If you follow me on Twitter, you might have an idea that my son is currently without one of his rides (i.e. a Razor Cruiser kick scooter). My son is big and tall for his age, and this scooter is perfect for him.

Like most boys his age, though, he doesn’t understand “cruiser” in the face of a neighborhood of boys who all like to jump all manner of wheeled vehicle. As a result of this lack of appreciation (er, love of both scooter and jumping), what looked like

now looks like

Do you see the opportunity?

Razor makes a quality product–one the is easy to use and maintain. Ease of maintenance is largely facilitated by modularity of design.

So when my son came to me with the disappointment of pushing his ride too hard, my first thought was to simply disassemble the scooter to isolate the failed part (deck). Easily accomplished.

Except that apparently Razor and its authorized parts retailers doesn’t stock replacement decks for the Cruiser kick scooter.

So…Razor built a modular kick scooter but doesn’t stock a critical module (deck).

What’s the point of modularity, if there are no modules (i.e. ability to swap module instances that fulfill necessary interfaces)?

My son’s predicament is clearly of his own making, but herein is opportunity for Razor. Beyond already clearly stating what their product is designed to perform, Razor can anticipate that boys will be boys and provide timely relief in the form of complete replacement parts, including readily available decks.

Within earshot of my son are more than a dozen boys of similar age, and they’re always outside planning their next jump. Many already own their own Razor, too. What if he could turn around an accident with word that Razor saved the day? Talk about brand advocacy and social media!

What’s your Razor-like story? What’s your Razor-like opportunity?

Dear Outlook team:

As I was riding home on the train today talking with my fellow riders, an idea for a practical feature in an upcoming Outlook release developed. Since time is precious, and I’m focused on other pursuits, I wanted to place this idea into the Creative Commons for your consideration.

At least the passengers of the train car I typically occupy find it all too common to receive meeting requests in Outlook that clearly conflict with existing appointments already scheduled. It’s as if the person who called the meeting just added names (reading off a script) without even bothering to click into the Scheduling Assistant UI.

This is unfortunate since that UI does a fairly good job of actually assisting the caller of a meeting with the scheduling process.

However, it’s hard to teach a drone how to find pollen; so, I think there is an opportunity to bring more assistance into the default Appointment UI.

Sparklines.

Here’s the essential idea: as attendees (or resources) are entered into a meeting request, dynamically shade the background of each name according to availability as follows:

• Green – potential attendee is completely available
• Yellow – potential attendee has a tentative conflict (i.e. a complet or partial conflict)
• Red – potential attendee has already committed to attend another meeting

Changes to the date/time of the meeting should trigger event handlers that reflect any change in availability shading.

Additionally, you could also provide another, central visual cue for the overall meeting (e.g. a green highlight effect around the current Send button to indicate that there are presently no scheduling conflicts known to the system).

Frankly, I think it’s fair to question a person calling a meeting who doesn’t bother to confirm attendee availability. However, we are talking about drones not worker bees. So, for those of us who receive such meeting requests all too frequently, please consider this idea for a future release of Outlook. (If you have implementation questions, you can always reach out to your Excel colleagues. )

Thanks for your consideration.

Several years ago, I blogged about how I winnowed atom-based content at that time. When I consider my increasingly digital life now, I smile at how out-dated that post seems.

Maybe some day I’ll let go of my hardcopy altogether and go 100% digital.

Almost two years after my winnowing (paper-based) content post, I briefly waxed sentimental about personal content management. Judging by that post’s imagery, I’m not sure how much “evolution” had actually occurred. I do know that the binders of paper were eventually tosed outright, but even a quick glance at my current technical library at home tells me that I have far from reached any “evolved” state.

As a visual person, I tend to value what I can see and tangibly interact with. Books present a particular challenge to me. A good book, in hard cover format especially, is immediately available to give to someone else as a loan or a gift (e.g. from one generation to the next). The same book in electronic format is more subject to the winds of technology (e.g. will there be a reader for this format? what all is required to actually read the book in terms of supporting hardware and software? etc.). On the other hand, if I took the time to bookmark or otherwise annotate paper, this could distract subsequent reading by others–electronic metadata should be more distinctly layered and separable from original content.

Given the choice between hunter or gatherer in a shopping context, I’m definitely a hunter. Put me in the middle of a men’s department or clothing store and I’ll happily panoramically scan the selection, deciding in mere seconds whether there is something for me (to killpurchase), or not. (Thankfully, my wife is my primary wardrobe consultant; so, my hunter instincts are necessarily balanced and muted. ) However, as much as I may be a hunter over clothes, I am a serious gatherer of books and music. Places like Barnes & Noble and Borders love guys like me.

So, you might think that my struggle over books (i.e. physical or digital) is a struggle I have with music, too. Perhaps, but I think that my music-as-content evolution is a bit more “advanced” and, therefore, may be informative.

Although I still buy physical CDs more than digital downloads, all of my music is immediately rendered in digital format and almost entirely consumed digitally thereafter. Going “essentially digital” has enabled me to take full advantage of classification software (e.g. MusicBrainz, freedb, etc.), playback software (e.g. Apple iTunes, Microsoft Zune, etc.), recommendation engines like Pandora, etc. and also various playback hardware (e.g. an Apple iDevice, laptop, PC, etc.). If I read the liner notes for an album, I do so once (typically after unwrapping the CD). From then on, interaction with music is based on bits rather than atoms (the occasional CD play through my high fidelity entertainment system notwithstanding).

Perhaps with the advent of The Undesigned Web, software like Instapaper, and hardware like iPad, etc., my interaction with reading material will tip to become predominantly digital. Certainly, as I use the Read Later feature of Instapaper, I find it to be a digital equivalent to my paper-based content winnowing approach from years ago. (Tapping into familiar workstreams is always an effective catalyst to change my behavior.)

…if I did go digital my office would be too Spartan.

Actually, I think another contributing factor to my attempt at balancing the gathering of atoms with gathering bits instead is the fact that there is limited physical space to house either. Today, it’s not really a concern over becoming Spartan, it’s about using limited wall and desktop space to display physical items of the greatest value (e.g. family photos, art, sculpture, etc.).

Just like I’m able to visualize the “height” (or “depth”) of, say, my iPod (i.e. the number of digitized albums stored in terms of a stack of CD cases), I’m beginning to visualize my iPad in a similar manner (i.e. in terms of the stack of print magazines and books available electronically instead). Virtually speaking, such devices “fill a room.”

Who knows, I may just have to invest in my own book scanner to help free up some shelf space…

So, I finally was able to complete my PDC sessions scheduling. It was a bit more “involved” then I expected, and I have a few suggestions for, in this case, Microsoft as they prepare for future conferences:

• Enable Outlook (ICS-based) scheduling sooner
• Include the online session home page as a link in the ICS file
• Default to “no alert” in ICS files (e.g. avoid creating noise from multiple sessions of interest all vying for my attention on my smart phone)
• Add a map link to help guide attendees to where sessions are being held (i.e. nowadays location-aware service is expected, IMHO; so, allow users to opt-in where correlating to present location (device GPS coordinates) is concerned)
• Promote session hashtags (e.g. help guide the use of Twitter et al by going beyond just #PDC09)
• When you post a location and date/time, and you change it, indicate the change more prominently (e.g. maintain version history)

Next year, I’d love to say something like, “I’m a PC. PDC10 scheduling…was my idea.”

Last month I read In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing and am finally posting my thoughts on this book by Matthew May.

First of all, it’s a well-written book that applies its message to itself.

I’m glad that I found it after my previous read, since it covers similar ground in places as does Subject To Change but ends up exploring different vistas, too. As a matter of fact, I can relate the contents of this book to several previous reads, and In Pursuit of Elegance has refined my thinking drawn from past reading through deeper correlation and, well, elegance.

“To find elegance, you must appreciate, embrace, and then travel beyond complexity.” The pursuit of elegance is more like chess than checkers. Elegance is “far side,” not “near side,” simplicity; it is at once symmetrical, seductive, subtractive and sustainable.

Concerning this book’s refining effect, take the somewhat popular subject of kaizen–a principle and a practice of “change for the better.” A student of kaizen creates a standard, follows it, and finds a better way. A student of kaizen understands that there are two types of work: value-adding and non-value-adding. In the pursuit of value-adding work, one must be wary of muri (overload), mura (inconsistency), and muda (waste).

Up to this point, I focused more on muda (waste) as a concern, drawing from lessons learned in The Machine That Changed the World while contemplating software factories. However, May writes: “Muda is the easiest to target because it is generally more visible. But muri and mura are often the more evil of the sins, as they can be the actual cause of all muda.” Yes, of course!

Taiichi Ohno, Toyota engineering pioneer and the man behind kaizen, taught his colleagues that new thoughts and better ideas do not come out of the blue, they come from a true understanding of the process. [Aside: Developing and applying empathy is an important theme in Subject To Change.] Writes May: “By requiring keen observation before action, by demanding that one look beyond the obvious surface symptoms to better see the deeper causes, by never giving answers and only asking questions, Ohno taught people to stop and think.”

Make decisions that are based on observation, not assumption (or necessarily inference alone). Therefore, actively form your mental model through firsthand observation (empathy) to ask “What is possible?;” don’t passively succumb to the “ladder of inference” and prematurely ask “What should be done?”

Since reading Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, I’ve been looking forward to Malcolm Gladwell‘s next book. Outliers: The Story of Success didn’t disappoint, and I recommend reading it yourself.

As the book’s title suggests, Gladwell’s text is about success and outliers; however, he engages the reader from the get-go by starting with a definition of outlier expressly to follow-up by quickly suggesting a concrete redefinition of what is truly an outlier and what determines success. Gladwell challenges the reader to think in less-conventional terms (e.g. thinking about health in terms of community–beyond just the individual): “…there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.”

Outliers has two parts, focused on opportunity and legacy, respectively. Part one emphasizes “from-ness” (i.e. from where (e.g. birthplace), from when (e.g. time, era, norms), from how (e.g. culture, legacy), etc.). In doing so, part one indicates by one example after another why merely personal explanations of success don’t work.

     Where are you from?

Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of the those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play–and by ‘we’ I mean society–in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.

Gladwell states, “Achievement is talent plus preparation.” He then goes on to uncover patterns of achievement and underachievement as well as patterns of encouragement and discouragement. He focuses on the work ethic of those who are purposeful, single-minded, intentional–who achieve success by working much, much harder.

