Getting the hard stuff done, effectively!

It’s not about making the hard stuff easy, it’s about making sure that the hard stuff can get done, effectively.

In today’s “app-ified” world, where companies all over the world are generating new applications that are supposed to make doing the hard things easy. It’s a lofty goal and one that thousands upon thousands of companies pursue. But, sometimes, we think that goal is wrongly assigned to a particular task. 

Let’s take, for example, Air Traffic Control, or NASA’s Mission Control systems, or even a Nuclear Power Plant Management system.  These are “hard” tasks that are complex, dangerous, and require enormous reliability, performance metrics, and resiliency. I don’t want the government, NASA, or a power company to deploy applications that claim, as part of their value prop, that they make doing these tasks “easy”.  On the list of criteria that any organization should use when evaluating, improving, or replacing mission critical applications, “ease of use” should be at the bottom of their list…if on the list at all.

Recently, we engaged with several prospective global telecommunications carriers who were looking to upgrade their interconnect voice management solution (their LCR tool for all their voice traffic). This mission critical system is the operational tool carriers use every minute of every day to manage every voice call into and out of their network. As a result, the application must work all the time, support a wide range of needs, be reliable, resilient, scalable and perform under stress (volume).  Not in any of these conversations did any of these prospects discuss or ask how “easy” the system would be to use. They wanted to know what our ICP solution could do, how it would do it, and how it was designed to mitigate risks of failure or diminished performance.    

We spend our time investing in building carrier grade applications that will manage a mission critical aspect of a voice service provider’s business.  Making the application easy is a luxury that we implement when we can, but never at the sacrifice of performance, reliability, or resiliency. It’s amazing how that has gotten lost in the current zeitgeist of one touch applications that do everything for us. Real companies, with real needs, focus on issues of scale, reliability, and performance. That’s what separates them from the pretenders who are focused on ease of use and cheaper price!