Original title: Zhongtai, I believe in your evil

More than a year after the concept of “China and Taiwan” became popular, it revealed its grim side.

A number of industry insiders told 36 Krypton that the CIO of a women's clothing company in Shenzhen was expelled due to blindly going to China; in a CIO (Chief Information Officer, short for Chief Information Officer) community in South China with dozens of people, more than a dozen executives left their jobs or were transferred in 2019 due to mistakes in the China-Taiwan project.

“Get you out of Maotai without paying a penny.” A former executive of the China-Taiwan service company “Yunyu Technology” told 36Krypton that since Maotai was extremely dissatisfied with the Zhongtai project constructed by the company, it once made such remarks.

Maotai's China-Taiwan project was once the most notable China-Taiwan case because Party A is famous and expensive, and is also extremely representative. 36 Krypton learned that although Maotai did not end cooperation with Yunyun in the end, it took at least 13 months before officially signing the contract; the industry said that Maotai was a “super big order,” yet in the end, Yunyu received only just over 10 million dollars. Bao Zhigang, founder of Yunyu, admitted to 36 Krypton that “it is true that no costs have been recovered.”

By the end of last year, Alibaba Chairman and CEO Zhang Yong also shared at Huban University, saying, “If a company goes to China to become a central platform, it will die.

Today's disappointment comes from the initial high expectations.

The concept of “middle and Taiwan” first became popular, and there is indeed a demand base for it.

When Yang Ruodong, director of corporate architecture in Lenovo's BT/IT department, couldn't do anything, “middle stage” was the best antidote he could find. In 2017, Lenovo Group proposed to expand to new businesses such as clouds, data centers, and AI, but a new business division was established. Should a new IT department be set up to support it?

“Impossible.” Yang Ruodongfei quickly settled the bill: to set up a new BU at Lenovo, it often requires an IT team of 100 people, which means that the yearly budget continues to rise. Even if this amount of money can be applied for, it won't be able to recruit enough people within a few months. However, the business cannot wait. First-line sales people cannot afford to set up a system in three months, sell in six months, and earn money within a year.

What Yang Ruodong found after searching a lot was a book called “The Way to Transform Enterprise IT Architecture” written by Zhong Hua, chief architect of Alibaba's middleware. The subtitle is “Alibaba's Strategic Thoughts and Architectural Practice between China and Taiwan.” After placing an order, Yang Ruodong discovered that “the question has been answered,” and he immediately bought another 20 copies to give to his colleague.

At the beginning of the article, this book uses the Finnish game company Supercell as an example. I think it can develop a new game within a few weeks with a small team of a few people, thanks to the accumulation of materials commonly used by the public during the game development process.

Immediately, this book talks about the history of Alibaba from the establishment of the “Sharing Division” in 2009 to the launch of the “China Taiwan Strategy” in 2015. It not only rationally stated the benefits of being a central platform, but also gave examples: it only took one and a half months for Alibaba to launch a group buying platform, that is, gathering and savings, while similar group buying platforms “may have invested tens of times more R&D resources than Ali, and the preparation time may be several times that of Ali”. “The greatest credit comes from the Alibaba shared service system, which has been operating normally for two years at the time.”

Alibaba's sharing division has supported the expansion of businesses such as Taobao, Tmall, and Cost-effective. Photo Source: “How to Transform Enterprise IT Architecture”

“Middle Taiwan” seems like a cure to support the rapid rise of new businesses. While saving effort, it can also save money. In 2019, when Internet companies' calling dividends reached their peak and staff were reduced to improve efficiency, it became all the rage for a while.

“Zhongtai” is also seen as the foundation for ByteDance to become an “app factory”: a veteran in the IT field told 36 Krypton that Zhang Yiming, a technical background, incorporated into the central platform structure when he founded today's headlines; 36 Krypton also exclusively reported in March 2019 that ByteDance built a “live streaming center” to draw out and merge the live streaming technology and operation teams of the three products to support all of its live streaming business.

Tencent entered the market in May 2019 and announced that it would further open up the data center and technology center, further advancing this wave of “cult between China and Taiwan” to a climax.

“Zhongtai” then became a racetrack for VCs to bet on in 2019: many investors believe that a large number of traditional companies do not have IT capabilities to build their own platforms, so third-party service providers will have a market. In the fourth quarter of 2019, three Chinese and **** service providers announced that they had received financing: Dipu Technology completed Series A financing of 35 million US dollars, Yunyu Technology completed Series B financing of 350 million yuan, and Kangaroo Cloud completed Series B financing of hundreds of millions of yuan.

