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.”

The “Reply All” feature of most email programs like Outlook is a convenience ripe for abuse. Unfortunately such abuse seems to occur about once a quarter or so where I work. Folks add an alias to their message (To or Cc) that ends up involving a multitude of folks who could care less about the message just received.

So, unfortunately (!), what many folks do in reply is Reply All, yet again.

When you Reply All to a Reply All asking not to Reply All, you defeat your purpose. Instead, be surgical and just educate the offenders. That is, be sure to remove all aliases from your reply–if you really feel the need to reply in the first place–and communicate solely with individuals on the To line of the diseased message.

Surely there is a way in Outlook to establish a rule as follows:

    Apply this rule after the message arrives
    with INOCULATION_KEYWORD(S)_HERE in the subject
    reply using INOCULATION_EMAIL_TEMPLATE_HERE
        and move it to the Deleted Items folder

If you really feel compelled to Reply All, then at least do others the favor of changing the Reply-To address in your message to something less hideous (e.g. (in Outlook) Options | Direct Replies To | Have replies sent to: no-reply@…).

Yeah, I know that Twitter lately is all about Oprah, CNN and Ashton Kutcher, but it’s also about brief remarks, gripes and triumphs related to products and/or services that you send into the world wide market. (And if you were waiting for The Tipping Point, it’s already occurred for Twitter, IMHO.)

BTW, before I go any further, I’m @craigsmusings on Twitter. (Thanks, Dan.)

If a tree falls in a forest, it always makes a noise–regardless of your presence there. There are social conversations that occur online (e.g. Facebook, blogs, wikis, Twitter, newsgroups, IIRC, etc.), and they will continue to occur regardless of your presence there, too. However, that’s an especially risky position to take these days–see the conversation but not engage.

Consider the following conversation on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/johnsmith

Very disappointed in _YOUR_PRODUCT_HERE_, does not appear to have very much to it at all….if anything!
12:10 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck

http://twitter.com/janedoe

@johnsmith Did you see a live presentation or play with it,
4:45 AM Apr 23rd from TwitterBerry

http://twitter.com/johnsmith

@janedoe Had a play with it, will blog later this week, does not seem to give us anything to use as an accelerator
4:52 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck in reply to janedoe

http://twitter.com/janedoe

@johnsmith Ouch! That’s the point in theory.
4:58 AM Apr 23rd from TwitterBerry

So, what will John Smith blog exactly? He’s indicated that his post is forthcoming but also that there may be time to engage him–understand his concern and possibly influence him after listening by demonstrating value.

Jane appears to be an interested party, too. Is Jane a known advocate, possibly trying to reach out on your behalf? Is Jane known to be skeptical?

How can you “see” this conversation?

I use TweetDeck, an Adobe AIR-based Twitter client, for my tweeting, etc. It works equally well on both MacOS and Windows. (There are many other clients out there, too!)

TweetDeck allows me to do a number of useful things.

• For example, the leftmost column/pane is a group. (You can read that tiny font, right? ) In my case, I filtered All Friends (i.e. those I follow in Twitter) into just the subset that tweets about content management. (You can see that there is a horizontal scroll bar on the bottom, and the default “All Friends” column/pane is off to the far right (where I moved it to reduce seen UI changes).)
• The “Replies” column/pane is just what it implies—tweets in reply to me from others.
• The “Direct Messages” column/pane contains DM’s from me and DM’s to me.
• The two rightmost columns/panes in view above are searches. Since these are Twitter-based searches–one for tweets containing “CMIS” and another for tweets containing both “EMC” and “Documentum”–I receive traffic updates that apply in near realtime (unlike, e.g., a Google search that requires one to hit Refresh to see new results).

Anyway, I can visit John Smith’s Twitter profile to learn that he has a 70:30 ratio (i.e. he’s following 70 twitters and 30 twitters are following him). Clearly, Mr. Smith is not a “rock star” by Twitter standards. (Certainly, I am not either!)

However, consider the junior high campfire song’s sentiment: “It only takes a spark, to get a fire going…” This goes back to my point above: there may be time to engage him–understand his concern and possibly influence him after listening by demonstrating value (and create a positive fire–however big or small–about your product or service).

The truth is that, although I’ve been blogging for awhile now, I’m relatively new to Twitter. Fortunately for me, I have great resources in my “2.0 type” EMC colleagues and elsewhere online. For example, I recommend that you check out Gina Minks’ Twitter Cheat Sheet. (I understand from Gina that a v2.0 release is due out in time for EMC World, too.)

I recall during last year’s Microsoft Strategic Architect Forum (SAF) that a good industry colleague of mine suggested a “I don’t get Twitter” topic for the open space segment of that afternoon. I egged him on to make the suggestion; so, of course I attended…and I think that everyone learned a fair bit in the process.

Since then I’ve only recently begun to seriously tweet. Already that engagement has paid dividends, and due to the fact that most of my cross-domain architect colleagues don’t yet tweet, I thought I’d humbly offer this post to get them to “dive into” Twitter, too, in a way that’s both meaningful to them and meaningful to their communities. (You know who you are. )

For those who weren’t at or don’t know about SAF, Microsoft worked with Mindjet to mind map the open space sessions. Here are the notes from the “I don’t get Twitter” session in mind map form–just click the following image for the .mmap (MindManager 8 format) file:

So, what do you think of Twitter? If you find it useful, how do you receive value from it?

Update 4/30/2009: Gina Minks just published a new cheat sheet for tweeting from your phone.

Last month I revealed that I suffered a basketball injury (i.e. a high rupture of my right Achilles tendon, requiring surgical repair). Yesterday marked the six-week point since surgery. Today I completed my third week of physical therapy and being out of a cast and in a walking boot. This afternoon was my three-week follow-up with my surgeon.

Those professionally helping me in my recovery say that I’m making excellent progress. Given where I am calendar-wise since the injury, my range of motion is great and my strength is good, too. Perhaps next week, I’ll be able to spend time out of my walking boot in a regular shoe assisted by a crutch. This will allow me to work on re-establishing my normal gait.

