What did we learn today?

Microsoft Office 365 Cloud-Based Productivity Service Now Helps Customers Comply with HIPAA Privacy and Security Standards - Microsoft in Health - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

2011-12-14T12:02:00.000-08:00

Microsoft Office 365 Cloud-Based Productivity Service Now Helps Customers Comply with HIPAA Privacy and Security Standards - Microsoft in Health - Site Home - MSDN Blogs:

With reimbursements falling and medical loss ratio minimums rising, hospitals, physicians, and health plans are under unprecedented pressure to drive down operating costs while still improving the quality and safety of patient care. The economic advantages of cloud-based productivity solutions to drive down operational costs and complexity are well understood, but for most health organizations, HIPAA security and privacy concerns have been a showstopping barrier to realizing the full anywhere, anytime productivity potential of cloud-based technologies.

That is, until now. Today ... Microsoft is helping remove that barrier by embedding privacy and security capabilities in Office 365, our next-generation cloud productivity service. This means that Office 365 is now a cloud-based platform that complies with leading information privacy and security standards for customers operating in the United States and European Union. As part of its contractual commitment to customers, Microsoft will now sign business associate agreements under the U.S.-mandated Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

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Great anecdote from "Users, not Customers"

2011-10-27T10:02:00.000-07:00

I just started the book "Users, not Customers: Who Really Determines the Success of Your Business." It starts with a great short anecdote about comparison shopping in our brave new world. If the rest of the book stays as intriguing, this will be a great read.

"My wife loves seltzer water. I can’t stand it, but she will hardly drink water if bubbles aren’t in it. So I thought it’d be great to buy her a soda maker. One afternoon, I passed by a Williams-Sonoma store and decided to stop in. Lo and behold, they had one sitting on the shelf: a SodaStream Genesis drinks maker for $150. But it seemed expensive. I could buy her a pantry full of 150 bottles of premade seltzer for that price. So I decided to shop around.

I opened the RedLaser app on my iPhone and used it to scan the machine’s bar code to find out what other retailers charged. Bed Bath & Beyond carried the same thing for a hundred dollars. Success! Fifty dollars in savings. I waved down a sales clerk and showed her my findings. But she declined to match the price.

So right there, in the middle of a beautiful Williams-Sonoma store in a high-rent location on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, I bought the SodaStream Genesis drinks maker—from Bed Bath & Beyond by using my mobile browser."

Why Digital Talent Doesn’t Want To Work At Your Company | Fast Company

2011-10-27T08:35:00.000-07:00

I like this blog post so much that I am re-posting it in it's entirety.

Why Digital Talent Doesn’t Want To Work At Your Company | Fast Company:

Why doesn't digital talent want to work at your company? It’s not because you’re a consumer packaged goods company, rather than Google. It’s not because you’re in Ohio instead of Silicon Valley. It’s not because your salaries are too low, or because you don’t offer free food and laundry services.

It’s because you’re not providing them the right opportunity. The talent you want would be happy to work in an un-air-conditioned garage in New Mexico if it meant the chance to change the world.

This, the opportunity to do great things, to make a real difference, is what drives most digital talent--whether they’re developers, designers, producers, marketers or business folks.

Most companies don’t offer this, so they skip your company and work somewhere that’s more innovative and exciting. End of story. But the good news is that you can offer them something exciting and great. The promise of changing a giant, behind-the-times organization into an Internet-savvy business is an incredibly exciting challenge and a big way for ambitious people to make an impact.

But it takes more than lip service to make the sale. Job candidates and new hires with digital chops must truly believe in the company’s dedication to digital transformation and they must see that they are empowered to make this change. Trouble is, many big businesses aren’t structured to deliver on this type of opportunity. The attributes of a soul-crushing, Sisyphean, anti-digital workplace run deep.

Digital talent won’t want to work at your company if:

Every element of their work will be pored over by multiple layers of bureaucracy. Even if that’s how the rest of the company operates, it can’t spill into the digital department. In a technology environment, new products and businesses spring up daily and a new endeavor can go from conception to launch in a matter of months. Reining in the momentum will be read as inaction and a clear signal the company isn’t willing to grasp the new way of the world.
Mediocre is good enough. While clocking out at 5 p.m. is attractive to some, it will discourage digital talent. They want to be expected to do something great. They want to be pushed. They care about their work. Their leadership, and those they rely on to get things done, must match their appetite for success.
Trial and error is condemned. The freedom to try out new ideas allows employees to take initiative, make decisions, and learn from their mistakes. It also demonstrates an attractive and inspiring entrepreneurial spirit.
Your company is structured so it takes a lifetime to get to the top, and as such there are no digital experts in company-wide leadership positions.Digital talent--often in their 20s and 30s--need to see a clear path for uninhibited career development that’s based on merit, not years spent, and that’s beyond the confines of the digital department. If they don’t, they won’t see a reason to stay with the company in the long term.
Your offices are cold, impersonal and downright stodgy. It may sound like it conflicts with the “you don’t need to be in Silicon Valley point,” but appreciate the nuance. A traditional office layout is designed to communicate power among certain individuals and barriers between departments. This does not support the collaborative ethos which is intrinsic to the web. Companies should do everything possible to provide the digital team friendlier, open office space. A location in a hip, young neighborhood (which surely exists in every mid- to large-sized city) is also a big plus.

When all of these digital-talent deterring points are addressed, company leadership has effectively and proactively demonstrated the company’s dedication to a digital transformation. It is at this time that their words, a broadly communicated firm stance on the significance of the company’s digital goals, will make the most impact. Without this conspicuous top-down support, politics in the organization or simply one influential disbeliever can hinder the effort, limit the extent of digital integration possible, and discourage valuable employees.

You need them more than they need you. Demand for their services is so high, they can afford to be finicky. If they don’t like where they’re working, another firm with a more attractive culture and more grand opportunity will quickly swipe them up. That could be your company. But it could just as easily be someone else.

Adapted from Users Not Customers: Who Really Determines the Success of Your Business(Portfolio), by Aaron Shapiro, CEO of HUGE, a digital agency that helps companies including PespiCo, Comcast, Target, HBO, and Unilever reimagine how they interact with their customers and manage their business in the online economy. Visit aaronshapiro.com.

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Opinion - Image - NYTimes.com

2011-09-09T13:48:00.000-07:00

Opinion - Image - NYTimes.com:

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Steve Jobs Resigns As CEO Of Apple | TechCrunch

2011-08-24T15:45:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs Resigns As CEO Of Apple | TechCrunch: "Title says it all. More to come. For now, the letter:

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve"

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Getting in shape the geek way

2011-07-12T08:44:00.000-07:00

I caught a Wired magazine article about Tim Cigelske. He is attempting to run a mile and drink a beer, every day for a year. While my days of drinking beer (nearly) every day are long past, the article inspired me step up my own workouts. I should note that I’ve been a runner on and off for a couple of decades, even completing a marathon in my thirties. So it isn’t a stretch for me to start running again.

Of course, like a true geek, I’m getting help from the Web with my training. I’m using FitBit to keep track of my exercise and diet. FitBit is a pedometer type device that is used in conjunction with their web site. The device is tiny, well designed, and stylish. I can wear it on my belt and it is barely noticeable or I can keep it in my pocket. There’s no bulky nerd case like those that hold phones (or calculators back in the ‘80s). It keeps track of your exercise by counting your steps throughout the day. You may also wear it at night to track your sleep patterns (I find the sleep data pretty intriguing).

The FitBit connects to a web site by syncing through a computer. The process of getting started is very simple, but you have to download a small software program and register on the site. FitBit walks you through this step by step. The device syncs via a USB cable that is provided and comes attached to a cute little stand. The software sits in the background, waiting for you to plug in device in; once plugged in, syncing data is automatic.

But then there’s the really nerdy part. The FitBit web site has forms to enter what you’ve eaten, types of exercise you’ve done, or your weight. Nutritional information has been crowd-sourced, so virtually anything you buy at a restaurant chain or grocery store is listed. Because it’s crowd-sourced, though, there are often many entries for the same thing, the trick is finding the most accurate entry. Of course, if you want, you can enter the nutritional information yourself. The web site also tracks daily weight, body fat, or measurements (like your waistline) and plots them on a graph.

So I am thirteen days into my running streak. Next week I’m off to camp with my son, so I may modify my goal to run, bike, or swim every day. My FitBit came yesterday, so I’ve only just started the geek side of my training. I can see that entering calorie and weight data could get tedious, especially if the graphs trend in the wrong direction. So I’m taking the step of connecting sharing by FitBit data on Facebook and Twitter. I’m hoping that public exposure will keep me motivated. Wish me luck.

What's up with Google?

2011-07-07T13:02:00.000-07:00

Several years ago a friend introduced me to Google Maps. At the time, MapQuest was king, but MapQuest presented a tiny square on a page that painfully refreshed as you scrolled or zoomed. Google Maps was entirely different and now we take it for granted. But the way a map was presented via tiles, the size of the map, and the speed of panning was amazing. That mapping is so pervasive, even MapQuest works that way today (does anyone use MapQest anymore?).

This was roughly the same time as Gmail was introduced, and everything that Google did was impressive. Google was developer paradise; the place where all software engineers dreamed of working. Its’ reputation of encouraging innovation was, and is, beyond all others. Even the Google doodle, the sometimes funny and irreverent logo presented on its’ search page, was creative. All of that creativity is funded by the immense engine of search; ad supported search.

The company is still a financial juggernaut. Remember the IPO? They set their price at $85; it’s now $547.

With all its’ growth and success; with all its’ creativity and innovation; I still sit back and wonder: what’s up with Google? I have never known any other company that has thrown more ideas, poorly executed ideas, into the marketplace. It’s although the company simply operates on a “try it and see what happens” strategy. As examples, look at this list…

· Orkut
· Google Wave
· Buzz
· Google Health
· Google X
· Google Video
· Google Answers

You could argue that the crazy popular acquisition, YouTube, may never make money. And the critically acclaimed Google Docs remains an also-ran next to Office, which even as a web application is far superior. The jury is out on Google Music and Google+, but the company doesn’t compete well with entrenched players like Apple and Facebook, especially on their own ground.

So what’s my point here? I guess I am stunned and amazed at the search giant’s success. I find it incredible that a company can grind out such a large number of failures. And yet to this day, any developer worth their salt would go there in a heartbeat. The businessman in me would advise them to stick to their success, but the inventor in me loves the way they keep trying.

Go to the Cloud

2011-06-07T06:53:00.001-07:00

With yesterday's announcement of the iCloud service, Apple is once again redefining technology and computing. This time the impact will go beyond consumer devices and reach into the enterprise (that's where we work). No, you may say, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are already there with their offerings, Google App Engine, Google Music, Amazon EC, Amazon Cloud Drive, and Azure. Well, duh, cloud services have been available for some time from a variety of providers, but Apple's entry validates the space. Apple's iCloud is a wake-up call to all traditional commercial software providers: your precious applications will soon be under attack by aggressive young entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs can attack any industry vertical will little investment beyond a laptop, Mountain Dew, Cool Ranch Doritos, and time. All enabled by the cloud, and made cool by Apple.

In the shadow of the World Trade Center

2010-09-10T08:12:00.000-07:00

This is a repost of a previous article.

I remember almost nothing about the morning of September 11th. It was my son's first day of school, but I don't recall thinking about that on my way to the office that morning. A huge black and silver banner hung from the face of the New York Stock Exchange, it read Blackwood. I remember the sign, because my company was Blackwood. The sign however was an advertisement for a forthcoming truck from Lincoln. I don't recall looking at the sign that morning. I don't remember the walk up Wall Street to the Trump Building and I do not recall my agenda for the day.

The first thing I remember was Adam's announcement as he came into the office, "A bomb just went off at the Trade Center!"

Adam's deep voice belies his small frame, but his accent is a true indicator of his roots. He has lived his entire life in New York City, settling down in a Staten Island townhome. It was unusual for him to be one of the first to arrive in the morning. He had side projects recording music and writing game software that kept him up late. This time he was a little early, and he got to break the news. "I saw it. It's a mess out there."

Together we rushed to the windows to take a look. The sky all around us was filled with paper; eight and a half by eleven sheets drifting in the air like a strange high-rise ticker tape parade. From the top of the Trade Center's North Tower, a thick black cloud rose into the bright blue sky.

Blackwood had offices spanning two floors high in the Trump Building on Wall Street. Surrounding the offices on three sides were large windows offering panoramic views of lower Manhattans canyons. Across the length of the floors, the Windows faced west toward the Hudson river. Standing at these windows you looked up at the massive twin towers standing tall and dwarfing the surrounding buildings. From our vantage on the 30th floor, the south tower was mostly unobstructed while only the top third of the north tower was visible.

I watched the smoke and flames for a minute then turned to the televisions. Blackwood had an extensive and modern trading floor including several televisions monitoring financial news. As it was well before the market open, the sets were tuned to MSNBC. That's how we discovered an airplane had hit Tower One. From our windows, we could not see the point of impact, but the news showed the tower with the impact clearly in the shape of an airplane.

"How could a plane hit the Trade Center?" I barely uttered the words, not expecting an answer.

