EDS' Next Big Thing Blog: Read and Respond to What the EDS Fellows Say About Technology

Architects, Developers and Operations

I came across this article that polarizes the differences in perspective between Architects and Developers. It is a great read for larger organizations that have these kinds of distinctions in the way they approach creating business value through software.

A quote from the article about why there is a difference:

"We have a tendency as human beings to divide people into 'us' and 'them.' In organizations, we often form tribes with our peers, social structures that provide identity and support, but that also can become obstacles to effective interaction among groups. For example, differences in language and rituals, when not acknowledged, can create unnecessary divides. This is the nature of the architect/developer divide."

I view myself as being more of a developer, but since my development skills are years out of date, I'm likely an architect -- at best. It happens to us all.

There is one other classification I would add to the article though, and that is Operations. Once the architects and developers have left the area, there are still operations personnel toiling away cleaning up those pesky day-to-day issues. They have a whole other view of these other two groups and should not be dismissed (since they were left out of the article) for the important role they play in actually delivering the value and keeping systems running well.

Managing Geeks

One of the folks I work with sent me this posting pointing out 10 things to look out for when managing technical folks.

I could definitely relate to many of them and since one of the things about technology is that it shifts behavior and expectation, it made me wonder how these rules shift as technology improves, since I could have read that same posting 20 years ago, relatively unchanged.

The description of the issues and response didn't really use technology to facilitate addressing the situation. Is there a "cobbler's children" issue here or is it really something else? With all our modern technology (e.g, improved workflow, dashboarding, portals and knowledge management) are we (technical folks) sometimes willing to force these tools on others, but reluctant to use them ourselves?

One of the issues was "Don't give them any tools." Maybe the issue has as much to do with the inability to create a business case to make the tool a business issue, instead of a technical issue.

We used to joke around within the EDS development community that "SE time is free" meaning that dedicated developers are willing to do whatever it takes to make a project successful. You can only go to that well a limited number of times though, before it becomes dry.

Thinking Out Loud

So there you are, minding your own business when someone behind you asks, “So, do you want to have lunch with me today?”

You turn around and say, “Do I know you?” The person behind you turns the other way and you see the telltale Bluetooth ear pod, blue light flashing, firmly planted in their ear. The worst part is the look they give you; like you are an idiot for thinking they were speaking to you. You try to ignore them without showing your annoyance.

To me, the big flaw in the whole tiny-Bluetooth-headset-with-secreted-cell-phone thing is that, when used in public, someone often seems to come away either looking like or feeling like an idiot. I think it would be nice if those headsets could project an animated “I’m on the phone” hologram above the user’s head. That way we would all know that we should just ignore their ranting and raving.

NASA comes to the rescue. The concept of sub vocal speech is already more than two years old but its future successful implementation could be pure magic. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “thinking out loud” and will make private cell phone conversations possible in public.

Of course the potential impact of this technology goes way beyond my little cell phone scenario. As speech based human-computer interfaces become more robust, the ability to use silent speech with them will be groundbreaking. With the ability to silently control our technologies, we would be able to unobtrusively use them to augment our intelligence, manipulate our environment and communicate with each other.

I better stop now; it’s getting a little scary.

Developer behavior Part 1

I was in a discussion the other day at EDS with Greg Papadopoulos, and he said something I'd never really thought about quite that way before:

“Developers don't buy things, they join things."

That is part of the explanation for the open source movement. Software developers are in the creation business. They'll use something if other people they know are using it, otherwise they'd rather create it.

That's part of what crossing the chasm is all about in Geoffrey Moore's books. You need to have the early adopters market your product in order to get a foothold.

It does make me wonder about the whole SOA approach though. One of the issues about OO development was that we never got the planned reuse (it was harder to find it than to write it). Could SOA run into that same kind of issue because of the lack of "joining" for the developers. Do they need to incorporate the services as well as the concepts into their practices?

When I think of the SAP phenomenon, it did not require a great deal of developer involvement. If done "right," it didn't require a great deal of development. The same could be said about Business Process Outsourcing. That can't be said about SOA though.

Internet tools vs. SOA tools

Another area we've been discussing is the adoption of "Internet Web 2.0" tools (e.g., RoR, AJAX) vs. the adoption of SOA tools (e.g., SOAP, JEE). A barrier to the adoption of SOA tools is their complexity and the market’s rapid adoption of the Web 2.0 tools.

The Web 2.0 tools are designed to be fast and flexible. Reuse is a minor concern. The small to medium enterprise organizations (where a large portion of the software is developed today) have oriented around these tools. The time and investment to come up-to-speed and the skills required are significantly lower, allowing the small organizations to adjust quickly.