• Adversity presenting itself as opportunity
• Developing skills amidst obscurity
• Meaningful – complexity, autonomy and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work
• “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.”

For example, the “10,000 hour rule” is discussed (i.e. its typically takes 10K hours of deliberate practice to develop true expertise and world-class mastery). The point of the discussion is not to admire those who earn such mastery as much as it is to understand the kinds of obstacles most of us encounter in the pursuit of such commitment. Furthermore, it concerns the creation of (more) equal opportunities for practicing in order to reach greater common potential: “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

     Are you regularly practicing what your core profession requires
     (e.g. modeling, design, coding, testing, writing)?

“Success arises out of a steady accumulation of advantages.”
“Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.”
     Talent: intellect, “general intelligence,” innate ability
     Opportunity: imagination, savvy, “practical intelligence,” surrounding
     community, family background, demographics, virtues and values
     (e.g. frugality, initiative, sacrifice)

“General intelligence” and “practical intelligence” are orthogonal (i.e. presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other); therefore, keep clear and separate (i.e. don’t confuse one for the other).

Part two, moves from opportunity to legacy and starts by focusing on cultural legacies (e.g. a culture of honor, where reputation is of foremost concern). The focus becomes about teamwork and communication (e.g. “mitigated speech”). For example, understanding cultural legacy as a way to effectively combat mitigation (i.e. developing clearer and more assertive communication where both transmitter and receiver are not a afraid to speak up or to speak straight).

To bring cultural legacy into better focus, Gladwell leverages the Cultural Dimensions work of Geert Hofstede (e.g. IDV – Individualism (i.e. what Gladwell refers to as the individualism-collectivism scale), UAI – Uncertainty Avoidance Index, PDI – Power Distance Index). For example, the United States has the highest IDV score and the fifth-lowest PDI score.

Mitigated speech and high PDI influence communication, especially when the person speaking (transmitter) and the person listening (receiver) have different orientation. In Western cultures, communication tends to be transmitter-oriented (i.e. speaker is responsible to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously). However, in Asian cultures, communication tends to be receiver-oriented (i.e. listener is responsible to make sense of what is being said). For this reason, I believe that communication is both my responsibility and also a two-way discipline (i.e. if you don’t understand something speak up–I’m trying my best to be clear). It’s why I prefer more interactive sessions at conferences, etc.

As a mathematician by training, I was fascinated to learn that, as human beings, we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. When you compare the fairly transparent Asian number system with the highly irregular number system in English, it starts to become clearer how English-speaking (English-thinking) student accumulate a disadvantage. Stowe Boyd goes into more detail of Gladwell’s treatment of this cultural legacy. (I need to start thinking si instead of four, qi instead of seven, etc. )

Cultural legacy suggests to me that it would be naive to apply an American timeline to the future development of, for example, China. Rice paddies aren’t fields of corn or wheat (i.e. skill-oriented versus mechanically-oriented farming tradition). So why should it take the Chinese the same amount of time to “modernize” as it did take Americans?

You’ve likely heard or seen the business cliché “Your attitude determines your altitude.” Well, Outliers posits that success is not much about ability as it is about attitude. That is, success is a function of persistence, doggedness and willingness to work hard. Success is more about out-learning than it is about being smarter. School works, but there just isn’t enough of it (e.g. 180 days versus 243 days–American versus Japanese school year). Or said another way, school isn’t the problem as much as summer vacation may be.

In closing:

• “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities–and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”
• Success is a gift.
• “To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success–the fortunate birth date and the happy accidents of history–with a society that provides opportunities for all.”

P.S. I recently began a major revision of my Books page. You can now more easily see other book reviews I’ve posted herein. Soon you’ll be able to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein). Why? Well, if you’re nearby and you see something of interest, please ask to borrow books of interest. If you’re not (i.e. regardless of your location to me), I’m hoping that opening up my library will help to solicit feedback as to what the especially good reads are (and why). I typically have multiple books queued up to read; so, knowing what should be top-of-list from my readers would be welcome feedback. Cheers…

Update 12/26/2008: Today I was able to get to watching the second part of Charlie Rose’s show on performance where, after interviewing Malcolm Gladwell in the first half, he interviewed the author of Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Geoff Colvin. Mr. Colvin referenced the little known body of scientific work concerning deliberate practice, much like Mr. Gladwell drew upon it in Outliers. I appreciated Mr. Colvin’s belief, based on conversation with this scientific community, that the research frontier here is parenting.

Continuing from the first half of my day two notes…

Steve Santini (internal EMC link), CTO, Bank of America Securities spoke next as the day’s featured guest speaker. Steve shared his perspective on how how Bank of America (BofA), as a very large company, organizes itself for successful innovation; the bank’s vision for the future of information; and the Center for Future Banking. Notes from this session:

• Per Steve’s acknowledgment, this presentation itself is innovation, since normally BofA has avoided such engagements so as not to appear to be making an endorsement. To those at BofA who made the call to allow Steve to present during this conference, a hearty “Thank You!”
• BofA is a company that is always in transition (e.g. due to M&A activity), and it has a well-defined process to handle transitions such as merging IT data centers (i.e. concept of a “lean” – e.g. if I could do X or Y, I lean toward X). A first lean is about gut feel. A second lean is about details, and a third lean is about execution.
• BofA has to innovate in order to deliver products that meet ever-changing lifestyles.
• First, create the room and the structure for innovation to grow.

Next, the conference focused on university research and heard updates from several EMC-sponsored efforts as follows:

1. Fudan University Ph.D candidate from Parallel Processing Institute, Haibo Chen, presented “Inside and Outside Protection of Cloud Services through Daoli Trusted Infrastructure.” More (EMC internal) details on this presentation are here.
2. University of Washington doctoral student in Computer Science & Engineering, Evan Welbourne, presented “RFID Data Management for Pervasive Computing Applications.” More (EMC internal) details on this presentation are here. Evan is the graduate student lead of the RFID Ecosystem project.
3. University of Michigan Professor Peter Honeyman, research professor, scientific director, Center for Information Technology Integration (CITI), challenged the conference audience to look to parallel computing for storage innovation. During session Q&A (in response to modern OS deficiencies where massive throughput is concerned): “you solve the problem you have…CITI is addressing new problems…”

The final segment of the conference was the announcement of showcase judging results and awarding the winners, which are outlined here.

This was a great conference both in terms of content and in terms of networking with fellow EMC colleagues. It was invigorating, and I’m already looking forward to next year’s event.

Update 10/27/2008: Cornelia Davis posted a nice blog on her conference experience here.

Continuing from the good start on day 1 (10/21/2008), the second and final day of the conference (10/22/2008) began with a world tour of EMC’s Centers of Excellence in China, India, Russia and Ireland. It was great to see a large remote gathering at each site via live video feed. The leadership of each center discussed how they innovate current EMC products and research the next generation of offerings. There was plenty of energy apparent in each team. Notes from this session:

• India is the largest and most tenured CoE, and this year its innovation showcase submissions alone outnumbered all submissions last year (i.e. the first year of the showcase).
• China is a much younger CoE, yet it already represents a significant percentage of innovations submitted this year. Where will the China CoE be at the same point in its history? Or Russia? Or elsewhere?
• The CoE concept has the advantage of multiple products being developed under the same roof (e.g. benefits of co-location collaboration, etc.).
• The “Great Wall” in the China CoE is a large, lengthy wall that acts as a whiteboard dedicated to capturing innovation.
• As we do in CMA, the China CoE has site-wide wiki and collaboration is encouraged.
• I’m a fan of Charles Fan, head of the China CoE, and it was a pleasure to meet and talk with him in person. Consider, for example, his perspective on hiring talent (with which I agree): It’s all about building EMC’s brand. A very selective hiring process–one that targets the best of the best–means that few are hired into EMC; however, many more candidates and applicants are exposed to what EMC is all about. Furthermore, many of those not hired become employees of EMC’s customers.

Next, there was a panel discussion about driving innovation within several EMC business units (i.e. which processes and programs work and which don’t). Doc D’Errico was an effective moderator of Rich Napolitano, Amnon Naamad and Mark Sorensen. Notes from this session (raw):

• Convergence – process/workflow
• Technologists maturing into business people
• Rid complexity (!…and reduce engineering cost); simplify to enable technology adoption by customers
• Tyranny of the installed base–the innovator’s dilemma
• Quarter-based drivers versus long-term strategy
• Critical transition for a successful startup: making the move from idea to value proposition; therefore, pay attention to wider industry and look for such events
• Practice of “R&D grants”: receipt of one rewards recipient with 1 day/week to pursue idea (e.g. 10 people in a 2000-person organization)
• (Music to my ears…) First architect; then implement.
• Not being able to measure is no reason not to start. Start!
• Forrest floor…big trees block out the light; develop others by allowing light hit the “sapplings”
• Encourage risk-taking (don’t reward failure)
• Mark captured Rich’s “army of innovators” remark, which I fully align myself to (versus an ivory innovation tower approach)

More to come in a follow-up post…some of which I see already captured here…

First of all, I echo what Mark posted about the refreshment that comes from talking with people face-to-face that I typically communicate with less personally (e.g. IM, email, wiki, blog, etc.).

Being at the conference in person also allowed me to meet several folks for the first time.

Right before lunch, I spent some time talking with Kartik and Steve about various ways to bring different parts of the EMC business together for real customer impact (e.g. around archiving–not just reacting to today’s concerns but helping customers articulate their vision toward long-term return on information such as may be found in a presidential library or elsewhere “100 year problems” may exist).

This year the conference went virtual, with over 1000 participants around the globe. (Last year was just a physical event with roughly 400 attendees). This is a welcome development.

The conference itself kicked off by Harry You welcoming this physical-and-virtual audience and fielding questions. In short, I really like Harry. He is a strong advocate for technology and technologists, and he is both warm and plain spoken.

Next, Jeff Nick addressed the topic of “Innovation at EMC: One Year Later.” Jeff did so by talking about seven new C’s: concepts, connections, communities, career track, customer interactions, communications and course. Within this seven-C framework, Jeff emphasized a disruptive, collective approach to innovation rather than one living only in ivory towers.

