Author: JP

One of my favourite Homerisms:

“Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forfty percent of all people know that.”

Yes, forfty [sic]. In years to come, I’m sure we will hear about people studying the works of Matt Groening to figure out the deep philosophical meaning behind forfty. People do these things. Reminds me of the raging debate thirty years ago related to why Jim Morrison intoned the words Mr Mojo Risin at the end of LA Woman. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth. Much pontification. Theories to do with magic and sexual prowess and whatever. Until Jim’s childhood next-door neighbour wrote in and said “My husband used to call young James that. It’s an anagram of Jim Morrison”.

Incidentally, Groening is probably the most prolific living neologism-creator, following in the footsteps of Lewis Carroll, Ogden Nash and PG Wodehouse. There’s a good summary of his Homerisms in Wikipedia; sadly, unless we convince the powers-that-be otherwise, the summary is set for deletion. So read it while you can.

Incidentally, why do humourists and comedians dominate the neologism space? Perhaps you have to have a level of noncomformism and a willingness to be laughed at as well as with, that strange almost-vain vulnerability that all good comics have.

Back to the point of this post. Surveys and measurements. Would you believe that 100% of the readers of LinuxWorld.com use Microsoft IE as their browser? Well, take a look at Don Marti’s post on the subject. In fact take a look at any of Don Marti’s posts, he’s usually worth it.

There’s a serious point here. We now use the web for all sorts of surveys and measurements and polls. Soon we will enter an age where serious companies make serious decisions based on the information. And they have no idea how flaky all this is. How rankings can be gamed. How readership and audience figures are weak at best and downright wrong at worst. Why a world of IP addresses and corporate proxies and RSS readers and aggregators lead to such weird results. Why location information and map-related mashups don’t always work.

Maybe it’s time to educate people about all this. Otherwise we will have a repeat of something that nearly killed me the first time around: the number of people who believe that Excel is industrial-strength. There’s a lot of them about. Still.

And maybe forfty per cent of them believe that Excel never lies.

For many years now, I’ve had the joy (?!?) of being involved in argument and debate about sharing in the enterprise. Sharing what? In the old days it used to be time on mainframes, as departments or even firms clubbed together to do things they couldn’t otherwise afford to do. Then it became space in data centres, as people figured out that having mainframes in office buildings wasn’t the brightest thing to do as office rents rose. By the time the PC came along and destroyed every vestige of “centralised control”, nobody was into sharing.

Every tinpot business unit became its own IT department, because it could. This disintermediation was a good thing, it stopped the tyrannical behaviour of the MIS guys, with their waterfall models and their GANTT charts and their PERT charts and their Thou-Shalt-Nots. Users could get their own staff to build things rather than wait for the bureaucratic processes of SSADM and PRINCE and whatever else their IT department was using. They could do what they liked. Heaven.

Or was it?

When they defenestrated the bathwater of 19th century project management, many of them threw the baby out the window as well. The baby of simple good practice, such as keeping notes of what you had and where you had it; what you had to worry about when you wanted to change things; how to upgrade; what to do when the sun stopped shining, or when you hit a problem.

Simple disciplines. Simple things to do that kept problems at bay. But it was too late, baby went with bathwater.

And there were consequences. Consequences such as the Year 2000 panic. My personal estimate is that less than 10% of the expense associated with Y2K had anything to do with code. It was all about replacing the disciplines and controls that used to be there. Strange things happen when you mix panic with consultants.
But that was a long time ago. Since then, terms like consolidation and virtualisation and service orientation and utility computing and grid computing and a bunch of other things have come out and bred like rabbits, rabbits whose sole aim was to prove Fibonacci wrong.