Microsoft seems to be trying to straddle the fence with their tool coming up with their own flavors of both development branches (e.g., Atlas, .NET). MS also is improving its modeling, and assembly tools, which should allow them to capitalize on their investments in the business solution space as well as other service based solutions.

As was stated in the previous post – those that get enough "joiners" will have the advantage over the long haul. Does the complexity of SOA warrant the investment? I think it will, but it may need to wait for developers to have the tools and capability to focus on solving business problems using models and automated assembly of the services, instead of having to be consumed by the tedium of hand-crafted 3GL code.

Emotive computing

I saw this article titled This Computer May Be Too Smart about creating a computer that can recognize emotion and "read minds." The article describes a number of applications for responding to the emotions displayed.

When I wrote about attention management before, it was about sending the right info to the right place (push). With an emotion sensing approach, computers could recognize when the users are becoming overloaded and change up the interface to keep their interest, using pull techniques (like active listening) to bring the user's attention back.

The possibilities will be interesting at least...

Dispensing Prescription Drugs

Reading recent news stories about high rates of prescription drug errors causing injuries to large numbers of American citizens, I can’t help but think of all the great things that modern IT technologies could do to seriously reduce those numbers.

During my last hospital stay (about a year ago), I was fascinated by the amount of technology that was dedicated to ensuring I was able to be easily and accurately identified (bar-coded wrist band) and how the process for dispensing my medication was neatly tied to a wristband identification process (bar-coded medicine tray). I couldn’t help but wonder: If such systems were in place in all hospitals would we have this problem?

Upon further examination I learned that the identification process must be applied to more than just the dispensing of prescriptions. Accurate identification must be carried through the entire decision making process. Lab tests must be accurately attributed to the correct patient and medical chart. Physicians and nurses need to verify the chart they are viewing matches the patient they are examining. Medical systems need to ensure potential drug interactions are red flagged and proper sign-off is obtained before dispensing these exceptions. It appears to be a systemic problem waiting for a good integrated solution.

The big question for me isn’t whether we can build the systems to solve this problem. We may already have them. It is more about whether we can get medical professionals and institutions to invest the time, money and absolute commitment required to make them work. Our lives may depend on it.

It's About The Power

My recent blog “Mobile Technology Needs Batteries” may have been too narrow. One of my associates sent me this link, which leads me to believe that batteries are only one answer to power for mobile and remote technologies. So, mobile technologies may need power but the power doesn't necessarily have to come from batteries.

Robotic Sensibilities

I like to think about a number of topics that relate to emerging technologies. That’s why I write about things like nanotechnology, mobile technologies and robotics. It is particularly satisfying when multiple technologies come together yielding cross discipline solutions to specific thorny problems. I am particularly attuned to such developments in robotics.

When we examine modern robotics we find that robots are commonly used in manufacturing to perform relatively simple and repetitive tasks. Even though these solutions have a low “Wow” factor, they often represent the state-of-the-art in robotics. But the word “robot” still fuels our imagination, because the popular meaning of the word comes from science fiction, not from the factory floor.

So when I read about a new breakthrough in nanotechnology that gives a sense of touch to robotics, I interpret it as a step closer to the robots of science fiction even though it is really still just about the factory floor.

We Still Need Supercomputers

Compute platforms can be described using several major categories. Viewed from the IT business, we end up with mainframes, supercomputers, minicomputers and microcomputers (further broken down into servers, PCs, handhelds, tablets, etc.). These days the term minicomputer has all but disappeared while mainframes hang on and microcomputers continue to increase their parallelism and ubiquity.

Supercomputers remain the most arcane compute platform. In the days when we were impressed by terms like mega flops and giga flops we could always look to the supercomputer for the limits of the possible. Nowadays we are unimpressed by such measures and look more at what a supercomputer platform can do that other platforms can’t (or shouldn't). To that end, the supercomputer dominates extreme simulations and, unapologetically, chess.

The most popular extreme simulation niche continues to be weather forecasting. As concerns about global warming increase so will our need to simulate weather along with the changes to the environment and geography that could result. Plans for new and improved long-term weather forecasting, along with the side effects, will help keep the term supercomputer alive and well for many years to come.

Quant Funds, workflow and agentry

I came across this article in the New York Times that talks about the growth of quantitative funds on Wall Street. These funds use models to predict when to buy or sell stock. I've written in the past about the movement to more of a model-based approach to business and the use of computers to respond to events, and this is an indication of what's to come.

As organizations begin to capitalize on these techniques inside their internal and external information flows, patterns can be determined. Once you recognize the patterns, you should be able to determine deviation from patterns. That is where the real value begins, as the people begin to focus on the anomalies and turn them into opportunities.

