Category: Solution Architecture

Over-specification

Jimmy and Grandad 2.0One of my tools is a Logitech Cordless Presenter. I really like this device. It enables me to stand and present and to ignore the laptop and keep the engagement on me. This device has nine buttons – and is over-specified.

For some people it might be perfectly specified, but for me it is over-specified. Let me tell you why.

Yesterday I travelled to the south of England via a customers corporate jet (yes, I know that sounds very fancy, but it isn’t believe me). Even though this is effectively a private flight it still has to abide by all of the rules and regulations that a commercial flight would, the same restricted material, the same security checks, the same hand luggage restrictions. That’s where the problem comes in, the Logitech Cordless Presenter has a laser pointer, and lasers are not allowed in hand luggage.

I’m sure that a laser point is really useful to some people – but I never use one. The type of presentation that I give doesn’t require such a thing (to be honest I’m not a fan of people who do).

As I join the flight reasonably early in the morning the location of the Presenter is not high on my list of priorities. A couple of times now, most recently yesterday, I have had my bag checked on the far side of security and had to relinquish the Presenter to security. It sits in my bag for those occasions when I want to use it.

Even though it’s only nine buttons, this one button makes the Presenter over-specified.

The keyboard in front of me has lots of buttons on it. I know which ones I use because they are clean and shinny, there are an awful lot that are dull and dusty. Why on earth would I want a “Shopping” button? The keyboard is over-specified.

I’ve recently started using TweetDeck for Twitter. It’s a really nice twitter client. Today I updated to a new version and got, in return, a few more buttons. I’m highly unlikely to ever use these buttons. TweetDeck had the capabilities I required, it now has some capabilities I don’t. TweetDeck is in danger of becoming over-specified.

Over-specification is a huge problem in IT. People ask for more and more features which have less and less value. If they were high value it’s likely people would have thought of them early in the lifecycle – the further along the road you get the less likely it is that you are adding something of really significant value.

What’s even worse though, is that the new features become diversionary, particularly in the development cycle. I’m currently working on a number of large programmes where we are in danger of focussing on the peripheral requirements and not the core capabilities. People will get something new and shiny, but not something that makes a real difference to how they work.

Someone once told me a story about a spider that lived up in the eaves of a garage.

One day the spider noticed that there were lots of nice juicy bugs down on the ground, so he decided to lower himself down. He started by building a simple web to see how he got on. This web was a very successful web and the spider decided to extend a little further to see whether he could be even more successful.

Bit-by-bit he extended to form a whole complex of webs that kept him supplied with more bugs than he could have ever imagined.

One day he was walking around his vast abode when he noticed this rather scruffily and dusty looking strand leading up into the eaves above. Seeing all of the webs around him he decided that he no longer needed this connection with his past. He climbed up onto the webs and rid himself of this piece of history with a single snip.

No sooner had he snipped than the web below him started to collapse, trapping his feet. Further down he sank deeper into the web. Before he knew it he was completely engulfed, with no way out. There he lay until he starved to death.

The spider took his focus off his foundations, we must be careful that we don;t do the same.

Architect: Engineer + Artist

Jimmy and Grandad 2.0My job title includes the words “solution architect”, words are interesting things. Words have been used by people to communicate things for thousands of years, and yet we still spend just as much time defining words as we have ever done.

I’ve also noticed that words have a life. They have a meaning for a particular time, that meaning then becomes mainstream, its meaning gets diluted, so people move onto a new word.

So what do these two words in my job title mean?

Let’s start with “architect”. Someone said to me the other day that they regarded an architects is an engineer + an artist. I liked that, it simply summed up a lot of my own feelings.

An architect is someone who has an idea that needs to be brought to fruition, but it can’t just be engineered through technical reasoning, it needs to have some creativity to it, it needs to be beautiful, functional, emotional, efficient, elegant and practical. It also needs to fit the budget and deliver on the requirements.

Art + Engineering

My father is an engineer, my mother is an artist, perhaps that’s how I got here.

I think I’ll leave the “solution” word for another day.

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My Tools: Lotus Notes

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallEver since I started using Wakoopa something has been nagging away at me. Sitting at number 3 of my most used applications has been a tool that I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to write about – Lotus Notes.

In this week of Lotusphere I’ve finally decided that I can’t avoid it anymore.

But why to reticent?

The primary reason is that I have a very mature relationship with Notes, I’ve been using it since version 2 (now on version 8+) and the relationship has not always been a good one. It has been an incredibly powerful tool helping me to achieve things that I couldn’t have done in any other way. A number of years ago (too many to count actually) I was working with a team and we were processing a lot of paper forms, Notes enabled us to automate the process quite quickly and very efficiently. But that was some time ago.