He provided compelling evidence of the inclusive, viral nature of innovation at EMC, especially taking place in our Centers of Excellence (CoE) around the world. Internally, we have EMC ONE, which provides an easy-to-use platform for group collaboration (e.g. communities and wikis) and individual editorial (e.g. blogging). EMC ONE was preceded by an internal wiki pilot in the corporate CTO office and has since influenced the corporation’s public web properties (e.g. EDN).

The model Jeff described works; it has been proven already within EMC. However, it doesn’t scale…yet. (To those of my colleagues at EMC: think about this next year holds.)

Jeff closed by stating the following three things that matter:

• EMC puts the ‘I’ back into IT. Information doesn’t commoditize; technology does. Therefore, focus on the derivation of value from information.
• EMC leads the way in inclusive innovation. EMC’s talent pool–its people–is its least commoditizable asset. Therefore, leverage it; don’t go around it.
• EMC inspires, empowers and honors its technical community. The conference thus far certainly reinforces this priority and commitment.

The day’s guest speaker was Alan Marcus, Director, Head of IT and Telecommunications Industries, World Economic Forum. Alan spoke on “The Geography of Innovation” (or as he suggested, the economy of innovation). His presentation was both interesting and meaty (i.e. I need to re-read his presentation, which was packed with engaging visuals, charts and anecdotes).

Here are some of the rough notes I took during Alan’s talk:

• Patents are a terrible measure of innovation, but no one has come up with a better alternative.
• For the first time, there are four generations of workers in today’s workforce–each wanting very different sets of things.
• Collaboration is a tough problem where innovation is concerned (e.g. openness vs. IP risks).
• Closed, open, mass–these types of collaboration remind me of interaction design and observation of user-system interaction (e.g. the value of understanding mass behavior as well as the innovation produced by the mass). That is, I believe that you must be engaged in the process–perhaps more so in a mass context.
• WEF Innovation Heat Map
• Understand the implications of comparative advantage
• Out-innovate yourself, or someone else will!
• Innovation is about a core aspiration. Structures form and structures fall (e.g. middle management moving to use LinkedIn, then moving to use Facebook, then moving to…). Structure serves aspirations.

Following Alan’s presentation, conference attendees were invited to attend the innovation showcase, which featured the final 30 submissions diligently reviewed and selected from among the 984 total ideas submitted from 19 countries world-wide (414 India; 205 US; 169 Ireland; 97 China; …). The team or individual behind each final submission stood by a large poster conveying (visualizing) the idea’s essence. What a great set of ideas! Furthermore, the passion behind each idea was clearly on display, too. I had a chance to meet and share ideas with Dr. Jidong Cheng from EMC Research China, and I look forward to our future collaborations.

To wrap up this post, here are some additional notes I took during the day:

• Inspiration doesn’t guarantee impact. Therefore, will to make innovation presented during this year’s conference more impactful.
• Innovation investment is all the more critical in a down-turn (e.g. current, prevailing economic conditions).
• Connecting ideas and communities is the essence of EMC’s innovation conference.
• Integration isn’t just about technology or technical integration. I will continue to maintain that SOA is least about technology; it’s more to do with organization and behavior (thinking and acting).
• I got to thinking about Cloud/SaaS/PaaS as a way to pool together smaller business/tenants into larger “unions” to yield better cost (TCO). For example, consider such behavior for health insurance or even phone company discounts offered to employees of larger corporations. The implications of the economies of scale makes me think…
• Nearing intersection of personal and professional information management
• Pain typically precedes change/action/transition (e.g. cost of IT…hosted solutions)
• Enterprise space can learn from consumer space, and vice versa–what are the key lessons/observations?

More to report in a follow-up post…

During a recent Charlie Rose interview with Peter Chernin, the subject of media formats came up, which reminded me of an earlier question I raised, “What is the natural unit of written collaboration?” When I mused upon this question it was in the context of documents and written content. I hadn’t really thought about so-called rich media (interactive) content.

So, what is the natural unit of such content?

Mr. Chernin remarked that the movie, the hour-long drama and the half-hour comedy are all resilient forms of content–and he would hope so given his responsibilities at News Corp. He also sees new forms emerging–all shorts, if you will: five, ten and 15 minute segments, depending on one’s context (e.g. watch on your smart phone while waiting for public transportation).

I recall the following quote from Mr. Chernin: “In a world of infinite choice, mediocrity is death.” (More quotes are captured here, for example.) Or, aim to stand out. Speaking of short films and excellence, Pixar’s Presto, which plays before WALL-E, is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in a movie theater.

Anyway, back to new forms of interactive content… Content reuse is something I build software to promote based on conversations with customers. During this interview, I couldn’t help but to think that there is a real opportunity here for software to support the production of variously sized shorts from full originals in such a way as to retain, if not amplify, the essence of the first edition.

Enter seam carving.

I found a seam carving implementation by Mike Swanson called Seamonster. This led me to a paper by seam carving’s creators, Dr. Shai Avidan and Dr. Ariel Shamir: Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing.

As the author’s note, without additional “higher level cues.” seam carving doesn’t work on all images. Nevertheless, the relatively straightforward nature of seam carving causes me to wonder if similar techniques can be applied to video, audio and even text.

This later work describes video application of seam carving. It appears, upon first glance, that a key to application is what Avidan and Shamir call energy criteria (e.g. the notion of forward energy in a video context).

What are the key energy criteria for audio files? What are the key energy criteria for documents? What artifacts should be anticipated when applying seam carving to various media and how can they be mitigated, if not avoided altogether?

I need to investigate seam carving in more detail. All resource pointers are much appreciated.

News about TownSquare is making its way across the Internet. I’m not surprised that Chris Pratley has a hand in this venture either. He was the original creative force behind OneNote, a tool that quickly found its way into my “appbox” as a mainstream application/tool.

As Chris recalls, apparently this caught the attention of Jeff Raikes, which led to the following:

Jeff had a two-part mission for me that was simple to say and hard to do. Basically he said, “help the division try more ideas”, and “explain to the world and the company what our long term vision is for productivity”.

Since moving over to be the GM of Office Labs, Chris & Co. have been busy working on what some have called “SharePoint + Facebook.” Since I’m not a Microsoft employee, I haven’t been able to test drive TownSquare first hand. Perhaps, after tomorrow at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, this will soon change.

Update 6/11/2008: Digging around a bit more, I see that Chris is presenting “Accelerating Innovation within the Enterprise: The Value of Rapid Prototyping and User Insights” today with Nelle Steele, User Experience – Ethnographer, Microsoft Office Labs. This article on Nelle’s SMB work only increases my interested in TownSquare.

Before the end of 2007, I finished reading Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, and then I promptly forgot to blog my thoughts (i.e. beyond this).

Cirque du Soleil is the leading example of a business successfully applying blue ocean strategy to break away from the pack and to define new space market space (i.e. it’s not a circus…or is it? It’s not adult theater…or is it?). Having been to several Cirque shows both locally and in Las Vegas, I can’t think of a better model to reference.

The authors present various frameworks in support of their strategic model focused on blue oceans:

• Four actions framework, featuring the eliminate-reduce-raise-create grid and focused on the analytics behind blue ocean realization
• Six paths framework, focusing on the formulation and execution of blue ocean strategy by looking across alternative industries (e.g. trade-across dynamics), looking across strategic groups within industries (e.g. trade-up/trade-down dynamics), looking across the chain of buyers (i.e. purchasers + users + influencers), looking across complementary product and service offerings (e.g. identify and eliminate pain points), looking across functional or emotional appeal to buyers, and looking across time (i.e. trends of interest that are decisive to your business, irreversible, and have a clear trajectory)

Reading the emotional appeal that Cemex was able to produce with its 1998 launch of the Patrimonio Hoy program–the emotion that comes from a “gift of dreams”–caused me to think about potential ways to add emotion to my own profession.

I think that there is an opportunity, for example, to cast knowledge management today in a more emotional light. Baby boomers represent a significant amount of knowledge and part of that knowledge is professional and corporate. It seems to me that this “boomer generation” can be better incented to transfer its vast experience in business, for example, by projecting knowledge management as a social cause, casting subsequent generations in a cynical but also free spirited manner, etc.

Thinking about trends of interest, I wonder what new software and services will emerge to support an education process that continues to increase its basis upon teams and collaboration. For example:

1. Support young students who already launch multiple IM windows to accomplish homework collectively with peers
2. Shift toward open, public wikis and away from closed, private documents
3. Shift toward shared authoring instead of solo authoring, increasing the need to promote proper attribution (i.e. credit where its due)–possibly beyond citations and bibliographies
4. Promote original thought and study, establishing one’s reputation as a strong contributor, team player, leader, negotiator, etc.

According to authors Kim and Mauborgne, “To fundamentally shift the strategic canvas as an industry, you must begin by reorienting your strategic focus from competitors to alternatives, and from customers to noncustomers of the industry.”

I finished my previous post on this book by asking open questions to enterprise content management (ECM) noncustomers. In closing here, my question is simply, if you have addressed content management needs but have opted for a non-ECM solution, what alternative did you go with and why? What was/is missing from ECM that if provided would change that decision?

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

Once again, watching Modern Marvels yields another software idea. This time an episode on harvesting referenced the practice known as “precision farming” (also “precision agriculture“).

Rather than treating everything equal on a farm with a crop harvest in mind, precision farming enables farmers to take a different view of their crops and land. Farmers can see that specific area need more or less water, more or less fertilizer, are more or less ready to harvest, etc. Precision is used to provide for the actual needs of the crops, which in turn benefits the farmer’s time, lessens the environmental impact due to farming and increases crop yields.

This got me to thinking about collaboration in general and then my own collaboration wherever it takes place. Is my collaboration as effective as it can be? Can a sort of precision be brought to bear on collaboration? Is their a science or psychology to collaboration as there is to agriculture so that a high-level (satellite) view can be produced in order to determine where collaboration will yield the desired outcome and where it needs more or less of a particular concern, whether participants, content, discussion, connection, context, control, process, reward, vision, immediacy?

I believe that there is; therefore, I coin the phrase “precision collaboration” to embody the practice of looking at collaboration–enterprise-wide, group-based, even ad-hoc–as a process with intrinsic variability that should supported accordingly.

Before I was introduced to precision farming, I started reading Beyond the Desktop Metaphor, which is an edited collection of current research on integrated digital work environments. Although I’m haven’t finished reading it yet, this book has already challenged and also validated my thinking where these environments are concerned with content and collaboration.

