Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Unbelievable


Like a badly-trained terrier with emotional issues Blogger managed to chew up the first draft of this post and pooped it out on the screen of my browser. Here's hoping that I will be second time lucky.

I remember going and watching Falling Down when it came out at the cinema. It was a weird film to watch because I became aware early on in the film that I was watching the audience watch the film laughing with the Michael Douglas 'William D-FENS Foster' character, until they suddenly realised that the joke was on them.


The scene that got the most laughs was the scene in the fast-food restaurant were he asks for a breakfast five minutes after breakfast has closed. D-FENS outburst encapsulated what everyone in the audience wanted to say to McDonalds about breakfasts, it tapped into the zeitgest beautifully.

For many years most of the people that I know who will frequent a McDonalds restaurant reckon that breakfasts are their best offering, yet the company will make all kinds of special edition burgers but not sell all-day breakfasts.

Which makes this quote from Reuters by the CEO of McDonalds Jim Skinner pretty surreal:

"It's not compatible with our current operating system," Skinner said about offering its breakfast menu all day. "But with this system, that could be possible."

The so-called flexible operating platform will make McDonald's food preparation processes more transparent to customers and "offer more variety with greater ease," Skinner said.

To the average consumer this must seem Kafta-esque, however having worked in IT I can believe it. It is ironic that businesses are built on interconnected electronic structures that are so poorly architected, badly implemented, complex and unwieldy that they calcify the business processes that are the life blood of the organisation.

And the technology sector wonders why business managers won't invest in new systems?

The flexibility and adaptability of consumer computing and web applications will make business managers more frustrated with the poorly designed and implemented systems that they have to work with.