For me Notes (and Domino) is an application development platform, that happens to also do a reasonable job as a personal information tool. The problem is, these days, I only use it as a personal information tool. All of the things I used to do on Notes have pretty much gone away, being replaced by portal type tools. Some of these portal sites are little more than web enabled Domino applications, but I’m not using Notes to access them.

So that leaves my relationship with Notes as a “personal information tool” relationship, and it’s in these capabilities that my love-hate experience is the most acute.

I love the ability to access my email, calendar and tasks across a firewall boundary, something that Notes could do long before Outlook.

I hate the lack of trust I still have in the calendar. This week I tried to delete an item, got an error message, went to the IBM support site to find an answer. The answer, and I paraphrase – get stuffed. The problem is, this is a reoccurring appointment which I can’t delete and lasts almost forever. I have never been able to trust my Notes calendar.

I love the enhancements to the Notes 8+ interface. I especially like the ability to see all of the emails in a thread from within the email.

I hate the way that flagging works and the document properties dialogue.

I could carry on, like I say this is an old relationship.

Whether Notes is winning market share or loosing against Exchange is, in my opinion, irrelevant. As an application platform it’s loosing to the web. Both Exchange and Notes are also going to loose to the web in the long run (even if they persist at the back-end) for email, calendaring and tasks.

So I’ve done it, I’ve written about one of the oldest tools in my kitbag. A tool that I think will be around for a good while yet, but only because it’s not easy to get rid of. If I was starting a business today – I wouldn’t start from here.

My Tools: At least 94 of them

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallI was starting to think that the My Tools series was running out of steam so I thought I would do some analysis on how much I use the various tools. My chosen tool for this is wakoopa.

I’ve only been running it for a few days and I’ve already accessed 94 different applications. Considering that I’ve written less than 20 articles and some of them were about parts of applications, or physical tools I clearly have a long way to go before I really cover the full set of tools that I really use.

If you want to look at my usage profile it’s here.

On a lighter note, look out for something happening on the Jimmy and Grandad front, you will be shocked.

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Returning to work: Needing more context

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallEvery time I return from a break I think about writing this post – and then forget.

Returning from a break can be a very frustrating experience for IT users and one of the main reasons for that is that all of those so-called scheduled tasks have been queuing up in the infrastructure waiting for you to plug-in or turn on.

There can be quite a number of them: system updates, password expiry, anti-virus updates, password expiry, application updates, browser updates, etc.

The main challenge here is that the activities aren’t really “scheduled”, they are just set by a simple daily, weekly, monthly elapsed agenda without any context. Any break in the system being online means that the activities are just queued up waiting to happen.

Personally, the ones that I find most frustrating are the password expiry ones. You always have a lot to think about when you return from a break, thinking about new passwords is one that you shouldn’t really be burdened with. What I find worse are the passwords that expired just before I went on holiday.

It can’t beyond us to do this in a less intrusive way. We only have to understand the context a bit better and schedule appropriately.

Understanding the value of things

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallInteresting questions, interesting responses:

  • £50 today or £60 in a month?
  • £350 in 12 months or £360 pounds in 13 months?

It’s interesting what our response to some questions are.

  • You have a ticket to the theatre which cost £20 and a £20 note in your pocket. When you get to the theatre you have lost the ticket. Do you buy another ticket?
  • You have two £20 notes in your pocket. When you get tot the theatre you have lost one of the £20 notes. Do you buy a ticket to the theatre?

Your first reaction to these questions and your considered response might be significantly different. The problem with estimating the value is that we use very strange (complex) logic.

I spend a lot of time helping people to change there business by bringing extra value to the way that they do things. These changes normally involve IT, because that’s my area of expertise, but not always. Understanding and agreeing what the value of any particular activity is can be quite a stressful exercise, particularly when it comes to the decision to spend money.

The values that people place on things has always fascinated and frustrated me. Surprisingly few decisions are based cold hard economics. The value is often much more subjective, or so it appears to me. Perhaps I’m just not seeing the complicated value judgement that they are making. Perhaps my value judgement is missing important elements.

I don’t have any answers here, I’m just making an observation, but I’m not the only one that sees the paradox. Dan Gilbert does a much better job of explaining than I do.

http://static.videoegg.com/ted2/flash/loader.swf

If you ever want to extend your thinking TED is a really good place to start.