“But now we are all reflecting: the Chinese platform has raised customer expectations too high.” A former Alibaba Cloud executive told 36 Krypton. Zhongtai is neither a set of software nor a set of servers, but a set of ideas and methodologies, which ultimately causes customers to “not be able to catch”.

Third-party companies' sales will also exaggerate the effectiveness of the middle stage in order to win over customers. Zhou Hong, a former technical leader in Yunyu, told 36 Krypton that he discovered that when selling to customers about PPT, “everything is promised, everything is there,” creating a feeling that China and Taiwan can “cure all diseases.”

This has created an extremely strange phenomenon: everyone has been talking about China Taiwan for a while, and it seems that everything can be loaded into “middle ground.” There is a business center, a data center, a technology center, a security center, an AI center... there has never been a “wind outlet”. It is as inexplicable and unclear as the middle stage.

1. Real or fake middle stage

Confused is a key word for many people at the beginning of their entry into the middle of the game.

This is the case with Zhou Hong. Shortly after he joined Yunyu Technology, when an architect visited the client, the architect presented a set of PPTs. After talking in front of the customer for a few hours, Zhou Hong, like the client, was “enthralled” by this PPT.

“After watching it at the time, I thought my whole life of technology was probably in vain.” Zhou Hong said to 36 krypton.

Zhou Hong has worked on big projects for Internet giants and brought a technical team of over 100 people. He has been in the business for almost 20 years. However, in the beautiful PPT in front of him, the technical solutions he talks about are unheard of. He has made up his mind to ask this colleague for advice. Coming out from the customer, Zhou Hongman said with admiration, “Brother X, I will study with you carefully in the future. Your skills are excellent.”

Zhou Hong was shocked by the other party's response: “I've never worked in technology.” “Well, I think what you just said is very esoteric.” Zhou Hong is puzzled.

“Oh, these are all things I copied here, copied a little there, and finally put them together.” The other person explained.

Zhou Hong showed 36 a similar PPT. In the “Maotai Cloud Business Platform Strategy Plan” on the second page of the PPT, almost all popular Internet concepts are gathered: O2O, B2B, B2C, crowdfunding, Internet of Things, financial services, blockchain...

“It's easy to be fooled when you see this place; you think this set of plans is simply omnipotent.” Zhou Hong said. But this is clearly unrealistic.

In the early days of China and Taiwan, no one knew how China and Taiwan should do. Businesses that fell into the maze of China and Taiwan all had one thing in common: they did what they did and lacked clear goals.

When asked what the goals of Maotai's “China Taiwan” project are, Zhou Hong replied, “The goal is unclear, so (the project) has been going on for a long time.”

“Do you think we want to be a center stage?” Tong Jilong, vice president of the real estate information technology service provider “Ming Yuanyun,” is often asked this question. It is often asked by real estate industry executives with 10 billion projects in their hands. “As long as this question is raised, most of them have seen others do it. They are anxious, and they want to follow suit.”

However, customers want to catch up with the trend, service providers want to make money, and everyone is flocking to it for one concept. However, when you actually do it, you often find that there is no way to get started.

One scenario encountered by a refinery and Yunyu is: when a user goes to a gas station to refuel, “Zhongtai” can tell the oil mill how much fuel has been added; how much fuel is left at the gas station, so that the oil factory can plan production and sales strategies. However, after actually going to the field investigation, I discovered that the oil factory went back to the oil factory, the gas station belonged to Sinopec, and the refinery actually couldn't get data on the gas station.

In order to get through with this scenario, Yunyu and the refinery held meetings for over half a month and added public accounts and mini-programs to the plan. In the end, to no avail. “This is a scene that sounds beautiful, but it's actually useless because it can't be commercialized at all.”

What is even more irritating is that when implemented by China and Taiwan, it is surprisingly expensive, and surprisingly time-consuming.

Unlike SaaS software projects that usually only involve one department, since the emphasis on “opening up”, the central Taiwan project often means sorting out the business with all departments, so it takes a lot of manpower, and labor costs are the most expensive part of the “middle and Taiwan” project.

Taking Yunyu as an example, a number of employees told 36 Krypton that the price they gave to customers was about 3,000 yuan/person/day; the account was calculated this way: 50 employees were stationed in Maotai, and the head fee was 150,000 a day, not to mention that the Maotai project was postponed for one year. (Note: The “person/day” fee only exists during the project contract period. After the project is extended, Party A will no longer pay, while Party B will be required to pay a penalty.)