And in between, we’ve learnt a little bit about component architectures and re-use. And every time we do this, we land up with the same objectors, the same objections. You see them everywhere:

• The Reuseniks: These are reuse refuseniks, conscientious objectors to code-sharing. Habitual wheel-reinventors. Sometimes seen brandishing terms like privacy and confidentiality and competitive edge, even within organisations. Scary. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
• Freasy Riders: These guys will do anything, provided they don’t have to pay. Close relatives of the Credit Grabbers, they jump on sharing bandwagons only after all the hard work’s been done and the entry costs have come down. They then employ an army of checkers to nickel-and-dime their shared-service bills. Woeful.
• Cyclopaths: These guys get on the shared-service bandwagon without any ado, and then get stuck on it. They are fundamentally unable to cooperate with the rest of the platform users, objecting to every plan to change the status quo, using specious operational risk or even ROI arguments. They act as drag factors on the rest of the shared-service population, and often create an environment where, one by one, the others just leave. Which creates its own problems, as the shared-service bills get doled out over a smaller population.

Of the three, the cyclopaths are the most dangerous, because they seem to believe, because they seem to cooperate. Insidious.
How do we deal with them? In the end, I think it comes down to economics. Not accounting, economics.

As things commoditise, the ability to consolidate increases; there is an implied pace of standardisation, and over time there’s an incredible scaling effect. A tipping point is reached, and the shared-service models get traction.

All this is easy to say, but we’re some way from that destination. We may be on the last lap, but we’re not there yet.

Which is why we need to spend time thinking about the economics of shared-service models. How to price the utility. How to prevent first-mover disadvantage. How to dissuade freeriders. How to get leavers to pay their fair share.

A number of you must have done research on all this already. Why not share it with the rest of us? Comments welcome.

In the meantime, I shall busy myself with reading more about game theory and Talmudic wisdom and prisoner’s dilemmas. And dip every now and then into The Numbers Guy, Carl Bialik. [If you haven’t discovered Carl, I strongly recommend you do, he’s a fun read. Sort of Asimov-and-Gamow-meet-John-Allen-Paulos].

Starting with Three Economists Get Into A Cab.

I continue to guest for Shane Richmond at the Telegraph, looking at the themes of customer economics, differentiation and predictability. I’m still getting used to being somewhere else, using different formats for different communities. Please do let me know what you think.

Just had a delightful dinner at Drones with old colleagues, hosted by Sean. (Thanks, Sean). Sometime over dinner, Stu mentioned what the president of CBS “interactive”, Quincy Smith,  had said a few days ago; I’d seen the story but not the quote.

It’s worth repeating.

Television network CBS has seen increases in two of its late night shows, which they attribute to clips uploaded to YouTube. The late night talk shows have seen a 5% and 7% increase of viewers since CBS began posting clips on YouTube.

When asked about the partnership Quincy Smith, new president at CBS Interactive said, “We believe this inflection point is the precursor to many exciting developments as we continue to build bridges rather than construct walls.”

Attaboy, Quincy. Let’s all continue to build bridges rather than construct walls. You can read the rest of the story here.
After hearing similar stories from publishers who let their books be Looked Inside by Amazon or  Book Scanned by Google, the retarded hippie in me starts singing Seeger. When will they ever learn?

If you see me post less frequently here over the next ten days, there’s a reason for it. I’m trying out a number of things, and the net effect is that I’m rushed off my feet. This quarter, I hope to:

• Have changed jobs after a decade (done)
• Move house after a decade (doing)
• Pack in the nicotine after three decades (done)
• Pack in the caffeine after four decades (done)
• Sleep a little more (doing)

So it’s been quite a quarter already, as I wend my way towards 50. And somewhere in between, I was asked if I felt like guesting at Shane Richmond’s blog at the Telegraph, which I started doing yesterday. In the meantime, I’m still working on kicking off my BT internal blog; still figuring out why I need one (there are good reasons); still working on the ethos of the blog (nearly complete). When I’m done with that, I intend to share what I’ve learnt about internal versus external blogs. Comments welcome.
All this is as new to me as it is to most of you. We all learn as we go along, seeing what works, junking what doesn’t. Thanks for your patience.