We stared at the televisions and speculated about private planes. Probably a tourist flight.

I called my wife to give her the news. Susan had worked in the World Financial Center, just across the West Side Highway from the Trade Center. She often recalled the time fondly, describing her favorite hangouts. She loved the towers and remembers vividly the day they were bombed. I was telling her to turn on the news when the second airplane struck the towers.

The second impact made a very distinctive sound. It was higher pitched than a Hollywood explosion and only lasted a fraction of a second. Imagine the sound a large dump truck makes when it's gate slams against an empty bed. I turned toward the windows as my staff yelled a collective "oh my God!" Melba, our receptionist made the sign of the cross.

I did not see the impact, and for a minute no one could describe it to me. I told Susan I had to hang up the phone and went to the windows. As I did, Dan came into the office. He was covered in debris; little pieces of glass, paper, and dust.

"It was a missile!" he claimed. "A greenish brown missile, like it was camouflage. I was watching from the end of Wall Street when it hit."

Dan worked with our backoffice systems and was primarily responsible to see Blackwood met its' compliance requirements. He was not prone to exaggeration and he was clearly shaken. Our entire staff lined the windows, mesmerized.

The company's CEO was a long time investment banker who had come from J.P. Morgan through a failed Internet startup. John hailed from the Carolinas attending Duke University along the way. He still spoke with a southern accident, occasionally peppered with New York street talk. The combination never seemed natural. He stood with his hands on his hips for a minute, then rallied the staff away from the windows. The markets opened as normal at 9:30am and for a short time it looked like it would be business as usual.

"Dmitry called in," our admin Melba came over relaying a message, "his train was held at Newark."

Dmitry was a Russian immigrant with a warm smile and freckles. He is soft spoken, intelligent, and punctual. And when his PATH train to the World Trade Center was cancelled, he found another route into the city. From his commuter train in Newark, New Jersey, he could see the smoke from the Towers. He had promised to arrive at the office before the trading floor had opened, but the trains were delayed and he would be late. He dutifully called the office from his cell phone.

On a normal day, Dmitry would change trains in Newark, moving from the NJ Transit commuter train to the PATH. The PATH went direct to the World Trade Center where it was a short walk to Blackwood's offices in the Trump Building. But with the PATH temporarily shut down, he stayed on the commuter train to Penn Station in New York City.

From there he fought through the crowds and chaos to the Mass Transit Authority's 1 and 9 subway line. The 1 and 9 was a downtown express train with a station at the World Trade Center. He found the trains were crowded but running. Dmitry squeezed into a subway car and headed downtown.

Back at 40 Wall Street, news of the Pentagon attack spread like wildfire. For the first time, there was true fear among the employees. Adam expressed panic and a desire to leave. Immediately. John and I calmed him a little.

"You don't know what kind of shit is falling out of the sky now," John stated with some authority. "We're safer inside."

But the fear was real. Two of the tallest buildings in the world were burning, the Pentagon was under attack, and at least one more plane was unaccounted for. At that moment, in downtown New York City, we believed that rogue jet liners were screaming toward us. I became acutely aware that next to the World Trade Center, I was standing in the tallest building in lower Manhattan.

The Institutional Sales desk had the best view of the burning towers. From his desk our lead salesman Kirk watched the flames intently. The fire was hypnotic, and once it attracted our attention we were powerless to turn away. Kirk and I stared at the flames, commenting on their intensity and wondering how the Fire Department would ever put them out.

I turned to speak with another executive as Kirk shouted out, "Did you see that?! Someone jumped!" I turned and thankfully, saw nothing.

I returned my attention to the other executive when he asked "Has anyone heard from Karen? She is attending a conference at the Windows on The World."

Karen was Blackwood's marketing executive. She was attractive, outgoing, and extremely effective. On September 11th she was scheduled to attend a seminar where she hoped to spread the Blackwood story.

Karen lived in Battery Park City, just blocks from the World Trade Center. Not an early riser, she had taken her time leaving home for the short walk to the Trade Center. The seminar was at The Windows on the World, on the top floor of Tower One. She reached the lobby of the north tower shortly after nine in the morning, only to discover the building was being evacuated. With no explanation she was directed outdoors. Everyone who was on-time for the seminar had only an hour to live.

She started back across the West Side Highway toward home, contemplating whether or not to go to the office when the second plane exploded into the south tower. The explosion shook the cross walk where she stood, but her view of the tower was blocked. Through the small windows she could see debris raining down on the street below. During the ensuing panic she thought it best to head to Battery Park. From there she could enjoy the sunny morning and watch what was happening at the World Trade Center.

At Blackwood Kirk and I were observing the fires. He was glued to the windows morbidly looking for more jumpers. We saw none.

We could clearly see the point of impact on the south tower. We could also see the areas where the explosion had blown out windows in both towers. There were few windows intact on the damaged floors creating an eerie affect where the upper floors of each building were held up by the ribs that formed the skeleton of the building. Thick black smoke poured from the open floors. Huge orange and yellow flames seemed to cover entire floors.

For a moment I thought the flames were dying down in the north tower. I pointed them out to Kirk, saying that maybe the fire was starting to burn itself out in Tower One. But Kirk's eyes were riveted to Tower Two.

"I think bars are bending..." he was pointing to the south tower, but I couldn't see what he was pointing at. Then in slow motion the top third of Tower Two tilted directly toward us.

"My God! It's coming down!" Kirk barely got the words out of his mouth when Tower Two imploded, collapsing straight down on itself as if the bottom floor was kicked out from beneath it. Within seconds our building was covered in a thick black cloud. We could no long see either tower.

Down in the subway tunnels, Dmitry's train stopped short of the Chambers street station. The train did not move for several minutes when the lights flickered and went dark. Even in the blackness, Dmitry could see the train car fill with a dust cloud. Passengers started screaming.

In a short time that must have seemed like hours, the lights came on and the train started moving. At Chambers street the conductor announced that the train was out of service. All passengers must exit. Dmitry shuffled out of the crowded train, following the flow of people through the turnstiles and up the stairs to the street.

On the street was pandemonium. Sirens wailed, people were running, and the ground was covered with light gray dust. There was only one tower at the World Trade Center. A policeman shouted at him to leave and to run, so he ran. He ran and ran, not stopping until he reached the lawn of City Hall. There he turned to watch.

In the office Blackwood was still trading stocks, but we were huddled around the televisions as we could not see through the fog cloud surrounding us.

"I can't believe there is only one tower" Melba was almost crying, or maybe she was too shocked to cry.

" If one came down, the other is probably going to come down too." I replied. I called my wife one more time to let her know I was safe. From my office I watched the live news as Tower One collapsed too. The phone was dead.

The cloud surrounding us changed from gray to black. Pure pitch black. Blacker than coal and blacker than night. I could not see more than an inch out the window. For the first time I felt a real pang of fear as I checked the air conditioning ducts to make sure the dust was not pouring into the office.

"Give it a couple minutes, it will clear up" the CEO tried to be reassuring. "Maybe the dust will snuff out the fires."

We held a short meeting of executives to plan for the inevitable close of business. The CEO wanted a clear plan for shutting down our computer servers, but first we needed to create reports of customers trades and positions. I suggested we make arrangements to provide the staff with housing for the night. Those living in the city volunteered their apartments for those living in New Jersey or Long Island.

For Karen Battery Park was becoming a problem. Crowds of panicked people flowed into the park by the thousands. She found herself forced deeper and deeper into the park to avoid the throng. At the furthest most point she ran out of room and became pinned to metal railed that prevented the crowd from being pushed into New York harbor.

There was no escape of moving from her position. One man nearby climbed over the rail, briefly considered jumping into the water, then perched himself on the narrow ledge. There were boats nearby, maybe only twenty feet, but the water was dangerous and there was no mooring. She had to wait.

Shortly after our meeting the New York Fire Department made it official. The Trump building was being evacuated. The CEO and General Counsel were the first out the door, rushing to make morning ferry back to Long Island. Most others quickly but orderly packed their things and headed for the stairs. The elevators were not running.

I stayed behind with Mike, the Director of Operations. He started shutting down our computers and I made sure the office was empty. Sure enough, on the trading floor, a trader remained at his work station furiously banging at his keys. He was trying to close his positions before he left the building. When Mike shut down the system, the trader packed up his things, slung his backpack over this shoulder, and made for the stairs. I locked the doors behind him.

Mike and I were the last to leave the offices, making sure everyone was gone, and every door locked. By time we left, the stairwell was mostly empty and very easy to descend. We quickly climb down ten to twenty flights before reaching a pack of stragglers. Together our little group slowly made our way to the first floor, exiting near the rear of the building. Security ushered us out the back door.

Outside, downtown Manhattan had been transformed into a surreal moonscape. All around was total absence of color; only shades of gray. Looking west down Pine Street, toward the Trade Center, the streets were black as night. We trudged through the ankle deep dust, making our way to the FDR highway. There, we were told, were shuttle buses to take us out of downtown. It was eerily silent.

I caught up with Mike, and we explored our options for getting off the Island of Manhattan. We could go to the FDR. Or we could make our way to the Village where one of our executives had offered his apartment for the night. On a whim, Mike suggested the ferries at Pier 11, so we turned right at Water Street instead of following the crowd uptown.

The dock at Pier 11 was busy, but not crowed. For me, the Seastreak ferry was docked and idling its' engine. The ship mates were calling all comers; there would be no charge for the trip. As I boarded the ferry for Atlantic Highlands, Mike found the New York Ferry to Jersey City waiting. In little more than an hour, I was home.

Everyone at Blackwood survived that day, but unfortunately the company would not. Those of us in the office remained safe during the attacks, and everyone returned home that day. Dmitry and Karen, whose lives were spared by little more than 10 minutes, escaped their ordeal. Karen could not return to her apartment for weeks, and eventually moved to New Jersey. By the following summer none of us worked at Blackwood or even downtown Manhattan.

Thoughts on Safari (browser)

2009-02-26T07:48:00.000-08:00

I just downloaded and installed the Safari 4 browser from Apple and it is, well, ugly! The ugliness is particularly bad on the rendering of its' tabs. The tabs are integrated into the window title bar with clumsy 3-D affects. It also eschews the former brushed aluminum theme for drab beige. I find this particularly disturbing since the software comes from one of the few technology companies that actually pays attention to design.

I was able to mitigate the ugliness a little by hiding the menu, bookmarks, and status bars. However, there's no changing the tabs. At first I rationalized the look in two ways. One, the software is beta so the appearance of the UI may change And two, Apple may be taking digs at Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. On further thought, neither makes sense as Apple should never risk its' reputation for design by releasing ugly software, especially on the most common desktop OS in the world.

That's not to say that Safari isn't a great web browser, it is innovative on a few fronts. First among these is speed, but does the average web surfer notice the speed of their browser? Maybe not, but the speed of Safari allows its' top page and history features to display and scroll pages. This works much like the CoolIris add-in (for IE and Firefox). I've only had Safari for a couple of hours, and I've already found the history search very useful.

The browser wars are heating up again and it's getting interesting. Internet Explorer 8, Chrome, FireFox, and Safari are all great software each with a compelling story. As for me, I use Explorer for all our intranet applications and Chrome as my default browser.

Tweetdeck

2009-02-20T13:38:00.000-08:00

I've been using TweetDeck lately to submit my Twitter tweets. At first this seemed like a convenient way to tweet in absence of the instant messaging capability. While that is true, TweetDeck's real benefit comes in reading the tweets that I follow.

I always found the Twitter website a little clumsy for reading the streams of messages. That's because Twitter presents a single thread of messages displayed in the order they were posted. So my technology messages are intermixed with world news intermixed with gossips intermixed with nonsense. The result amounted to little more than noise.

TweetDeck solves this problems by grouping related tweets into columns. I separated technology and new into their own columns, for instance. Since installing TweetDeck, I find that I follow Twitter much more consistently (well OK, I generally ignored it before).

TweetDeck is also interesting because it is constructed and deployed on Adobe Air. Adobe Air runs Internet applications outside a browser and it therefore an interesting technology solving the multi-browser problem (which is getting worse, not better).

Atlantis found?

2009-02-20T13:23:00.000-08:00

CrunchGear posted a blog indicating that Atlantis has been found. Sure, the source is a British tabloid, but apparently the ancient city was found using Google Earth.

While Atlantis is interesting in and of itself, the real story here is the technology. Google has been collecting data on the ocean floors using sonar. Impressive as it is that Google hired drivers to snap pictures of our major cities, it is even more incredible that they have hired boats to gather data about the ocean floor and stitch that data into their maps.

Don’t think of BI as an all-in-one solution

2009-02-18T06:39:00.001-08:00

I recently had a short conversation on Business Intelligence with one of my peers. I tried to explain the premise that a Business Intelligence application in our industry (Health Care) should not be a one-size-fits all solution. Instead the technology should be tailored to the types of questions that it will need to answer most frequently.

When he claimed "of course it has to be able to answer any question, otherwise we could just write queries," I realized I failed to make my point. He is not the first person I've met to have this opinion. In fact, the opinion is pretty pervasive among my peers; and it is wrong.