There are “three major battles” within Yunju, which refers to its three important customers in the early days: Maotai,Pearl River Brewery, and the daily chemical direct sales company “Like New.” According to 36 Krypton, all three companies have signed contracts of more than 10 million dollars, and all of them have had their projects postponed. Among them, Maotai has been postponed for nearly two years, and the new phase of the project has been postponed for nearly 10 months.

Zhou Hong remembers that in order to get the customer to sign a “delivery confirmation”, a salesperson once imparted “experience”: on a snowy day, he only wears a single garment and stands downstairs, “it's best to freeze and shiver,” and wait until the customer leaves to sign the order.

This is also why Maotai is so furious that CIOs will “step down” by blindly going up to the middle stage.

“If the problem is serious, one is the CIO who spends money and the other is the business leader who makes money. How do you think the boss will make trade-offs?” A technical director said to 36 krypton.

Before getting into the middle of the game, every business should actually ask itself: Do you really need China Taiwan?

Before that, there is a more basic question: what exactly is China and Taiwan?

It's almost difficult to get a consistent explanation of the middle office in the industry, but there is one key standard: whether it can be reused.

At the Lenovo conference, when his subordinates reported on how smoothly China and Taiwan are progressing, Chief Information Officer Arthur Hu raised a question: “Now that there are so many China-Taiwan services, it looks pretty good, but one piece of information is missing: How many services are calling on China and Taiwan?” Judging the utilization efficiency of the center through the number of calls is a KPI of Lenovo's IT center, and it is also a clear methodology.

This is also the test standard for Baiguo Technology's R&D director Yao Yang. He once received sales of “China Taiwan” products. After not saying a few words to the other party, Yao Yang lost interest. The “middle platform” sold by the other party is to split one large module into small centers one by one. The industry generally refers to this as a “micro service,” which is an old concept. It looks very similar to the middle stage, but if these small centers are only taken apart and cannot be reused, they are just “pseudo-central platforms.”

Reuse is the origin of “middle ground.”

Therefore, when asked if he wants to be the center of the center, Tong Jilong usually asks the other person two questions: 1. Are you large enough to absorb the center? 2. What commercial value can China and Taiwan bring you?

Often, only large enough enterprises will have multiple businesses and will have the problem of repeated construction. Tong Jilong threw out a slightly shocking analogy: “Don't treat China and Taiwan as a panacea. Elephants take this medicine to strengthen their health; ants take this medicine and kill them with one blow.”

In the case of Lenovo, it has developed a “configurator” function that can help consumers and channel providers customize computer components such as CPUs on their own, but when sorting through the business, Lenovo discovered that there are actually 5 or 6 similar configurators scattered across different departments. Well, using a configurator in the middle is effective for Lenovo.

But this is also where the so-called “business center” is confusing: the needs of every industry are not the same, and the things that can be reused are not the same. Lenovo Center can be used as a configurator, but it is inexplicable for other companies.

The industry generally believes that there is a high degree of similarity between the middle and office configurations in the same industry. This is also the reason why third-party service providers can get investment: after Maotai completes the project, the same things can be changed and sold to Yanghe Dagu — but this is just an assumption. Even if Alibaba's e-commerce center is placed in other e-commerce businesses, such as “Maotai Cloud Business,” it may not necessarily be used. Because every company's organizational structure and business logic are very different.

2. It's not an IT problem, but an organizational issue

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

In Yunyu's PPT for Maotai, a panorama of China and Taiwan is quite similar to the central platform structure that Alibaba has established for 10 years. It also looks well-organized — the large and middle platform is wrapped in two boxes, “business” and “data”, and the box is divided into different categories of “user center,” “member center,” and “product center”... The PPT is reversed, and how to build each “box” and “center”. The instructions are all clearly written.

“The architecture is nicely drawn, but when implemented, everything is not like this.” Zhou Hong said.

Is Maotai's business the same as Tmall's? Of course not. In May 2017, nearly 30 employees from Yunyu went to Maotai one after another. They had Alibaba's experience in China and thought they could draw a picture of a tiger and move into Maotai, but soon, they were caught up in scenes they had never imagined.

“Don't talk about building a system; you can't even bring a computer into the Maotai warehouse.” Wang Feng, a former Yunyu executive, recalled. In the early stages of project research, they discovered that Maotai warehousing workers resisted informatization and only accepted the recording of goods in the form of handwritten documents.

