The Inovis Blog

Image taken from http://blogs.ign.com/Matt-IGN/p21

Let’s talk about what Managed File Transfer and your home stereo system have in common, starting with file transfer. On the supply chain side, file transfer is done in a very structured fashion. We use EDI, XML, everything’s well defined, there are committees upon committees, and there are all the accoutrements that go along with that. There’s a lot of energy that goes into making sure file transfer works consistently, and after twenty years of working on it, we’ve got that part down pat.

The rest of the business community non-supply chain side where you’re sending HR records, finance information, or whatever it may be, is not so well defined. People use email, people use instant message (much to the IT Department’s chagrin), people use attachments, and people use FTP because those are things the IT guys figured out you can send big files back and forth with and get around firewalls from the email server.

There are a lot of point solutions that work clearly well for one particular thing, and they’re all piled up. The problem with that strategy is those point solutions are probably reliant upon one or two really sharp IT guys who are the heroes and the firefighters. They’re probably not well documented, and if anything happens to those guys, the probability of you using it or replicating it in some place is almost zero. In real life, it just doesn’t work that way. At Inovis, I’ve experienced this, I understand it, and I don’t like it much.

I’ve found that the perfect analogy for this situation is your home stereo system. Any of us that have unboxed our brand new home theater system know this scenario well. You’ve got your DVR, your home theater system, your DVD player, your Xbox, and you set them all up on a rack. You’re proud because they look really good, and they look like they’ll work perfectly. Next, you get behind there, you figure out the wiring, you get it all hooked up, and you think you’re doing a great job. You get the tie wraps out, you strap them down, and you think it looks pretty. It’s laid out, and it’s great. Then you turn around, you fire it up, and when you turn on the DVD, the TV sound comes on. Then you come around to the back again. The first thing you say is, “I’ve got to move these cords.” The only problem is that you can’t move them because you’ve strapped them on so tight. You’ve got to disconnect them all, and you end up with a big ball of wire in the back. That ball of wire is going to stay there until you get a new home theater system, because there’s no way to go back and retool that. If you walk away from that in a month and come back; you’ll have absolutely no idea how to rewire that ball.

It’s the exact same scenario. Your scripts, your little pieces of knowledge, and everything else create this big, great fur ball of File Transfer ‘stuff’ in your organization. Now imagine the home theater police coming in and wanting to inspect and audit your stereo connections. Most of us would be in a really bad place if we were graded on our setup or fined because it wasn’t clean and neat. In business, you have auditors who want to know where you sent what, how it got there, how the recipient obtained it, and if it’s securely encrypted. Managed File Transfer is clean, secure, and doesn’t rely on that one IT hero in your company. Now if only there was a Managed Stereo Home Setup solution…