Already this experience has been rich in life lessons for me:

• When you listen to your care givers, good things can and do happen! (Wish I’d learned this in my twenties.)
• I still have a ways to go until I’m a consistently patient person. (Sometimes, I’m not a patient patient!)
• I value my independence, and I have a hard time asking for help.
• Handicapping injuries offer a great opportunity to slow down and experience the subtler, finer points of life (e.g. wonderful family moments).
• When operating on a single crutch, the crutch goes on the strong side, not alongside the injury. (My physical therapist had a good laugh–and said that it’s not uncommon to see patients operate incorrectly.)
• I thrive on communication (e.g. interacting with colleagues at work). While I’m grateful to be able to work regularly from home–even more so since my injury–there is simply no substitute for face-to-face communication.
• Be conservative in your recovery goals, allowing more opportunity to be pleasantly surprised. Don’t confuse this with owning your recovery, being confident and taking initiative.
• The human walk is truly elegant. It seems so simple, but there’s a lot to it when you have to deconstruct and re-learn it. Coordination requires more effort and focus than strength requires.

You may have noticed that I’ve been light on blogging this month, after starting the year off at a better pace (for me, anyway). Needless to say, I’ve been focusing my spare (and non-spare) time on my recovery. Let’s see…post a blog…regain ability to walk…blog…walk…hmmm…

Suffice it to say, for now, that plenty of good things are happening where my professional life is concerned, too (e.g. cool new software features and products forthcoming from EMC). More on that later.

In the meantime, thanks for all the well-wishes and support. Cheers…

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.

Back when I joined Documentum in 1998–later acquired by EMC, I can recall its first CEO, Jeff Miller, saying: “We may not always be right, but at least we’re not confused.” (Fast Company captured a slightly different quote: “It might not be the right plan, but at least we’re not confused.”)

So, when I read a recent quote from eBay’s CEO, Meg Whitman, I was reminded of Mark Twain’s word, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Actually, in defense of her company’s acquisition of Skype to Tim O’Reilly, Whitman appears to be quoting Meister Eckhart, German writer and theologian, 1260-1328: “The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.”

Repaving – def. the computer-based act of reformatting the system partition followed by installing a fresh operating system followed by fresh application installations followed by user settings restoration

For starters, it’s a good idea to separate your data from your applications (e.g. C: has OS and software; D: has documents, pictures, music, videos, etc.). You can accomplish this separation via separate physical hard disk drives or drive partitions. (Given the amount of software I use regularly due to my professional as well as the volume of digital content I posses, I go the multiple drive route.) So, if you currently run a one-disk-and-one-partition environment (RAID 1 (mirror), RAID 0 (striped) or no RAID), consider creating two partitions in your new environment.

Any robust repaving process should begin with current backups. If you don’t already possess a current backup of your critical files, settings, software installers, etc., find your backup medium of choice and start that process. If your backup solution is online and off-premise, just make certain that you save the means to reconnect to your service from your new computing environment–same applies to your ISP. If you choose, for example, to backup to disc (DVD or (gasp) CD) be sure to validate written data is readable before calling it a day. Also, be sure to exit out of all applications before commencing backup–even to the point of confirming exits via Task Manager (e.g. OUTLOOK.EXE isn’t hanging around nor is any other desktop search software that maintain a lock on your PST file, etc.).

Recently I’ve found it useful to maintain a list of what I install on a machine, especially for work (software architecture). When I’m repaving, I simply review this list to trigger anything specific that may require backing up. This list also comes in handy further into the repaving process when I start re-installing software. As a cross-checking measure, I save the contents of my Start menu, my Quick Launch toolbar, and a listing from my Program Files directory, too. Be sure to save the means to reinstall each piece of software (e.g. URL’s, license keys, setup programs, access credentials, etc.).

Use care when your repave involves software or content with activation (e.g. Adobe) or other rights management (e.g. music). By “care” I mean take time to confirm that nothing OS-specific forms a basis for rights (e.g. seen as one machine under XP and a different, second machine under Vista, or not). Omar Shahine has a useful post about persistent application cache care and other concerns.

So, you have your current system backed up and your ready to repave.

First, restart your PC using your Windows operating system installation disc and not your existing OS. Select the existing system partition and perform a complete reformatting of this partition–nothing less than NTFS, of course. This reformatting should not affect any other partition or hard disk drive on your computer. Depending on the size of the system partition/drive, reformatting can take some time (i.e. window of opportunity to break for another activity of choice).

Next, install the software you require. Unlike looking over everything in your closet of garage before you get rid of it, take the time to consider whether or not you really need to restore a particular piece of software in your new computing home. If no compelling reason comes to mind, don’t install it–instead just save it for a later day (that may never come).

Finally, restore or apply your particular software configuration, app-by-app. Fortunately a growing amount of software provides an automated way to backup and restore user settings (e.g. Microsoft Office). For me, this also involves a review of my Start menu, Quick Launch bar, Windows environment variables, Windows Registry favorites, IE favorites, Firefox bookmarks, etc.

Once you have your new environment finally setup and configured to preference, it’s a good idea to create an image (e.g. built-in ImageX software on Windows Vista or third party software like Acronis True Image). By creating an image, should your system partition head south, you can restore your OS and applications back to a known state in minutes rather than hours. Of course, as your system changes over time, it’s worth periodically updating your system image.

One last tip: Increasingly I’m using virtualization as a means to partition my computing environments (e.g. I have several VMware-based virtual machine images for work-related projects). Virtualization allows me to keep my physical computing environment (i.e. host OS in VMware parlance) simple and more spartan. Virtual images compress well; so, I regularly archive these to my data partition/drive.

This process has served me well over the years. Fortunately as Windows has matured, my need to repave has decreased. Alas, it hasn’t gone away completely, though… 

Whether you like to think of it as “eating your own dogfood” or “drinking your own champagne”, you may appreciate the following succinct expression of why doing so is vital to your enterprise:

You sell what you know.
You know what you use.
You use what you have access to.

To be clear, “sell” isn’t merely limited to the traditional definition highly relevant to your sales force. In the context of creative, architectural and engineering staff, “sell” can be substituted with “innovate.” How can you innovate upon your current product offerings if you aren’t regularly using and stressing them?

Credit to Tod Tompkins for sharing this expression.

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).

Yesterday Laurence talked about the challenges that a multitude of interfaces can present a solution builder, specifically in the context of ECM, and today Billy added his thoughts. While both posts seem to be focused more on visual interfaces (UI) than non-visual interfaces, the concerns raised apply to interfaces in general.