While I could probably blog more about this now, I’m going to wait until I’ve finished this book–and perhaps a few others–in order to better collect my thoughts and ground my thinking with real-world examples. Collaboration is personal, and frankly I’m not sure that a blog is the best way to convey thoughts collaboratively (notwithstanding comments). Nevertheless…

Last weekend–before the Sierra’s were dumped on–my family and a friend’s family went up past Sonora for a few days to play in the snow. On the first day while driving to Pine Crest, we came across of hillside perfect for sledding. In fact a whole army of families had and continued to make the same conclusion.

My son, the daredevil, kept asking me to position his sled runs wherever he could find a way to “catch air.” Eventually, the question arose as to why I wasn’t doing the same. So, with my son looking on…

Upon landing in my paper-thin plastic saucer an idea occurred to my tail bone and I: there has to be a way to apply durable, cost-effective, lightweight cushioning to typical sledding gear.

Immediately the name “cushy” came to mind for the business of providing such comfort. (Alas, an XYZ 2.0 company has already claimed the .com address.)

Anyway, if I ever change jobs for the material sciences and manufacturing, I wanted to capture the moment inspiring such change.

Happy New Year!

Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation is a refreshingly unpretentious read–one that I accomplished straightaway in an afternoon (off).

Here are my takeaways–all quotes are Scott’s unless explicitly noted otherwise:

• Innovation as an accumulation of smaller insights…connecting pieces…realizing picture (puzzle); therefore, take action to enable insights to occur more freely.
• Work passionately and take breaks to let the mind wander and the allow the subconscious to work on our behalf.
• Epiphany as an occasional bonus of working on tough problems
• “It is an achievement to find a great idea, but it is a greater one to successfully use it to improve the world.”
• “The secret tragedy of innovators is that their desire to improve the world is rarely matched by support from the people they hope to help.”
• “The greater the potential of an idea, the harder it is to find anyone willing to try it.”
• “Innovative idea are rarely rejected on their merits; they’re rejected because of how they make people feel.”
• Is your desire to find new ideas to conquer greater than your desire to protect the success you already have?
• “Wise innovators–driven by passion more than ego–initiate partnerships, collaborations, and humble studies of the past, raising their odds against the timeless challenges of innovation.”
• Imagination > Knowledge > Information

• I’ve put knowledge above information for some time know, but Albert Einstein’s belief that “imagination is more important than knowledge” (stated on page 83) captured my attention.
• How can content-centric applications do a better job of capturing the user’s imagination, let alone increate the knowledge derivative?

• Actually commit reminds me of something U2 bassist Adam Clayton said while being interviewed on the How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb DVD. His comments are captured here, although I recall them to be slightly different on the DVD.
• A group of people, a team or a band, has to commit before any real business can take place. Too often I see groups form for one reason or another without mutual commitment, and typically it’s just a matter of time until they disband, leaving some frustrated and others numb.

• “What problems does this innovation solve? Whose problems are they?”
• “What problems does this innovation create? Whose problems are they?”

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

Although I’m posting this today, I originally sent the following thoughts via email on 7/3/2002 to my GM at the time–subject “Preface for our 1-1 about future architecture (.NET & J2EE) – some (hopefully) thought-provoking analogies.” The email in its entirety (and unedited) follows.

At the time I sent my remarks I wouldn’t have thought that it would be until roughly five years later that SOA enablement would become initial reality in the form of EMC Documentum Foundation Services.

Hi [GM].

I thought that I’d precede our discussion on this topic with some analogies that I see developing for business around “service-oriented architectures” like the one I described for DCTM in its future.

Do you visit Starbucks regularly? How about the movie theater? Sporting events?

Imagine if these vendors told you that you had to pony up a year or more’s worth of mocha/latte purchase, movie or game tickets (plus concessions) before you could enter the premises; however, if you did so, you’d be able to enter regularly thereafter without additional cost. But please be advised, if you bought the matinee package, you could only see matinees; if you purchased tall lattes, venti mochas or Frappuccino® are out of the question. Would you still pay your money to Starbucks, etc?

Some folks might, under these terms, but MSFT and others are betting that more enterprises are more inclined to pay for what they need (or even what they don’t), if they pay smaller amounts for more discrete, value-added services. The days of MSFT being able to annually charge its customers $400~500 for the next Office application suite upgrade are drawing to a close. Office .NET is a realization of this by MSFT.

Consider the modern phone with its support for caller ID, call waiting, etc.

Pacific Bell (SBC) allows its customers to choose to pay-as-you-use or to pay a flat monthly rate for unlimited usage of such features. The customer has the phone, but the phone company has the centralized service. The phone is only as good as its service.

MSFT, for example, is positioning Windows in all its various forms (PC, PDA, XBox, WebTV and soon the Tablet PC) as the software equivalent of the modern phone—fully capable of hosting rich services from multiple enterprises. .NET is akin to SBC phone lines—tying together desktops with servers, delivering software services on demand just like your local utilities. MSFT talks about “software as a service.” The computing platform (e.g. PC) will be defined by the services it supports and presents.

Clearly, DCTM is in a strong position to become the service provider for enterprise content management. We have an opportunity to draw additional revenue through exploiting our capabilities within service-based environments and through service-aware clients—“smart clients” as MSFT calls them.

Hopefully these analogies will be though-provoking over the long weekend. I look forward to picking up our discussion this coming Monday afternoon.

-Craig

Of course here in late 2007, there is still the whole matter of Software-as-a-Services (SaaS) to address in EMC’s Content Management & Archiving (CMA) division.

“The companies that figure out how to harness the power of open platforms while providing adequate incentives to all stakeholders are poised to reap great rewards.” -from Wikinomics

A few months ago, I blogged about this thought-provoking book. Around the same time I began to promote the idea of taking aspects of our product documentation (e.g. development guides) and “wikifying” them. I contend that it’s better to replace the current delivery model (i.e. a PDF drop per release) with a new model that harnesses the power of the web and the energy of the Documentum community. Better for writer (uptake, feedback), better for all cross-functional product team members (accessibility, performance, quality, functionality, architecture, usability), better for the overall community (collaboration, connectedness).

The Django Book is an example application (user experience) of what I’d like very much to see become of the DFS Development Guide content—Wikibooks (e.g. this) is another example.

As you might expect our Technical Publications group leverages XML (DocBook to be more specific) as the underlying markup for its deliverable, which are released in PDF form. This is great news, since XML to wiki markup format transformations are fairly straightforward. By taking the underlying XML content and projecting it into a wiki–for example, off the EMC Developer Network (EDN) web site–rather than a PDF document can open up documents like the DFS Development Guide to our developer/admin/user community. By doing so, I believe that such documents can be revised, extended and planned more effectively. For example:

• I find a gap I can fill. So, I simply create the missing wiki page(s)–I don’t have to wait until the next release of the software or the PDF document.
• I find a gap I don’t know how to fill. So, I add a topic to the wiki’s “wish list” page, and someone else with the ability to author the missing content gains my respect and builds his or her reputation in the DFS community.
• I can share how I took an existing code sample and tweaked or extended it to satisfy a new requirement.
• I can talk about how DFS did or did not work with my existing IT environment–and expect more timely, specific/targeted response in return.
• Etc.

Once the wiki exists, it can (and IMHO should) become the truth of its subject matter. In fact, PDF documents simply become the output of convenience (e.g. Atlassian’s Confluence wiki allows you to quickly rendition any wiki page as a PDF or, via a plugin, an entire wiki space as a single PDF document–links and all). Snapshots are just snapshots, and the current state of information is open for all to access and contribute.

To quote one of my colleagues: “The idea that we can control and perfect the quality of the information internally and shield it from possible inaccuracies introduced by customers is pretty flawed.”

When I talk with developers, partners and customers in the Documentum community to explain the idea of such wikis, the universal response is, to paraphrase, “sure…and yesterday would be great!” To trim it down to a single word: “Duh!”

So, to quote Jerry Maguire, “Help me help you” by posting a comment here, sending an email to the good folks at EDN and/or posting to the EDN forums, or call your main EMC point of contact to make your voice heard and your vote count. Thanks!

Update 12/27/2007: Thanks to Anne Gentle’s link to my post, I found Wiki Patterns, which offers an open catalog of patterns and anti-patterns concerning people using and adoption of wikis (e.g. a WikiGnome versus a WikiTroll).

During my recent, reasonably long (and fully unplugged!) vacation, I was able to read David Weinberger’s latest work, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. I enjoyed this book every bit as much as I enjoyed reading Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

David begins by asking how our ideas, organizations, and knowledge itself might change if we could arrange such concepts without the “silent limitations of the physical.” He immediately suggests that in such a world, being free (as in freedom) is not the desired result; being miscellaneous is.

In the process of making music miscellaneous, iTunes et al revealed that the natural unit of music is track, not album. Translating this to the world of ECM, what is the natural unit of content (or if you prefer, information)? Is it document, or is it something else? Does the answer depend on whether you sort it all out on the way in or sort it all out on the way out?

One of the early solutions from Documentum–long before its acquisition by EMC–provided the ability to take a collection of PowerPoint presentations and present the end user with a filtered collection of individual slides to promote visibility of already authored content and therefore increase the likelihood of content reuse via assembly. (Fast forward to the present and an offering like SlideShare.) Since then, XML has taken center stage along with macro-formats like ODF and Open XML, increasing the potential for chunking, decomposition, remixing, etc.

David defines three orders of order as follows:

• First: organize things themselves
• Second: separate information regarding first order objects (e.g. catalog)
• Third: digitizing content and metadata then being extravagant about placement/categorization/fulfillment

ECM operates largely in a third order world where traditional terms such as document, content and information are exploding–requiring long-held views to be rethought (e.g. are we talking about content or metadata? What is the difference between the two? What about indexing, full-text or otherwise?). Just when you near clarity the landscape shifts again (e.g. a binary/closed document format becomes a more open envelope of embedded documents–some content, some behavior, some presentation-related, etc.; a pivot occurs that swaps foreground concerns with background concerns–authors and publications, content and metadata, taxonomies and folksonomies, indices and relationships, etc.).

Is it fair to continue talking about structured information and unstructured information in the way largely batted around today (e.g. structured information fits neatly into rows and columns, typically within a database)? Or is this characterization increasing less black and white (e.g. databases handling BLOB’s, document assembly at runtime via a managed (structured) process, etc.)?

What other premises are accepted that can/should be re-thought (e.g. there is a set of appropriate criteria for finding–one right way to find)?

