Author: JP

I’m fascinated by the process that anyone takes to shut down an application. I think there’s a lot I can learn from it, so every chance I get I watch very carefully.

For a while, maybe a decade ago, I was pretty much obsessed by it. At the time, I was working at the bank, and we had a large bunch of apps scheduled for retirement. So much so that we created a role called Head of Decommissioning, and only partially tongue-in-cheek, we used creation, preservation and destruction to describe development, maintenance and decommissioning. Why destruction? Maybe it’s down to my Saivite roots, who knows?

Anyway, here are a few rules about application “destruction”.

1. People will push back much harder than you would have expected. Organisational inertia and pushback against applications shutdowns quite often exceeds the pushback against new applications. I guess it’s a version of loss aversion. Or maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome.

2. Time and cost estimates will always be greater than you would have expected. As a result of rule 1, something very strange happens in large organisations. A constant emerges, let’s call it the Shiva number or constant. The Shiva number can be represented as nX. It doesn’t matter which application you want to shut down, the answer is always n months and X million. At the first organisation where I came across this, n was 18 and X was 2.5. Consistently. Reminds me of the pre-crash internet business plans. Everyone projected revenues of $75m in 3 years, turning cash-positive only in year 3, and everyone showed an exit valuation of $1bn. Didn’t matter what the business model or segment was.

An aside: The Shiva number is a constant. Why? I think it has to do with spans and layers and risk-averse intermediaries, I think it has to do with the same people being asked similar questions and being able to reply regardless of context. That’s why I think it is only constant within a specific firm. If I am right, then n will tend to be similar in range everywhere, whereas X will vary by firm.

3. The actual time and cost will be considerably less than original estimates. Once, I was faced with a Shiva number and I couldn’t afford the time or the cost. And while I was mulling over what to do, the machine room had a flood. The app was irrecoverable,  it ran on hardware whose end-of-life was somewhere around Bishop Ussher time. And magically life continued with a shoestring replacement. And the moral of the story? Before you ask for estimates for shutting down an app, run a scenario where the app dies in a natural disaster or similar incident. Ask the team to come up with the fastest route to recovery. Price that route, that’s the best decommissioning price you’re going to get.

4. Declare victory on shutdowns one month after shutting them down. Keep absolutely shtum until then. Given the loss-aversion-driven estimation issues and traditional organisational inertia, there will always be someone over whose dead body you will have to cross before you shut his precious app down. Be nice to him. Tell him gently and politely about the shutdown, almost as if you were broaching a bereavement. Be diplomatic and tactful. Then, just as he begins to throw his toys, become even gentler. And in that extremely gentle tone tell him you did it a month ago. Works wonders.

5. Look out for Klingons. Particularly with enterprise architectures that specialised in DRM 1.o, otherwise called bad EAI, apps talked to each other using a variety of codes and reference data. Quite often, it was the largest app that defined the code set, and everyone else just had to go along with it. And quite often, even after the large app is as defunct as the erstwhile parrot, its codes live on.

Thankfully, all this is pre Web 2.0. One of the things that Web 2.0 gives us is the ability, the incredible freedom, to decommission apps at will, without having to create humongous and meaningless plans first. [Sean, see where I was going?] The cost of creating, preserving and destroying apps has begun to go down sharply. Which can only be a good thing.

I took my family to the Concert for Diana today at the new Wembley stadium, despite hearing about yesterday’s incidents at Glasgow and in London, despite hearing about Britain being put on its highest state of security alert, despite even knowing that there would be considerably increased levels of security at Wembley as a result.

Does that make me foolhardy? I hope not, I hope I was able to assess the risks and take a balanced decision rather than be bullied out of living a normal life. My intent was not to gamble on the safety and security of my family.

Yesterday, I was informed about the explosives-laden vehicle found near Tiger Tiger in Haymarket, and considered for a few minutes what I should do as a result. Why? I was hosting a 50th Anniversary lunch for Past Presidents of the British Computer Society at the BT Tower, a location that has been the target of terrorist attacks before. My decision was to proceed with the lunch as long as the police had not issued any “Do not travel except in emergency” directives.

The BT Tower yesterday. Wembley this afternoon. Both potential terrorist targets. In between those I was at St George’s Chapel, also a potential terrorist target, attending my daughter’s school speech day. As part of his speech, the headmaster rued the increasing nanny-state-ness of the environment we live in, lamenting that our children were losing out as a result. Losing out because they weren’t able to learn about risk, about the expectation of gains or losses, about knowing whom to trust or distrust (and, more particularly, why).