Unlike ordinary companies, Maotai Liquor doesn't worry about selling at all. After getting to know it a few times, Wang Feng understood that the person managing the Maotai warehouse has a certain percentage of the loss amount reported every month. “They can sell these Maotai liquors after reporting damage, but if they use a computer to scan into ERP, they won't be able to operate.”

Regarding the difficulties of Yunliu landing on the platform, Bao Zhigang told 36 Krypton: At the peak of progress in the Maotai project, Yunliu invested up to 70 people to develop the situation based on scenario development requirements.

Bao Zhigang also admitted that due to the complex business restructuring involving enterprises in China and Taiwan, and major organizational changes within Maotai also occurred during the project period, this was indeed a huge challenge for a startup like Yunyu, which needed to go from 0 to 1. (36. Note: In November 2018, Maotai Group announced the removal of Nie Yong, chairman of its e-commerce company; in May 2019, Nie Yong was arrested on suspicion of taking bribes; in December 2019, Maotai Group announced the dissolution of the e-commerce company.)

Wang Jian was also once puzzled by “China and Taiwan.” As a consultant, at the end of 2017, when Wang Jian was serving a customer service center project for a top 500 international company, the customer asked him: How can I prove that the center platform structure he showed is correct? Wang Jian was speechless at the time, and he also muttered in his heart: Ali's central platform seemed to be a success, but was it only because of the middle stage?

Wang Jian wrote all of these confusions in the public account “Vernacular China and Taiwan Strategy” series. As his understanding of China and Taiwan progressed, no matter how it was written, this topic, which originally belonged to IT architecture, became more and more inseparable from “organization”: if China and Taiwan were treated purely as a technical concept, then the “distributed, microservice,” in it, was already an old IT term; however, the reason for the success of Ali Zhongtai relied not only on technology, but also on agile organizational change.

That's true. At the end of 2015, after Zhang Yong proposed the organizational strategy of “big, middle, and small front desk,” Alibaba carried out 19 organizational adjustments in 2016-2019, which involved many executive changes and department mergers, all of which provided a foundation for connecting China and Taiwan.

However, Ali-style organizational adjustments are a sensitive issue for many enterprises. “This is like the emperor saying to the lords, “Come, next year I will redivide your respective territories.” An analyst at a consulting firm gave 36 krypton as an example, “How many emperors dare say that? Everything is counterproductive. This is why it is easy for companies to avoid talking about the organizational level when talking about China and Taiwan.”

Among them, Taiwan faces “organizational” problems, or “human” problems, which are far more difficult than the so-called IT, technology, and Internet architecture.

Once the “people” problem is encountered, even Alibaba, which has made full use of China and Taiwan, is unlikely to be able to cope better.

Li Xiaoqiang once ate a closed-door customer. He is the head of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent's new retail dairy line. At the beginning of 2019, Li Xiaoqiang tried to provide data center services for a first-tier domestic dairy brand. After reaching a cooperation agreement with the brand's CIO, they flew to Shanghai together to prepare to talk with the head of the brand's e-commerce company about “how to connect data.”

However, in the conference room, when Li Xiaoqiang proposed to connect e-commerce data to the overall data center, there was strong opposition from the other party. “The CIO and the e-commerce director took a picture of the table.” Finally, the e-commerce leader fell over the door and left.

This kind of game within the organization surprised Li Xiaoqiang at first. “If you have to access the other party's data, it means you can see all of his business. This is a natural defense of the section leader.” Li Xiaoqiang said to 36 Krypton.

Yang Ruodong, who is currently involved in radical design for the middle stage, soon also encountered the problem of organizational change.

Yang Ruodong recalled this reform to 36 Krypton and drew three large boxes on the whiteboard, representing Lenovo's PC, mobile phone, and server businesses, and each drawing a small box in the large box representing the IT support team for general functions such as sales, R&D, and supply chain. To promote the central office project, it was necessary to extract the small boxes in the big box one by one and then merge them into a new IT department.

“The IT industry has a desire to make their team bigger even after repeated construction. It's natural for people to make their teams bigger.” Yang Ruodong said to 36 Krypton. In the end, Lenovo BT/IT's 1,800 employees completed this adjustment. Yang Ruodong drew a long line on the whiteboard — “2017.09-2019.04.” This reform took nearly 20 months.

