Pragmatic Dictator

Let’s say you sell pottery. Your core business is about making that pottery, perhaps to order but there’s a whole load of additional work you must do around accounting and the like. Perhaps you also ship your pottery via surface carrier, this introduces further work tracking customer details (watch our for pesky privacy regulations), working with couriers etc.

Almost from the get go these days you’ll automate as much of this drudgery as possible using computers, essentially creating a one person IT department that supports your business processes. Obviously the bigger the business gets the more automation you will require, perhaps developing custom software to support the execution of your business processes (all that drudge you have to do but isn’t core). Your IT department will have to grow accordingly, hiring developers, project managers etc.

This standard tale of the relationship between business and technology plays out in many an enterprise every day. IT and in particular software development is a necessary evil, an undesirable cost to be carefully managed.

However for a certain class of enterprise, software is the product. Maybe it’s a shrink wrap product or a set of services provided to customers via the web. There will still be a need to have an IT department to support the business processes and it might well develop software of it’s own. There’s a fundamental difference between these two types of software because one of them is the business’ money generator. This software must be nurtured and tended to carefully, one can’t just add features, one must care about stability, performance, availability, scalability and so on. Money put into this effort is not a cost it’s an investment. Fundamentally, this software is not enterprise IT as most know it.

This key difference is oft-missed by management, vendors and analysts leading to confusion and unnecessary mistakes. I’ll cover one such mistake (related to SOA) in a follow-up post.

Technorati Tags: business, engineering, software

Much of what Betfair does must remain secret, however this stuff is a matter of public record so I can share a little with you - couple of excerpts that put a smile on my face:

JUDGE: You will explain to us how you find a matching bet?

OUR QC: I will, yes. That brings me to the little demonstration, your Honours. Your Honours ought have a bundle of material which is entitled “Demonstration of Online Betting”.

JUDGE: How much of this is on the CD?

OUR QC: This is all on the CD, your Honour. On the CD it is - - -

JUDGE: We had a Playstation shown to us in Sony and it was very exciting. Why did you not try that?

OUR QC: This is more fun.

JUDGE: It is one of the most exciting things that has happened in my time here.

…let’s talk about the Internet.

JUDGE: I do not think I have ever seen in my 12 years here longer written submissions.

OUR QC: I do not know whether to take that as a compliment or not, your Honour.

JUDGE: Take it as you will. I mean, the danger of very, very long submissions is that the detail swamps the appreciation of the structure and essence of the point which the whole point of oral advocacy ought to be to try and refine and press upon our minds in the brief time that is available.

OUR QC: Yes, I know all that and that is the way I hope to use the oral advocacy, your Honour.

JUDGE: It is just a response to your threat that you are going to be very long in some of your oral submissions.

…you should see the average system requirements spec.

How many times does something like this have to happen before we understand that:

1. Business isn’t about ethics.
2. Many a lawyer feeds off point (1).
3. The cost of (1) and (2) is a human cost.

And when will we all stand up, demand a change and make sure something is done about it? Next time your tax bill rises or you get bad service from a company who will you blame? Business or yourself for silently putting up with it?

Technorati Tags: philosophy, business, society

It’s an all too familiar story, an overflowing inbox of rapid fire emails day after day. A ceaseless bombardment of meeting requests, news updates, design discussions, status reports, the list goes on. It doesn’t take long for this bombardment to push recipients into pavlovian responses such as:

1. If the subject doesn’t have immediate meaning, delete the email
2. Another status email which surely is like all the previous ones, delete it
3. Another request to a meeting - book it into the calendar without a second’s thought

These behaviours and others are quite damaging to your organization. Potentially useful information is ignored, people end up permanently in meetings, never getting anything done or pausing to think strategically.

So what’s the problem? To echo a previous post, email is a push mechanism and worse, it tends to be an interrupting push mechanism. We are all familiar with bouncing icons or fading dialogues displaying recipient, subject etc of a just-received email. Email can also be problematic to manage:

1. Mailing lists are difficult to keep up to date
2. Getting on and off mailing lists can often be more complex than is desirable
3. How do you find the right people to email to?

So what might we use instead? How about blogs and RSS feeds? Blogs are a fine place to publish announcements, news, status reports etc. We have a wide range of readers, online and offline and managing subscriptions is a key area of focus for these applications. RSS of course gives us a pull mechanism allowing subscribers to choose how often they receive the updates. All that’s left is to maintain a well known page to link the blogs (and you can regularly email a link to that page around) so that potentially interested readers can find the subject matter they require.