Our Business Intelligence solution is a textbook case highlighting this point. Its' saga is a story for another day, but in our attempt to make it very flexible we failed to make it strong. That is, there's no limit to the reports you can create, but it's not great at answering any particular question.

I liken this to the difference between a hammer and a Swiss Army Knife. A hammer is great at driving nails, better than any other tool for this task. It also happens to be pretty good at removing nails too. A Swiss Army knife can do a lot of things from clipping nails to opening cans. But it's not particularly good at any of them.

The real beauty of a hammer, though, is the other things that it can do pretty well. In fact, if put to the test, it isn't hard to come up with at least as many tasks as can be done with a hammer as with the Swiss Army Knife. It can be a door-stop, a paper-weight, a meat tenderizer, a garden shovel, and more. Sure, it's lousy at tightening screws, but it can really drive nails.

Don't get me wrong. There's a place for firms that build all-in-one software. In fact, my former employer Information Builders is one such firm. My current BI solution is built on a MicroStrategy platform, another Swiss Army Knife vendor. Vertical solutions, like our health care application, need to be targeted; they need to be really good at particular questions.

Unfortunately, many designers of Business Intelligence solutions try to make Swiss Army Knives when they really need hammers. And given a good hammer and an innovative user, there will soon be many other tasks suitable for the tool.

I might have saved a life

2009-02-17T17:39:00.001-08:00

I might have saved a life today. In truth, my actions were more instinctive than intentional; I had prevented a stranger from being struck by a car by grabbing his coat as he stepped off a Manhattan curb and into traffic. The oncoming car was speeding fast down the narrow street, trying to make a green light. The stranger was concentrating on his iPhone and was oblivious to the danger. It was unlikely that the driver could have stopped in time, and the man surely would have been struck. He was shaken after the incident and thanked me, claiming I saved his life.

Later, as I replayed the scene, I wondered about the thought process that led to my grabbing a complete stranger and pulling him back out of harm's way. Of course it happened so fast that I was not conscious of the decisions I had to make. In short, I saw a speeding car and an unaware pedestrian and naturally reached out to prevent the accident. But were my actions natural? Sure, it was easy to access the danger of the situation, but the choice to grab the man was selected over other possibilities. I could have shouted a warning; I could have done nothing and hoped for the best; or I could have alerted the driver.

At first blush my decision seems obvious among the choices. Still, though, there was more information to process. I had to decide that the probability the man would be struck was very high. And I had to weigh the risk of him getting hurt against the chance that he would take offense at being forcibly grabbed by a stranger. This last point is trickier than it may seem, because I had to judge that it was appropriate to touch him and I wonder how I would have reacted if it was a different person. Would I grab a woman in the same way? Would I a grab a homeless person? Is the fact that he was a man similar to me a factor in saving him from injury? I like to think that I would react the same regardless of the person at harm.

In the end the only thing that matters was the man did not get injured. I suppose it was nice, too, that he was appreciative.

Every second

2009-02-17T15:19:00.000-08:00

Every now and then I come across a web site that seems like nonsense, but then turns out kind of cool. Such is the case with every second, a simple web site with several animations representing events in the world (or universe).

Visually, the site is attractive; it is rendered in gray-scale with a modern sans-serif font. There is one UI anomaly though, the links for Category, and item seemed reversed. But once you get past the odd click arrangement the site is pretty cool.

Cool yes, but not terribly useful. Maybe it is nonsense after all.

Sad saga of a three and a half hour commute

2009-02-12T06:40:00.000-08:00

Wrong decisions aren't necessarily bad decisions. After all, choosing to walk from Maze on 54Th street to Penn Station on a beautiful night isn't a bad decision. As it turned out, though, is was the wrong decision. So shortly before 10pm I set out on foot to enjoy the night and sights of midtown Manhattan.

A wise man would have checked his watch. And a wise man would know the train schedule. I did not check either my watch or the schedule; two mistakes I should not make as a seasoned commuter.

As it turns out, these were unfortunate errors because I arrived at Penn Station just minutes after my train had left. The next train was at 11:18pm, just under an hour wait.

Penn Station in New York is not a very pleasant place. During the day is bustles with activity as commuters pour out in the morning and pour back in later. Commuters are like automatons; showing little emotion they rush to their destination trying to interact with other as little as possible. There is nothing interesting or pretty about the station, it is completely utilitarian. At night it is a popular hang-out for the homeless. I spent my hour in the NJ Transit waiting area with my nose to my BlackBerry.

When the train was available for boarding, I found a quiet seat near the back and promptly fell asleep. I was awakened later by the conductor's announcement that our train had lost power. We had made it as far as the Secaucus transfer station; in the middle on the New Jersey swamps. The train was dead and the next one would be an hour wait.

By time I was home, it was 2am in the morning. After a half hour walk through Manhattan, an hour wait at Penn Station, an hour wait after my train was disabled, and an hour train ride home. Commuting is a bitch. But had I decided to take a cab to Penn Station, or even jump on the subway, I would have caught the 10:18 train and would have been snuggled in bed before midnight. Instead I made a wrong decision and paid the consequences.

Somebody agrees with my Chrome prediction

2009-02-10T04:58:00.000-08:00

When Google introduced its' Chrome browser, I posted a short article on my thoughts (see Thoughts on Google Chrome). One of my conclusions was that the browser which would most feel competitive pressure would by FireFox.

"...If my browsing patterns are common, though, then Firefox will suffer more. In the end, Firefox and Chrome may just duke it out..."

Today I read an article with a similar conclusion. I'm happy that someone out there agrees.

The article, though, overlooks the primary reason why IE will remain the dominate browser; the fact remains that a huge library of browser based applications are not cross-browser (case in point, my team's products). This software is not aimed at the consumer or deployed on the World Wide Web. Instead the applications are deployed on corporate intranets around the world, assuring that IE remains the browser of choice for IT departments.

Meme

2009-02-09T06:28:00.000-08:00

My introduction to YouTube was a viral video titled "Boom Goes the Dynamite". As it turned out, the video became part of Internet lore, and the term part of American vernacular. There are dozens of similar videos that have become what is called "meme" (pronounced meem). For those of us who quickly delete chain email, or don't have the inclination to follow viral stories, there is a source for the most significant meme, KnowYourMeme.

Know your meme is more than a collection of YouTube links. They have their own videos hosted by geeks in lab coats. They describe the source of the meme, show clips from the original source, and even follow-up on some of the near-celebrities. Check it out and never get left out of idle conversations again.

More web nonsense I don't need but will probably sign-up for anyway

2009-02-05T07:14:00.000-08:00

Google has recently announced Latitude. This service allows you to track your friend's location using Google Maps. At first blush, I would categorize this service much like Twitter, as one of the dumbest services on the Web.

I'm a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to Twitter. I use it to update my Facebook status from my cell phone. As yet, though, I don't see how Latitude will provide a similar benefit and I don't think my friends will care about my exact location. Maybe my boss can use it to see how freely I come and go.

Latitude smacks a little like Big Brother. Google is famous for its' don't be evil mantra, but it this type of information will provide a lot of temptation for misuse. Privacy advocates will hate the service. In the end, joining and sharing the information will be voluntary, so I guess users will make their own trouble.

As for me, I'll kick the tires a bit, but you can bet that the service will be turned on my kids phones.

Some cool green transportation

2009-02-04T14:48:00.000-08:00

An RSS from Fast Company just popped into my inbox. It describes the coolest electric vehicle I've seen. This is no Prius dork-mobile; no it's a hot super-bike capable of using it's electric motor for mind numbing acceleration. The bike is from Mission Motors, but go to Fast Company for the low-down.

Natural oraffice surgey; maybe it's cool, but it gives me the creeps

2009-02-04T06:29:00.000-08:00

Apparently Johns Hopkins research doctors have successfully removed a kidney through, um, the donor's oraffice. It's called "transvaginal nephrectomy" or, more broadly, "natural orifice" surgery. In the case of us guys, the idea would be to use the rectum.

The procedure reduces external damage or injury to the donor. The necessary incisions are smaller. Recovery time is quicker. And pain in reduced.

While the benefits seems positive, it still gives me the "willies" to think that someday I could donate a kidney out of my butt.

Engaging the entrepreneurial power of employees with a venture capital model

2009-01-26T15:59:00.001-08:00

The entrepreneur in us sees opportunities everywhere we look, but many people see only problems everywhere they look. The entrepreneur in us is more concerned with discriminating between opportunities than he or she is with failing to see the opportunities - Michael Gerber, author, entrepreneur

This year I participated, in an innovative project as we prepared for review by an internal leadership team. As of this writing, the project is not approved, but the financials are very strong and the technology is very low risk. By the time the project is reviewed by the board later this year, my firm will have spent nearly 18 months, hundreds of man-hours, and tens of thousands of dollars. Yet the work product produced is merely a document and an idea. There is no code and no proof of concept.

The procedure is at best a difficult process; at its’ worst an impossible process. There should be little doubt that the net effect of the process is to inhibit growth through innovation. It is, in fact, a barrier to entry for teams with go-to-market ideas.

Industry is full of companies with high profile examples of innovation. Firms like Google, Pixar, GE, and Apple show that a culture of innovation can bring success. This paper describes how any firm can evolve into a venture driven company that empowers employees with an entrepreneurial spirit.

The goal is plain and simple: achieve explosive growth through a culture of innovation.

To foster this culture, I suggest a model based on capital markets for startup companies. There are three aspects to this proposal:

The corporation acts as a Hedge Fund by allocating funds for investment and measuring aggregate results;
Senior executives function as Venture Capitalists by soliciting ideas and managing a portfolio of investments; and
Employees become the Entrepreneurs championing their ideas and finding resources to execute a project.

The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It's as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer - Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese's

The Hedge Fund

A hedge fund is a private investment fund whose managers can make speculative investment and participate in profits from money invested. The company can function much like a hedge fund by structuring projects as a portfolio of investments. The managers of the “hedge fund” are the executives who normally vet within for the company.

The corporation, then, decides how much to invest in the fund. Each year these funds are set aside for innovation and it becomes the responsibility of the hedge fund managers to assure the funds are invested, and that the portfolio achieves an appropriate return.

As the Hedge Fund, the company would:

Invest in the fund by allocating monies for innovation. An investment to the innovation fund each year;
Appoint executives to function as the Venture Capitalists;
Set an ROI threshold for the fund

Taking Risk

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work - Thomas Edison, inventor and scientist

A great percentage of start-ups fail. Hedge funds that specialize in innovation spread their investments over a wide range of projects with the understanding that a small number of winners will earn a return for the entire portfolio. Risky projects will be an integral part of the firm’s portfolio.

Like true VC hedge funds, the firm can mitigate risk by funding projects that already have some track record of success. This track record could be a successful competitor, a custom built technology, or a joint venture with a client.

Exit Strategies

Unlike the holdings in venture capital hedge funds, the company’s investments generally do not end with a liquidity event (sale of the company or IPO).Instead successful investments will result in product lines or business that generate revenue and profit. Less successful projects are absorbed into existing businesses or closed outright.

It should be noted that there is the possibility of a liquidity event. Although these may be rare, some projects could be spun off as independent companies. In such cases the firm would act as a private equity fund, holding a stake in the company until an appropriate liquidity event occurs.

Venture Capitalists

Since one fails often, address markets that make it worthwhile when one does succeed. Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems

Executives that normally vet for capital investment will serve as the venture capitalists in this model. As VC, each executive is expected to oversee a portfolio of projects and to assure that their funds are invested. Each VC would have a specialty where they would focus their investments. It would be expected, though, that they would invest outside their area on occasion.

The VC has four primary roles:

Invest a share of the fund in projects of their choosing;
Provide oversight of the projects in their portfolio;
Mentor the entrepreneurs assigned to the projects in their portfolio; and
Arrange exit strategies for their projects.

Key to the success of the hedge fund is the oversight and mentoring role of the VC. Unlike an “approve-and-forget” capital investment model, VCs of the hedge fund share responsibility for the success of their portfolio. This oversight keeps entrepreneurs accountable to accomplish milestones and meet their financial goals.

VCs solicit, review, and select projects based on the business plan from the entrepreneur. The VCs is empowered and required to invest his share of the fund. VCs will be expected to accomplish the appropriate due diligence, but being empowered will make the decision process move quickly. With empowerment comes accountability, and the VC will be expected to make rational decisions based on standard venture criteria such as, experience of management, amount of existing business, size of the market, first-in status, and the competitive landscape.

Like true VCs, the managers in the firm’s hedge fund will collaborate on some projects. Some of the VCs will assume an “angle investor” role by making small investments in a large set of projects in their early stages. As angle projects progress, the VC may decide to invest additional rounds of financing. Also, several VCs may invest together in a project, thereby sharing the risk, or implementing a large scale innovation.

VCs shall participate is the financial success of their portfolio. A bonus would be paid based on the success of the projects in the portfolio.

I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others... I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent -Thomas Edison, inventor and scientist

Intrapreneurs

Some people dream of great accomplishments, while others stay awake and do them – Anonymous

Entrepreneur : one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.

Intrapreneur : one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of an idea within a business or enterprise.