Returning to iTunes, browsing Apple’s online music store requires a particular approach (i.e. genre, artist, album–in that order) to find tunes of interest to buy. However, once you return to the iTune music player software, there is more freedom to order and sort your collection–from Apple’s store and/or elsewhere. Better yet, you can create playlists (i.e. pure metadata collections) to share with family and friends–and this is so popular that practically every digital music player supports the creation, import and export of playlists.

“Now that information is being commoditized, it has more value if it’s set free into the miscellaneous.” -David Weinberger

Arguably there are a number of content-related playlists already (e.g. bookmarks/favorites and sites like Delicious, feeds based in Atom or RSS, subscription outlines in OPML). Does your content management system satisfy your playlist needs? How do you share content-related playlists at work or outside of work (e.g. like you would share an .m3u file with a friend)?

I plan to post more about Everything Is Miscellaneous; there is certainly much more to this book.

In the meantime, my feed reader is enriched thanks to David’s references to the following thought leaders: Danah Boyd, Peter Morville, and Thomas Vander Wal–plus David Weinberger, too. Of course, in keeping with this post, you’ll find my updated “playlist” with these inputs now, too.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

Phil Windley blogged about his user-centric reputation talk about AOL in Virginia today. “User-centric reputation” set off a cascade of thoughts, which are highlighted here (i.e. beware stream of consciousness)…

Recently the above catch phrase (i.e. Switchfoot song/lyric from Nothing Is Sound) came to mind while I was thinking again about content management and the role of people. That is, content proves authorship, and a fair bit of authoring is still a human-based endeavor.

Yet, much of information analytics within content management is focused on the results of authoring–the content–and its about-ness. This is an asset-centric or information-centric view to analytics embodied in clustering, classifying, tagging, summarizing, transcribing, translating, etc. There is value in this form of analysis; however, it simply creates more information–more content–while tending to cap the visibility of original authors and potential collaborators. I mean, folks are still out there, but I have to work to find them, to recall them, to (re-)engage with them.

Why aren’t there more systems that promote people first–treat people as the pre-eminent metadata? That is, why isn’t ECM more user-centric? Why doesn’t it promote reputation more effectively?

Information (+collaboration/behavioral) analytics can just as easily assume a contextual view centered upon people. It can help me understand potential collaborators in light of my current task or role or community affiliation. It can inform me of the “emotion” of a digital workspace (e.g. present a panel color or icon to flag a “heated” discussion currently underway–one that I may wish to avoid to run headlong into straightaway). It can go beyond mere presence display to mood display based on recent content-related activities by colleagues. It can help set my expectations for collaborative outcomes based on related process knowledge, social context and reputation.

Back to Phil’s blog and referenced presentation. Slide 50 talks about reputation in relation to trust, reciprocity and social benefit, in the context of social platforms like Facebook. I’ve recreated and redlined his graphic to emphasize business value where promotion of people and reputation is concerned (e.g. reduced time-to-innovation):

More on this topic to come, I suspect…

Awhile ago, my wife gifted me with a Belkin TuneFM for my iPod nano. Pop the TuneFM into the iPod and optionally into your car’s power outlet and viola! You can use your car’s FM receiver to transmit music from your iPod over your car’s speaker system.

Belkin itself provides a service (based on frequency data from Radio-Locator) that will suggest an ideal FM frequency given a particular ZIP code–plus lesser alternatives.

The longer the drive the greater the benefit of not having to exchange CD’s. On the other hand, the longer the drive the greater chance that the ideal FM frequency you begin with won’t be ideal for the duration of the trip.

There are already numerous mashups that leverage Google Maps (e.g. open houses on the real estate market in a particular neighbor, etc.). So, it seems possible at least to take driving direction data from Google Maps (or MapQuest et al), combine it with FM frequency data from Radio-Locator (or Sirius et al) and produce a trip-long, location-aware FM frequency recommendation service. For extra credit, this mashup could produce a script that could be imported into your GPS device (e.g. an audio script: “change FM frequency to 92.9 in one mile”).

I wonder how easy or difficult it is to build such a mashup.

Update 9/2/2007: The approach taken by Mark Snesrud and Bob Mayo to decode the “San Jose Semaphore” is inspiring.

Paul Graham’s essay last month, “Stuff,” really resonates with me. I strongly encourage you to take a few minutes and go read it. Good, isn’t it?!

Stuff appears to be a key contributing factor to the commoditization–er, evaporation–of my time. In fact, I can effectively replace “stuff” with “information” in Paul’s essay and feel equally downtrodden. I’m overwhelmed with information, probably just like you are.

To paraphrase and personalize some of Paul’s points:

• Information has gotten a lot cheaper, but my attitude toward it hasn’t changed correspondingly. I overvalue information.
• Once I’ve accumulated a certain amount of information, it starts to own me rather than the other way around.
• A cluttered room [or computer file system or feed aggregator or ...] is literally exhausting.
• Another way to resist acquiring information is to think of the overall cost of owning [or even just managing] it. The purchase price [or initial download, even free] is just the beginning. I’m going to have to think about the thing for years–perhaps even for the rest of your life. Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.

I’m known to be a packrat, which has certainly saved me and others in the past. However, the burden that comes with this mountain of information (stuff) is wearing. Techniques I’ve described before end up involved more about paying in time lost than in real value gained (i.e. organization for no apparent long-term benefit).

Earlier this week I was meeting with several EMC colleagues to discuss the whole REST/POX/SOAP/RPC/SOA/ROA(/DOA) thing. During this candid discussion–a good subject for another post–someone remarked, and I’m paraphrasing, “Forget about organization; focus on good search. Organization is an intractable problem, and one that no one is willing to pay for to solve properly.” This gave me pause…so, how do I leverage search on the web and on my desktop? Has search truly replaced navigation for me? If not, why?

Back to Paul’s essay and the realization that I may overvalue information, I got to thinking about physical books, digital books and links to books online. Paper is pleasant to hold and read, but it can burn and consumes shelf space. PDFs are fine on a big display, but they require software to read (albeit free) and additional electronic storage themselves–not to mention that they’re fixed/frozen, not dynamic/living, in nature. Links consume far less storage then documents on my hard drive–even nothing when placed into del.icio.us–but they can break or become useful when my ISP decides to disappear. When I go offline, how do I access a particular document given only a link? When I’m away from my computer, PDA, smart phone, etc. how do I read my softcopy document? When I’m away from my home library and a nearby book seller, how do I thumb through a certain chapter for that particular key phrase or figure?

Given all my questions, I need something empirical to help me to change my ways. Ironically, it seems like more data could help my information overload.

The kind of data I’m currently envisioning represents the number of browse, read and write related actions upon sets of electronic documents. For example, if I navigate to a folder that contains two documents but do nothing more, then each document gets a +1 in the browse column. If I navigate here again and open one of the documents, both documents get another +1 for browse and the opened document gets a +1 in the read column, too. If I edit the open document and save my changes, then that document also receives a +1 in the write column.

I say “columns” to represent this metadata due to my leverage of a useful Windows Explorer add-in (i.e. shell namespace extension), Folder Size for Windows, which presents a new Folder Size column within the main file system navigator:

On the other hand, I’m not sure that adding three columns of numbers would be terribly useful.

Fortunately there are lots of ways to project this kind of information. I circulated Visual Literacy’s A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods amongst my colleagues at work back in May and it garnered a fair bit of praise and admiration. More recently, Jeff Atwood blogged more generally about catalogs of data visualization. For example, maybe I could apply Crazy Egg‘s ”heat map” concept.

Perhaps I’m simply over-engineering the whole thing.

Taking a step back and returning to Paul’s essay, the following paragraph may represent the simplest way to my information tranquility:

A friend of mine cured herself of a clothes buying habit by asking herself before she bought anything “Am I going to wear this all the time?” If she couldn’t convince herself that something she was thinking of buying would become one of those few things she wore all the time, she wouldn’t buy it. I think that would work for any kind of purchase. Before you buy anything, ask yourself: will this be something I use constantly? Or is it just something nice? Or worse still, a mere bargain?

I’ve successfully applied this practice to physical books and music CD’s–I’m a sucker for both–but I’ve got a long way to go where general downloading and filing is concerned.

Update 8/24/2007: Not that TreeMaps are necessarily ideal, but I ran across a TreeMap-based disk drive content visualization software for Windows and MacOS recently: SequoiaView (Windows) and Disk Inventory X (MacOS).

I just finished reading Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, and it’s a book (and cocreated playbook/unwritten chapter) I recommend.

If you want to peek into my notes (er, stream of raw thoughts), please feel free to follow along:

