Charge Both Ways

At the turning point of the Battle of Parker's Cross Roads, Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest discovered that his forces had been caught in a pincer movement between two Federal armies, each of them much larger than his own. Having narrowly escaped personal capture by means of an audacious bluff, Forrest was approached by his aides, who asked in despair, "General, what shall we do?" "Charge!" he ordered. "Which way, sir?" they asked. "Both ways!" he replied. Powered no doubt by a combination of desperation, adrenaline and chicory-laced coffee, that's what they did -- and smashed their way through a stunned enemy to escape.

These days, corporate developers know what it's like to feel surrounded and outnumbered. At many companies, the ongoing financial strain of the last few years has decimated IT staff and training budgets. But while they've been engaged in front on projects that amounted to technological entrenchment, a surprising development has crept up from behind. Explosions of innovation are churning up the ground around their positions, fired from what had been quiet fields and hedgerows they had marched by on their way to the front lines.

For it's clear now that in the two years since the meltdown, mobile devices have shifted the lines of battle. Enterprise development is no longer drawn up in tidy Napoleonic ranks behind Java on the one side and .NET on the other, with SOA and the desktop browser as a no-man's land in the middle. Apple broke smartphones out of their corporate niche as constrained email clients. They seem to be to be on the verge of accomplishing a similar breakthrough with tablets. Ironically, the same exclusive partnership with AT&T and tight control of the iOS application market that has guaranteed Apple's profitability has also created room for Android, Blackberry and others to rise as strong competitors. Customers and business users have grasped the possibilities and now expect access to corporate applications from whatever device they're using, wherever they happen to be. This in turn is opening new fronts in platforms, languages and frameworks, as the dominant solutions of five years ago have proven too unwieldy to meet the demands of the mobile environment.

The front has moved and many IT organizations now find that their cannons are all pointing the wrong way. During the lean times, they outsourced away their technical expertise and optimized their platforms and infrastructure to the point of monoculture. Now they find themselves depleted of the capacity to exploit technological innovation for business advantage. These organizations may well ask, "What shall we do?"

IT leaders in this situation must see the answer with the same terrible clarity that Nathan Bedford Forrest saw it. When challenged on two fronts, you have no choice but to engage both. If you must engage at a disadvantage, then you must seize the initiative at all costs. So by all means cover the essentials. Find efficiencies and keep the fixes and enhancements rolling. Just make sure that you muster the resources for a charge on the front of innovation. A century and a half later, fortune still favors the bold and charging both ways is still the best tactic to burst out of a tight spot.