Here are my thoughts:

• I very much agree that it’s more a matter of should than can. Is the new UI or user experience relevant to my business? Does a new experience enable the retirement of any other experiences? Does a new experience lower training costs (e.g. is it more intuitive to my users)?
• At some level, all user experiences from a vendor should be consistent. However, one must also consider where ultimate experience control resides. For example, I see at least two major categories of users where ECM applications are concerned: (1) those who prefer a standalone experience, typically within their web browser of choice, and (2) those who prefer that the vendor provide an integrated experience within the primary applications serving the business’s knowledge work (e.g. Office applications, a third party portal, etc.).
• I agree with Laurence: UI should serve the task at hand; not the other way around. You have a job to accomplish and the provided experience should clarify and simplify that job–even anticipate next steps, etc.
• How a business is run and wants to be run will determine whether or not a solution has one or more graphical/visual aspects. Knowledge work is becoming more specialized; so, each user experience should be tailored specifically to the particular link in the value chain it serves. Some have called this approach “purpose-built applications” or “task-centric experiences.” At the same time, there are horizontal (cross-cutting) concerns with visual needs, too (e.g. CIO dashboards, BAM, management consoles for admins, etc.).

When you provide presentation tier code as part of your solution–”whole cloth UI’s” as Billy calls them, you should acknowledge that users can be a fickle bunch (read: today’s Lexus experience will become a Yugo eventually–it’s a matter of when, not if).

So you should have a well-factored architecture that separates business logic and services, which serve all your UI’s, from application logic and services, which serve a particular UI (e.g. web-based, Office-based, etc.). Doing so, should produce a “thin veneer” for a presentation layer, which is easier to evolve or replace. Again, the UI serves the task at hand; over time, a new UI may serve the task better.

From “Lessons from the Anti-Mentor” (via my folks):

• People are essentially reliable; therefore, their actions should be understood with that consistency in mind (e.g. always generous, always selfish, always doing, always (just) talking, etc.). Trust your instincts here.
• “You spend too much time at work to spend it around people you don’t like or trust. If you’re not having fun, it’s time to move on.”

Although I’m not a fan of Digg, I nevertheless appreciate the following quote (originally in Business 2.0 magazine and more recently referenced in ComputerWorld) from Jay Adelson, Digg’s CEO: “A lot of companies are afraid to touch their original technology, to reconsider the premise on which they started the business. But when you stop doing that, that’s when you get lapped.”

Aside: This post is brought to you by the shiny new beta two version of Windows Live Writer. Recommended.

From: Craig Randall
Sent: 5/30/2007 7:45:19 PM
Newsgroups: jetbrains.omniamea.eap, jetbrains.omea.reader, jetbrains.omea.pro, jetbrains.omea.dev
Subject: When will the source finally become open for Omea?

Omea Team-

Many months ago Jetbrains announced that Omea was going open source. However, to date the source is still entirely closed. There has been very little explanation about the lack of follow-through (timely or otherwise) concerning progress (or challenges) in achieving the publicly announced goal of making Omea an open source project.

When you read through a significant number of posts since the Omea announcement, it’s obvious that the Omea community is loyal. But all loyalty has its limits, and I fear that Jetbrains is pushing this community to the point of writing off the announcement as vaporous. That is really unfortunate and completely unnecessary. From my correspondence separately with you, I know that there is still passion around Omea (i.e. the core dev’s at Jetbrains).

So, what say you? Can you give your long-suffering community a definitive answer about when you will finally make Omea fully open source?

-Craig

It’s also been almost six months since version 2.2 was released. So regardless of the critical environment around open sourcing your product, you need to convince your community that, regardless of open/closed, Omea is alive and well, receiving its due care and feeding one way or another.

You made Omea free (as in free beer); now, please liberate Omea.

Sincerely, your languishing advocate…

Update 3/14/2008: JetBrains has finally released Omea under GPL v2, and the community can participate in its ongoing development (!!). More in a separate post…

I recently came across the following quote from Abraham Lincoln: “Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.“

Considering how the passing of the sun, for example, causes a tree’s shadow to change shape (and finally disappear), the President’s statement gives me pause. How much time do I devote to “shadow observation” rather than observing the tree itself? How much time do I attend to my “personal tree” instead of worrying about shadows currently cast by it (i.e. others’ perceptions)?

At the Microsoft MVP 2007 Global Summit held last month, I had the opportunity to hear Jack Greenfield talk about software factories. During Jack’s presentation Sam Gentile essentially remarked that while he understands and uses software factories, he doesn’t understand the point/value of software product lines (e.g. BDUF vs. agile…).

As Jack provided a thoughtful response, I too was thinking about how I’d reply. The following analogy came to mind–from an episode of The History Channel’s “Modern Marvels” show on the subject of assembly lines. (You can view a small portion of the show online here.)

Henry Ford was quite successful in cementing the role of the assembly line in automobile manufacturing. A well-known remark of his is, “You can have whatever color you want as long as it’s black.” And the way Ford tooled and drove its assembly line exemplified this focus. After Ford’s workforce rebelled against the ever-increasing speed of the line and was wooed back by essentially by money, Ford’s customer base increased its demand for customization–even just a change in external paint color. Enter GM.

GM was able to grab a fair bit of market share from Ford by understanding how to copy Ford’s success while also addressing consumer demand for increased choice.

Later, after choice was commoditized (i.e. presumed by the consumer), quality came to the foreground. Enter Toyota.

Toyota dramatically changed the role of the line worker to a fully empowered, responsible agent of quality and process improvement. Instead of increasing production by dialing up the speed of the line, Toyota practiced “kaizen.” Its management reduced available resources by 10% and expected/supported the line to adapt. Quality wasn’t a job–recall Ford’s more recent “quality is job one” campaign–it was a mindset…a workplace lifestyle, if you will.

Now South Korea and its Hyundai corporation are getting into the fray with an emphasis on enhancing quality through robotics and repeatable fine tolerances in manufacturing as a result. A May 2007 Motor Trend article about Hyundai’s recently revealed Concept Genesis emphasized the potential of a car that can compete with a Lexus while featuring a price of a Toyota. Sounds like more disruption to me.

Back to software factories and software product lines…

At its very beginning, Ford represented (just) a software factory. GM represents an initial software product line–harvesting assets from Ford. Toyota represents a later software product line–harvesting assets from GM and from Ford.

Perhaps Ford could have kept GM at bay or out of its market by taking more of a “software product line” mentality from the get-go–similarly, American auto makers and the likes of Toyota and Honda (Japanese auto makers).