The entrepreneurs are the employees that champion an idea (intrapreneur is a term made up for this white paper). Entrepreneurs are passionate about an idea, and work to see it through to its completion. This includes building prototypes, writing business plans, seeking funding from VCs, and managing the project day-to-day.

Much of the motivation and reward of these employees is intrinsic and non-financial. This includes the excitement of working on a new and innovative idea. In addition, once funding is approved, the employee will have effectively transferred into a new position with the company. Like the VC, however, the entrepreneur will be rewarded based on the financial success of the project or its exit strategy.

The entrepreneur has the following roles:

Develop a business plan;
Seek and obtain funding from the company VCs;
Build prototypes and proof-of-concepts for the project;
Obtain resources needed to complete the project;
Manage the project, day-to-day; and
Report progress and financial results to the VC

It should be expected that projects are present by a team of employees. In these cases, one member of the team shall be designated as the entrepreneur. It is likely that the entrepreneurs are employees that already hold management or leadership positions (but that are not a requirement).

Mitigating Personal Risk

Entrepreneurs assume a great deal of personal risk with regard to the security of their career. Although positions cannot be held open for the entrepreneur pending completion of their project, the corporation should guarantee that a position will be made available regardless of the success or failure of the project. Truly motivated entrepreneurs, however, do not consider failure, and will pursue the idea under the assumption of success.

The Business Plan

Entrepreneurs must submit a business plan to obtain funding for their projects. Business plans should follow common standards for start-up plans. At a minimum, a business plan shall include:

Description of the Idea;
Marketing Plan;

List of existing customers
List of target customers
Size of the market
Pricing

Competitive Analysis

List of competitors
Advantages and Disadvantages

Operational Plan

Management Team
Personnel
Technology

Financial Plan

Start-up Expenses
3 Year Pro-Forma

Advantages of the Hedge Fund Model

This approach to funding invention, and building a culture of innovation has distinct advantages over my company’s current model.

The current procedure in of itself is an expensive and labor intense process. It requires multiple stages of presentation and approval. The current process is self-regulating, scaring away employees that are intimidated by the process regardless of the quality of their idea.
An innovation provides a method of easily submitting an idea, but except for quick rejections, it routes ideas through the same burdensome approval process.
The hedge fund model is simple; write a business plan and present it to a VC.
Our current procedure is slow. It will be very difficult to have first-in status if seeking funding through the current process. Real-time Fraud and Abuse, for example, has been in-process for months.
The hedge fund model is fast.
Where our current procedure is focused on preparation and planning during the approval process, hedge fund is focused on execution of the idea.
Hedge fund rewards entrepreneurs and VCs for taking risk and accomplishing goals.
Hedge fund provides a tangible portfolio of innovation and R&D.
Hedge fund is based on tried and true practices of bring an idea to market.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover -Mark Twain, author

Twitter gives up on Instant Messaging (for now)

2008-10-13T05:57:00.000-07:00

Twitter, one of Web 2.0's most pointless sites, is giving up on their Instant Messaging capability. According to their status page, Twitter is changing the classification of the feature from something needing a fix to something they will build. Apparently their implementation of the feature is neither scalable nor reliable.

Twitter's existence is based on their invention of "micro-blogging." Micro blogs are short notes posted in response to the question "what are you doing." Beyond the concept of a micro-blog Twitter makes it easy to submit updates through their web site or via an SMS message. Instant messaging is simply another way to post the tiny blogs.

The relevance of Twitter has to come into question. Certainly Facebook's news feed serves the same purpose, and is much more common. In fact, most of my Twitter posting are made through the Twitter Facebook application. Maybe it's me, but I believe the real value to Twitter is it's ability to post comments via several easy to use methods. Instant messaging is one of those sources and should be an urgent capability to add. Otherwise the company will lose any relevance to others providing a similar service as part of a greater offering.

Thoughts on Google Chrome

2008-09-05T15:32:00.001-07:00

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine said "everything Google does is excellent". He was showing me Google Maps, which at that time, was revolutionary. Until then, I considered Google another search vendor of Yahoo and Alta Vista ilk. Shortly thereafter I signed up for Google Mail (remember when it was by invitation only), then Google Talk, and later Google Docs.

Although I like Google Docs a lot, using it made me realize that not everything from Google is excellent. And that sums up my opinion about Google's new browser, Chrome. While I like it, and am using it a lot, it's not excellent…yet.

I downloaded and installed Chrome shortly after it was made publicly available this week. Like everything that Google does, the download and installation was fast and automatic. Getting started is easy. Regardless of their claims, Chrome is really just another browser. But true to the Google brand, the browser excels at search. Sure the integrated address and search bar is nice, but IE and firefox let you search from the address bar too. The search feature I really like is the within a page; I like the way Chrome highlights hits on the scrollbar.

Two days is not a lot of time to work with a program, and being a new application in a mature market, Chrome is expected to have flaws. Here some of the issues that I found:

Sites that perform browser sniffing don't render properly. Hotmail, for instance, only supports its' classic html mode. And our FogBugz issue tracking software refuses to run its' Wiki in Chrome.
Facebook applications behave oddly, in particular I found that links and buttons, such as "Allow" or "Ignore" fail.
Our web applications developed by my teams do not render well, but then they don't render well in FireFox either. We remain a Microsoft shop.
Silverlight applications do not run in Chrome, so Google surfers can't see pictures of my family.
There's no history list, at least not without typing the first few characters of a web site.
There's no button to display a home page; well Ok, there's a setting but it's off by default.
I can't (and maybe it's just me) get back to the frequent-page thumbnails without opening a new tab. I want to make this my home page.

I find it interesting that Google chose to enter the browser market. Do we need another browser? It's only been a couple of years since Internet Explorer was the only real player. If Chrome catches on there will be four; IE, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome (nah, I don't count Opera). Personally, I find myself gravitating to Chrome despite its' flaws and am considering making it my default browser. Although I use Internet Explorer a bit less I find that I never open Firefox anymore (I have Safari for Windows, but really, who uses that?); this after only two days with Chrome.

The competitive target of Chrome is Internet Explorer, and certainly the Chrome comic book takes shots at IE weaknesses. If my browsing patterns are common, though, then Firefox will suffer more. In the end, Firefox and Chrome may just duke it out for the (tiny but vocal) anti-Microsoft crowd. I heard a rumor that Google's entry into the browser space is a precursor to their entry into PDA's with Android. In much the same way that Apple leveraged Safari on the iPhone, Google will leverage Chrome. And on a tiny cell phone screen Chrome's quirkiness will be unimportant. The cell phone angle is intriguing, but Google's open platform approach will produce odd devices and applications that will seem crude when compared to Apple's cohesive offering. If nothing else, Google is making the software industry fun again.

eWeek looks at Computing on the Cloud

2008-07-08T19:30:00.001-07:00

My paper copy of eWeek is generally fodder for the circular file. In fact, the magazine rarely makes it as far as my office. Instead it stays in our reception area on a coffee table along with other unread magazines. This week, though, I picked up a couple of editions to browse while taking lunch. In the process I discovered some interesting cloud computing technologies.

The first is old news for leading edge developers, but new to me. The June 30 edition ran an analysis on the Google App Engine. The Google App Engine competes with Amazon Web Services in scope and intent. Although Google currently only supports the Python language, betting an application on Google infrastructure seems pretty safe.

In a similar vein, GigaSpaces offers an application server that sits on Amazon's EC2 cloud computing solution. The GigaSpaces application server provides a middleware layer between Java or .Net applications and the Amazon Web Services backend.

A third product, Jungle Disk, has a different goal, but uses computing on the cloud none-the-less. Jungle Disk is a backup and storage solution that works with Amazon's S3 Web Service. I have not tried Jungle Disk, but eWeek offers a fairly thorough analysis that puts the product on my to-do list.

Of course the interesting common thread with all these applications is computing on the cloud. GigaSpaces and Jungle Disk take advantage of Amazon's early entry into the utility computing space. Google, however, does everything well, and should have little trouble catching up. Old timers like myself remember the days of time-sharing on mainframes. Cloud computing proves what's old is new again with one important difference; now utility computing is affordable.

Once You’re Lucky

2008-07-03T08:38:00.001-07:00

I often pick books based on reviews from Wired Magazine. This was true when I picked up Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good. In Mark Horowitz's review, he claimed that "Sarah Lacy…hangs with [entrepreneurs] them, gains their trust, and gets the goods. No other recent chronicle delivers such intimate, behind-the-scene glimpses into Silicon Valley startup life." It's an entertaining read reminiscent of Accidental Empires.

My issue with the current crop of valley startups has little to do with Sarah Lacy's book, although her tales reinforce my opinion. The problem is very few of the companies actually provide a site that is useful. Even Facebook, the current reigning king of Web 2.0, doesn't help its members solve problems or get things done. Of course my days of finding a good off-campus kegger with lots of girls are long past. As Twitter, Slide, or Ning they seem even less useful.

What's interesting about these sites, though, and the stories Sarah wraps around them, is the underlying technology. Maybe an old-timer like myself doesn't see the benefit of social networking. I do see where collaboration and go anywhere sites can be very useful. I'm expecting a new wave of web startups that take Web 2.0 into truly commercially viable areas.

Thoughts on Innovation

2008-06-30T18:54:00.001-07:00

It is not easy to foster a culture of innovation in a corporation. Ironically, I have not always felt this way. I have spent the great majority of my career at start-ups, entrepreneurial charged companies, and software makers. Each of these environments relied on the creativity of their people to remain competitive.

When I joined my current firm, we were a small and hungry software supplier in the HealthCare industry. We served a particular niche market and our growth was dependent upon finding new and inventive ways to sell more products into this niche. In my first year with the firm we doubled our number of offerings.

Something happened to that culture of invention when we were swallowed by a bigger fish. It's hard to put a finger on it, but maybe it's our build vs. buy strategy that favors buy over build. Maybe it's our market dominance and entrenched legacy customer base. Maybe it's a culture that meticulously tracks where each hour of engineering time is spent.

You can start with the existing method of starting a project around a new idea. A rigid and exhaustive procedure was established to analyze projects for funding. The firm sets aside money especially for these projects. But the process is long, bureaucratic, and daunting. Only those employees with the greatest perseverance can weather the multiple stages, detailed requirements, and long delays of this process. The process itself, then, serves to prevent innovation.

It's not that the company is not interested in innovation. This year the firm initiated a council of thinkers who are charged with encouraging the submission of creative ideas. On the surface you might think the initiative could be very successful, but I see some fundamental flaws that could stall our efforts.

First and foremost of the flaws is the establishment of yet another process. And what happens when an idea passes through the process established by the idea team? The idea is handed off to the same process as before, but possibly skipping the first stage. In affect we have put a new process in front of the old process. If the old process was a deterrent to innovation, then the new one is doubly so.

Add to the mess of procedures, a subtle lack of focus. This lack of focus was exposed by our firm's COO who made it apparent her goal is innovation in operations. The Japanese auto industry of the 1980s was cited as an example. This is fine enough, except the council had established criteria around the analysis of new product ideas. In other words, we were looking externally for innovation, when the COO expected us to look internally. The criteria to judge projects of these two types are dramatically different.

So far, the results of our council are disappointing. No idea has successfully come to fruition. And the promotion of an innovative culture is stalled.

Of course everyone holds up Google as the standard. Even among my staff, I've tried to encourage the idea of spending 20% of our time on new ideas. The key to the Google concept, though, isn't necessarily the allocation of time. Instead it's the thinking that with a new idea, many people "won't get it", at least not at first. The idea has to go through some element of trial and error before it can be tabled or killed. This is in direct contrast to our approach, which puts rigorous paperwork between the idea and a prototype.

If we really want innovation to take hold at our company, we'll need to change the model. We'll need to empower people to spend time building working versions of their idea, instead of filing a form. We'll need a little of the "just do it" attitude, instead of waiting for approvals. I guess we'll need to regain a some of our entrepreneurial mojo.

Thoughts on some Web 2.0 Sites

2008-06-20T21:02:00.001-07:00

The expression Web 2.0 has been with us so long that we can consider it a Tired term. Founded on the principles of collaboration, and built on highly interactive technology (read AJAX), Web 2.0 sites represent the post bubble rebirth of an industry. Some of these sites offer fairly valuable services and some of them are nonsense. Here are my thoughts…

Facebook is seen as the company with the most potential for long term success. I've been using the site almost daily for over a month and I can honestly say that "I don't get it". Sure, I'm a bit of a dinosaur, having attended college (both degrees) long before social networking came to the web. But in all my use of the site over the last several weeks, it hasn't helped me accomplish anything. Facebook has been pretty successful at positioning itself as a platform for micro-applications. Here again, I don't get it. I've tried many of the applications and always end up with the same thought…"so what?". I read somewhere that everyone eventually has an "ah-ha" moment with social networking; I'm still waiting for mine with Facebook.

On the contrary I saw the benefit to LinkedIn the day I started using it nearly five years ago. This site has helped me find work, consultants, and business leads. I've heard it called social networking for business people, but there's really very little that social about it. The site generally prevents people from contacting strangers, at least without an introduction. Ironically, you can pay money to override this fundamental aspect of the site. Paying members have access to InMail messages and can reach out to people directly. Anyone in a career should be active on LinkedIn.