• Wikinomics embodies four powerful new ideas: openness (i.e. candor, transparency (disclosure of pertinent information), freedom, flexibility, expansiveness, engagement and access), peering (i.e. horizontal, not hierarchical; leveraging self-organization; egalitarianism is the general rule for motivation), sharing (i.e. expanding markets to create new opportunities), and acting globally (i.e. removing insulation and insular thinking; thinking and acting globally–no more think globally and act locally).
• “This new way or organizing [mass collaboration, aka peer production] will eventually displace the traditional corporate structures as the economy’s primary engine of wealth creation.”
• Given mass collaboration, what lessons, if any, apply from mass production?
• “When employees are living in a hierarchical structure there’s a lot of fear. People two or three layers above resist the rules being changed. And with all that fear most people do nothing. They let the hierarchy rule.” -Kal Patel, EVP Strategy, Best Buy
• Is cooperation treated as a synonym for counter-operation? If not generally, in any specific situations? If so, why? What does this say about your business culture?
• “The pace of change and evolving demands of customers are such that firms can no longer depend on internal capabilities to meet external needs.” That is, mitigate limited time and limited creativity by going/becoming open.
• Value chains in terms of participation, results and rewards are seeing their ecosystems flatten. It’s about participation, not control–rivers more than chains (i.e. building trust > controlling; steer/guide/influence > control; “engage and cocreate” versus “plan and push”). Facilitate (embrace) natural convergence.
• “Conventional wisdom says companies innovate, differentiate, and compete by doing certain things right: by having superior human capital; protecting their intellectual property fiercely; focusing on customers; thinking globally but acting locally; and by executing well (i.e. having good management and controls). But the new business world is rendering each of these principles in sufficient, and in some cases, completely inappropriate.”
• “The new Web is about verbs, not nouns.” -Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext Assuming this is true, think about grammar–what are the Web’s adverbs and adjectives?
• Net Generation (Net Gen, aka “web natives”) norms are speed, freedom, openness, innovation, mobility, authenticity and playfulness. Net Gen’ers search for flexibility, identity, ownership, authenticity, and continuous learning. Design for them.
• With respect to the Net Generation, what you ascribe value to may not be what someone else ascribes value to. Offer choice and respect it. Build trust. For example, with respect to open source software, take the time and pay attention to its culture and processes (e.g. norms, clock speeds, level of technical exchange, responsiveness). Adapt accordingly.
• It’s about thinking differently. Therefore, attack fundamental assumptions–question everything. Sitting on the fence…belongs to isolation. Only the connected will survive (e.g. web immigrants with web natives, and vice versa).
• Embracing open source should be strategic, not tactical. “Embracing open source means embracing new mental models and new ways of conceptualizing value creation.” Don’t lose sight of where the value comes from, create new value to harvest it, and earn your harvest, too!
• Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself continues to make more and more sense…
• “Smart companies will treat the world as their R&D department and use ideagoras to seek out ideas, innovations, and uniquely qualified minds on a global basis.”
• What things outside can be acquired? What things inside can be licensed? Apply fresh perspective (e.g. is XYZ a scalable asset or trade secret?).
• Shift away from “everything invented here” toward “nothing invented here.” Take back NIH as a sign of health, not cancer.
• Threadless.com is a good example of leadership to me.
• To paraphrase Jim Griffin, “You can hold more in an open hand than you can in a closed fist.”
• Success breeds complacency. Beware also cultural inertia, complex legacies, political wrangling, etc.
• “Open up your platforms to increase the speed, scope, and success of innovation. Choose not to open up and you risk ceding the game to more nimble platform orchestrators. The question every business leader in every sector should be asking is: How do I make my organization a platform for participation? How, when, and where do I open up my business? And how do I attract an energetic group of people to share the innovation load?”
• Good enough: adequate to participate or to enable participation–versus over-engineered
• All innovation is ultimately cumulative.
• In the past I’ve talked about work a fair bit between points and vectors, where a vector is more valuable in that it conveys direction and magnitude (e.g. where a particular architecture is intended to be taken and how far it can capably do so). My mental picture is growing, though, to account for not just internal vectors but external vectors, too. By accounting for unforeseen drivers and markets through collaboration and openness, direction can be adapted, for example, to achieve results of greater magnitude.
          
• “The companies that figure out how to harness the power of open platforms while providing adequate incentives to all stakeholders are poised to reap great rewards.”
• Commoditize the technology of others while monetizing it yourself (e.g. search – Alexa (Amazon) versus Google, Yahoo, MSFT–soon Wikia may do likewise to all of the above, ECM – Alfresco versus IBM, EMC, Oracle, MSFT, and RDBMS – MySQL versus Oracle, MSFT, IBM).
• Is this about a culture of generosity or a smoke screen for exploitation? Consider again, Om Malik’s blog post. Avoid commoditization of your time.
• Customer cocreation is underexploited generally. View customers as central change agents.
• “Always strive to be the best at what your customers value most and partner for everything else.” Recall Geoff Moore (Dealing with Darwin) and maintain vigilance over core versus non-core (context)–constantly evaluate core competencies (e.g. user experience) in light of customer feedback.
• “We are shifting from closed and hierarchical workplaces with rigid employment relationships to increasingly self-organized, distributed, and collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge and resources from inside and outside the firm.”
• “Work has become more cognitively complex, more team-based and collaborative, more dependent on social skills, more time pressured, more reliant on technological competence, more mobile, and less dependent on geography.”
• Stability is dead.

Update 8/11/2007: Wikinomics provides an example of how Best Buy’s Geek Squad agents are already doing this–if you’re willing to consider “an approach to customer service” as a form of architecture.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

Laurence picked up on this earlier today: EMC’s D6 Web Services Challenge. Whether you’re an established partner or an up-and-coming consultancy of one or more individuals, you’re invited to take the challenge and submit your entries in the next couple of months (i.e. by 9/28/2007 per contest rules). First prize is $50,000, with total prizes  amounting to $100,000! This is a great chance to get your name and company established as a leader where the new Documentum Foundation Services (DFS) are concerned. So, please consider taking the challenge!

I just finished reading John Naisbitt‘s Mind Set!: Reset Your Thinking and See the Future. (You can download a PDF of its table of contents, prologue and introduction here.) I can certainly recommend this book, and it has piqued my interest in one of his earlier books, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives–a sum of local analyses can lead to a “megatrend.”

The author describes a mindset in terms of how we receive information. A mindset impacts one’s perception and one’s reality–perception of reality can be self-fulfilling when deliberate enough. In particular, Mind Set! is focused on “mindsets that are deliberately developed for a purpose.”

What purposes do I have in mind? What mindsets are required of me to achieve them?

Part one (of two) is focused on the following eleven mindsets:

1. While many things change, most things remain constant
2. The future is embedded in the present
3. Focus on the score of the game
4. Understanding how powerful it is not to have to be right
5. See the future as a picture puzzle
6. Don’t get so far ahead of the parade that people don’t know you’re in it
7. Resistance to change falls if benefits are real
8. Things that we expect to happen always happen more slowly
9. You don’t get results by solving problems but by exploiting opportunities
10. Don’t add unless you subtract
11. Don’t forget the ecology of technology

(#1) “Most change is not in what we do, but how we do it.” Mr. Naisbitt is adamant that business is more about constancy than it is about change. He advises to differentiate between the following concerns: basics and embellishment, rules and techniques, trends and fads, and breakthroughs and refinements.

(#2) “We find the seeds of the future on the ground, and not in the width of the sky.” Mr. Naisbitt also cautions: “Basic change is the result of a confluence of forces, rarely because of just one force (especially when it is against the recited wisdom).” Consider the term “news hole” and the impact of print media going away and being replaced by digital/online media (e.g. InfoWorld). Is the size of the “hole” fundamentally changing? What new disciplines are required in light of these changes? “While it is crucial to be well instructed, it is not the amount of information we collect but how consciously we receive it.” Be verifying and selective where source of information are concerned. Optimize signal-to-noise ratio. Maximize value for time spent and attention given.

(#3) “In business, politics, or private life, the gap between words and facts widens when personal pride is involved. Often it’s not the promises made but the problems hidden. In the fight for performance, the power of having to be right often takes over. Don’t be misled; check the score of the game.” Rhetoric does not beget performance. Simplification to increase transparency wards off the camouflage of complexity.

(#4) “Having to be right becomes a barrier to learning and understanding. It keeps you away from growing, for there is no growth without changing, correcting, and questioning yourself.” One would be wise to emulate Albert Einstein who was more focused on what than who.

(#5) To assemble the puzzle, value intuition over calculation; so, develop your intuition (e.g. ability to correctly time slice). Make the proper connections, and pick ripe fruits.

(#6) “Even the most talented leaders need the parade to put an idea into practice. If we have the parade too far behind and run ahead with our vision, we will be running empty miles.”

(#7) “Do not underestimate people. When they resist change–change you think they ought to readily embrace–you have either failed to make benefits transparent or there are good reasons to resist. In that case, instead of lamenting the resistance, look for their reasons for resisting.”

(#8) “Expectations always travel at higher speeds [than results].” Follow the path of least resistance (e.g. flood with ideas to see which “break out,” where and how, too).

(#9) “You don’t get results by solving problems but by exploiting opportunities.” To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, if you don’t find the circumstances you want, create them. So, rather than hunkering down and solving problems (i.e. dealing with yesterday), set sail and create opportunities (i.e. mine the future by understanding its embedding in the present). You’ll need a prepared mind, a strong will and an affinity for (or at least a high tolerance for) repetition (and therefore patience, too).

(#10) Pay attention to the principle of forced choice in a closed system. Produce and retrieve consumable levels of information (i.e. don’t be wasteful). Be selective to avoid paralysis (e.g. the number of books in my library, the number of magazines and feeds I subscribe to, etc.). Strike manageable levels, focusing on relevance and quality of sources. “Our goal should not be to create cemeteries of information, but cradles of knowledge and inspiration.”

(#11) “The more technological our world becomes, the more we need our artists and poets.” As Mr. Naisbitt explains, the artist and creative among us are especially equipped to help society accommodate technology and to help culture evolve through meaningful embrace (e.g. imagination). Regardless of your artistic bent or mine, we can all consider the consequences of our relationship with technology by asking the following questions raised by the author:

• What will be enhanced?
• What will be diminished?
• What will be replaced?
• What new opportunities does it represent?

Part two of this book involves the presentation of a set of puzzles assembled using a particular combination of the mindsets presented in part one.

The first puzzle announces: “A visual culture is taking over the world.” This take-over appears to come at the cost of literacy and the written word. Collaterally, verbal and communication skills decline, leading to less informed, less active and less independent minded individuals. In the end, human imagination suffers.

However, to communicate these days one has to project an immersive experience. More importantly, I would argue, one must develop one’s own integrity and authenticity, and consistently serve that up to his or her audience. Where content, data and information is concerned, visualization techniques that promote people as much or more than, for example, documents are increasingly important. One cannot afford to imagine their colleagues attending to their ideas. Rather must be able to qualitatively and quantitatively visualize all-important collaboration around them and progress about them. For example, when I seed an idea, who most consistently contributes to its germination?

The second puzzle articulates how we’re moving from nation-states to economic domains, not multinational corporations. Mr. Naisbitt advises the reader to study the economic activity of a domain (e.g. all products and services for enterprise content management) as the way to know the score of the game. He suggests that behavior in economic domains shall:

• Cause countries to enhance their identities by becoming more culturally nationalistic.
• Cause companies to be defined by their confederations and networks of entrepreneurs.
• Cause a mass customization of talent where individual talent is fitted to needs–globally. That is Free Agent Nation but on a global scale.

The global trading system is regrouping at a higher level; therefore, our number one economic priority must be education and training. It also sounds like a fantastic opportunity for a new breed of talent agencies to rise up and connect “players” and “teams.”

The next two puzzles dealt with China and Europe, respectively. I’m convinced that I need to visit China–reading and research alone are insufficient for me to appreciate its ramifications on my work and livelihood. I’m also convinced that if I ever start a company with global aspirations, I’ll insist on an Asian Pacific sales and marketing strategy before one focused on the European Union–recall the author’s “Mutually Assured Destruction” criticism of the EU (e.g. central planning and individual freedom cannot coexist).