Top 10 – 2008 Posts

A Trip to Hadrian's WallThis is my second, and last Top 10 for a little while, I promise.

I had a few minutes so thought I would put this together:

  1. My Tools: Mindjet MindManager Pro – clearly a very interesting tool for people. Personally, I’m seeing mind-maps all over the place.
  2. Lotus Notes Tabs – My Usability Problem – I’ve since had a template update and it’s a lot better
  3. “Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy” – this one gets a lot of attention, people are clearly starting to become concerned about it as an issue
  4. My Tools: Twitter & Twhirl – twitter had to get in the top 10 somewhere
  5. The Cost and the Value of Virtual Meetings – I’m starting to evolve my thinking on this, we need to think more holistically about the end-user experience of collaboration.
  6. My Tools: BlackBerry 8800 – mobile technology is getting hotter and hotter.
  7. I need a new bag – and still do. Other things have taken priority on the Chastney family finances.
  8. More iTunes bloat – I think that they started to listen in 2008, but it’s still not great.
  9. The Power of the List – a list with a reference to lists.
  10. iTunes Update – Interesting Selection of Font – it looks like I wrote a lot about iTunes, I didn’t really.
  11. I don’t blog enough! Do you? – yes I know that this is number 11, but it has the same number of visits as number 10.

This isn’t my all-time list, just my Top 10 for the 2008 posts.

Antivirus Gamer Edition: Why only for gamers?

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallThe latest version of Symantec Norton Anti-Virus comes in a Gamer Edition.

Yes that’s right an edition designed specifically for gamers?!?!

Is this just clever marketing or are there some technology differences here?

Norton AntiVirus Gamer Edition

So what makes it a Gamer Edition:

Gamer Mode

  • No alerts + no notifications = no interruptions
  • Optional settings to temporarily suspend updates, behavioural scanning and intrusion prevention
  • Enabled automatically when your PC is in full screen mode
  • Activate manually with a quick click on the Norton system tray icon

Lightning Fast*

  • Rapid Pulse Updates every 5 to 15 minutes
  • Installs in less than a minute
  • Adds less than 1 second to boot time

Light as a Feather*

  • Uses less than 6MB memory even without the Gamer Mode performance boost
  • Needs less than 50MB hard disk space on installation
  • Runs only 2 processes at a time
  • Performance graphs display CPU and memory usage and how little Norton is using

Respects your needs

  • Smart Scheduler holds resource intensive actions for when you are not using your PC
  • Resource usage table shows you the what, when and how long for background actions taken by Norton AntiVirus
  • Delivers consistently strong protection – that’s why Norton AntiVirus has won more consecutive Virus Bulletin 100 awards than any other AV software

So what is it that makes Gamers special why wouldn’t everyone want these capabilities? I’ve been of the opinion for some time that, in many ways, antivirus software is a medicine that is worse than the illness it’s trying to cure. And I’m not the only one to think so:

“It can be awful to have your Windows computer infected with malicious software, but it is almost as bad suffering the daily burdens imposed by the security software designed to protect you.

Too often, security programs significantly slow down the computer, causing lags in booting up the machine, launching programs and receiving email. Not only that, they can be incredibly annoying, popping up frequent messages or asking questions in techie lingo.”

Walt Mossberg – Wall Street Journal

The problems that are being resolved here are exactly the complaints that I hear from my corporate customers. People only have antivirus software because they have to, it’s not something they really want so every time they see it it’s a problem. If it gives them a pop-up it’s a problem. If it slows their machine down it’s a problem. If it takes longer for their machine to start it’s a problem.

But again, it’s another human psychology problem. I don’t what interruptions, but the interruptions do actually tell me something.

The video is fun though.

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English Language Innovation

Grandma in GrizedaleThere are times when the English language is one of the most frustrating things in my life – they tend to be the times when I am thinking about spellings with a dyslexic son. At other times I love the ever changes nature of the lexicon that we use.

The Post Office (of all people) has just released a report titled: Are you 404 when it comes to tech chat?

I’m not normally a huge fan of these things because they age so quickly, once its been published it’s already out of date. This one seems to be reasonable though, it’s interesting because it picks up on localised abbreviations too, the ones in the report relate to the London Oyster Card.

I’ve spent all of my working life in the IT language sub-culture, it’s interesting to see how this language is leaking into day-to-day common language.

This came to my attention recently as an example of what I mean, it uses a whole set of words and phrases that 10 years ago none of us had heard of, or if we had they probably had a different meaning. Today we understand all of the meanings:

George Carlin – Modern Man

For me it’s a great example of user innovation – people who use the language innovate it all of the time. The need for people to innovate is very strong, something those of us in IT do well to remember.