Plaxo is an odd hybrid of Facebook and LinkedIn. I actually avoided using Plaxo for sometime, opting instead for GoodContacts, but when GoodContacts looked like they weren't going to make it, I switched loyalties. Plaxo suffers from an identity crisis. It started as a convenient way of managing business and personal contacts online. I use it as my main address book, and sync Outlook, my Blackberry, and other sites to Plaxo. Somewhere along the way, though, the site morphed into Plaxo Pulse. The new site is a clone of Facebook, right down to the page layout and color scheme. I still use it to keep my address list, but I don't think this company will survive.

Geni is a cute social networking site for families. I checked it out after reading Once You're Lucky. This site is actually pretty good. It is easy to use and has all the capabilities needed to stay in touch with your extended family. Nonetheless I feel this site is doomed. I make this judgment simply because no one seems to know anything about it. My family is so tired of receiving web site invitations from me that they've all but ignored the Geni invites. And without active participation from my family, the site loses its' usefulness. Add in the fact that there is no subscription or advertising; I have no clue how the site expects to earn revenue.

Twitter is dumbest idea I've ever seen. Still, it's pretty addictive. I checked it out because I am starting a project that requires a similar SMS interface. My project, however, will be useful, where Twitter simply generates noise.

I have a love/hate relationship with Flickr. I use the site a lot by storing all my family's pictures there. I uploaded so many pictures that I had to buy a subscription. Flickr was a leader in establishing sharing, but now its UI seems dated. I find it difficult to use, or at least difficult to learn how to use. And I am disappointed in the site's "badge" ability; that led me to seek alternatives including Slide.

Krugle on the other hand is one of the best and most useful sites I've found. Of course you have to be a programmer to appreciate the site's benefits, but for those of us developing software for a living the site is amazing. Forget Google Code Search; Krugle is the place to go for snippets of code and projects in the public domain.

YouTube is silly and innocent fun. If you're reading this far into this post, then you already know all about YouTube.

Some people claim that Google Docs is meant to replace Microsoft Office. Google, of course, denies such claims by saying that Google Docs are meant to augment productivity suites. Frankly I don't care about the pending Microsoft vs Google wars. I like Office and I like Google Docs. I've read that Google Docs is not as feature rich as Office, and certainly the Google toolbar has nowhere near the number of buttons as the Office Ribbon. That said, I've never looked for a feature in Google Docs that it didn't have. I guess that says something for the feature bloat in Office.

Everybody uses maps online. MapQuest was amazing when it first came out. Google, however, really lifted the bar when it introduced Google Maps. Now all the map providers have full screen maps that pan as you drag them. They all have satellite pictures and zoom. Google has Street View and Live and Birdseye View. Of Google, Live, Yahoo! and MapQuest, I like Live best. But they're all good.

I checked out Slide because I wanted a cool way to show pictures on my web site. Slide has some cool features, but I was a little disappointed. I can't imagine building an entire business around slide shows so I don't look for this site to last long.

Popfly is Microsoft's site to demonstrate how cool their Silverlight technology is. It's kind of cool for developers building mashups and who don't mind using Microsoft technology. That's probably a pretty small group, but since I am technology agnostic, I use it and think it's a pretty cool site.

Delicious on the other hand is about as uncool as you can get. I think the site is ugly and serves little purpose. On the contrary, Trailfire, is of similar ilk but is amazing friendly and helpful. What a difference a thoughtful UI can make. Unfortunately, Delicious is the better bet for longevity in this space as they have the backing of Yahoo! and some web 2.0 brand recognition.

Stay away from Fanbox

2008-04-30T09:40:00.001-07:00

I am normally a proponent, and sometimes early adopter, of new technologies including Web Sites and Web Services. I'm also a believer in the value of personal networking. I have accounts all over the web including Face book, LinkedIn, and Plaxo Pulse. I've even signed up for some of the losers such as Friendster, Naymz, and Spaces. I never had a bad experience until I came across Fanbox (notice that I refuse to link to it).

It started with an innocent looking message from a colleague; Dawn has a question for you. When I clicked on the link, I was directed to Fanbox and presented a somewhat racy question that was apparently directed at someone with a much different demographic than me. Ironically I had been introduced to Fanbox a few days early by Sterling Brown and given Sterling's reputation I was intrigued. So I clicked on an answer to the question.

Here's a clue, if you get a message about a question, don't click on it! Answering the question kicked off a wizard inviting my contacts to Fanbox. Fanbox apparently scanned my Outlook Contact list, even though I never click a link for that purpose. It then asked if I me to send a question so I immediately clicked cancel. Later I discovered that Fanbox forwarded the question to my contacts and causing me much embarrassment.

It's really a shame because the fundamental technology of Fanbox is pretty cool. They have reproduced a workstation desktop and point-and-click user interface deployed over the web. The desktop comes with storage, email, and that mimic Microsoft Windows pretty closely. Apparently a Web-based Windows environment is a solution looking for a problem, because Fanbox has jumped on the social networking bandwagon. Outside of social networking, I did not see any real value to the site. There certainly is nothing that would persuade users of Facebook or Google Docs to jump to Fanbox.

So Fanbox has resorted to tricks to obtain members. Grabbing my contact list was akin to spyware or worm tactics. Maybe someday a company with vision will snatch up the Fanbox technology and deploy it provide some real benefit. Until then, avoid Fanbox like the plague.

Plant a Billion Trees

2008-04-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

Brainteaser

2008-04-16T07:55:00.001-07:00

See if you can solve this problem.

Each number shown below follows a certain rule. Figure out the rule and determine the missing number.

January	20
March	5
April	10
December	15
July	?

Is the answer?

Check back in a couple of days. I will post the answer in a comment.

Cash is King

2008-04-16T07:30:00.001-07:00

There is a common notion that most start-ups fail for one of two reasons; either they are under capitalized or do not sell aggressively. In both these cases, the firm fails to raise the appropriate amount of cash needed to sustain operations. Of course all failed businesses run out of money, but some never give themselves a chance.

A firm that never gave itself was chance is Elite Technology Partners. The company was born from the technical brain trust of Blackwood Trading, and quickly conceived a product and business model based on their experience from the other firm. Their product was greatly inspired by Blackwood, but targeted a specific strategy and different distribution channel.

Elite's founders had learned from their experience at Blackwood. Certainly, they put to use the intellectual capital gained at Blackwood. They also learned from Blackwood's failed effort to market themselves successfully. In addition, the founders recognized that Blackwood's operational model was very expensive.

However, Elite underestimated the effort required to develop a product and bring it to market. Very quickly the firm fell into a chicken and egg situation. In Elite's case, they couldn't sell product because they did not have the capital to complete it. And they could not raise cash through sales because their product was not finished. Add to their situation the economic environment during 2002, where investment capital had effectively dried up. Venture capitalists were only looking at firms generating cash through sales.

In Elite's case, the lack of cash led to a series of strategies changes that sealed the fate of the company. First, a shortage of cash caused many of their best engineers to secure positions at other employers. Elite sought an investment arrangement through key prospects that would enable them to bring their product to market. But partnerships with a large investment come with restrictions. Demands of exclusive use and ownership of intellectual property made partnership deals impractical.

To raise cash, Elite sold its' talent in consulting arrangements. The consulting business was profitable and brought in enough cash to keep the operating. Unfortunately the opportunity cost of consulting was a halt to further development of Elite's product. In the end, Elite failed to complete its' product; Elite failed to complete its' product because it failed to raise the capital necessary to build the necessary technology.

I am working with an entrepreneur who is in a similar position. He is following a conscious strategy of delaying raising despite having an established relationship with investment bankers. The entrepreneur is betting that signed contracts will make the firm more attractive to investors. This may be true, but having no cash in his firm, he will have a difficult time meeting any operational commitments.

My observations of Elite Technology Partners leads me to believe that my friend has a risky strategy. Because he refuses to seek capital, he will not have a fully functional team in place when he signs his first contract. When the contract is signed he will need to complete his technology, hire staff, and seek capital within a very short timeframe. In the three to six months needed to receive private equity cash his venture could fail.

Elite Technology Partners failed because they did not raise cash for their operations. Successful entrepreneurs beg, borrow, or steal (Ok, maybe not steal) enough to give their companies inertia. A firm with inertia will attract further investment, or generate cash organically.

Here’s a Good Read

2008-03-25T11:22:00.001-07:00

I just finished Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. The book has to be one of my most favorite non-fiction reads. I have to admit that Mr. Ariely had me engaged from the first page of the introduction.

Here's the premise; we believe we make perfectly informed decisions, but truth be told we are a product of our nature. That nature makes decisions that are irrational; not only are our decisions irrational, but they are irrational in a consist manner. Through over a dozen chapters supported by controlled experiment, Ariely makes his point that our choices are behavioral.

Do you know why we so often promise ourselves to diet and exercise, only to have the thought vanish when the dessert cart rolls by?

Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don't really need?

Do you know why we still have a headache after taking a five-cent aspirin, but why that same headache vanishes when the aspirin costs 50 cents?

Do you know why people who have been asked to recall the Ten Commandments tend to be more honest (at least immediately afterward) than those who haven't? Or why honor codes actually do reduce dishonesty in the workplace?

By the end of this book, you'll know the answers to these and many other questions that have implications for your personal life, for your business life, and for the way you look at the world. As a bonus you will also learn how much fun social science can be, and how to see more clearly the causes for our everyday behaviors, including the many cases in which we are predictably irrational.
Click here for more information.

I stumbled across the book while browsing "What We're Reading" on Slate. Check it out. In the meantime, I think I'll pay more attention to the books reviewed at Slate.

Middlesex

2008-03-14T10:02:00.001-07:00

I recently finished the book Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. The book is a Pulitzer Prize winner and Opra Book Club award winner. It is a well narrated but strange tale of a hermaphite exploring the roots of his condition.

It's hard to compare the story to another book. It spans three generation like many classic "come to America" novels. The subject matter will make some people uncomfortable, with its' thread of incest and gender confusion. In some ways I liken it to Running with Scissors, except that it is much more coherent and expertly told. Running with Scissor is more of a collection of oddball short stories written in a style of a middle-schooler.

I found myself drawn to the time period and location of the story. The narrator is my age, and grows up in the same metropolitan area as I did. References to Detroit places and events brought back memories of my own formative years.

Once started, I found the book hard to put down. I recommend it.

Hey Google, WTF?

2008-02-29T13:45:00.000-08:00

Last month I started displaying ads on this blog using Google Adsense. I did it as a curiosity more than anything else. After all, a low traffic blog like mine will not generate much revenue. In fact, six weeks of Adsense has earned a whopping $9.76. Imagine my surprise, then, when I received the follow notice...

It has come to our attention that invalid clicks have been generated on your Google ads, posing a financial risk to our AdWords advertisers.Please note that any activity that may artificially inflate an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings is strictly prohibited by our program policies.
...
Please note that because we credit advertisers for any invalid activity we detect, we may adjust your account earnings for any days during which invalid clicks occurred.

If you were clicking your ads out of interest or to see who was advertising on your site, please note that clicking on your own ads for any reason is strictly prohibited by our program policies. Instead, we suggest using the AdSense preview tool as an alternative.
...

Ok. I understand that advertisers will not be happy about publishers clicking away on ads for no other purpose than to inflate the click-throughs. Higher click-throughs result in higher fees. In my case, however, it's pretty obvious that I'm not stealing advertisers blind. I would think that Google, for all their sophisticated engineering power, could derive an algorithm that ignore sites with a minimum number of clicks. Less than 10 in a month in my case.

Now here's the rub; I clicked on the ads because I had a legitimate interest in the products offered. It's a compliment to Google that the ads they choose by my blog have relevance to the topics I discuss. I've even downloaded whitepapers and started conversations with sales reps. I expect that Google's fancy algorithms will never determine that.

Google's note refers me to their preview tool, but it isn't supported in my browser. In short, Google's strict policy prohibits me from viewing information that has peaked my interested. Given that I am a buyer of technology I exactly represent the target market of my advertisers.

When it's all said and done, I will continue to click on ads that interest me. If Google revokes my Adsense, then so-be-it. It's a sad testament to a company that many hold in high esteem, but frankly this web behemoth seems more and more like vintage 90s Microsoft.

Project Runway

2008-02-14T05:24:00.000-08:00

My family has grown attached to Bravo's reality show Project Runway. Of course we love it's entertainment value. The colorful characters. The drama. The stress. The reviews. I like looking at the models. My daughter loves the clothes.

During last night's episode, I had an epiphany of sort, and yes this will tie to technology. In the episode the panel needed to eliminate two designers, reducing their number to three for a show at Bryant Park. Instead, though, the panel had deadlocked on two designers and concocted a run-off for the final spot.

During the panel discussion, the judges criticized work they felt was good and commercial viable. The problem was it didn't fit their perception of "fashion". Here's the thing; I always felt fashion was driven by consumer demand and that designer's true goal was creating clothing that people desired. Silly me.

