The author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables Victor Hugo once remarked:
“You can resist an invading army; you cannot resist an idea whose time has come”.
Hugo was born in 1802 and I think it is unlikely that he was thinking about Cloud based Asset Management Systems when he wrote this. Similarly, when Quartz was conceived, we were not doing this in the knowledge that a global pandemic would strike the month after development was complete. However, companies who have survived the last months, as light appears at the end of the tunnel, must at some stage review their working practices and contemplate what the ‘new normal’ will look like and what fresh ideas fit their new requirements.
Since the lockdown was announced, companies have been struggling with how they can price funds, ensure transactions are processed and service their clients whilst being denied access to their premises. Some will have found this impossible and have skeleton staff performing essential tasks in their offices. Others will have invoked their disaster recovery (DR) plans and have staff working from home. To quote another person who is long departed, Helmuth von Moltke (1800–91) a Prussian military commander said
‘No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main force’.
I have always thought that this is particularly apt for IT development. No matter how much planning and testing is undertaken, there will invariably be issues once any new development is first used in the ‘heat of battle’. The same is true of DR plans. One company known to me, who to their credit have managed to effectively shut down their office, found that staff who were used to using large monitors in the office found it impossible to use their business software on laptops at home. Hence, they had to purchase extra equipment and have it delivered to the staff at home. This in no way detracts from their efforts in keeping their staff safe, but it does illustrate Herr Moltke’s point. DR plans are designed to be used in emergencies should systems or premises be unavailable. Companies will not have spent the money or have the software systems that would be needed to have staff working efficiently from home over a sustained period. I suspect not too many of these DR plans will survive completely intact once we are out of the lockdown.
Companies that get through this situation successfully are likely to review why they are spending so much money on the rent of their building. Companies need a base and somewhere for staff to gather for some meetings. I do not think it is necessary for all staff to spend many hours travelling backwards and forwards between home and their office to perform routine tasks that could easily be accomplished where they live or, should be automated. Right now, companies will be operating at full capacity just to maintain their operations. None will be thinking about radical changes to systems. But this time will pass, and it would be remiss not to reflect on what has worked and what has been less successful. If this truly awful virus is something that is going to become part of all our lives going forward, we need to be much better prepared the next time it strikes. Indeed, changing the way we work could become a major part of our remedial actions against it.
When we were building Quartz the phrase that was often used was ‘location independence’. It is used frequently on our website. We wanted to build a system that went from ‘Front to Back’ covering all aspects of investment management. The Cloud was the natural place to site the system as it gave easy access to users and was completely scalable. The system was to be usable in any jurisdiction which this involved developing a rules-based approach. Having worked at GT Management from the early eighties until the late nineties, I was aware of the complications having offices around the world that were investing for the same funds presented. Staff in diverse locations need to be able to contribute to updating a single database. Anything entered by one user had to be immediately available to another. Being Cloud based also makes it easy to connect to other systems and collect data. We have connected the software to a Business Intelligence tool that is also located in the Cloud. Users building or running reports use our Cloud based database to do this, again with a complete absence of any software located on a local server.
I do not know if Jeff Bezos had a clear plan of world domination when he created Amazon. However, I believe that Amazon has done more to change the way we live our lives than would have initially appeared in any business plan. Companies who did not adapt to this new way of buying things have been consigned to the history books. I may be labouring the point here, but had Bezos had his idea 5 years earlier the technology would not have been in place, 5 years later and someone would have beaten him to market. Amazon was a company with an ‘idea whose time had come’. I wrote earlier about the importance of the Cloud and how I felt it was going to become a big part of our lives (and some would argue already is). It is not something that was planned with a global pandemic in mind. Nor, do I believe, that the pioneers thought ‘we will have everyone working from home in the near future’. Were Victor Hugo alive today, had he been following the development of Cloud computing and were he observing the chaos caused by the virus, I think he would have put down his double espresso and uttered
“C’est exactement ce que je veux dire”. “That’s Exactly what I meant”.