Later, another MVP remarked that his essential concern is protection from what is going to change (or from “variability” to reference Jack’s translation of this concern). I believe that a software product line practice can raise visibility here and also to the inverse concern: Where are my fundamental assumptions? What are my invariants and what happens when change happens there?

In the case of automobile makers like Ford, GM and Toyota, history offers powerful examples of why architects should pursue software product lines and understand how they underlie software factories.

I just finished reading The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary Into Extraordinary by Joseph A. Michelli. I originally picked up this book given its sub-title and recurring thoughts about content management. Is CM mundane, everyday, even boring? Is it just ordinary? If it is, why is that?

Some things are meant to be in the background. They silently assist; they just work; they draw no attention to themselves per se. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they cannot also be extraordinary (e.g. principle #3: surprise and delight).

Likewise, customer experience is determined more by the people develop, market and otherwise represent the product, good or service in question. Certainly that is true of Starbucks, and I believe it’s true of any software enterprise. So, this read was an opportunity for me to step outside my own hand-crafted experience, if you will, and contrast it with a highly successful experience and approach.

Dr. Michelli distills the Starbucks Experience into five key business principles as follows:

1. Make it your own
2. Everything matters
3. Surprise and delight
4. Embrace resistance
5. Leave your mark

Throughout the book, the author provides several questions to consider under the heading “Create Your Own Experience.” While discussing “make it your own,” Dr. Michelli asks the following question: “What can you do to invest more of yourself and to get others to invest more of themselves in the process of interpersonal connection and discovery?” As a connector and collaborator, I thrive when I’m debating the merits of an architecture, listening to how customers leverage the products I build, mentoring colleagues, etc. I’m puzzled when there isn’t a natural buzz on the floor at work–why don’t others want to connect and collaborate to the same degree? (Shouldn’t everyone in the content management industry have an active blog? )

Starbucks’ Green Apron Book with its “Five Ways of Being” serves as a counter-balance to such questions: be welcoming, be genuine, be considerate, be knowledgeable and be involved. Rather than focusing on others, I should focus first on myself–how can I connect, discover and respond? True passion demands involvement.

Throughout the book, the author provides several observations to consider under the heading “Ideas to Sip On.” While discussing “everything matters,” Dr. Michelli makes the following observation: “Details affect the emotional connection (the ‘felt sense’) that others have with you.” Do I actively and fully listen to concerns? Do I act more than I speak? Am I on a soul quest or just following a mental ascent?

“Whether it’s brewing coffee, designing software, or mopping floors, a commitment to Surprise and Delight literally transforms the very nature of work. Employment stops being about the words written in job descriptions and expands to including offering unexpected experiences.” -Joseph A. Michelli

It’s important to anticipate the needs of colleagues and customers alike and to surprise those served by the business, and I agree with the author that leadership sets the tone herein. Fortunately “leader” isn’t a formal title reserved for a few either. Leader is an attribute available to you and I, and it’s individually and personally realized. For example, some lead by serving; others lead by making a stand.

“Embrace Resistance” was a chapter that underscored the importance of trust in collaboration for me. It’s common for me to seek out others, perhaps fellow architects or product managers, for example, to become effective proxies for my vision and roadmap where a particular product or project is concerned. Have I effectively conveyed my passion to him or her? Have they been able to “play it back” to me (in high-def mode even)?

I can certainly inform Starbucks that their partnership with the local Albertsons grocery store (in-store Starbucks) is failing them when it comes to the production of customer delight. Not only are my wife and I often surprised by the non-welcoming, somewhat aloof staff but the service is predictably sub-par. This is surely not the Cracker Jack-like result Starbucks invests in and expects.

My point in this recollection is that embracing resistance may involve indirect resistance, too. Someone on my behalf may inadvertently (or perhaps even intentionally) create resistance–to a product, to a feature, to an idea, etc. It’s my job to seek this out, too, engage and respond accordingly after understand legitimate issues and possible recourse.

In closing, I appreciate the author’s chapter of exhortation (i.e. personal application) in “A Final Word,” and I return back to the world of content management and to you my readership. How can I surprise and delight more effectively? Am I delivering predictable, positive experiences personally and through the products I bring to market? Where is there a resistance to use content management software in your business and workflow? What works well for you and what isn’t working as expected? How can I leave a deeper and longer lasting mark on my workplace and on my industry?

I’d love to hear from you. Thanks in advance for taking the time…

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.

Now that Michael Gerasimov, one of the last remaining Omea developers at JetBrains, has gone public on the jetbrains.omea.pro newsgroup with the state of affairs at JetBrains concerning Omea, I can comment here.

While JetBrains may receive more revenue and recognition from its IntelliJ IDEA product (e.g. leading edge refactoring support in a Java IDE), Omea represents a compelling and leading offering in the personal information management space. I certainly hope that Omea continues to thrive long from now in one way or another. Thoughts of an open source Omea project are particularly exciting, but I’d be just as happy for JetBrains to decide to maintain it as a viable commercial offering.

My worst fear is that Omea may simply die–be quietly taken offline and become forgotten…nothing more than archived code, binaries and docs…thoughts of what could have been.

There is certainly software deserving of such a fate, but Omea is not among it. Not by a long shot!

Update 3/15/2008: My fears have been relieved.

While the Microsoft Architect Advisory Board (MAAB) was still active, I had the opportunity to work with Rocky Lhotka in the Smart Client Architectures working group. I’ve subscribed to his blog for awhile now and flagged both of his posts that software is too hard ( [1] and [2]) to read on my flight up to next week’s SharePoint conference. Today’s mail included a copy of Visual Studio magazine featuring a guest column by Rocky adapted from his first blog post. It was all the nudge I needed to stop and read the article “Software Is Too Darn Hard.”

This is timely advice for all of us in the software industry and certainly for me personally as I focus on services and service orientation (e.g. value yielded, not architectural polish).

2005

About a year ago, I acquired the “craigrandall.net” domain and set out to employ WordPress as my blogging foundation. Both moves have paid nice dividends. My domain has been easier for contacts to recall and WordPress has allowed me to focus on creating content rather than maintaining infrastructure.

Looking at the year’s content creation, I’m pleasantly surprised but also motivated to change my emphases a bit in 2006. I benefitted greatly over the past year by the writing of others, averaging over a solid read a month. I had more inspirational posts than posts about my site. Still I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time posting about my site.