The Fashion industry isn't about wearable clothes. Instead, it's about creating an artistic vision around clothing. This is an important distinction. Fashion designers, especially at high levels, think of themselves as artists. Entire economies and sub-cultures have formed around this concept. Those artists with the most successful vision can attach their names to commercial garments. In a sense, the Fashion industry is all about building a "brand" for the designer/artist that.

So what does this have to do with technology? Well, in case you haven't noticed, our industry works in much the same way. Think of ventures like Delicious, YouTube, and Facebook; what commercial value do they provide? Do they even make money?

I would venture to say that these firms, and the people who formed them, see themselves as technology visionaries. Like fashion, entire economies and sub-cultures have formed around their offerings. And although their technology may not be profitable, their brand has great value.

Ironically my former manager at Information Builders, Gerry Cohen, used to say "we're not in the fashion business." Firms like mine that grind out a living supplying technology and it's not very sexy or glamorous. It begs the question: is it necessary to have a visionary brand that brings attention to more commercial offerings? Or can non-sexy technology exist simply on the value they provide.

Data Warehousing Dilemma

2008-02-13T09:54:00.000-08:00

We are in the midst of a long running Business Intelligence project. The original thought behind the iniative was a solution allowing analysts to explore their data. Through a combination of historical data and predictive modelling, the solution would provide key metrics to manage their business. After several mis-starts, we discovered the wisdom of Ralph Kimball.

Kimball's Data Warehouse Toolkit was an ephifany and inspiration. Suddenly before us was the solution to performance woes. His solution? A star schema, where with the warehouse measures are retained in a single table linked with related descriptive data. All the descriptive data (dimensions) were related through the single fact table containing the measures.

Our project started simple enough. Using sample report templates from our Product Management team, we determined a grain for the warehouse and computed the appropriate measures. The grain, by the way, is the lowest level of detail needed to answer the questions asked of the data.

It soon became apparent that there was a flaw in our design. Not the design of the warehouse, per se, but the design of the system. The reports designed by our Product Management team were at the level of the grain. Running them would produce thousands of pages of detail. Nowhere were we taking advantage of the warehouse's dimensions to drill into these reports. Seeing the flaw, we tasked our Product Managers with spec'ing the entry points to their reports.

What was returned to us was a disaster. Instead of taking advantage of the warehouse or even the capabilities of the Business Intelligence technology, the PMs designed more reports. These new reports were summaries with drill paths to the detail provided earlier. They also contained an entirely new set of metrics, all calculated at a different grain.

The problem of the different grain was exocerbated by many of the new metrics. These metrics were computed with division of aggregated counts. The counts, however, were not on the fact table, instead they were distinct counts of dimension values. There is the dilemma, we needed figures that could not be pre-computed into our cubes. The metrics were computed "on-the-fly" and resulted in tremendous performance problems.

I believe the solution is simple and obvious. We need additional fact tables a different grains. The purists among my team didn't see it so clearly (they will by time we're finished). The problem is Kimble's treatse on data warehouses discourages multiple fact tables in the database schema.

Kimble oversimplifyies warehouses with the star schema. Any complex set of data will have measures that can not be summarized into a single fact table. In truth, though, multiple fact tables will be an integral part of any practical solution based on a data warehouse.

The 33 Strategies of War

2008-02-13T09:53:00.000-08:00

I just finish the War book in Robert Greene's amoral series. This is one of those non-fiction books that starts great but becomes a bit of a drag to finish. That said, I would recommend it. History buffs and self-help freaks may find it intriguing.

Greene outlines 33 strategies of War, and then attempts to demonstrate how these are used in everyday life. Many of the strategies are polar opposites; like #4 Create a Sense of Urgency and Desperation and #11 Trade Space for Time. One strategy suggests a quick strike and the other recommends waiting.

I like the historical references. I was especially interested in tales of Alexander the Great and Napoleon, two of Greene's favorites. I also found the stories around the Austrian leader Klemens von Metternich fascinating; I was unfamiliar with Metternich prior to reading this book. Greene also uses several stories of Samurai warriors, another culture that I found intriguing.

Frankly, I found the self-help side of the book a little light. This is much more a history review than a treatise on how to beat your co-workers to a promotion.

Greene's amoral series includes to other volumes, The 48 Laws of Power, and The Art of Seduction. I should check out the latter book...I need lots of help there.

The Kite Runner

2008-02-13T09:17:00.000-08:00

Khaled Hossein spins a tale worthy of Charles Dickens. As I read The Kite Runner I was reminded of the stories David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities. The first because of the person propose and decades long story line. The second because the situation becomes dangerous for the protagonist when he travels back home.

Hossein, however, avoids the flowery language and odd analogies of Dickens. Instead he writes in a more direct style reminiscent of Hemmingway.

Did I just do that? Did I compare a first novel to Dickens and Hemmingway. How cliche'. Needless to say, I enjoyed the book and recommend it. And don't let Hossein's Afghan roots fool you, the book it definitely written from an American point of view.

Maybe Blogger's not so bad

2008-01-24T05:12:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I submitted a post complaining about blogging with Blogger. I switched the host from Doteasy to Blogspot, and has resolved most of my issues. So maybe Blogger isn't that bad, but they could improve their support for FTP sites.

There is still some quirkiness though. For instance, I changed my feed setting from "full" to "short" expecting that my feed will carry the first paragraph or two of my posts. Instead the feed shows none of the post. I also can't figure out how to include comments on the main page. And the comments page is styled with Blogger's default color and font scheme.

I have also set my main page to hold seven days worth of posts, but I see that it goes back a month. There must be a setting that I am missing, because the QA of a site like Blogger can not possibly pass errors this obvious.

By the way. I have a new URL for my feed. For those of you who subscribe (both of you) please change the feed to: http://iambillmccann.blogspot.com/rss.xml

Blogger Frustrations

2008-01-23T06:56:00.000-08:00

I have been using Blogger for about a year. Prior to using Blogger, I published my blog manually by typing html and updating links on the pages. Blogger has made publishing much easier, but there are some things I haven't had the time to figure out.

For instance, I don't know how to write a summary for RSS feeds. It was pretty easy using manual methods. I would simply copy the first couple of paragraphs of my post into atom.xml and I was done. Blogger, though, seems to post the entire article to my feed.

I also struggle with styling. My posting on "How Much Detail in Requirement", for example, switches to the "smallest" type size on the bullet list. I have manually adjusted it many times, but I can't get the text to match. I also struggle with the vertical spacing. Unfortunately, Blogger's WYSIWYG editor isn't all that. Maybe I'll switch to Google Docs for editing my posts.

I have trouble with my template too. I like the top of my blogger pages to match the style of my web site. Unfortunately, Blogger's styles clash with my stylesheet resulting in odd colors on my links. I can fix this manually, but I haven't found the time...so I look stupid instead.

The problem could be related to my host. I use Doteasy to host my blog and web site. Blogger supports richer layouts, but you have to host with Blog*Spot. I'm thinking of hosting with Blog*Spot and using links to connect my blog with my web site.

Of course I'm secretly hoping that someone reads this post and has quick and dirty solutions for my problems.

Are we dumbing down programming?

2008-01-23T05:02:00.000-08:00

Her resume looked great. She was coming to us as a high end (price) developer. But as I listened to her describe an abstract class in response to my asking her about abstraction, I had to wonder; have we made it too easy to be a programmer?

It's true that abstraction is the most intangible concept of OOP. During my phone screens of candidates, though, I find myself wishing I had tipped them off. I will be asking about OOP. Go look up "object oriented programming" on wikipedia.

I generally blame our universities for this failure. OOP is largely conceptual, and should be introduced and reinforced by any Computer Science department worth their accreditation. Once in the workplace, software engineers rarely get the proper mentoring on solid coding habits.

We really can't lay blame entirely on universities and trade schools. No, much of the problem lies with the technologies we use to build applications. High on the list of offenders are Visual Basic, Visual Studio, Java, and .Net. Throw in HTML, XHTML, XML, and all the mark-up language derivatives. Then add in any of the web development tools like Cold Fusion and Flash. Of course the scripting languages, JavaScript, VBScript, and Perl virtually prevent solid coding practices.

My obsession with OOP stems from a very specific business need. I have to support ten software products with a very modest staff. The most basic way to accomplish this is by reducing the amount of code. An obvious way to reduce code is reusing code. Unfortunately I inherited a situation based on copy-and-paste code. After three years of fighting copy-and-paste habits, we still support multiple versions of code that perform the same task.

Many developers confuse using objects with OOP. Dropping a control onto a form does not constitute object oriented programming. In fact, there will be nothing reusable in the result. In addition, the automatically generated code written by the action of dropping the control is almost certainly unreadable. But then, many developers today don't even realize code is being generated.

So our tools have dumbed down programming skills. Especially for those developers who rely on the designers and tools built into their development environments (IDE). For me, I'd like to find an engineer or two who would love to create the next Visual Studio, instead of dragging controls from a toolbar like some pre-programmed automaton.

Small Company Blues

2008-01-17T04:53:00.000-08:00

At dinner with a friend yesterday, he lamented about problems rolling out technology in a firm he is managing. Apparently his team misses their delivery dates; by a large amount. As he described his situation I felt like I was experiencing deja-vu.

His story in brief; he has four people maintaining his technology. These people are responsible for bringing clients online, handling technical problems, and building new capabilities. Projects are frequently months late. A core component of the system is constructed on an antiquated platform (Paradox) and only one individual has working knowledge of the code. And on and on.

This is a very common situation in technology firms managed by "non-technical" people. It is caused by the number one oversight of CEOs who have never worked with sourcecode. I even see it here, at my current firm. The problem is that there is little accounting for maintaining the product. The assumption being, when the product is delivered to the customer, its' developers are free to work on the next thing.This is a dangerous trap and I have seen many very intelligent executives fall in it. Inevitably, the development team becomes forced into choosing between support of the current product and construction of the next. That decision is a no-brainer, and construction of the next thing gets continually put on hold.The solution is fairly simple, but it is a bitter pill for developers. The team must be split, with one group providing support and the other working on the next thing. Of course no one want to be trapped providing full-time support. In my role, I have tempered this morale issue through job rotation. In the end it is necessary to prevent the continuous interruption of new development.

No Country for Old Men

2008-01-17T04:29:00.000-08:00

I didn't see the movie. I read the book. Here's your warning: this blog is a spoiler for the story, so if you plan on seeing the movie, take a pass on this posting.

I finished No Country for Old Men with mixed feelings. Admittedly I found the story riveting, after all I could hardly put the book down once I had started it. Call me soft, though, I don't like when the bad guy wins.

It is fast paced with a riveting story line. The language is simple and boiled down to the basics. There are no flowery descriptions of peoples feelings or dramatic landscapes. Given that most scenes carry a fair amount of blood, this is a good thing. Characters aren't very deep or well developed, or maybe they just don't live long enough to get developed. It's a perfect story for a Coen brothers movie.

One more thing...the book would be easier to read if the dialog was surrounded by quotes. I don't see why a basic grammar rule would be flat out neglected.

How much detail in requirement?

2008-01-10T14:03:00.000-08:00

I mentioned that over the course of twenty five plus years, I've tried nearly every development process you can name. In my experience, I find that projects tend to break down at the start. Yep. Failure is built in into the project during the requirements stage.

Requirements are written in varying detail. During my tenure with DoubleClick in 2000, we had initiated a project for the advertiser side of our industry. In my ten months with the firm, the document was never finished. The last time I saw it, it exceeded 300 pages. We appointed a steering committee to oversee the project and they would debate the document endlessly. And the result of the debate? A bigger document.

In short, the entire exercise was useless. In parallel to the requirements fiasco, an engineering team was already well into the project, virtually ignoring the written requirements. I have seen this practice of over doing requirements at several firms, including DoubleClick, Information Builders, and Ameritech. In most cases the resulting document is either too large to be useful, or is ignored by the developers.

Of course the reverse is often true too. In fact, the reverse is probably much more frequent. For example, my team recently received the following requirement for a component of a new product:

"Management reports – using multiple selection criteria, produce reports that track turnaround time and other metrics."

Thing about the number of questions that are opened by this simple one sentence requirement. What reports? How many? What columns, rows, sorting, totals? What selection criteria? What is turnaround time? What other metrics? In fact, this requirement tells a developer nothing. There is absolutely nothing the system architect can do except return to the business analyst and ask questions. To make matters worse, the business analyst believe he has provided a useful document.

Then there are requirements that mask the business need in technical details. Some might read something like:

"Add a column to the x table to hold a flag. Display the flag on the detail page. When transactions are received for records with the flag set to 0, ignore the transaction."

This might look like the appropriate middle ground, between the extreme examples illustrated earlier. But it's not. The business analyst has interpreted the business requirement and supplied a solution. Although many business analysts fancy themselves as system architects, I have yet to meet one who is better than the engineer. What is the requirements above? A method of disabling master records? A method to manually override batch operations?

The plain fact is it hard to write useful requirements. And a project with poor requirements is destined for delays and cost overruns. If you wish to keep your requirements meaningful, stick to the following rules of thumb:

Describe the business need (not the technical solution)
Keep it brief (it a single capability takes more than a couple pages then your too verbose)
Describe everything (if there are four reports, describe each in with their own requirement)

When you avoid the pitfalls from poor requirements, your project will be constructed on a solid foundation. The chances of success are will be far greater.

