The current thinking in business schools and in bean counter-land in general is that everything should be treated as a commodity, that all of 'X' are the same and that the cheapest 'X' should always be purchased.

I'm assuming this is what you call "fast food" mentality.

It's what I call the "transaction" mentality. I've posted about this before. Businesspeople are eager to get to "transaction" mentality because it makes decision-making easy. Treat all 'X' the same, find the cheapest one, and get rid of the rest. Make all providers of 'X' "bid" each time.

Most successful people I know run off of relationships, not transactions.

Relationships are far more important than transactions, and the "old fashioned" values like keeping one's promises, telling the truth, etc. are critical to every business venture. Wall Street WILL NOT recover until executives get back to these "old fashioned values". Trust has been violated and it must be restored. That's relationship.

Transaction mentality tells you to trust NOONE. Always get bids, protect everything with legal contract language. But, it's never that easy, and if you build your business around the tight legal language of every contract, you're sure to fail. And many large software consulting houses are pretty far down that road.

Successful companies focus on relationships, and even when they don't have the greatest technology, they still win. If your customer believes you are working in their best interest, they will usually give you lots of rope to pull yourself out of a mess. If your customer doesn't trust you, or has fallen into "transaction mode", then the first time you slip, they execute the "exit" clauses of the contract and they're gone.

Great companies got there by treating their customers with respect. I think Microsoft's early years were even characterized by good customer and developer relations.

Today, it's too much about the money and the contract and the legal stuff, and not enough about knowing WHO you are dealing with and how they do business.

Glen Austin

There are some key differences, especially with the employees.

Managers at McDonalds aren't looking for employees with 2-3 years experience in the XJ-41 fry making machine. The machine is simple enough to use that 2-3 hours of training (at most), and the guy either "gets it" or he doesn't. You might try him on the grill if he doesn't, or at the counter, but if you can't make fries, then probably counting money is out of the question. At that point, if he's not a really good cleaning person, he's outta there in a shift or two.

Basically, at a fast food joint, the managers has to coach the employee to:

1. Show up on time.
2. Clean tables and equipment.
3. Run a fry maker, grill, or fill drinks correctly.
4. Advanced employees can accurately run a register, count change, and don't steal.
5. Finally, maybe there's some skill in checking in inventory into the cooler, checking milk and OJ dates, etc.
6. When you're really a good manager, your employees smile, are friendly to customers, and handle the pressure of sudden lines (business) well.

The company I work for has 6 software/service lines of business, with 3 generations of Delphi, two releases of Java, IBM PC Assembler, and 4 databases. I have employees programming in each of these languages and databases with different desires and expectations. The boss has deadlines in all 6 lines of business which must be met.

To be proficient, each language/DB requires weeks, if not months or years of training, and the employee must be taught to work a specific way to preserve data, build test environments, use software engineering disciplines, etc.

The tasks may be similar, but in doing software, the scale is completely different, and the training requirements are much more rigorous.

The costs are much higher, and I think much of the problem in the industry right now is that upper management WANTS fast food software, but can't get it.

The closest we come is in assembling components (without building our own unless absolutely necessary) in an Object Oriented programming environment, with separate disciplines in database. The sad fact is that we don't have the french fry maker already built, or the ice cream shake maker, or the ice cream machine, or the coke dispenser. The closest we come is packaged software like ERP, CRM, or financial/accounting software (JDEdwards, Great Plains), etc. The next step down are "configurable" tools like Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Project.

So before we ever make a single french fry, we have to build a french fry machine. Before we every cook a single burger, we have to build a grill. Instead of using the same machine across 2000 stores, every store has to build its own.

So, NO fast food is nothing like IT or software. The closest we come is in networking, where things are very standardized and we can quickly assemble hubs, wires, and put network cards into computers to build a network. That's about as good as it gets.

While the bean counters would like us to become standardized commodities, we aren't, and I think we're years away from a fast food IT model, with Web Services being the "great hope" of standardization through centralization.

Glen Austin