“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”
–Aldous Huxley
Above reminds me of another quote, often attributed to Albert Einstein, about limitations of the universe and human stupidity (which is a quote from a Fritz Perls book, quoting supposedly what Einstein would have said to Fritz, the astronomer).
Perhaps Aldous discovered the primary reason, why we feel people may or may not be of a certain standard, at a moment, or in general.
It may be, that’s the human condition in a nutshell? Now regardless of the reason for why organizations perform less than expected, with lower quality output than expected, or in any number of ways, worse than expected, it is certainly because of people and whatever the human condition may be.
I guess this is because of our residual image of ourselves, digital or otherwise, a construct of mind we have of ourselves and thus also others, which is why we seldom take things for what they are and rather try to make it as it fits ourselves at a moment.
In Software Asset Management self-deception is the primary cause of failure. As we often say (some of us, anyway) belief is something we may do in church, but in this business, we either know, or we don’t.
So the idea is, to have an idea, of what one wishes to achieve, then keep working at it, until it’s a simple line of text, describing your mission statement.
Now, that I’m finished with the intro and “Ignorantia est lætitia“, let’s get back to the issue at hand.
I have recently switched sides, to the external “service provider corner” from being an in-house, all you can use me “asset”.
I used to call myself “a chair”; simply because that’s how I sometimes felt not without humor, of course.
Why self-deception? Well, we are humans, and we humans tell ourselves things. We are so good at it that we can become blind to the truth, and see only the lies we are comfortable with. This seems to be true, regardless of the chair we happen to sit in and the funny part is that sometimes we can see it coming from “some other chair” plain as day.
I have been made “upset” twice last week. I wanted to use the word “stirr, stirred and the stirr” but didn’t manage to find a form a dictionary would agree to, the way I wished to use it and so since I’m no Shakespeare, I changed the word.
Firstly, when I was asked a question by a former colleague about something rather obvious to me being a potential disaster in the making down the line.
Secondly being visited by a ghost from the past. Namely after having a collision with common publishers return to auditing their clients, although they call it “revision or review”. This even though they have made the move to named licensing a while ago and publically announced discarding the need for audits as of the end of 2015.
Let’s start with agitation number one.
The company in question has been introducing a global service provider to outsource most of its IT services. That can work to some degree of course. Unfortunately in the process of outsourcing, they ended up without certain key assets, able to make sense of the mess, aka some SAM professionals. Now, that isn’t the trouble, if you have options. In this case, some of the management of entitlements went back to local departments. And thus local departments are now to manage their software assets with all that entails. The question I was asked was: facing a request from the up-top, an absolute reduction of cost is preferred. Can it be done?
The trouble here is that this reduction affects former work. The produce of labour and intellectual property on which more work is based. Which is on file for a reason, needs still to be accessed for use, for an unforeseen number of years ahead.
Ergo, the idea is to discontinue the update and the support part of the maintenance contract for all licenses. This leaves ageing assets to the merciless life cycle of the operating systems. Regardless of the long term costs, the risk of inability to use the software and thus losing access to previously created work is quite substantial.
Of course, I advised reducing active license count to as low, as the management could live with, and maintain until no longer needed. For archived work purposes, one license would suffice and guarantee business continuity at least.
The only alternative with sense is to convert the work to some other format(s). This being a more cumbersome and costly alternative. The comment I received was that the management wanted to discontinue the product entirely. I’m good, but I’m no magician…
The agitation number two,
regards revisiting a waste of time and resources of IT departments by publishers policies, which directly reflect on their hidden source of income and agenda, meaning dreaded audits.
For me, an audit is an aggressive negotiation method. The publisher wishes to make money by more or less forcing the organization into buying more licenses through proving a none-compliance. It is cannibalization of their customer base, but hey, they are just trying to survive.
Yes, the publisher has absolute rights to their IP property, which the executable code is. They have the right to request several things, but since they have moved towards named licensingwhich evidently enforces compliance and subscriptions which changed the model from pay for “ownership” to “right to use as long as you keep paying”, they can’t call it an audit, so they call it a review with an agenda: they wish to help their customers to manage and get the best value out of their software by requesting detailed logs or running their auditing software.
I believe they call it something else nowadays, but the fact is, it is still the same annoying process, again. The king was dead, long live the king. They might be looking at different things now, so they have evolved, but for most companies, the push to named licensing was to get rid of the annoying time and resource-consuming software audits as main motivation. Fact is this is how this publisher more or less enforced taking back what was sold only to lease it.
And so, from my side, as a Business Software Alliance certified SAM professional, I have to represent both sides and quite objectively at that. And yes, it creates a conflict of interest here at some intersections. I have to assist the customer to the best of my ability, as well as protect the IP rights of the publisher. The question I ask myself time and time again since the aforementioned agitation is: If the publisher always keeps changing the game and one can’t trust what they say, claim or do (or ask) (subjectively) how flexibly honest can a customer be towards such a publisher and should we judge them for it if they were? I always presume innocense until proven guilty.
Luckily for me, I’m not a customer anymore, nor do I directly represent one. If this was a personal relationship of mine, and my partner would behave like this claiming things, and then do the opposite, I would have ended the relationship, not being able to trust the partner. At best it’s hypocrisy, at worst a blatant lie. Since there’s always plenty of fish in the sea moving on would make logical sense. And even here, there’s plenty of alternatives, which makes me ask another simple question: Why choosing or sticking with such a publisher?
It reminds me of listening to a, let’s call it a lecture, once, asking the audience: What is quality?
I then, just as many others, answered that: quality is subjective to the perceiving party and their expectations.
The reply I received back was then an absolute: No! “The definition of quality is conformance to requirements (requirements meaning both the product and the customer’s requirements). The system of quality is prevention. The performance standard is zero defects (relative to requirements). The measurement of quality is the price of nonconformance.”
A statement (a mantra) that I have adopted as my own set of values, ever since.
And thus I will do my best to represent my customer, following the rules I must follow, as I must. My grandma used to say, if you agreed to work as a horse, pull the darn wagon.
And so we end up at the end, again, proving that self-deception indeed makes companies make choices no company should make. That in regards to maintaining their business continuity. Or as in this case, risking it.
In addition, we should evaluate our use of software where the publishers seem to only care about their income budgets, feeling free to go back on their word, under a new pretext. In SAM terms this is Relationship management. Should I interpret the ISO19770 here to the word, I’d say this publisher is none-compliant, but then again, what do I know?
