It is difficult to overestimate the revolution wrought on the world of freight by Malcolm McLean in the 1950s as he realised the benefits of a single, standardised container infrastructure for the movement of stuff (broadly) regardless of the nature of that stuff and the mode of transport. The world of information is ripe for a similar upheaval. Of course, critics can point out that this is precisely what the World Wide Web represents. Tim Berners-Lee's vision of standardised methods of display and connection prompted the memorable phrase, 'a massive one-off positive information supply shock'. The Dot Com Boom was born, and a succession of companies were launched on stock markets with heroic valuations. Of course the boom turned to bust - it did not herald the new age as advertised. Why not?
First, all maniacal investment booms turn to bust eventually, regardless of the nature of the assets underneath. A Dutch tulip bulb has its worth, just not equivalent to a country estate. Second, technology is not a business model: hype does not equal revenue let alone profits, and too many Dot Com darlings did not make any money. Third, and most relevant to this blog, the dreams of a frictionless, standardised computing environment were just that. As any web developer worth their salt will tell you, developing anything other than an online brochure requires a complex code dance to cope with the different browsers out there. And, it's all very well to talk about the display layer (i.e. The browser), but what about the picture underneath? It's still a jumble of competing technologies to store the data, and serve it into the browser for the user to interact with. Thus businesses are saddled with an accumulated cludge of tech that was commissioned at one time for the management of information, perhaps better known as stuff: different types of stuff, granted, but still stuff.
Historically, there was an excuse for this. Technology was in its infancy and even commercialised products were largely built in a vacuum, where each piece was chosen on its merits for that project, and not to fit into a wider set of standards, as those standards did not exist beyond the establishment of popular coding languages. However, from the rubble of the Dot Com Boom came a few survivors who managed to grasp the need for a compelling product that generated revenue that might exceed the costs. They also got around the discordant nature of all the subterranean bits of technology by bundling everything inside a website, allowing end users a simple way both to see their stuff, but also to configure what stuff was stored and how it could be displayed. Thus Application Service Provision (ASP) was born, allowing businesses to manage standardised buckets of their stuff (client relationship management, for instance) through a website without recourse to code. Largely through one such ASP purveyor, Salesforce.com, the geeky ASP became SaaS - Software as a Service.
Great, problem solved, I hear you say. Well, a casual glance into any organisation with its legion of spreadsheets will tell you that there is a need to manage stuff not met by the use of the big SaaS apps. This is partly down to the way organisations view these apps. Salesforce is typically brought in by the marketing/client service department to manage their sales and service channels. Actually, it is a cleverly designed extensible relational database that can be used to manage any number of business processes, any type of stuff: we have used their excellent Charity version to power all manner of things, not just donor management (see the Case Study here). Second, its wide use in non-charitable contexts is difficult for a business to stomach due to its spicy per head licence cost.
Things are moving on. From the provision of clearly-defined apps for particularly verticals, typically stated as abbreviations (CRM, ERP), we have progressed to more universal systems that offer all the building blocks (or containers) to assemble your own bespoke SaaS app. Perhaps because of a lack of catchy name or defined purpose, these universal systems have had less traction: how many organisations use Microsoft 365 simply because they need to provide their users with Microsoft Word and Excel, and continue to see each other's calendars? Subject to the exact licence, all sorts of goodies are lying around already paid for, just waiting to be assembled into, say, a mobile app that contains stuff that is usually sent round in a spreadsheet on a Monday (or was it the one sent round last Friday? Who knows?). As difficult as it is for IT pros to accept, information is just stuff to power processes and decisions, and in the same way that you would be happy for the firm's stationery and bottled water to be delivered in the same van, so other elements of its stuff can be delivered with the same standardisation.