Seventy-four posts in 2005 is an OK pace. There were only two months where I didn’t average a post per week. But I’m less interested in quantity and more interested in quality. Compared to 2004, I did post more about my thoughts in 2005 and less about aggregating the thoughts of others. However, in 2006, I intend to carry this trend further by writing more from the gut and perhaps somewhat less in quotes.

2006

“Resolution” is a bit strong; so, I’m going with “intention” instead… Having just reflected upon 2005, I intend to focus moving forward on the following subjects (in no particular order):

• Areas of personal expertise and/or passion
• More reflections on the books I read
• Services and SOA
• WinFS – Microsoft’s next-generation integrated storage
• Enterprise content management (ECM) – including email archiving, identity management, basic content services (BCS)
• Open source projects of note

I’m sure that I’ll still take some space to share aspects of my life outside work and to describe how my site continues to evolve. However, I intend to tip the balance in favor of professional content. Perhaps in the process I will benefit from more interaction with my readership, but I know what is in my control and what I can only hope to influence.

My intention stated here is motivated in part by my recent read of The Success of Open Source. That is, open source credits its membership based more on creation (evidence of skill) than it does on credential. It’s still always a good idea to have an up-to-date resume and to leverage tools like LinkedIn, but blogging is living and evolving evidence of being “fit for purpose.”

More on The Success of Open Source in a subsequent post…

“Resolution” is a bit strong; so, I’m going with “intention” instead.

Looking back on 2005, I intend to focus during 2006 on the following subject (in no particular order):

• More reflections on the books I read
• Enterprise content management (ECM) – including email archiving, identity management, basic content services (BCS)
• Open source projects of note
• WinFS – Microsoft’s next-generation integrated storage
• Similarities and differences between .NET and J2EE
• Services and SOA
• Areas of personal expertise and/or passion

I’m sure that I’ll still take some space to share aspects of my life outside work and to describe how my site continues to evolve. However, I intend to tip the balance in favor of professional content. Perhaps in the process I will benefit from more interaction with my readership, but I know what is in my control and what I can only hope to influence.

My intention stated here is motivated in part by my recent read of The Success of Open Source. That is, open source credits its membership based more on creation (evidence of skill) than it does on credential. It’s still always a good idea to have an up-to-date resume and to leverage tools like LinkedIn, but blogging is living and evolving evidence of being “fit for purpose.”

A colleague of mine was kind enough to refer me to this. As a result I also read Garr Reynolds‘ follow-up post. To me the whole “Live” announcement came as little surprise–it’s very much aligned with recent reorganizations at Microsoft and clearly addresses threats Microsoft faces from the likes of Google and others in the software-as-services space. But while I’ve read much of the blogosphere’s commentary on the announcement, I did not see it myself, nor did I, until now, read a critique of Bill’s performance in making this announcement. Although Garr is ex-Apple, his critique is, in my view, constructive and fair.

To me the overwhelming (and at the same time underwhelming) visuals are indicative of trying to bite off too much to chew in one slide. “Live” may be another one of those over-arching strategies–recall the Internet becoming everything–but if it is cast too broadly than its staying power is diluted and its resonance more quickly dissipates.

In the second post of the two I link to above, Garr shows a picture of Steve Jobs with a giant ‘?’ behind him (white character on black background). Simple. Direct. Engaging. It reminds me of a story Tom Peters conveyed in his book Re-imagine! The only difference was that Tom projected “So What?!?” instead of ‘?’

“Eclipse is an open source project and one of our goals is to practice completely transparent development. The rationale is simple; if you don’t know where the project is going you cannot help out or provide feedback.” -Erich Gamma (foreword to Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 2e
, the subject of my post here) Even if your development process is slightly translucent, Erich’s rationale applies. If your development process is opaque, ask why and demand an answer.

Values bring purpose to practices. Practices are evidence of values. Principles bridge the gap between values (universal) and practices (intensely situated).

Extreme programming (XP) values communication, simplicity, feedback, courage and respect. These values are effective when applied together, not in isolation.

Mr. Beck’s four criteria used to evaluate the simplicity of a design:

1. Appropriateness for the intended audience
2. Communicative
3. Factored
4. Minimal

Feedback is the value I focused on the most during my read of Kent Beck’s text. I see the need for better heartbeat recognition, pulse taking and continual health assessments in some of the projects I lead. Establishing the right frequency and depth of project heartbeats can lead to a proper balance between process and reflection. Without periodic and regular project “physicals” it can be difficult to ascertain whether project/participant health is improving or declining. Project assessment need not be arduous or mysterious, but it does require discipline and commitment.

I was also impressed by Mr. Beck’s focus on flow. Insist on a high degree of continuous flow and quickly resolve all flow disruptions. Daily builds are not enough! Software should function correctly on a (verified) daily basis, at a minimum (i.e. always be deployable). Integration environments are critical to project flow. Metrics can lead to awareness. Awareness can lead to change and the development of practices to institutionalize change.

Here are just a few of the statements made by Kent Beck that made a particularly strong impression:

• “If you’re having trouble succeeding, fail.”
• “A concern for quality is no excuse for inaction.” The goal is to make the quality of software development good enough that there is no need for downstream QA. This means that everyone in the project is responsible for quality without exception.
• “Without daily attention to design, the cost of changes does skyrocket.”
• “Keep the design investment in proportion to the needs of the system so far.”
• On the role of Product Managers: “In XP, product managers write stories, pick themes and stories in the quarterly [release] cycle, pick stories in the [bi-]weekly [iteration] cycle, and answer questions as implementation uncovers under-specified areas of stories.”
• On the role of Architects: “Architects on an XP team look for and execute large-scale refactorings, write system-level tests that stress the architecture, and implement stories.”
• “There is so much waste in software development. The waste is rooted more in what we believe and feel than in what we do. Becoming aware of and addressing those beliefs and feelings takes time and experience.”

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.

As I mentioned earlier in my trip report, this PDC was highly energetic and projected a sense of urgency (i.e. its technology horizon is both near, medium and far). Technologies are more baked; forthcoming pipelines are more substantial; capabilities are more comprehensive and offer a better foundation upon which to build software solutions.

Storage, Data, Presentation – FREEDOM !!