What Were They Thinking?

2008-01-08T06:14:00.000-08:00

Here's a book that you can pass on. What Were They Thinking is management dribble that either states the obvious or makes poor conclusion. I've seen the reviews on Amazon and must admit that I disagree. In fact, I think this book is dumb and was very disappointed. I picked the book up based on a magazine review. I didn't feel the anecdotal examples sited by the author truly supported his conclusions. I could easily come up with examples of my own that would refute his claims.

SDLC

2008-01-04T12:42:00.000-08:00

Agile. Waterfall. CMM. Spiral. Test Driven. Blah, blah, blah. I believe I have researched a dozen software development methodology and have tried many of them in practice. Unfortunately I have yet to find one that works. One that combines rapid development with high quality and delivers projects within their targeted timeframes.

I suppose if it was easy, then there wouldn't be entire shelves at Barnes and Noble devoted to it. It it was easy, then everyone would deliver with great success. I'm becoming convinced that no single methodology is portable through development shops. And that successful SDLC (System Development Life Cycle) is a painful trial-and-error process that adopts aspects of several disciplines.

I've tried the standard waterfall. It generally has two problems. First, it is nearly impossible to completely define all the functions of a system prior to providing any code. And second it is very difficult to prevent scope creep.

In the first case, a business analyst has to be imaginative enough to define all aspects of the system. Then she must be able to accurately write these into requirements that are understandable by developers. I've never seen this done well. When overdone, the volumes of requirements become impossible of shift through, when underdone entire aspects of logic are left undocumented.

Waterfall project tend to be very long, running months or even years. This causes the inevitable panic when business analysts realize a pet feature is not included. The panic often results in scope creep, which in turn causes the project to run longer.

We've tried incremental methodologies, such as Agile too. Ok, you say, Agile isn't a methodology, but a class of methodologies. But does anyone really implement strict Extreme or Scrum or EVO?

Regardless, Agile methods have their built-in weakness too. For instance, how do you know when you are done? Or, as in the case with my current projects, resources get diverted into new critical projects, leaving others unfinished.

When it's all said and done, some hybrid method seems to work best. Concrete, but overlapping, phases are necessary for project management. Within each phase, iterative cycles with feedback have great benefit. Who knows, maybe I'll develop my own methodology, and then write a book (that no one will read).

Headhunters

2008-01-01T15:28:00.000-08:00

Has anyone noticed that recruiters work harder when you're hiring than when you are looking?

Just read a great book

2007-08-13T07:32:00.000-07:00

Ok, while not exactly a summer read, I found Made to Stick is a great book. The book is a must read for anyone struggling to get their message out. The author's method is based on their academic observations which they have summarized with the acronym SUCCESs.

SUCCESs is easy enough. It stands for:

Simplicity Stripping an idea to it's core, without turning it into a soundbite.
Upexpectedness Grabbing a person's attention.
Concreteness Making the idea understandable.
Credibility Getting people to believe the idea.
Emotional Getting people to care about the idea.
Stories Getting people to act on the idea.

Whether you agree with their classifications and conclusions or not, you will find incite in their examples.

What happened to OOP?

2007-04-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

When recruiting engineers I always start with a discussion on object oriented programming. I try not to completely surprise the candidate, so I always list the four topics: abstraction, encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance. Then I ask the candidate to define each term, and tell me how (and why) it is used in real world situations.

I have to admit that I am amazed at the percentage of developers who do not know the fundamentals of OOP. Even developers coming right out of school struggle with this conversation. This despite the fact that most of our entry level developers are coming out of Masters of Computer Science programs.

It has caused me to wonder if OOP is coming out of favor. If this is the case, then what is replacing it? Gang of four patterns? Something else?

You can say I am an old school developer. I learned to code when the style was structured programming. There was no concept of OOP when I earned my Computer Science degree. I was introduced to OOP several years later, when building my first applications for Windows. I immediately saw the maintain beauty of maintaining a single piece of reusable code, this was a logical extension of function libraries.

OOP was a natural evolution of structured programming, and yet I was amazed at the number of my colleagues that did not make the switch. And those who didn't were relegated to mainframe jobs and maintenance of legacy system. The best engineering opportunities were given to those who were evangelists of object oriented programming.

But as Internet development took off during the first dot com boom, a couple of trends started. One was the adoption of Visual Basic, and the other was design patterns from the gang of four (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides).

In my mind, Visual Basic is and was a horrible trend in the practice of software development. The language, especially in its' early versions, encourage poor programming practices. And Microsoft's CASE style designer tools only exacerbated the problem. Departmental developers from corporations picked up the easy to learn language, and churned out applications that were impossible to maintain. Although recent versions of the Basic language implement OOP constructs, traditional VB developers generally do not use them.

Design patterns should have been an advancement in OOP development. In practical use, however, programmers often use patterns without practicing OOP themselves. Much the same way that procedural developers use Java or .Net and still fail to implement OOP.

The problem for me, as a manager and leader of engineering teams, is finding people who write code that is easy to maintain. To a degree, I equate maintainability with re-usability because code that is reused is not rewritten. And code that is reused is tested frequently. Coders that do not understand or practice disciplined OOP will fall into the copy-and-paste trap. When this happens, many versions of similar code appear throughout the source code, creating a maintenance nightmare.

The irony here is that descriptions of object oriented programming are very common. Wikipedia, for instance has an entry for OOP that a developer could review and understand in a couple of minutes. I hope too, that Computer Science programs strive to instill these basic concepts to their students. In the meantime I continue my search for solid OOP engineers who will help evolve our products.

Recruiting headaches; how not to get hired

2007-04-12T08:08:00.000-07:00

I spend much of my time recruiting people for my technology teams. Currently we have openings for software engineers, QA Analysts, and a DBA. Thankfully I have corporate resources to post ads and review resumes. After candidates successfully navigate through HR, I do a short phone screen to gauge the candidate's ability to carry a conversation, and to match their knowledge with their experience (as it appears on paper).

I believe the best developers and testers have a strong academic knowledge of their profession. From this knowledge, good coding habits or solid testing methodology is learned. So my phone conversations always start with a discussion of fundamentals.

For software engineers, the conversation begins with a discussion of object oriented programming. Because I often catch candidate by surprise with this line of questioning, I always list the specific terms we will discuss. Abstraction, Encapsulation, Inheritance, and Polymorphism. I have been applying these concepts for nearly twenty years and expect every competent developer understands how they work in real world applications.

Of course some candidates can not describe OOP concepts. I usually give a lot of latitude on abstraction and encapsulation. These tend to be more conceptual than inheritance and polymorphism, which are implemented with specific language constructs. Imagine my surprise, though, when a candidate recently told me he did not know any of the terms.

When a candidate struggles with my OOP discussion, I try to give him some relief by asking him to define inheritance. Inheritance, after all, is fundamental to all modern programming and is easy to describe; simply define the word. But I was shocked when the candidate admitted that he did not know of inheritance.

This story should end right here, for at this point I politely ended my line of questioning and suggested that we did not have an appropriate "fit". The candidate, however, wasn't quite finished. He assured me that given proper requirements he could finish any project. Then he claimed that academic concepts weren't that important and if necessary he could easily look up the information he needed.

Of course he was wrong. A developer can not possibly build a class library or reusable object without understanding inheritance. In fact you can not write a meaningful Java, c++, or .Net application without inheriting an object. And you can not possibly know when to use an interface without understanding polymorphism. You can not implement objects without understanding encapsulation, and your objects will be a mess if you do not apply abstraction. Most of all, you can not hope to get hired into a position if downplay knowledge an interviewer deems important.
My quality assurance conversions cover testing methods in a similar manner as the OOP concepts. For QA, I have twelve types of tests that I expect a candidate to discuss. In the course of the discussion, I ask that the candidate describe how he applied each type of test in his experience.

I am guilty of acquiring my definitions of the tests from the web. I can't even remember where they came from, but we have a list of a few dozen QA terms. From this list I have flagged twelve to drill candidates. I always start by asking the candidate to describe Black Box Testing.

It was surprising when a recent candidate quoted the exact phrase "not based on any knowledge of internal design or code." Surprising because that phrase is an exact match of the definition on my sheet. I assumed this was a coincidence and continued.

But the next item was quoted exactly too. And the third, Unit Test was again quoted exactly, using the phrase "the most 'micro' scale of testing." Nobody talks like that. She could have at least used the word "smallest".

At this point I stopped her and asked what she was reading from. She denied reading the responses. I mentioned that I was reading my terms from a sheet that we had acquired long ago, and asked where she had gotten her material. I do not believe it is possible for anyone to have memorized those specific terms using such precise language. Again, she denied using reference material.

Generally speaking, I would not fault a person for using notes or reference material during a phone screen. But I expect they can show how an academic concept makes sense in real situations. I would also expect a person to acknowledge using reference material when it has become obvious to the interviewer. She had the opportunity to look resourceful, but instead looked like a cheat.

In both these cases, the candidate's resume looked great but they weren't a good fit for our team. These candidates simply didn't apply common sense to our conversation. Want to know how not to get hired? Simple, be unprepared, lie, or ridicule the interviewer's questions; it's guaranteed to keep you out of the position.

The end of an era, say goodbye to an icon

2007-04-12T08:04:00.000-07:00

I was shocked last week when I received my copy of InfoWorld. Printed in the corner of the cover was the announcement: "The Final Print Issue."

I have been reading InfoWorld for nearly twenty years. I remember when it was printed on large newsprint. In the early days, the paper was the premier source of information on technology. The articles, reviews, and news were relevant to the industry. I loved Robert X. Cringley when he provided insider information wrapped in his unique humor about Pammy and his Studebaker Hawk.

But the years have not been kind of the paper. The content simply has not retained the same quality and relavence it had during the 90s. Even Cringley digressed into useless gossip from readers and ranting against Microsoft. From my perspective, only Tom Yager remained insightful.

InfoWorld spins the change as evolution; a move away from the print world and strictly into the online world. I see it as evolution toward death. The move ignores the fact that people read newspapers and magazines for the convenience of the media. It's very easy to skim through a paper, absorb the headlines, and drill into interesting articles. No one will skim online content in the same manner.

Everyone knows the web is a tremendous source of information. And every provider of news, technology or otherwise, must have a web presence. The online experience, however, is very different from the offline experience. InfoWorld, for example, was delivered to me. It's the perfect push technology because once it is in my hands I always flip through it. InfoWorld also sends me email with links to their site. These are very easy to ignore, unsubscribe, or filter as junk. I generally ignore them.

I don't see InfoWorld reinventing themselves into Digg. It is still old school and its' web site doesn't put them on the Web 2.0 radar (which is getting tired anyway). In fact, their web-site feels more like CNN than Digg. As for me, it looks like I will be getting my technology news from eWeek and Wired.

Hey Spencer F. Katt, I miss Pammy and the Studebaker.

64-bit OS kicks butt!

2007-03-06T11:21:00.000-08:00

Last month I wrote mention that our applications are facing challenges regarding scalability (see Strategies for Performance). One of the strategies mentioned was moving to a 64-bit operating system, Windows Server 2003 X64. Our observations are anecdotal, but the OS kicks ass...at least when compared to the 32 bit Windows Server 2003. Reports that were running for nearly 30 minutes are completing in less than two (minutes).

We recently rebuilt the server for a key customer onto X64. In moving them to the new OS, we made other improvements too. We upgraded their database to SQL Server 2005. We also realigned the storage, separating data and logs onto different physical drives. And changing those drives from RAID 5 to RAID 1.

All these changes will contribute to the performance improvement. We have restructured systems before, separating data from logs and changing RAID, but have only seen an incremental improvement in performance. It's a reasonable conclusion that the greatest improvement comes from x64.

Searching for Code

2007-03-06T09:37:00.000-08:00

Have you tried Krugle yet? Krugle is a search engine of open source code and technology pages. It is an indepensible tool to any developer. Need a special snippet of code for a specific task? Type in your search keywords and review the results.

Krugle searches code, tech pages, and projects. Code and projects return essentially the same thing; links to source code. Tech pages will find your search term in blogs and newsgroups.

I find the code search especially helpful. I have searched for grid computing, sorting, and EBCDIC; and have found useful code in each case. For me, the projects are most interesting, as I want a complete solution.

The site has a sweet Web 2.0 interface that includes plenty of Ajax. It also has allows sharing of notes. One point of contention though, I tagged several files with comments, but was unable to find them (my comments) later.

Google also has a code search capability too, but I believe it is inferior. In Google's case, the search results will highlight key words in source code files. True to Google form, its' code search is very spartan. Google does not have the Web 2.0 capabilities of Krugle, but it is fine for quick and dirty searches for very specific algorithm.

Kudos to Krugle. I suggest you add it to your bag of tricks.

Have you tried SearchMash?

2007-03-02T08:08:00.000-08:00

Have you tried SearchMash? I like it so much that I made it my default search engine. The SearchMash features page explains how it is unique.