The fifth and final puzzle addresses the present innovation reservoir borne out of revolutions from the 1980′s and 1990′s. Mr. Naisbitt submits that such a period of discontinuous changes begets a longer period of continuous changes–an evolutionary era of great opportunity and a period that builds on a ground already prepared.

I’ve already changed how I go about my research and how I gauge the value in contributing sources based on reading Mind Set! I’m committed more than ever to reading more of the thought-through and less of the off-the-cuff (e.g. with respect to the printed word (roughly): books > research papers > magazines > blogs).

This book has tempered my thinking and my expectations. Hopefully both are more realistic in light of applying and learning to apply several of the mindsets Mr. Naisbitt details.

Update 8/10/2007 (via The Journal of the EDS Agility Alliance): “We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.” -John Naisbitt, in his 1982 book Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

First there was his article in Wired, then there was his blog (i.e. ideas beta test bed), and now there is Chris Anderson’s book, which I recently finished reading and highly recommend: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.

“The Long Tail” comes from a type of statistics phenomenon known as a “long-tailed distribution” wherein the tail of the curve is very long relative to its head.

I see that Nicolas Carr is trying to further “the debate about the extent of the Long Tail phenomenon” by capturing some of the recent dialog between Chris Anderson and Lee Gomes of Wall Street Journal. Chris responds to Lee afterward here. Before that exchange, Tim Wu of Slate penned a review of The Long Tail entitled “The Wrong Tail: How to Turn a Powerful Idea into a Dubious Theory of Everything.”

While I don’t think that long-tailed distributions are under every rock in the quarries of culture and commerce, I can’t help but wonder what the implications of The Long Tail are when considering ECM and SOA.

I sketched the following on my office white board while discussing my impressions of this book with some of my colleagues:

Example music purveyors above are listed as examples of the following economies: physical goods (atoms) in physical stores (Tower Records), digital catalogs of physical goods with warehouses help to mitigate some of the zero-sum shelf space game)(Amazon.com), and digital catalogs of digitals goods (bits) with digital distribution that is ideally end-to-end (Apple’s iTunes).

Is there a long tail for content and/or a long tail for content services and solutions? Common content management (CM) needs (necessities vs. hits) are at the head (i.e. what Gartner calls “Basic Content Services”), and specialized CM needs (niches) occupy the (substantial?) tail.

Chris’s remark–”For too long, we’ve been suffering the tyranny of least common denominator fare”–resonates with me where most mainstream ECM functionality is concerned. Checkin, checkout, versioning, branching, lifecycle, workflow, etc. are powerful atoms but they’re meant to be a means to a wide variety of perhaps domain-specific ends. They’re the words that should make up the sentences and even chapters of ECM.

Applying SOA to ECM ECM enables platform vendors like EMC to provide a range of high-value CM services to its diverse customer base. “Clumps of services” can be bundled and sold according to the target domain or industry. Customer-driven composition, instead of code-based customization, can take effect, in part, because services are free from specific user experience and because their bundling is designed to address the task-centric workplace and the need to do more with less (e.g. a bundle of ten services should yield more than ten solutions–some with user experience and others solely focused on back end automation).

It seems clear, too, that vendors engaged in this pursuit must provide more than just a “veneer of variety.” By this, I’m referring to the book’s discussion about some of the perceived paradoxes surrounding increasing choice. The author contends that the process of choosing rather than the number of choices has more to do with subsequent motivation to buy or a sense of confusion and even oppression. Is the service consumer debilitated or liberated? Are the choices ordered in ways benefiting the consumer? Is informed choice enabled?

And what about the nature of service discovery in today’s SOAs? Public UDDI-based registries haven’t panned out as originally planned, and even within enterprises, UDDI alone often isn’t a sufficient basis for discovery. If the notion of filters as presented in this book (i.e. recommendations, rankings, search, taxonomies, etc.) has application in SOA, how will standards such as UDDI evolve accordingly? Given that traditional telephone company yellow pages are essentially service provider-based ads, is “UDDI as the yellow pages for web services” enough for informed discovery within the longer tail of services, CM-related or otherwise? (Ads shouldn’t be confused with recommendations.)

The book talks about the fractal nature of The Long Tail–tails within tails and “self-similarity at multiple scales.” ECM has evolved to address a particular set of broad requirements (e.g. web content management (WCM), digital asset management (DAM), collaboration, compliance, archiving, imaging, reporting, search, etc.). Each of these industry segments represents its own tail. Each vertical served by a particular set of product offerings represents another tail. Each of these tails should be served by a set of tailored filters to increase customer confidence that specific business needs will be met. Out of this fractal environment ontologies emerge (e.g. ways to organize ECM services)–both on the part of the provider and on the parts of consumers with robust business intelligence and analytics in place to reveal discrepancies and opportunities in near real-time.

A couple of ideas hit me while I was reading: (1) Playlist sharing and OPML sharing are increasing in popularity as ways to recommend music and content to others. Why not provide the ability to share content subscriptions within ECM repositories, too, perhaps leveraging something like OPML? Consider the typical project team whose membership may change over time based on its development phase. Being able to pass such information easily to new team members could greatly decrease ramp-up time. (2) What about realizing a standard way to auto-discover OPML much like RSS/Atom (feeds) can be auto-discovered today? This realization could enable OPML-based community formation (i.e. my OPML references a set of feeds; if one of these feeds has OPML associated with it then continue to fan out; …).

In unfinished form, here some more of the impressions this books has left with me. All quotes are from the book’s author unless attributed otherwise:

• Three forces of The Long Tail: Make it – democratize the tools of production; get it out there – democratize the tools of distribution (e.g. cut costs of consumption; bits vs. atoms); help me find it – connect supply and demand
• Identify niches and serve them authentically
• Affinity-based and massively parallel culture
• Mass culture versus micro-cultures massively parallel – how to avoid divisiveness, factions, walls, etc.?
• “These days our water coolers are increasingly virtual – there are many different ones, and the people who gather around them are self-selected. We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation, defined now not by our geography but by our interests.”
• Redefining connectivity, community, commerce, business, culture, allegiance, affinity
• Greater choice involves solving a specific need/want WELL
• Choice = competition, distraction, confusion; therefore, increase quality and experience
• “Market of multitudes” and “mass of niches”
• Consumer market of non-compliance/non-conformance versus business compliance as a potential challenge (friction) and opportunity
• Physical versus online (virtual) boundaries; enterprise versus consumer boundaries
• Professional < -> Prosumer < -> Consumer
• Consumer becomes producer: “It is when the tools of production are transparent that we are inspired to create.”
• The book’s discussion about content reuse in the form of house music makes me think that house software or house apps could be additional labels for today’s mashups.
• Availability at reasonable cost both to the producer and the consumer
• [The Long Tail as] “the true shape of demand in our culture, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity”
• “Our growing affluence has allowed us to shift from being bargain shoppers buying branded (or even unbranded) commodities to become mini-connoisseurs, flexing our taste with a 1000 little indulgences that set us apart from others.”
• How will consumers behave in markets of infinite choice?
• Recall my first impression of Rhapsody and later of Pandora (blogged both herein)
• “The biggest money is in the smallest sales.” -Kevin Laws
• “Popularity is no longer a monopoly on profitability.”
• What “norms” today are “forced” and poised to break apart? What choices, boundaries, etc. are artificial? What advantage can be gained by exposing them as such (artificial)? For example, the author suggests that 30-minute TV shows (i.e. 22 minute shows with 8 minutes of ads) are artificial: “Demand [for TV] will shift to shorter content for convenience and entertainment, and longer content for substance and satisfaction. But the arbitrary middle will not hold.”
• Re-evaluate what receives my attention? Even if it’s still deserving of my attention, should it continue to consume the same amount of my time (e.g. TiVo or your choice of DVR/PVR for TV-without-ads-and-on-your-schedule, 1.4x playback of audio, etc.)? Greater choice can raise the bar of what is worthy and what constitutes waste. It’s all about control (e.g. my control over news and the newsworthy, not someone else’s dictate that such programming occurs at 6pm or any other particular time).
• Human beings are curious; enabling exploration is compelling.
• “In a world of infinite choice, context–not content–is king.” -Rob Reid, Listen.com (Rhapsody)
• Filters – consider how to promote and encourage context via submission, especially as context would otherwise fall off and become harder to ascertain (subtleties and nuances) (e.g. consider what Pandora provides in its recommendation UI)
• Continue feeding navigation and explanation (i.e. discovery > acquisition) but understand when the destination take over the journey, too.
• Contextual pivoting (context pivots) – enabling different perspective to a given context (or jumping from one context to another)
• Google as an example of providing different contextual views (e.g. text, pictures, email, video, etc.)
• The Information Age is becoming the Recommendation Age (also the Participation Age) … recommendation = respected opinion … respect comes by reputation … reputation through interaction and engagement
• “The motives to create are not the same in the head as they are in the tail.” (aka Reputation Economy)
• “Niches operate by different economics than the mainstream.” So if you apply “scarcity thinking” to long tail content, much of it can be counterintuitive.
• Difference between push and pull markets (e.g. shrink-wrapped software vs. SaaS“)
• “One size fits one. Many sizes fit many.”
• WAS: dozens of markets of millions; IS: millions of markets of dozens
• “Transparency can build trust at no cost.”
• “Don’t predict; measure and respond.”

Finally, the author states: “Although the decline of mainstream cultural institutions may result in some people turning to echo chambers of like-minded views, I suspect that over time the power of human curiosity combined with near-infinite access to information will tend to make most people more open-minded, not less.” While I hope that he is right about open-mindedness, I wonder what the expression of this will become. Will the masses become more engaged in and committed to the process of discovering truth among opinions, or will we suffer mental atrophy and apathy by taking the easy way out and settling for merely something aligned with personal or collective bias? This is the challenge and opportunity of probabilistic systems where certainty and likelihood are concerned: you enter cone of uncertainty and are able to leave before absolute truth is acquired. Will we experience an erosion of critical thinking?

