The concept of “Zhongtai” has been popular for more than a year, but it shows its ferocious side.

A number of industry people said, due to blind in Taiwan, shenzhen, a women’s clothing enterprise CIO was fired; In a CIO community with dozens of people in southern China, more than a dozen senior executives left or were transferred in 2019 due to mistakes in the Zhongtai project.

“I won’t give you a cent. Get out of Maotai.” A former executive of Yunjue Technology, a China-Taiwan service company, said moutai once made the comment because it was not satisfied with the zhongtai project the company had contracted to build.

Moutai zhongtai project was once the most eye-catching zhongtai case because of its famous party A and large amount of money, which was also very representative. Moutai did not end its cooperation with Yunjou, but it took at least 13 months to sign a formal contract. The industry said that Moutai was a “huge deal”, but in the end, Yunjou received just over 10 million yuan. Founder Of Yunjou, Bao Zhigang, admitted that “it did not recover the cost”.

At the end of last year, Alibaba chairman and CEO Zhang Yong also said in hupan University sharing: if an enterprise runs to do zhongtai, it is dead.

Today’s disappointment comes from high expectations.

The initial popularity of the concept of “Zhongtai” does have its demand basis.

When Yang Ruodong, director of enterprise architecture in LENOVO’s BT/IT department, was at his wits end, “Zhongtai” was the best antidote he could find. In 2017, Lenovo Group proposed to extend to cloud, data center, AI and other new businesses, but the new business department was established, should we set up a new IT department to support IT?

“Impossible.” Yang Ruodong quickly calculated: Lenovo often needs an IT team of 100 people to set up a new BU, which means the annual budget keeps rising. Even if the money can be applied for, IT will not be enough to recruit people in a few months. But the business can’t wait. The front-line salesmen want to build a system in three months, sell it in six months and make money in a year.

Yang Ruodong after searching, is a book written by Ali middleware chief architect Zhong Hua “The transformation of enterprise IT architecture”, the subtitle is “Alibaba in Taiwan strategic thought and architecture combat”. After placing the order, Yang ruodong found that “the question has been answered”, he immediately bought 20 copies for colleagues.

The book starts with Supercell, a Finnish game company, as an example of how it was able to develop a new game with a small team of a few people in a matter of weeks, thanks to the accumulation of common materials and algorithms used in game development.

Then, the book talked about the history of Alibaba from the establishment of the “Sharing business Division” in 2009 to the launch of the “Zhongtai Strategy” in 2015. It not only explained the benefits of doing Zhongtai from reason, but also gave examples: Ali launched its group-buying platform, juhuasuan.com, in only one and a half months, while similar group-buying platforms “invested dozens of times as much r&d resources as Ali and took several times as much preparation time”. “The biggest contribution came from the Ali sharing service system that had been in normal operation for two years at that time”.

The “middle platform” seems to be a recipe for supporting the rapid rise of new businesses while saving money. In 2019, when Internet companies are calling for dividends to peak and layoffs to improve efficiency, it has become a trend.

“Zhongtai” is also seen as the basis for Bytedance to become an “App factory” : Technology-trained Zhang Yiming was integrated into the zhongtai structure when he founded Toutiao, and Bytedance built “Zhongtai Live Broadcasting”, extracting and combining the live broadcasting technology and operation teams of the three products to support all its live broadcasting businesses.

Tencent’s entry into the game in May 2019, announced that it would further open the data center and the technology center, is to promote this wave of “worship in the center” to the climax.

But now we are all reflecting: The centre raised client expectations too high. Zhongtai is neither a set of software nor a set of server, but an idea, a set of methodology, which ultimately leads to customers “can not catch”.

Third party company sales in order to win customers, will also exaggerate the effect of the middle. Zhou Hong, a former technical backbone of Yunjou, told 36 Krypton that he found that when salespeople went to clients to talk about powerpoint, “they promised everything and had everything,” creating a feeling that zhongtai could “cure all ills.”

This caused a very strange phenomenon: for a time we are saying in the middle, it seems that what can be installed in the “middle”. There are business center, data center, technology center, security center, AI Center… There has never been a “tuyere”, as in Taiwan so unclear, unclear.

Confused, is a lot of people into the game at the beginning of the key word.

On the second page of PPT, “Strategic Conception of Moutai Cloud Business Platform”, almost all the popular Internet concepts are aggregated: O2O, B2B, B2C, crowd funding, Internet of Things, financial services, block chain…

In the early stage of “Zhongtai”, no one knew how to do “Zhongtai”, those enterprises falling into the maze of “Zhongtai” have one thing in common: do for doing, lack of clear goals.

It is surprisingly expensive and time-consuming to actually implement.

This is also why Maotai will be furious, CIOs will blindly on the platform and “step down”.

If the problem is serious, one is the CIO who spends money, and one is the head of the business who makes money. How do you think the boss will choose?

In the brain a hot in the middle before, in fact, every enterprise should first ask yourself: do you really need the middle?

Before that comes a more basic question: what exactly is the Centre?

It is almost impossible to get a consistent explanation of the median in the industry, but there is one key criterion: whether it can be reused.

Reuse, this is the origin of “middle stage”. Often only large enough enterprises, will have multiple businesses, will have the problem of repeated construction. An apt analogy: “Do not treat The Centre as a panacea. Elephants take this medicine to strengthen their health, while ants take this medicine and die at a stroke.”

Take Lenovo for example, it developed a “configurator” function, which can help consumers and channel suppliers customize CPU and other computer components. However, when sorting out the business, Lenovo found that there were 5 or 6 similar configurators scattered in different departments. So do configurator in Taiwan, for Lenovo is effective.