I like that I do not need to click in the textbox to type a new search. It's a little bit of Ajax magic, but it makes a big difference. In addition to a list of web sites, SearchMash also provides separate lists for blogs, images, and video. And you can watch video by clicking the thumbnail.

The searches are provided by Google, so you should have complete confidence in the results.

Need to do a little shopping?

2007-03-02T06:44:00.000-08:00

Ok. This has absolutely nothing to do with business or software. But everyone needs to do a little shopping every now and then. Sure Valentines Day is behind us, but birthdays, anniversaries, and special occasions lurk just around the corner.

If you are like me, the "big" gifts aren't a problem. The kids, for instance, make it apparent what they want for Christmas and birthdays. My problem is the smaller gifts; items for co-workers or friends; stuff for my sister on mother's day; etc.

Anyway, here's two ideas. Kali Gift Bag and TranquiliTea. Kali has an eclectic inventory of odds and ends as reasonable prices that are perfect for little surprise gifts. You wouldn't shop for your wife at Kali, but it will be great on Secrataries Day. TranquiliTea is specifically for the tea drinker. Their inventory is unique.

Kali's is geared toward the online shopper. Their web site is pretty typical for a retailer. It's not fancy, but is easy to navigate and has pictures of the gifts. TranquiliTea is aimed at the in store experience. If suburban Detroit is not convenient then you should pick up the phone. Their service is extremely helpful and friendly.

Ok, one more confession; I don't buy a gift for my sister on Mother's Day...I wonder if Kali's Gift Bag will wrap something up for her.

Almost Famous

2007-02-28T11:43:00.000-08:00

Ever type your name on the Google page to see what comes up? I searched on mine today and found I am high on the list. When searching for "William McCann" I come up first on Google and Yahoo!, and third on Live (as of 2/28/2007).

When I search for "Bill McCann" I come up third on Google. Yahoo! does not find this site under "Bill McCann", but lists my LinkedIn profile second. I didn't see myself when searching Live with my nickname.

The irony here is that I have taken no steps to assure that I am found by search engines. It must be getting easier to get noticed; no need to take special steps (Doing something right). Or maybe I'm almost famous ;).

Leadership and Self-Deception

2007-02-28T05:27:00.000-08:00

I received the book Leadership and Self-Deception as a gift from a close friend of mine recently. The book is written as a parable much like another leadership book, The Goal given to me as a gift (but not from a friend). I have to admit, I do not like the parable format. The stories told in this way seem contrived; no wait, they don't seem contrived, they are contrived.

The book also has no author. Well, OK, no single author. Instead, credit for the book is given to the Arbinger Institute. There is no research behind the story, and no academic references other than to an obscure doctor Ignaz Semmelweis. The book felt like a white paper for a leadership consulting firm. Maybe that is Arbinger's intent, or maybe that's my self-betrayal.

That's not to say that there aren't helpful tips in the book. Like all material of this ilk, there is plenty we can apply to ourselves. In Leadership, the authors make the case that spend our time in boxes, where we rationalize our behavior and blame others. Coming out of these boxes must be like a self-actualizing experience.

I wouldn't be honest if I recommended the book. Certainly the lessons, taken with a grain of salt, could be very helpful. Myself, I will take away some of the concepts and I will be more conscious of delusions. In the end, maybe it will make me a better leader and person after all.

What is a CTO?

2007-02-28T05:23:00.000-08:00

Recently someone asked me "What is a CTO?" I answered with nonsense about software engineering and network infrastructure. Thinking back on the conversation I realized how badly I described the role. What's more surprising is that I've held the role, albeit under different titles, at three firms.

First and foremost, the Chief Technology Officer is the technical visionary for the company. In this role he must be the evangelist for technology; keeping products and services competitive. He must set a clear path to achieve the goals for the vision. And he must assure that everyone knows the vision.

A great CTO will be a passionate advocate for best practices of engineering, quality assurance, and technology operations. Of course, to advocate best practices, he has to know the best practices. These practices will include agile development methods, test driven engineering, and thorough securing of infrastructure.

The CTO have intimate knowledge of the technologies required of his vision. He must be passionate about the platform, when the platform is specific; and agnostic of the platform, when the vision is independent of it. The best CTOs are not concerned about Microsoft vs Linux or Java vs .Net. Instead he pushes the platform needed to accomplish the goals for the company.

The best CTO are excellent managers and leaders. They recruit talented staff and have great retention rates. He understands the value of knowledge capital and continuously encourages learning. And he keeps his own knowledge sharp too.

Through vision and planning the CTO will instill confidence from other senior managers. He will keep his products and services best-in-breed. And he will give customers confidence that their solution will get better and better.

These are the points I should have made when asked..."What is a CTO"?

Implementing Agile Development

2007-02-09T05:32:00.000-08:00

Sometime late last year I was introduced to the concept of Agile Development. Actually, I had been formulating iterative techniques over the past 10 years. Craig Larman's book simply reinforced my thinking. That is, software is best developed in manageable increments.

The bigger problem is moving a team steeped in serial waterfall methods to interative methods. Some people simply don't get it; they don't get collaboration; they don't get accepting change; and they don't get emphasizing software over documentation. All of which is surprising because most development teams never receive adequate documentation, constantly deal with change, and usually brain storm to solve problems.

For us de-emphasizing documentation shouldn't be so bad, after all, we don't receive good requirements anyway. But strangely enough, there are developers who still believe that one big master documents is necessary for successful projects. These people are wrong. It is wasteful and expensive to attempt to write a complete specification prior to engineering the software.

I saw this first hand a DoubleClick, Inc several years back. The firm hired a team (larger than my current department) dedicated to writing specs. The documents produced by this group were huge, numbering hundreds of pages. And the details were debated ad-nausium, leading to stagnation. What was produced was documents, what wasn't produced was working software.

A greater problem for us is managing multiple projects. Our technologies are not constructed on a common code base. Therefore each project becomes its' own set of increments. Currently we have five projects under development. That's a lot of work for a staff of seven plus four consultants. With all these concurrent projects, managing increments becomes difficult. Afterall, it isn't practical to deliver an increment every week. Or is it?

We seem to do alright with collaboration, but there is room for improvement. It helped to implement daily stand-up, or scrum, meeting. The meetings are short and focus on the goals for the day. We have not attempted to implement strict pair programming, althought there is very frequent teaming on tasks.

I remain a strong proponent of agile and iterative development. Over the next couple of months we will be able to take an objective look at the results of these methods.

Strategies for Performance

2007-01-24T05:51:00.000-08:00

Like many growing technology companies, we frequently wrestle with performance and scalability of our offerings. In our case, we're tied pretty tightly to Microsoft; a hold over from a time when the products were built using Access. We've since moved on to Visual Basic, c#, .Net, and SQL Server, but we are not platform agnostic.

We're also taking steps to move off a pure client-server architecture, and to an n-tier architecture delivered through a browser. Typically our applications have a small number of users who submit long running queries. There are two primary stress points for performance, loading the data repository, and running queries (reports).

We are attacking the problem across several fronts. First, we're throwing hardware at it. Second, we are upgrading the OS and database platform. And finally, we are optimizing the applications. Note that we are not considering using a server farm for the application servers. We believe the low number of hits to the web apps make scaling the application server a lower priority.

Throwing hardware at the problem is the easiest and quickest way to scale. In our case, that means moving the application server to a separate box, and purchasing more power. More memory, more speed, and more processors. We all know, however, that this type of solution simply covers up bottlenecks in the application.

We are also stepping up to SQL Server 2005. In the standard edition, which most of our customers deploy, SQL Server 2005 will use 4 CPUs and as much memory as the OS can give it. Some of our customers are CPU and memory bound when using SQL Server 2000. Stepping up to 2005 is a significant boost. SQL Server 2005 also runs on Windows 2003 64 bit.

The 64 bit OS appears, in our sample testing, to give a huge performance boost. Unfortunately, it also gives us problems with some of our applications. Most significantly, we have not successfully deployed .Net 1.1 on the OS. Therefore, all our web applications must be migrated to Visual Studio 2005. We found that moving our web applications from VS 2003 to VS 2005 required some work. We are still trying to work through problems with deployment projects for these applications. Our Visual Basic legacy clients flat out do not run in the Terminal Services environment.

Finally, we are confronting the code in the applications themselves. The products have evolved from a client-server architecture. The software requires an active user that performs key functions synchronously. We will move file operations and reporting to asynchronous classes. This frees up the UI and gives the user a responsive experience. But asynchronous does not make queries run faster. Improving query performance requires reviews of the execution plan, indexes, and index views.

It is tedious work, but it will payoff in greater revenue.

New Year Resolution

2007-01-02T06:36:00.000-08:00

January 2007. A new year; a fresh start. OK, not exactly a fresh start. There is plenty of carry-over stress from 2006. But a lot is new too. My first, recently acquired, has a bright a new future as part of a much bigger family. We are also taking a fresh look a engineering software...adapting to the "Web 2.0" (now there's tired phrase) and adopting iterative development practices.

We had spent much of 2006 recruiting talent, reducing dependence on consulting, and introducing an aggressive slate of products. Now the challenge is tying our offering into a cohesive suite of applications that are scalable and easy to deploy. This includes our push to migrate legacy software written in Visual Basic (yes VB 6.0 client/server) to a current infrastructure. This challenge is as much political as technical.

So the resolution? It's sharing the experience, the same resolution made (and not kept) a year ago. This year my goal is to share both positive and negative experiences, thoughts, and ideas. Topics will include recruiting talent, migrating legacy code, engineering methods, and things I just don't foresee. And I'll try to leave my personal goals (fighting my waistline, renovating my home) out...usually.

In any case, here's to yet another new year and another resolution to keep or break (time will tell).

Open Source Software

2006-07-19T09:15:00.000-07:00

As a builder and seller of software, you may think I would not be a proponent of Open Source. And you would be wrong. I love Open Source; not for idealogical reasons, but because I can get great applications at little or no cost. Our firm is fairly small, and it's important that my modest development staff remain focused on engineering products. For internal requirements, we often turn to Open Source.

One such application is the Blogging software blojsom. And no, this blog is not written with blojsom, I use regular ole Blogger here. Blojsom was easy to set up and meets our needs for corporate blogging; which is actually a journal style knowledge base. Blojsom isn't perfect, administering a blog is clumsy, as is adding and editing entries. But the application is stable and attractive.

We also use Moodle. Moodle is software for running web based education. It is very mature and feature rich. We have only scratched the surface of the application's capabilities, but I am impressed. Moodle has the advantage of an active community.

Of course underneath these applications is Open Source infrastructure. In our case this includes MySQL, Apache Tomcat, and PHP. I don't believe any of these are up to the task of their commercial counterparts, but for the internal needs of a small business they are perfectly fine. With the exception of PHP, these were very easy to set up on a Windows 2003 Server. PHP was a bit more difficult as we configured it with Microsoft IIS instead of the recommended Apache web server.

Although not open source, we also use the free application Actitime from Actimind. Actitime performs timetracking. Interestingly, it uses a combination of ASP.NET and MySQL. I highly recommend Actitime and have considered using their developers as consultants on some of our development projects.

These are real apps being used by a real company to do business on a daily basis. Our usage of these applications clearly demonstrates the traction made by open source providers. I look forward to expanding our list; anyone know a good open source accounting package? Or how about CRM? ERP?

Running With Scissors

2006-06-12T06:01:00.000-07:00

I just finished the book Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. First I should let you know that there is nothing technical and no business lesson in the book. It is simply a memoir of the author's thoroughly screwed up adolescence.

The book is a quick read. I finished it in less than a week, reading only on the train during my commute (when I was not sleeping). There is no cohesive plot, and virtually no character development or plot tension. Instead each chapter reads like a short story. You could easily skip around the book, like a Quentin Tarantino movie, without confusion.

Each little tale is interesting, humorous, and disturbing all at once. And the strong gay theme makes the book a bit uncomfortable. I probably wouldn't have read much more than a chapter, but curiosity over what could happen next kept me going.

I don't care much for Burroughs' writing. He seems to waste words drifting off on tangents. And the characters are so underdeveloped that the reader forms no attachments. Reading the epilog was no more interesting than reading a newspaper article. With all the craziness, you'd think the author would express some passion, but instead he drones on almost completely detached.

I found the book entertaining enough to finish. But I would not recommend it. Save your summer reading for authors who pour passion into their work.

What Am I Doing?

2006-06-09T05:43:00.000-07:00

Bare with me you seasoned veterns of blogging. I am slowly making the transition from my home-grown blog to Blogger. I initially started by pasting my old entries into Blogger. But this morning I had to smack myself in the head and ask the question: "What am I doing?" Doh! Silly me. Instead of moving every article to blogger, I should simply move over the index page. From there, all my loyal fans can read the older articles. Happy happy joy joy.

Switching to Blogger

2006-06-07T05:48:00.000-07:00

Switching to Blogger. Up until now, I have been building my blog manually. Each page crafted one by one. This allowed be to keep a style consistent with my web site. Unfortunately, publishing entries is time consuming. And the more entries, the more time.

So I am switching to Blogger. With this being my first entry. After publishing this meager note, I intend to copy my current blog entries over to Blogger. And then the writing continues.