“With great power comes great responsibility,” and this applies more than ever to identifying truth in a relativistic society. Don’t confuse opinion with truth; don’t confuse judgment with discernment.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

Yesterday I mentioned how wikis could be useful way to reflect that fact that use cases, requirements, functionality, design and other aspects of software engineering are dynamic considerations, not static ones. While I mentioned that tools exist to capture the point-in-time state of a wiki into, for example a Word document or a PDF file, I didn’t talk about content flow in the other direction.

I believe that an effective way to seed a grassroots effort to employ wikis in a product development process (PDP) requires the presence of tools that take an existing document baseline and code baseline and produce a flexible environment such as a mature wiki implementation provides.

This belief is based on my experience with establishing UML diagrams as a standard, dense way to communicate design information. (See Martin Fowler’s “UML as Sketch” post for where I stand on UML’s role in a PDP.) During this process, the ability to extract UML class and sequence diagrams from existing code was valuable in establishing what well-formed “sketches” should look like. It also helped to quickly establish a base of work from which to build upon, versus starting from scratch.

So, why not apply reverse- and roundtrip-engineering from the code arena to the content arena?

Brian Jones presented the new and improved (default) XML formats coming in Office “12.” There were a couple of slides where the font was too small–simply because there was so much information being conveyed in a small amount of real estate. Other than that, and perhaps a couple of demo glitches, Brian gave a nice presentation.

Here are my notes:

• XML is default format in “12″ (not new information).
• The new XML formats are actually a Zip “package” of compressed XML documents or “parts” along with relationships and other bits. (Aside: this sure does smell like OpenOffice and the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) for Office Applications under development.).
• Unlike their binary (legacy) counterparts, the XML formats are compressed. Current storage measurements show around a 50+% savings (e.g. .docx vs. .doc).
• There will be patches available to patch down-level Office apps for new XML format support. This is critical if the new formats are to be adopted more rapidly and pervasively. ISVs must know that they’re not investing entirely in the future with no regard for the present enterprise landscape.
• The openness of the XML formats means that any compression library, any XML parser, on any system (e.g. Linux) may be employed.
• The current bits (not made available at PDC) make a binary format copy due to schema volatility (i.e. style undergoing work in fluid fashion) for the XML formats; this will change in final release (or before), of course.
• The ordering of parts in a package is still in flux (e.g. important parts up front, etc.). Of course, this begs the question, what makes a part important and who decides the definition (e.g. Microsoft, an ISV and/or our customers)?
• It was good to hear confirmation of Office “12″ and XPS (“Metro“) interop (e.g. unified rationale for Zip employment).
• Word “12″ format is similar to Word 2003 format; Excel “12″ format is a significant revision; Excel 2003 was not a full fidelity format (e.g. not everything was saved to XML); and PPT “12″ is a brand new format.
• The “Open Packaging Conventions” need to be studied, understood and followed (e.g. not adhering to these rules will result in data loss; e.g. a part with no reference flagged as corrupt and dropped in next save).
• There is custom-defined XML schema support in O12–reference schemas provide formatting while custom schemas provide meaning, both to the same content.
• I see these new XML formats as the new public, open API for OLE Structured Storage, which was previously only widely available via COM and Office binary formats. This transition is huge!
• The new formats should make solutions development much cleaner (e.g. InfoPath-Word integration, custom XML/XSL and Word XML, metadata exchange acrosss different stores and systems, including offline scenarios, etc.).
• The slide entitled “Sample Solution Scenarios” is particularly interesting when considering potential applications to add value to the new XML formats in Office “12″ (e.g. criteria/validation scans–inbound and outbound, inject/remove agents, taxonomy/ontology formation/refinement agents, etc.). Knowing that the packaged result is open and extensible (e.g. the VSTO manifest where Office “12″ is concerned will just be another part in the package) should prove to be a powerful development opportunity.
• You should expect to see a ton of samples (based on significant feedback from 2003 release)–i.e. not just docs that state what, but samples that state how and why.

Brian advises that we stay tuned to his blog. Later this week (perhaps as early as tomorrow), Microsoft will release the current (preview) reference schemas for Office “12,” at which point Brian promises to blog in more detail about this development canvas.

9/14/2005 update: Brian posts information to download the preview schemas.

Tags: PDC05

I wish more software would allow me to express my thoughts rather than force me to think about their expression.

This sentiment came up during a recent discussion with coworkers about the nature of most enterprise application tooling. Tools could be so much more usable and useful if they brought a rich semantic model to bear on the task at hand, whether it be coding against a class library API, visually composing controls on a page or form, enabling click-through navigation to event handling logic, etc. There are examples of this (e.g. JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA‘s refactoring support, Microsoft Visual Studio‘s IntelliSense support, M7 NitroX‘s recognition of JSF and Struts semantics), but overall it seems like there is plenty of room for growth.

Expression is certainly not the concern of developers only; in fact, it’s a general concern for anyone that interacts with software. During this office discussion the evolution of spell checking software was raised as a positive example of “getting it” today (but not when it was first released on the masses). Today’s spell checking, for example, in Outlook or Word is sophisticated enough to flag a potential issue inline and in near realtime without overwhelming its user with UI that forces the user to address issues and non-issues alike (i.e. the green and redline squiggly underline links with contextual guidance via right-click menu options). Is there room to grow? Absolutely! Case in point: when you correctly spell a word but place it in the wrong context, it would be nice for Word to indicate this potential too me in a similar manner as it does sentence fragments, statements vs. questions, misspelled words, etc. However, this is a lot better than having software take control of my task and assert its will on mine with a modal dialog, which used to be the case in most spell checking applications.

If more software “got it” in this regard–allowing users to express themselves and guiding them toward their success in the process–new levels of productivity would be achieved.

The Law of the Big Picture is but one of the powerful principles John C. Maxwell explains in his book The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork: Embrace Them and Empower Your Team. While reading this book, which I certainly recommend, I was particular drawn to the following laws:

#2) The Law of the Big Picture – The goal is more important than the role.

• Capture and communicate vision.
• When you see the big picture correctly, you serve the team more quickly.
• Great vision precedes great achievement.

#6) The Law of the Catalyst – Winning teams have players who make things happen.

• Catalysts are get-it-done-then-some people who are intuitive, communicative, passionate, talented, creative, initiating, responsible, generous and influential.

#7) The Law of the Compass – Vision gives team members direction and confidence.

• Moral compass (look above)
• Intuitive compass (look within)
• Historical compass (look behind)
• Directional compass (look ahead)
• Strategic compass (look around)
• Visionary compass (look beyond)

#11) The Law of the Scoreboard – The team can make adjustments when it knows where it stands.

• A scoreboard is essential to understanding, to evaluating, to decision making, to adjusting and to winning.
• When you know what to do, then you can do what you know.

#15) The Law of the Edge – The difference between two equally talented teams is leadership.

• Personnel determines the potential of the team.
• Vision determines the direction of the team.
• Work ethic determines the preparation of the team.
• Leadership determines the success of the team.

I have the privilege of working with a talented and committed group of developers on the product line whose architecture for which I am responsible. I believe that one of the reasons we work effectively together is that we’re able to practice what a mentor to me earlier in my career may have called The Law of the Potluck. Just like folks tend to bring their favorite, tried-and-true dishes to any potluck, a software development project may present an opportunity to bring together individuals with particular expertise into a cohesive and complete effort that can result in a fantastic product release. The goal is to identify individual team member strengths that in combination with other teammates’ skills lead to synergistic productivity and inspired levels of problem space ownership and more rapid solution discovery.

However, as anyone taking part in a potluck knows, you can end up with two much of one dish and not enough of another, as the meal progresses or as participants change. Enter The Law of the Big Picture. Recall what can make a start-up experience so energizing. There is work to do, and it’s up to me to get it done. Never mind the nature of the work, there’s a product to release! That’s the spirit of project catalysts, and it starts with each team member, but especially in the team leader.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

Recently I finished reading Design Rules, Vol. 1: The Power of Modularity. While I was less struck by this book than I was after reading Small Pieces Loosely Joined, I still picked up several points I hope to incorporate into my thought and application of design as a software architect.

• An understanding of the forces driving change is crucial to comprehending the opportunities and the risk that change creates.
• The first person that comes to mind as a practitioner of the previous statement is Pat Helland. What struck me… (read on)
• Design is the process of inventing objects [or evolving artifacts, including intangibles like rules] that perform specific functions.
• When applied faithfully, modularity greatly reduces the costs of experimenting with new designs.
• Experimentation yields both new opportunities and new competition.
• Chapter five of this book covered the complete set of modular operators as follows: splitting, substituting, augmenting, excluding, inverting and porting.
• The design structure of an artifact and the task structure of the design process are isomorphic.
• With respect to design, structure affects tasks deeply and unavoidably
• Every hierarchical relationship and interdependency in the creation of a design requires a corresponding connection among tasks.
• Human task structures have a fractal property.
• Human beings are capable of visualizing new artifacts in an imaginative domain, and then acting purposefully to bring those artifacts into existence in the real world. Axiom: Designers see and seek value in new designs. Aside (bias beware): Personal value vs. market value ./li>
• Imposing a design rule when one is ignorant of the true underlying interdependencies can lead to design failure. Or, as I’m known to say, Know what you leverage!
• Modularity increases the range of manageable complexity.
• Modularity allows different parts of a large design to be worked on concurrently.
• Modularity accommodates uncertainty.
• A modular design is a portfolio of options. Modularity creates real design options.
• The value inherent in a modular design is potentially dangerous to its creators. Control in the system (and decision making in the organization) becomes decentralized; no one has to grant permission for experimentation to occur. In fact, such experiments can take place unawares. Taken to an extreme, system architects and integrators can modularize themselves out of existence.
• However, as dangerous as this reality might be to some, the alternative is far worse in my view: Dominant Designs [that lead to], Frozen Organizations [that result in], and Complexity Catastrophes.
• Does efficiency in software production necessarily require rigidity and lack of flexibility? What does this say about CMM, ISO-9000 and the like?
• The driving force behind a quest for modularity is always a desire to achieve the right balance between fruitful uncertainty and paralyzing complexity.
• Modularity is about abstraction, information hiding and interfaces.
• There are two kinds of information hiding: visible and hidden.
• Visible design choices are relatively irreversible; hidden design choices are reversible.
• Visible design parameters == design rules

Aside: During part of my reading of this text, I saw a Citigroup TV ad, which showed a kid being swung by his dad while showing: Overtime pays more. <pause> Because of what you’re missing. Isn’t that the truth (and I don’t even receive OT)!

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.