This almost-institutional avoidance of risk can be seen everywhere. Many years ago, when I saw the unnecessary panic caused by Y2K, I tried to fight back. I remember using the examples of Lance-Corporal Jones from Dad’s Army, as well as Zaphod Beeblebrox from Hitch-hiker, to try and illustrate how we should behave in such circumstances. That all projects carried risk and that avoidance of risk was always expensive and often impossible as well. That instead, an understanding of the risks was what was required, along with clearly expressed mitigation strategies. That risks could be prioritised, as also the actions taken to mitigate them. That risk premia could therefore be calculated and compared against risk likelihoods and impacts, and that paying the premium wasn’t always the smart thing to do.

My employers listened. Thankfully. And we ran a lean Y2K programme.

Sadly, much of the time, this is not true. People are more apt to be Zaphod-like, allowing their glasses to turn opaque at the first sign of danger. I guess it’s a level of risk aversion that goes with large-institution blame cultures. This may be fine for many people, but I wish people were aware of what they were doing as a result. It’s a bit like Information Security telling you that your computers would not be affected by viruses if you enveloped them in six foot of concrete. For sure those computers would be virus-free. But not much use for anything else either.

It’s the same with bringing up children. A child putting its hands near a fire learns by that experience.  That learning is important, and we need to get better at helping later generations learn rather than legislating to prevent their learning. I think it was Esther Dyson whose e-mails consistently reminded me “Always make new mistakes”.  Which I guess was a variance of the Edisonian “I have not failed. I have found ten thousand ways that do not work.” Iteration is a critical component of agile strategy.

As we move more and more into dealing with problems of extreme scale, we’re more and more likely to use problem-solving approaches that emulate natural selection and evolution. Today, we are so enmeshed in blame cultures that organisations often get into Failure-Is-Not-An-Option syndrome. What happens in this syndrome is that people hide failure rather than prevent it, and over time that hiding culture gets deep into the organisation. This culminates in an even worse syndrome, The-Emperor’s-New-Clothes syndrome. Here, everyone knows that what they say is not true, yet no one does anything about it.

Without risk there is no learning. Without learning there is no life. We need to be careful about being too careful.

If you’re interested in reading about The Risk Management of Everything, you could do worse than read Michael Power’s tract on that subject. I loved it. [Incidentally, I notice he’s written a book recently called Organising a World of Risk Management; haven’t read it yet, will provide my comments after I get it and read it].

I  must have been 15 or so when I first heard Noel Coward speak the lines “In Bengal, to move at all is seldom ever done” in a recitation of Mad Dogs and Englishmen; it was at a quiz, probably at the Dalhousie Institute (then regularly referred to as the DI), probably compered by Neil O’Brien. Those were wonderful times, I have great memories of the vibrant quiz circuit that existed then.

Initially, the Coward lines used to irk me; I thought he meant that nobody did anything in Bengal, and, even if we were known to be somewhat languorous at times, I felt that the statement was a bit over-the-top. It made me realise how Slough residents must have felt about Betjeman, when he said:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough

It isn’t fit for humans now

There isn’t grass to graze a cow.

Swarm over, death!

But later on that same day I changed my interpretation of what he said. Took it to mean that the Calcuttan was too sensible to “move at all” during the midday sun, and that Coward was paying him a compliment. Now I don’t particularly care what the right interpretation is any more, I like Coward and I like Calcutta. So there.

I was reminded of all this while reading something I’d been waiting for, a book titled The Calcutta Kitchen. I love the quote at the back of the book:

What you’ve got to remember about us Bengalis is that we’re only really interested in three things: educating our children, reading books, and food.

[Yes I know, I don’t particularly care for the Oxford comma either, but I wanted to quote the line verbatim].