A Big Thing Within the ‘Next Big Thing'

A few weeks ago, I wrote a note about synnovation, a magazine about efforts between EDS and our alliance partners.

I just noticed that they published one of the articles I wrote.

Software Engineering With Microsoft Visual Studio Team System

I've interacted with Sam Guckenheimer of Microsoft since 2004 on software development process (MSF for Microsoft) and the interaction with tooling. He recently completed a book titled Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, which describes in detail his view on why Team System does what it does.

One of the criticism of Visual Studio has been the depth and breadth of documentation available. This book describes the underlying philosophy and will help in the exploration of what Visual Studio can and will do in the future.

In chapter 5, Sam talks about architectural modeling. In the past, I've blogged about the effect of moving to model based development, but at least for now, from chapter 6 through the end of the book Sam covers 3rd generation language-based coding and testing.

Hopefully by the next generation of Visual Studio, we'll be talking about testing models and less about hand crafted coding. We'll move beyond the discussion of code first or test first to model first.

I've not finished the book, but I'm trying to fit it into my schedule, since Sam has quite a bit of insight and it will be nice to see it all written down.

Portable storage still changing

I saw this article about a chip approach to storing data magnetically and it made me realize there have been a few interesting articles on new ways static storage is being used.

There are companies replacing a significant amount of disk storage with flash memory on their laptops, since it provide less of a battery draw. With nano technology devices being developed daily, and 8GB flash cards on the horizon (there appear to already be a number of USB drives in that size), static memory is finding application everywhere.

APEX Award for synnovation

EDS has a magazine containing articles about our work with alliance partners called synnovation.

It just won the APEX Award of Excellence in the Custom Published Magazines & Journals category.

A number of the Fellows have contributed articles to this magazine. So I just wanted to mention it here.

The Balance Between Risk and Reliability part II

I placed an entry back in June that got a number of comments. One of the comments mentioned that the CIO and CTO roles are something akin to unwanted step children feeding at the trough of corporate investment funding – if anything is left over.

That is one of the concerns I've felt at times as well, but can't that be evidence of a passive decision on our part? A great example I've encountered is when there is an N-1 agreement in our contract with a client, that means we can't get more than one release out of the current market facing version of a product for a particular vendor, without their approval.

My view is that the only time that clause should force an upgrade (once you've caught up) is if the vendor is adding no real business value. If the new features added functionality that would benefit the business, there would be a business case to accelerate deployment (N), not let it languish until an obtuse clause forces the upgrade.

It may be a more effective use of resources to scour the marketplace for products supporting that space, whose new features are being demanding by the revenue generating side of the business.

The IT organization should move from forcing upgrades down the throats of the business to educating and enabling them so they're demanding new features and functions. Then IT is not stuck with the leftovers for investment, but viewed as a real business partner strategically moving the organization in the industry.

The Gap Between Having an Idea and Getting Something Useful

I saw this blog post by Jeffrey Phillips, and it got me thinking about a number of different activities I've been in where there was interesting discussion but the idea had:

• been tried many times before or
• little to do with how the parent organization generates revenue

Phillips' blog entry talks about having some areas defined before starting a brainstorming session such as: What's going to happen to these ideas once we're finished? Who's documenting them? Where will they be published? Who is responsible for evaluation and moving these ideas along?

These may seem to constrain the very act of brainstorming, but I don't have time to waste on activities that will go nowhere.

When people talk about ideas that have been tried before, that's fine -- as long as we look at what happened last time. To try the same thing over again and expect a different result is insanity, yet it appears to happen fairly often.

Phillips' blog entry also talks about the value of context building through modeling and/or simulation to get the point across to others and get them on your side. I know I sometimes fail at context building and wonder why no one can understand my "obviously brilliant idea."

For example: If you are going to talk to a salesperson about an idea, make sure you describe the effect it will have on his commission or other financial rewards.

When we ask the question "Which is more important: ideas or execution?", I think we all know that execution is what matters to business.

Business Networks In Ireland

InterTradeIreland just published an 80-page report titled “Business Networks on the Island of Ireland” (PDF, 2.65M).  I found it interesting because it categorized business networks into three categories:

1. Business networks – firms collaborating for a specific purpose
2. Development networks - firms associating with other firms with the activity confined to the exchange of information or shared services.
3. Regional business clusters – groups of interconnected companies, educational institutions, local authorities, local economic development agencies, national government agencies and related institutions that promote and enhance the value of a geographic region.

The document goes on to draw a number of conclusions and recommendations on the value and enhancement possibilities of business networks.

Since outsourcing is by its very nature a business network, these kind of articles always interest me.