But this is where the “business mid-stage” gets confusing: every industry’s needs are different, and so is what can be reused. Lenovo in Taiwan can do configurator, but it is puzzling in other companies.

The industry is generally believed that the same industry in Taiwan configuration similarity is higher. That’s why third-party services can get funding: after Moutai’s work, the same stuff could be sold to Yanghe Daqu, but that’s just a hypothesis. Even Alibaba’s e-commerce zhongtai, placed in other e-commerce businesses, such as “Moutai Cloud business”, may not be able to use. Because every company’s organizational structure, business logic is very different.

Not an IT problem, but an organizational problem

From PPT back to real business, everything needs to be re-verified.

In maotai’s PPT, a panorama of Zhongtai is quite similar to alibaba’s zhongtai structure of 10 years, and it looks in perfect order — the big Zhongtai is wrapped with two boxes of “business” and “data”, and the boxes are divided into categories of “user center”, “member Center” and “commodity Center”… Slide back to the PPT, each “box” and “center” how to build, instructions are written clearly.

The architecture has to look good on the drawing, but in practice, nothing is.

Is Moutai in the same business as Tmall? Of course not. In May 2017, nearly 30 employees of Yunjou moved into Moutai one after another. Holding Alibaba’s experience in The middle Stage, they thought they could follow suit and move into Moutai, but soon they were caught in a scene they had never imagined.

“You can’t even bring a computer into maotai’s warehouse, let alone build a system.” At the beginning of the project, they found that maotai warehouse workers resisted information and only accepted handwritten receipts to record goods.

Unlike other companies, Moutai has no trouble selling. The person who manages Maotai warehouse has a certain proportion of the loss reported every month. “They can report the damage and then sell it, but if they use the COMPUTER to scan it into ERP, they can’t do that.”

Alibaba’s zhongtai seems to be a success, but is it only because of Zhongtai?

If the center purely as a technical concept, then among them “distributed, micro services, has long been the old IT noun; But the success of Ali Zhongtai relies not only on technology, but also on agile organizational change.

And so it is. At the end of 2015, after Zhang Yong put forward the organizational strategy of “big Central Taiwan and small front Desk”, Alibaba made 19 organizational adjustments from 2016 to 2019, involving many senior executives changing posts and department merging, which provided a foundation for Latong Central Taiwan.

However, ali’s organizational adjustment is a sensitive issue for many enterprises. “It’s like the emperor saying to his vassals, come on, next year I’m going to redivide your respective territories.” How many emperors dare say that? This is why it is easy for companies to avoid talking about the organizational level when talking about China.

The middle Stage faces an “organisational”, or “people”, problem that goes far beyond the so-called IT, technology and Internet architecture.

Once encountered the “people” problem, even if the use of the middle Taiwan alibaba, it is difficult to have a better response.

Li Xiaoqiang, head of aliyun’s smart new retail dairy line, has been rejected by customers. At the beginning of 2019, Li Xiaoqiang tried to provide data center service for a domestic first-tier dairy brand. After reaching a cooperation intention with the CIO of the brand, they flew to Shanghai together and prepared to talk with the person in charge of the brand’s e-commerce company about “how to get through the data.”

But to the conference room, when Li Xiaoqiang put forward to the e-commerce data access to the overall data center, was strongly opposed by the other side, “CIO and e-commerce person in charge of the table”, finally, the e-commerce person in charge of the door to leave.

Li Xiaoqiang did not expect this kind of game within the organization. “You have access to their data, which means all of their business is available to you, which is a natural defense of the head of the section.”

“There is a natural desire in the IT industry to make their teams bigger even if they are building them over and over again.” In the end, lenovo BT/IT’s 1,800 employees completed the adjustment. Yang drew a long line on the whiteboard — “2017.09-2019.04” — and the reform took nearly 20 months.

Reflections on China

At the beginning of 2019, the president of Ali Cloud Intelligent business Group went to the internal strategy meeting of the organization, and the participants were ali P9 (senior experts) and above employees and department heads. At the meeting, Epilepsy around the “medium” discussion, he put forward: “Ali to the customer’s medium structure, what is the output?”

Xing Epilepsy, who is technically trained and pragmatic in style, thinks: on the one hand, Ali’s own “Centralization of China” is still being explored and “only 30% of the company has been completed”; In addition, if Ali Cloud blindly rushed to the front to do the general integrator — customer characteristics may vary, the general package will do customized programs and implementation — will overdraw ali Cloud brand.

An IT vendor who works closely with Ali Cloud found that at present, Ali Cloud is mainly promoting “data center” rather than “business center”, because Ali Cloud cannot meet all business scenarios, but the products of the data center are more standardized.

Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang recently repeated his warning that the middle stage doesn’t work for every company at every stage. In the independent business development period, breakthrough period, “must use independent regiment, independent division, independent brigade system to do”, otherwise it will become a bottleneck; But to a certain stage, when there are too many mountains, it is necessary to “shut down and turn, to merge similar items. Management should be efficient and repetitive construction should be eliminated.”

Alibaba’s middle division has seen its share of bad times. “If you don’t have the support and approval of the top brass, it’s very, very difficult to go on in the middle.”

How to get the support of “no. 1”? In other words, ceos and CIOs survive to get to the center stage for what?

Alibaba gave a preliminary answer with nearly ten years of verification, alibaba’s center support group flexible array change, if there is no center, the array change once, the bottom system has to rebuild once, which is impossible to achieve.

Not everyone can become An Alibaba. Most business owners have pragmatic needs. But different from the front desk business, a “Double 11” end can say how much money, and the economic value of the central Taiwan, it is actually difficult to calculate a figure. To do or not to do, sometimes depends on whether the CEO believes or does not believe.

Zhongtai has now come to the critical intersection of value verification.