It all seems so obvious and yet there are still a mound of corporates out there that haven’t moved to this more balanced approach to information dissemination and co-ordination.

Technorati Tags: management, process

Rorie Devine, Betfair’s CTO starts out with a posting on greener computing.

Technorati Tags: betfair, blog

Push versus pull is a constant debate in techie land. Interestingly, a lot of the web is adopting pull techniques. I wonder if some of that is leaking into these other areas or whether it’s just a general trend away from centralized solutions which we know don’t scale.

In any case, this is an interesting read and recommended by none other than Werner Vogels.

Scary reading for the control freaks and another example of decentralized control/intelligence. Of course, a few minutes thought makes it clear that pull is not good for everything.

Technorati Tags: architecture, business, distributed systems, technology, web

Quick wins are all about proving a point in short order. Small effort big results, big bang for little buck, low hanging fruit and so on.

But there’s surely a limit to what can be done? How fast do we need to deliver something for it to qualify as a quick win? At some point don’t we need to get strategic because we’ve grabbed up all the low hanging fruit and now have to work harder and longer?

Does it make sense to ask for a quick win to prove a long-term strategy? Any quick win will surely have limited if not zero immediate benefit because only with a reasonable amount of your strategy implemented could you expect tangible results? How would you measure what limited effect there is anyway? More significantly there has to be a risk that the pressure to provide quick wins actually damages your ability to pursue long term strategy. For example, you might end up constantly undoing what you’ve already done to take the next quick step because you cut corners last time. Pretty soon you’re undoing so much because you cut so many corners that you come to a halt.

I have this feeling that quick wins are kind of like nibbling at fruit bars and Red Bull whilst you work flat out to complete a project. Eventually you’re going to need to stop, cook a proper meal and sleep. You’ll probably need to go to the doctor too - consequences of a none-too-nutritious diet. You got that project done but at what cost long term?

Focusing on quick wins is surely just storing up pain for later. How much does it have to hurt before we stop trying for quick wins and get strategic? Would we even be aware of the pain? How do we become aware of this nasty aching? Do we maybe not bother pushing strategy until it hurts so bad that we have no choice but to take a risk and try something new we can’t predict?

Maybe there’s something in the air as Doug McClure’s been independently pondering similar questions.

Technorati Tags: business, philosophy, strategy

A graphic demonstration of how short-term thinking over strategy can be outright life-threatening:

I was out driving this morning on a dual carriageway, approaching a slip-road in lane two (the outside lane) so as to avoid merging traffic. In front of me is another driver who in their impatience is on the boot-lid of another vehicle, we’re right on top of the merge point for the slip-road now which is a feeder from the M4. At this point, the boot-lid surfer dives into the inside lane clearly intent on an undertake, failing to account for the motor-cycllst merging from the slip road. What follows is best described as a lucky escape with both motor-cyclist and boot-lid surfer taking evasive action.

Many a technical decision is taken without measuring, pausing for strategic thought or evaluating alternatives. What we typically do is jump on whatever is the current hype without bothering to weigh up whether it’s worth it. This is a key contributory factor to the utter absurdity that is the hype curve where we all get far too optimistic about a technology, jump on it and then after a few years realise it is not the holy grail. Techies as a group are supposed to be some of the most rational, analytical of all and yet we make this newbie mistake - who are we kidding?

Short-term thinking can be seen elsewhere too such as in the feature’s versus refactoring/re-structuring discussions that go on in software product (shrink-wrap, web or otherwise) companies across the world. In general it seems that businesses encourage these minimal thought policies. Increase customers now. Increase revenue now. Don’t worry about consequences we’ll deal with those later………maybe!

But wait a minute - if a child wants to stick their fingers in the wall-socket should we just forget the consequences and let them do it? Clearly not - that’s strategic, big picture thinking which saved our child some pain. Why don’t we do similar things and save our businesses, systems and workers pain?

I do wonder if rampant short-termism is somewhat related to our own survival instincts. Perhaps when there’s too much pressure/threat we are more likely to stop thinking about the big picture? Understandable when it’s life or death but surely unnecessary in business, tech or the daily commute?

Technorati Tags: business, strategy, technology