The PDC Bloggers experiment for me failed. Why? First, the stream of information is substantial but it’s also overwhelming. Keeping up with it while focusing on PDC proved quickly to be impractical for me. Second, the vast majority of bloggers aggregated into the single feed aren’t known (vetted) to me; so, their authority is questionable–not to mention the fact that a number of posts are focused on “what’s in the goody bags” and other valueless trivial. However, I wouldn’t say it was a complete failure. Through the experience I was able to locate a new handful of blogs I subscribed to as a result. Perhaps my experience suggests that there a new tools waiting to be developed to efficiently mine feeds for the actual content of personal interest.

About the session slide decks…Attendees had to download sessions one at a time (or write a custom application to batch/bulk download instead). WHY?!? What a colossal waste of time. Microsoft would do well to consider a storage/server/net solution that could support downloading at least daily Zip files. Does the absence of a smart client solution for PDC05 say anything about Microsoft’s smart client priority? (Previous PDCs had such tools.) Where are the keynote decks? Why did the .one files never see the (second) light of day? (For each PowerPoint deck there was an associated OneNote file. At least that was apparent to the public CommNet briefly on the Sunday before PDC05.)

About internet access during the conference…Wireless access was still quite poor throughout the conference with quite a few dead spots and other areas of sporadic connectivity. Isn’t the underlying technology and current capacity such that we should be beyond this? The free high-speed internet in the hotel courtesy of Microsoft was a nice touch.

Finally, my original intent was to blog my trip report on a daily basis during the conference. This proved to be impractical and too ambitious for me. Settling time was necessary to add clarity and to help bubble up more important points. Even given some time after the conference, my trip reports here on this blog are essentially in note form and remain to be condensed, distilled and made more actionable.

Tags: PDC05

Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to attend this year’s PDC in Los Angeles. As it turns out, PDC ran during the same time as EMC | Documentum’s own developer conference. I was able to provide significant content for multiple sessions at the latter event and both were quite successful in my view and from what I’ve heard.

PDC05 reminded me of “PDC Y2K” in that much of what was discussed was nearly baked and ready for release. In fact, I heard more than one Microsoft employee talk about “assuming” the existence of such things as SQL Server 2005 (aka “Yukon”), Visual Studio 2005 (aka “Whidbey”), etc. This was actually refreshing for me. In recent years it’s been more of a challenge to engage with executive sponsors on Microsoft related endeavor due to Microsoft’s poor track record of on-time delivery. Beginning with the aforementioned products and throughout 2006, this should change (i.e. Microsoft’s substantial delivery pipeline is well-oiled).

I’ve already made a couple of posts on PDC05 (ref. [1], [2], [3]); so I won’t rehash what I’ve already stated. This trip report intends to accomplish at least two objectives: (1) provide information from the event and (2) offer what I believe the information means. For perhaps obvious reasons, my blog will not publicly declare a call to action for my employer–this I will do via internal, private means, and it is perhaps the most important content to digest. (So, my co-workers, stay tuned! )

So, without further adieu…

Tuesday 9/13/2005 (continued)

The “Big Room” space was excellent. I took the following panorama of it before attendees took it over for the rest of the conference. It’s layout did result in increased collaboration by placing the collaborative space up front and center and causing everyone to walk by that space on their way to anything else (e.g. meals, expo hall, hands-on labs, internet alley, book store, etc.).

After the day’s keynotes (ref. [1] – video/transcript, [2] – transcript) I attended the following breakout sessions: COM202, FUN302 and OFF304.

Before I detail my session experiences, I recall my impression of JavaOne earlier this year. Already I’ve heard Microsoft employees talk about importance of and value Microsoft places upon feedback. IMHO, it’s more challenging to guide and direct an open community than it is to drive a controlled ecosystem. Feedback is only one facet of participation. Giving feedback is different than making the decision or the change itself.

COM202 A Lap around the Windows Communications Foundation – Omri Gazitt

• I attended this session because I believe that service orientation (SO) is establishing itself as a major architectural trend.
• Microsoft is ahead of Sun on developer support for web services and Connected Systems.” Note: Be careful not to relax due to platform bias. There are two dominant platforms and their healthy competition make rapid change and advancement inevitable.
• There was standing room only and many attendees stood. As all attendees would later learn, if not leverage, Microsoft had a reasonable overflow room plan in place for the event. This allowed attendees to attend what they wanted to attend rather than be forced to even second choice sessions for lack of room.
• .NET Remoting – a “near” programming model (i.e. invocation calls appear to be local calls)
• Service orientation was first begun in Microsoft back in 2000 (as stated during Bill Gates’ keynote–why PDC 2000 was so important and perhaps the most important PDC to date). There would be more of this timeline presentation throughout PDC05, which gave me the impression that a “mature technology” message is important to Microsoft. Time after release will only tell the truth about effective maturity, though.
• The core abstraction in WCF is message passing.
• Similar concepts in WCF to the original Berkeley sockets work
• The ABC’s of endpoints…Easy as ABC
• ClientChannel and ServiceHost make connections real.
• The planned demo was skipped due to time constraints (i.e. the previous session ran long).
• Decorated CLR interfaces (i.e. special attribution)
• You can host services just about anywhere.
• Leverage config XML to declare
• “Indster” is a simple file-sharing app that Omri wrote in a few days. The speaker made his source available via the CommNet.
• Contracts are probably the most obvious implementation of SO (service orientation) in WCF.

FUN302 Programming with Concurrency (Part 1): Concepts, Patterns, and Best Practices – Jan Gray

• I attended this session because I believe that concurrency is under-appreciated in software development, generally speaking, and the way to continue to achieve substantial peformance gains moving forward on modern hardware will be to leverage concurrency.
• Jan works in the Office of the CTO as an architect focused on models for concurrent programming.
• Parallelism and scalability…toward a responsive application–not just its UI
• Show internal states and partial results.
• Exploit pre- and post-processing.
• Define async states and behaviors so that each is a feature, not a bug.
• Apply same ideas to responsive libraries (e.g. document thread safe sync usage).
• To maintain the current perf rate, you must understand and exploit concurrent software (ref. “Concurrency for Performance” slide).
• About a 100 W per chip is about all that can be cooled (i.e. physical driver for multi-core chip designs).
• Parallelism isn’t a panacea and sometimes it’s inappropriate.
• Jan gave a CLR perf talk at PDC 2003; so, it would be insightful to compare those slides with his PDC05 slides.
• Deadlocks are easier to debug than race conditions.

