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ACL - The Rise and Inevitable Fall of a Corporate Barony
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acl-fraud
Jun 29, 2012, 6:18:07 AM6/29/12
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This post is intended as an introduction to a series of documents which
provide insight into an organization which many people invest much time,
effort and money into supporting a market dominance achieved on the premise
of values which run contrary to fraudulent behavior through a toolset
created for the purposes of identifying and eliminating fraud.
ACL - The Rise and Inevitable Fall of a Corporate Barony
Make no mistake about it; Harald Will, the founder and President of ACL
Services is an astute man. He saw, early on in the evolution of personal
computing technology, a market need and a solution developed by his father
which, if properly developed, would lead to an undisputed leadership in an
otherwise non-existent industry niche.
Harald's father was an academic who identified a need in business and an
opportunity through the advancement of computer technology to automate an
inefficient labour intensive process which historically has been incapable
of tracking the various inconsistencies occurring on a daily basis in high
volume transaction environments.
He developed a highly efficient software program based upon a language he
designed called Audit Command Language. The source code for that program was
written in a now (mostly) abandoned style known as procedural programming.
This style of programming has been replaced by what is referred to as Object
Oriented Programming which offers the advantage of creating encapsulated
pieces of code that interact with each other and permit changes to be made
without the need to rewrite the entire code base from scratch. Procedural
approaches to writing code are notorious for being difficult to edit and add
functionality to because small changes often break the linear approach which
processors "step through" instructions to achieve results. This linear
approach toward programming infamously gave rise to what became known as
"spaghetti code" - essentially code that was incredibly difficult, if not
impossible to edit. Programmers often intentionally obfuscated their code to
ensure job security.
The result.for the ACL program was a software engineer which, although
highly efficient, was never going to evolve beyond its initial construction.
His son Harald however, has been able to effectively introduce, market and
sell the audit industry a tool built with the inherent limitations of
procedural programming because he was literally the first to introduce an
automated process which, once one overcame its steep learning curve proved
its worth. Harald even managed to identify, through his own team of
programmers, solutions which worked around the limitations of his father's
original code by using a technique called a "wrapper".
And wrapper is essentially an additional program which "pre-processes" data
and outputs it into a format which the original engine can interpret. It
also receives the original engine's output and converts it into a format
which can be presented in a modern computing environment. This is a solution
which has served Harald well as he has been able to expand the original
engine's capabilities to accommodate an evolving market.
The challenge he has always faced but has been increasingly become more
difficult is to stay ahead of his competition with an engine which remains
limited by its own inherent complexity and the inability for it to keep up
with the evolution of computer hardware. Processors today commonly operate
on a "bandwidth" of 64 bits while Harald's Audit engine will forever be
limited to 32 bit processing. And analogy for this engine core would be the
equivalent of pushing four lanes of traffic through a 2 lane bottleneck. For
many people, this speed limitation will have no noticeable impact because
they aren't faced with the prospect of handling thousands of transactions on
a daily basis. Indeed, the original engine was also so efficiently built
that this traffic bottleneck has not yet become a deal-breaking issue.
On the horizon however, has been the emergence of an array of competition
not saddled with this particular limitation and in time, Harald will either
have to commit resources he has never afforded toward rebuilding his engine
from scratch, or sell his business in whole or in part to raise capital
before the market and his competition surpasses his product, or he will
simply continue on until it becomes impossible to remain viable.
An additional factor which complicates his challenge is an increasingly
technology savy market which demands intuitive usability for simplifying
access to complex capability. Two approaches toward addressing the gap
between software complexity and user adoption lie within user interface
development and user training. Both strategies have also been adopted by his
competition and although few have yet matched ACL's advanced level of
capability, many have surpassed its usability.
The greatest challenge facing Harald however, does not lie within the realm
of technology but within a commonly known phenomenon responsible for many
business failures which is referred to as the "Peter Principle". Like every
small business which fails to make the transition toward large enterprise,
Harald has over-emphasized populating his senior decision makers with an
attitude of incestuousness. It's a common but understandable error in
judgment to place greater trust in the views of those who share a similar
background. For an organization which, even though dominates a market,
remains small because it's prominence in the humungous world of finance is
due precisely because of its specialized niche. This has allowed ACL
Services to develop a high profile while maintaining what is essentially a
small business psychology. Harald's senior VP, John Verver once proudly
announced to me how surprised customers are at the size of their operation;
"We're a small operation but we punch with the big boys".
Unfortunately, when they make numerous naïve mistakes such as elevating a
financial clerk to oversee their sales training division or relegating their
Instructional Designers to developing and implementing strategies by
Auditors, those mistakes invariably tally up to a company which will
inevitably lose out to its competition.
In short, ACL is a company which is living the short-term benefits from the
borrowed dividends of an appropriated technology.