Parkes and Sarkhel have done something that is rare for me: they’ve made me salivate just reading their book, despite my having had a wonderful dinner this evening. I’m looking forward to trying out their Aloo Makallah (heavenly deepfried potatoes), Ghugni (spiced-up chickpeas), Shingara (Pastry pyramids with spiced potato/vegetable filling), Kathi Kabab roll (spiced kebabs rolled up in a flat bread), Ledikenni (semolina and cottage cheese dumplings) and Maacher Jhol (serious Bengali fish curry), to name but a few.  What I particularly like about the book is that it seems to capture the cosmopolitan essence of Calcutta food as well as the roadside to restaurant spectrum. [And you’re right, I have this hang-up about spicy potatoes. And I am so tired of having samosas, which are nothing but bad shingaras that someone went and flattened. Pyramids not triangles…]

More after I try the recipes out. Flower Silliman first introduced me to Aloo Makallah, so they have a very hard act to follow.  She was a wonderful cook, I’m sure she still is one. I have not been able to order Around The World With a Skillet, her new cookery book. Sanjay Kapoor, whose family lived in the same apartment block as the Rangaswamis and the Sillimans, told me about its existence, but I haven’t been able to find a copy. Any suggestions out there?

One of my favourite parodies is  Ogden Nash’s Song Of the Open Road, a take on Joyce Kilmer’s Trees:

I think that I shall never see

A billboard lovely as a tree.

Indeed, unless the billboards fall

I shall not see a tree at all. 

Amazingly, he wrote this in 1933. Even more amazingly, it is still copyright protected, thirty six years after his death and over 70 years since he wrote it, so I guess I have to kowtow to the gods of fair use. Thankfully, you can see the whole of Kilmer’s poem in the Wikipedia link to his name.

As a child, I remember being amazed at finding out that Lewis Carroll’s Father William was a parody of Robert Southey’s earlier poem The Old Man’s Complaints. And how he gained them. These appear to be marginally out of copyright so you can read them at this link.

I’ve always considered a parody to be something new in copyright terms. I’m sure that people far more learned than I’ll ever be have drafted laws to make this possible. How else could I enjoy something like this, the recent take-off of Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie?   Do be careful when you watch it, I would recommend you sit comfortably and avoid eating or drinking anything while it’s playing. As usual I’ve made it available via my VodPod in the sidebar as well.

My thanks to Rachel Whetstone at Google, who reminded me of the existence of the video at a private conference we were both at.

Everything changes. Now one of the changes that has intrigued me this past decade is in the nature of the technology adoption curve. Simply put, for most of my life, I was used to a particular adoption curve. In order to experiment with emerging technologies, you had to be 28-40, a high-achieving professional, working for a company in aerospace, defence, high-end manufacturing or investment banking. Before 28 you didn’t have the seniority, after 40 you were past experimenting and having fun, you spent all your time in the paranoid timewasting that characterises so much of large-organisation behaviour.

All that changed with Generation M. The pyramid sort of inverted overnight, as the mobile multitasking multimedia generation caught hold of life in their inimitable way. Now it’s the 14-25 year old who first gets to play.

I’ve known this for a while, and regularly referred to this inversion. But there were other aspects of this inversion that continued to intrigue me, inspired by reading Michael Schrage’s Serious Play many years ago. The connection between play and work, something that has come to the fore more resonantly with MMOG and Second Life and all that jazz.

When I saw the Netvibes ecosystem grow, I had the opportunity to watch this curve evolve and grow, and something stirred within me. There was something I could really learn from plotting it right, but in the end I moved on in my ADD way and sadly forgot about it. More recently, when I was watching the explosion taking place in Facebook Applications, I thought to myself, wow, what a proxy for the adoption curve. I had a second chance to view the culture in the petri dish.

What am I talking about? Have I finally completely lost it? Patience, patience. I’m going to try and cut and paste the list of current applications in Facebook Platforms:

• All (1097)
• Alerts (65)
• Business (34)
• Chat (43)
• Classified (27)
• Dating (46)
• Education (66)
• Events (37)
• Fashion (25)
• File Sharing (24)
• Food and Drink (32)
• Gaming (138)
• Just for Fun (458)
• Messaging (84)
• Mobile (26)
• Money (28)
• Music (70)
• Photo (70)
• Politics (33)
• Sports (42)
• Travel (40)
• Utility (165)
• Video (67)

I think there’s  a big lesson for us all in the data presented above. Just For Fun leads, then comes Utility some way behind, then comes Gaming. Music, Photo, Video and Messaging bunch up a little later, and Business is around half the size of any one of those.

I’m sure someone can write an app that plots the movement of numbers in each of these classifications over time, or make it possible for someone else to do it. Any views, Dave? Enjoying your travels?

Now this is the supply side. What would be even more interesting is the demand side and how that behaves across these classifications? How many people are using applications in each classification? I accept there is risk of misclassification or fuzzy overlaps, but I am not looking for exact sciences here, I think the trend information is good enough.

Any comments or views? Have I finally lost it? Let me know what you think.