the form of management consoles such as RIM’s and the relatively new Microsoft equivalent, which provide customers with tools to manage the complexity). At this stage, simplification is a differentiator, and provides real value to customers.
Finally, we get to a stage (not reached yet in the mobile world) where that simplicity becomes a built-in feature of pretty much every product available in that market, and goes away as a differentiator. This is then a mark of maturity, and may well lead to a new complexity cycle in a successor product which either substitutes for or complements the current one. The complexity which grows in the first half of the cycle isn’t necessarily a bad thing per se, or at least it’s often a price worth paying because it is a side effect of increased functionality.
There’s often a big opportunity around the peak of the curve for companies to come in and make money from the simplification process, and certainly my recent conversations with major carriers about their plans for managed mobility services suggest that we are reaching that point in the case of enterprise mobility. Right now, there’s an opportunity to charge significant amounts to manage this complexity on customers’ behalf, although over time (probably not for several more years in this case) simplicity will start to be built into solutions and this opportunity will erode until few customers need it (or are willing to pay for it).
Although this thought first occurred to me in the context of mobile services, it has broader applicability. IP telephony is another good example: early PBXs, while not necessarily simple, were at least largely standalone voice devices without huge complexity. But with the introduction of unified communications solutions built around IPT, the picture becomes much more complex: more piece parts are involved, often procured from several vendors. In many cases, companies will find that complexity to be more than they can (or are willing to) handle, and so they will seek simplicity through outsourcing management to a third party - an integrator such as Dimension Data, or a carrier such as BT or AT&T. The ability to manage the complexity will be a great opportunity for a period of time, but over time products will become differentiated on the basis of simplicity, with such options as being naturally interoperable, self-installing and -discovering.
Sometimes there is a tension between this cycle and another - sometimes companies start to simplify very early on, attempting to drive the curve down rather than up from the outset. The current trend towards Web 2.0 approaches to enterprise telecom technology is an attempt in some ways to allow customers to self-provision technology, create their own mashups and so on, and Cisco for one wants to enable that trend. But at the same time Cisco is trying to drive its services business which relies on managing complexity for customers. These two opportunities depend on trends which are moving in completely different directions, a fact which I pointed out to John Chambers a while ago when he described both of them in a single talk without discussion the contradiction.
He didn’t have an easy answer - there isn’t one - but this is something all companies have to think about as they develop technology for the enterprise. Is it worth driving the complexity curve up in return for increased functionality? Or is it worth sacrificing some of that increased functionality in the hope of driving up simplicity instead early in the cycle? Ideally, of course, you achieve both at once, but that’s something of a holy grail at this point.