Yang Ruodong drew a sketch of the reform of Lenovo's BT/IT department. Photo: Su Jianxun

3. Reflect on Central Taiwan

At the beginning of 2019, Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Business Group President Xing Xing Ye organized an internal strategy meeting. The participants were Ali P9 (senior experts) and above and department heads. At the meeting, discussions revolved around the “middle stage”. He proposed, “What is the output of Ali's central platform structure for customers?”

A former Alibaba Cloud executive who was present told 36 Krypton that a technology-born and pragmatic professional thinks: on the one hand, Alibaba's own “China and Taiwan” is still being explored, and “only 30% has been completed”; furthermore, if Alibaba Cloud focuses on being a total integrator — the characteristics of customers may be very different, and the general package will have to make customized plans and implementation — it will overdraw Alibaba Cloud's brand. A number of Alibaba Cloud insiders admitted to 36 Krypton that they now need special approval from the department if they want to get customers as a general integrator.

An IT vendor closely cooperating with Alibaba Cloud discovered that Alibaba Cloud is currently promoting a “data center” rather than a “business center.” The reason is that Alibaba Cloud cannot meet all business scenarios, but data center products are more standardized.

“More pragmatic rather than cautious.” Referring to Alibaba's changing attitude towards advancing China and Taiwan, Guo Jijun, general manager of Alibaba Cloud's strategic marketing department, told 36 Krypton. He believes that the so-called pragmatism means that before, he didn't know how the water was deep and shallow, and he didn't know how to apply it in the industry. After two years of customer practice, he now knows what value it can provide to customers and what it cannot provide.

Alibaba Group CEO Zhang Yong recently reiterated the warning that China does not apply to every company at every stage. During the period of independent business development and breakthrough, “you must use independent groups, independent divisions, and independent brigades”; otherwise, it will become a bottleneck; however, at a certain stage, when too many hilltops appear, it is necessary to “shut down and reverse and merge similar projects.” Q Management should be efficient, and repetitive construction should be eliminated.”

Alibaba's middle office has experienced days of not being looked down upon. Zhong Hua once wrote in her book that the “Shared Business Division” needs to meet the business support of Taobao and Tmall at the same time. No matter how much overtime they work, it is difficult to meet the business needs of the two major business departments in a timely and thoughtful manner. Employees, on the other hand, cannot express their pain; they can only shed tears in silence.

The situation is the same in Baiguoyuan.

After Baiguoyuan's subsidiary “Baiguo Technology” was built, in order to reuse the central platform, it was stipulated that as long as front-end application project development is involved, it must go through the central platform system; otherwise, it is prohibited to use the database.

After mandatory reuse, functions such as membership, orders, and transactions within Baiguoyuan's Guodomei, Jieji, and Chaoqi brands were unified into the middle office. When these brands' own IT teams needed to retrieve these functions, they had to wait for Baiguo Technology's central office to do so first.

The problem comes back to organization and humanity. “Your system was not written by yourself, but was reused by others. This requires you to leave the backing to your brothers.” Shen Xin said.

Shen Xin told 36 Krypton that in order to encourage reuse between departments, Baiguo Technology has implemented a number of flexible strategies, such as an exemption mechanism: if it is due to problems such as downtime or lost orders caused by the reuse of central offices, it can be exempted from punishment. “If this culture of trust is not established, everyone will throw the pot at the center stage, which will soon be drowned in saliva.”

“Without the support and recognition of the 'top leaders', it would be very, very difficult for China and Taiwan to continue.” Guo Jijun said to 36 krypton.

How to get support from “top leaders”? In other words, CEOs and CIOs have endured numerous difficulties and risks to enter the middle stage. What are they trying to do?

Alibaba gave a preliminary answer using nearly ten years of verification. Guo Jijun said that Alibaba's central office has supported the flexible transformation of the group. Without the central platform, the transformation once, and the underlying system would have to be rebuilt once; this is simply impossible to achieve.

However, not everyone can become Alibaba; most business operators have pragmatic needs. However, unlike the front desk business, the end of a “double 11" can tell you how much money you have made, yet it is actually difficult to calculate a figure for the economic value of China Taiwan. To do it or not to do it is sometimes because the CEO believes or does not believe it.

China and Taiwan have now reached a critical juncture in value verification.

(According to the interviewee's wishes, Zhou Hong and Wang Feng are pseudonyms. (36. Krypton interns Yue Jiatong and Tan Zhongkui also contributed to this article.)