Tags: PDC05

This question was raised within the 1996 annual report for American Funds‘ SMALLCAP World mutual fund and accompanied by the following Ibbotson Associates chart:

The report goes on to state: “Most people instinctively know that volatility and risk are related. But they’re not synonymous. Volatility refers to the amount of fluctuation–both up and down–that an investment may experience. Risk is the perceived possibility of loss (or the perceived loss of purchasing power to inflation). … The charts above are an attempt to show that olatility, like risk, is in the eye of the beholder. Each uses the same data to illustrate what happened to small company stocks between the years of 1973 and 1982. The first chart (which we tend to think reflects how most people view their investments) traces the month-by-month percentage return. The second plots the cummulative effects of those monthly returns on the value of a $10,000 investment. The third shows the cummulative annual change in value of that same investment, illustrating how short-term fluctuations generally smooth out over time.”

I’ve always appreciated this chart’s visual reminder to perspective when investing, but lately, it’s caused me to think about its applicability to my profession of software development in a number of ways as follows:

• What kind of environment is set by executives, line management and architects like me to those in the trenches? How are decisions perceived once conveyed?
• In the context of mentoring and contributing to annual performance reviews of staff, how does the day-to-day translate into a curve of career development (or decline)?
• What are the equivalents of volatility and risk in software development for my superiors, for me and for my subordinates?
• Are context switches–the bane of most developers–about risk, volatility, or both?

How would you answer these questions? What connections, if any, can you draw here?

Instead of reading news first in something like InformationWeek, it’s a nice change to “report” on something before bigger media does–and I’m certainly not a media outlet of any kind. However, this personal enjoyment isn’t why I posting here.

InformationWeek quoted Pew researcher Mary Madden as follows: “[Teenagers] see email as much more formal, similar to how adults would see written letters: a quaint way of communicating with older relatives or for formal communications.”

What bothers me about this statement isn’t that it’s necessarily inaccurate but rather what its impartial reflection effectively means with respect to communication excellence and effective conveying non-trivial thoughts, ideas and beliefs. Are we now at the stage of IM capturing it all?

It’s true that I basically send email now and don’t write letters, which I wrote regularly up to the point that my wife (then serious girlfriend) moved to the Bay Area. However, I use email to convey the same reasoned thought that I would otherwise have penned to paper. (And I use the delay rule technique in Outlook just in case my efficiency on the keyboard gets me in trouble where writing with pen would slow me up enough to prevent poor or ill writing “just in time.”) Hand-written notes and cards are still the best way to convey certain sentiments. I enjoy receiving these as well. So, I don’t view written letters as quaint but rather a luxury I’m hard pressed to find time for making general practice. I enjoy written communication, and email is the medium I regularly choose–when I’m not posting here.

Now it’s true that a fair number of emails I receive are nothing more than single sentence directions or confirmations. In these cases, IM and email amount to a simple difference in medium. However, attempt to leverage IM for something that amounts to a paragraph or more in email and be prepared to irritate or otherwise loose your recipient–”cya l8r!”

Written personal letters are meant to read more than once over time. Emails can be saved for the same purpose, but often aren’t due to reduced time to create a new response and receive a new reply. The dialog goes back and forth more rapidly in email than today’s USPS can facilitate via regular mail. Plus mailboxes are mostly for bills (if you’re not into electronic bill payment) and junk mail. Of course, one’s email inbox probably has just as much if not more of the latter these days–and spam isn’t yet prevalent in IM.

So, I come back to my previous comment about IM: the need to facilitate conversational recall in this medium. Trillian does this, but it’s not pervasive. If the younger generation is already “there,” software should be supporting them–us all–in ways that keep IM relevant, informal and current. Otherwise, IM is bound to be replaced with something yet to be unleashed.

“There’s a sense of needing to always stay connected and having this persistence online,” Madden said. “Even if friends don’t IM each other everyday, they still know each is OK and around because they’re logged in.”

This statement supports and clarifies my previous comment about conversation roundtrip speed. The more connected two parties are the less need there may be for volume or formality in conversational content.

Instead of recalling messages, delay their delivery long enough to confirm they’re truly right to send in the first place.

While reviewing my flagged and annotated items in Omea, I was reminded of Scott Hanselman’s post on Outlook’s “Recall this message” function being naive. When I first flagged Scott’s post, I annotated it to remember its familiarity with a post by Chris Sells some time before. Later, Lars Bergstrom shared a Outlook rule idea with Chris that Chris captured here.

Along with Scott, Chris and Lars, an effective delay rule is priceless and more importantly more reliable, effective and professional. Recommended!

Given my previous post and Donald Norman’s recommendation that designers facilitate past-as-just-present functionality, I found the following headline in My Yahoo! news section particularly timely: “Email is for older people, teens say in survey.” Settings aside the fact that many in the world now view me as old, the fact that today’s teenagers prefer IM to email tells me that IM needs to grow up a bit or teenagers need to develop (or already possess) significant short-term memory capacity (i.e. more than the older set).

One of the reasons I use Trillian Pro is for its invaluable “prior chat capture” feature. Certainly there are times when individual chats with someone else run a wide enough range of topics that past history is rather moot, but being able to visually recall previous discussions with coworkers and colleagues is fantastic.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project study in question may be found here.

It’s important not to forget that despite what one generation may think of another, that those who build software keep in mind that generations very much change. Software designed for one may not be usable to or used by another.

“Proper design can make a difference in our quality of life.” -Donald Norman

I know that when I’ve replied “cockpit error” in the past to situations involving software and its users that I’ve focused more often than not on the “pilot” rather than the “plane.” Reading the preface of The Design of Everyday Things convinced me to readjust my perspective–focusing more on the design of software and how it contributes to “cockpit errors.” …and the rest of the book didn’t disappoint either!

While I’m studying the “plane” moving forward, I’ll be look for what affordances it provides or lacks. How does the software I’m ultimately responsible for provide strong clues to its operation? Can my user know what to do just by looking at the GUI? Are simple things truly usable without explanation?

I’ll re-double efforts to avoid false causality and false coincidence. Are unnecessary results being logged (e.g. a handled, non-critical error)? Is any user interaction not required or overly complicated (confusing)? Does my user always have a strong sense of feedback from the software? Is the mapping among actions and results natural and intuitive, or arbitray and forced?