Over and out to all of you Code 18’s

Why do you care that I've just updated that application?

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallOne of my tasks at the moment is to plan a significant change to a customer “desktop” infrastructure. A significant portion of this change will be looking at application management and delivery.

The technology is now available for us to make all sorts of changes without the end-user even knowing – we can be seamless. Technically, that’s what we can achieve now.

We have a worry though, what will the human impact of this be?

People are used to being disrupted by an application change, they complain about it all of the time, and rightly so. What we are discovering, though, is that the disruption actually gives them some value, and we are not sure how much of it to reproduce.

People feel attached to their personal device, even though it’s clearly a corporate asset they still feel that it’s theirs. The primary value in the interruption is communication – they know that the application has been updated. They don’t have a say in whether updates occur, but at least they know that something has happened to their device. Seamless changes mean that they don’t know and arguably that there is, therefore, nothing to worry about, but my concern is that seamless upgrades without communication start to breed a sense of mistrust – “something has changed and I don’t know what”, or “they keep changing things and I haven’t a clue what they’ve done this time”.

The other thing that the interruption does is warn the end-user to look out for things that might not be correct. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Sometimes they see problems in a change that weren’t caused by the change, but regularly they notice issues with the change that weren’t revealed in testing.

Interruptions also tell the end-user to look out for the new features that they have been looking for.

This is one of the situations where the technology is easy, but the customer experience is more difficult to judge. Any wisdom for me anyone?

Being Inquisitive

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallHow inquisitive are you?

Today’s quote to think about: “If you tell the average man there are 278,805,732,168 stars in the universe, he will believe you. But if a sign says Wet Paint he has to make a personnel investigation.”

I used to work in a restaurant and the same thing applied, if you told people the plates were hot, they would always have to touch them just to find out.

But how often are we completely the other way around? How many times do we take something as fact just because the person telling us spoke with authority? I have played a game a few times where I have embellished a truth and told it to a few people as fact. I’ve then sat back and waited to see how long it would take for the embellishment to come back to me. It normally only take a few days.

I’ve been in many problem solving situations where we would have fixed things a lot earlier if we hadn’t taken as fact the things that people told us.

Can a techie have business acumen?

Jimmy and Grandma have a day outI’m a techie I don’t mind admitting it – actually I’m quite proud of it. I can do things with technology that others marvel at.

I was recently in a meeting when someone who didn’t know I was in the room made the statement “well it must be a technical discussion you are wanting to have if you’ve invited Graham along”. There was a little bit of embarrassment when it was pointed out who the person sitting opposite them was. This person doesn’t know me so they were making a judgement on the basis of my role, but the role clearly said to them techie and the inference was not business.

There have been other situations myself and others have been in which highlight the same issue. Someone I speak to quite regularly was saying recently that one of the comments made to them in a recent interview was that they were “too techie”. Again the inference was not business.

The job that I do today requires a good deal of technical ability, but its primary purpose isn’t a technology leadership one, it’s a business understanding one. The premise of my role is that the gulf between business people and techie people is so great that they require an interpreter. In other words techies don’t speak the same language as business people.

Because my background is primarily a techie one I tend to be treated with a warm welcome by the technologists, but treated with a certain amount of suspicion by the business people.

It’s almost like some people think there is a one dimensional sliding scale with highly technical on one side and high business on the other. As a techie am I really incapable of thinking as a business person? Perhaps this goes all the way back to school where people were encouraged into the arts bucket or the sciences bucket.

Are these just age old prejudices with a new dimension? Or, do these definitions reveal some real issues? I’m not sure. What I do know, though, is that the need for edge people, or multi-dimensional people is growing all of the time, the innovators, the people who work beyond the process.

One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about the brain so much was the realisation that it will be the people who have a strong right-side of the brain who will be the most valuable ones in the coming economy.

Right-brained people are strongly creative, something that transcends arts, sciences, technical or even business. I think that is will be this characteristic that will become dominant, not the field in which you choose to exercise your creativity; Einstein was creative, Monet was creative, Tim Berners-Lee is creative, Warren Buffett is creative. Or perhaps you don’t like the word creative because that sounds too arty, then how about word innovative; Malcolm Gladwell is innovative, Ted Hoff is innovative, Stephen Hawkins is innovative, Yann Arthus-Bertrand is innovative.

Anyway enough of my musing it’s time for me to go and be innovative in a cross functional, multi dimensional, business focussed, technically challenging, problem solving, situation.

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