For more background insight into ACL Services, please visit
http://acl-fraud.blogspot.com
provide insight into an organization which many people invest much time,
effort and money into supporting a market dominance achieved on the premise
of values which run contrary to fraudulent behavior through a toolset
created for the purposes of identifying and eliminating fraud.
ACL - The Rise and Inevitable Fall of a Corporate Barony
Make no mistake about it; Harald Will, the founder and President of ACL
Services is an astute man. He saw, early on in the evolution of personal
computing technology, a market need and a solution developed by his father
which, if properly developed, would lead to an undisputed leadership in an
otherwise non-existent industry niche.
Harald's father was an academic who identified a need in business and an
opportunity through the advancement of computer technology to automate an
inefficient labour intensive process which historically has been incapable
of tracking the various inconsistencies occurring on a daily basis in high
volume transaction environments.
He developed a highly efficient software program based upon a language he
designed called Audit Command Language. The source code for that program was
written in a now (mostly) abandoned style known as procedural programming.
This style of programming has been replaced by what is referred to as Object
Oriented Programming which offers the advantage of creating encapsulated
pieces of code that interact with each other and permit changes to be made
without the need to rewrite the entire code base from scratch. Procedural
approaches to writing code are notorious for being difficult to edit and add
functionality to because small changes often break the linear approach which
processors "step through" instructions to achieve results. This linear
approach toward programming infamously gave rise to what became known as
"spaghetti code" - essentially code that was incredibly difficult, if not
impossible to edit. Programmers often intentionally obfuscated their code to
ensure job security.
The result.for the ACL program was a software engineer which, although
highly efficient, was never going to evolve beyond its initial construction.
His son Harald however, has been able to effectively introduce, market and
sell the audit industry a tool built with the inherent limitations of
procedural programming because he was literally the first to introduce an
automated process which, once one overcame its steep learning curve proved
its worth. Harald even managed to identify, through his own team of
programmers, solutions which worked around the limitations of his father's
original code by using a technique called a "wrapper".
And wrapper is essentially an additional program which "pre-processes" data
and outputs it into a format which the original engine can interpret. It
also receives the original engine's output and converts it into a format
which can be presented in a modern computing environment. This is a solution
which has served Harald well as he has been able to expand the original
engine's capabilities to accommodate an evolving market.
The challenge he has always faced but has been increasingly become more
difficult is to stay ahead of his competition with an engine which remains
limited by its own inherent complexity and the inability for it to keep up
with the evolution of computer hardware. Processors today commonly operate
on a "bandwidth" of 64 bits while Harald's Audit engine will forever be
limited to 32 bit processing. And analogy for this engine core would be the
equivalent of pushing four lanes of traffic through a 2 lane bottleneck. For
many people, this speed limitation will have no noticeable impact because
they aren't faced with the prospect of handling thousands of transactions on
a daily basis. Indeed, the original engine was also so efficiently built
that this traffic bottleneck has not yet become a deal-breaking issue.
On the horizon however, has been the emergence of an array of competition
not saddled with this particular limitation and in time, Harald will either
have to commit resources he has never afforded toward rebuilding his engine
from scratch, or sell his business in whole or in part to raise capital
before the market and his competition surpasses his product, or he will
simply continue on until it becomes impossible to remain viable.
An additional factor which complicates his challenge is an increasingly
technology savy market which demands intuitive usability for simplifying
access to complex capability. Two approaches toward addressing the gap
between software complexity and user adoption lie within user interface
development and user training. Both strategies have also been adopted by his
competition and although few have yet matched ACL's advanced level of
capability, many have surpassed its usability.
The greatest challenge facing Harald however, does not lie within the realm
of technology but within a commonly known phenomenon responsible for many
business failures which is referred to as the "Peter Principle". Like every
small business which fails to make the transition toward large enterprise,
Harald has over-emphasized populating his senior decision makers with an
attitude of incestuousness. It's a common but understandable error in
judgment to place greater trust in the views of those who share a similar
background. For an organization which, even though dominates a market,
remains small because it's prominence in the humungous world of finance is
due precisely because of its specialized niche. This has allowed ACL
Services to develop a high profile while maintaining what is essentially a
small business psychology. Harald's senior VP, John Verver once proudly
announced to me how surprised customers are at the size of their operation;
"We're a small operation but we punch with the big boys".
Unfortunately, when they make numerous naïve mistakes such as elevating a
financial clerk to oversee their sales training division or relegating their
Instructional Designers to developing and implementing strategies by
Auditors, those mistakes invariably tally up to a company which will
inevitably lose out to its competition.
In short, ACL is a company which is living the short-term benefits from the
borrowed dividends of an appropriated technology.
For more background insight into ACL Services, please visit
http://acl-fraud.blogspot.com
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