“The problem of determining the ‘naturalness’ of mappings is difficult, but crucial.” -Donald Norman

When the author reviewed stereo controls in cars, it got me to think about how content management could become more usable in a more 3D-like setting rather than the two dimensions afforded users today by ECM software (e.g. relationship mapping, content linking, associated discussions, hypertext, virtual documents, etc.). What about ECM software needs to be freed from a linear-only view?

With a deeper appreciation now for mental models and how they explain observations, being able to observe adequate feedback is crucial to forming a desirable impression of software and how one can go about their goals and tasks within it. It’s clearer now why perception becomes reality and how perception is shaped significantly by design. The more I can ensure reasonable ways for a user to digest the unfamiliar, the less mental energy will be required to successfully interact with new software, which should create a favorable impression and ultimately a satisfied user.

The author’s discussion concerning long term memory and short term memory gave me ideas for software improvements, too. The more my software can facilitate past-as-just-present functionality (e.g. saved searches, MRU lists, extensive undo/redo, etc.), the more mental relief can be afforded to my user.

“Try to design the system to allow for errors. Realize the normal behavior isn’t always accurate. Design so that errors are easy to discover and corrections are possible.” -Donald Norman

“The designer shouldn’t think of a simple dichotomy between errors and correct behavior; rather, the entire interaction should be treated as a cooperative endeavor between person and machine, one in which misconceptions can arise on either side.” -Donald Norman (emphasis mine)

“Seven Principles for Transforming Difficult Tasks into Simple Ones

1. “Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head.
2. “Simplify the structure of tasks.
3. “Make things visible: bridge the gulfs of Execution and Evaluation.
4. “Get the mappings right.
5. “Exploit the power of constraints, both natural and artificial.
6. “Design for error.
7. “When all else fails, standardize.”

-Donald Norman

I’m looking forward to reading Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things next.

What’s more Mr. Norman has a blog. Subscribed!

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.

Within the past month, I finished reading The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. Now I can follow-up my previous post on this book.

For expediency’s sake, here are my take-aways in rougher, list-oriented form:

• Capitalism – unequal wealth; communism – equal poverty
• RSS/Atom (feeds), blogs, tags – open, standard formats … but not open enough (e.g. annotations) … potential for integration with open, standard document-based metadata (e.g. XMP) … what I’m currently calling “fluid content dynamics” – more closely reflects the very nature of content–what do I really want to do?–capture thoughts and ideas … what is a .doc? why be forced to or choose to use Word? is the value Word provides worthy of my usage/loyalty/goals? what is the price of overkill over adequacy?
• “Standards don’t eliminate innovation, they just allow you to focus it. They allow you to focus on where the real value lies, which is usually everything you can add above and around the standard.” -Joel Cawley (e.g. e.g. VoIP – voice is free; surrounding service add value)
• “Software is not gold, it is lettuce–it is a perishable good.” -Brian Behlendorf
• “This emerging era [open-sourcing] is characterized by the collaborative innovation of many people working in gifted communities, just as innovation in the industrial era was characterized by individual genius.” -Irving Wladawsky-Berger
• Blogging as open-source intelligence gathering/dissemination
• Don’t confuse a competitive race to the top for a competitive race to the bottom (e.g. China’s global economic strategy, “ECM lite” (Gartner’s “Basic Content Services”), etc.).
• Get flat or be flattened!
• Align ILM/ECM/CM/DM to its flatteners (i.e. blogs, wikis, feeds, tag clouds, etc.). Re-engineer yourself, your workgroup, your company and your culture (think BIG!) accordingly.
• Are you transparent or translucent? I’m only the latter if I have no effective means to handle feedback.
• The Triple Convergence – new players, new playing field, new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration
• The state of being “legacy free” and the past’s drag on the present
• The Great Sorting Out – understand when friction is to be kept, modified or eliminated (e.g. legitimate barriers to entry, etc.)
• Value creation today is horizontal, not vertical–connect and collaborate, not command and control
• Power of perspective and anticipating its effects (e.g. the empowerment of those benefiting the most profoundly from flattening)
• Power of being able to assign or take action instead of asking for information because the information is already known
• IP ownership – CC mark on blogs, living wills and trusts (e.g. include “my bits”)
• Knowledge work and services (idea-based goods), not just (physical) goods, are tradeable.
• Wants today become needs tomorrow.
• “Sure, there is fear, and that fear is good because that stimulates a willingness to change and explore and find more things to do better.” -Vivek Paul
• “You have to constantly upgrade your skills.” – mediocre was never an option, but now mediocrity has been permanently kicked out of the proverbial closet (thank goodness!)
• Know how to “learn how to learn”
• Laws -> Markets -> Innovation (i.e. why I’ve been reading books on the judicial system in America and blogging about it)
• Running a marathon involves different musculature, breathing capacity and mental toughness than running a sprint
• “In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears–and that is our problem.” -Thomas Friedman
• Strive for the top but have a plan that accounts for arrival
• “Transformation of an enterprise begins with a sense of crisis or urgency. No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.” -Lou Gerstner
• “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” -Paul Romer
• Versatilist (Gartner) – not specialist and not generalist
• Values > Value; Values chains > Value chains
• Liberating technology that enslaves
• “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” -Albert Einstein
• “…in a flat world so many of the inputs and tools of collaboration are becoming commodities available to everyone. They are all out there for anyone to grasp. There is one thing, though, that has not and can never be commoditized–and that is imagination.”

In reply to Erik’s comment, a very sensible reason for a corporation or company to pursue outsourcing is when it must do so to effectively engage critical knowledge workers. The talent pool is global; it’s not local. I want the best candidates to be employees. I prefer to work locally and draw from my communities; however, I can see when this may not always be possible. Thomas Friedman makes the point of saying that today natural talent trumps geography.

Some of the complaint I hear to outsourcing tends to be focused on cost rather than talent. I see an emerging rationale swinging more toward talent. This is why it’s extremely critical that our educational system catch up and surpass corporate knowledge worker requirements. If we don’t educate the best and the brightest, someone else will. If we can’t attract and retain local talent, then we’ll be forced to “go remote.” (Assuming that a corporation wants to be a global leader in the marketplace.)

A cost-based competitive advantage implies a volume-based corporate economy. Knowledge work and its enabling technologies and products are not yet entirely volume commodities. To become such implies that something else–not based on cost/volume–has taken its place. Whatever this is will likely be what future talent is attracted to.

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.