Category: Four pillars

…this video by Simon Willison is a good place to start.

Incidentally, the way I got to the video is probably the way I’m going to get to many things in the future. I was in Facebook, used Blog Friends to get to Chris Messina’s Ma.gnolia, read a very interesting article on Identitu.de by Dan York, and while reading that saw the reference to the Simon Willison screencast (something I missed because I was recuperating in hospital when it came out).

While doing all this, I also found Aswath Rao’s blog, somewhere I intend to spend a little time. Soon.

We need to get used to this process. Some place in cyberspace you go to regularly, a place that supports your reading the blogs of people you trust and like, your friends. A way of following the recommendations that your friends make, particularly about things you’re interested in. A way of selecting from those recommendations those which you intend to do something about.

Lower search and discovery costs. Persistent and shareable processes. Patterns I can study and learn from. I like what I see.

There was a time when I was happy with enterprise budgeting processes and their underlying technology support. That time was thirty years ago, before I ever worked for an enterprise. [And that’s probably why I have so much time for Sig and Thingamy. Disclosure: I have no stock in Thingamy. Or any other company for that matter, save the ones I have worked for or am working for.]

So many places have nothing that approximates to project accounting yet they try and account for projects. So many places have nothing that approximates to multi-year planning, yet they try and account for multiple years and across year boundaries. So many places operate in multiple timezones and jurisdictions with multiple accounting standards and conventions, even if they claim to be using the same one. So many places have a habit of nesting cost centre charges, creating this monstrous concept called allocation cycles. So many places have people arguing till the cows come home about the allocation process, allocation keys, the amount allocated….. while all the time being completely unable to isolate the costs being allocated.

Sometimes I think that many people avoid getting into any form of management in order to avoid becoming spreadsheet jockeys; spreadsheet jockeys riding blindfolded through treacle while mounted on imaginary horses. I can’t blame them.

I’m no accountant, I want to keep things simple. Tell me how much money I can spend, as if it’s a credit limit on a card. Let me spend it on the people, things and processes I need, in order that I can keep the promises I make. At the end of each month, send me a statement of expenditure for that “card”. If I run more than one cost centre, then give me more than one “card”. If I run a P/L, then let me receive money into that “card” account as well. If I have the right to an overdraft, then let me know how much, and by when I need to pay it off. What’s frontloaded, what’s not. What the early termination penalties are.

And don’t let me charge one card account with another. No smoke. No mirrors. No nesting of allocations.

And all cash. No mumbo jumbo. No enterprise kiting.

That’s what I’ve always wanted. That’s what I’ve never had.

So, when I saw justgiving as an application on Facebook, it made me think. Shouldn’t that be how budgets work in an enterprise? Let the P/L holder “justgive” money to the “causes” he or she wants to support. Constrained by their available balance. Let the “causeholder” run the cause, equivalent to a project at a time. When multiple P/Ls want to support a particular enterprise “cause”, they can.

Sure we have to solve for other problems, like how to deal with overheads. In fact we need to go further, we need to understand far more about how we fund shared infrastructure, shared within an enterprise and shared beyond the enterprise as well.

But we need to start somewhere, and one place that needs attention is the way projects get funded and accounted for.

Following a recent post, Stephen questioned:

how much power we have, as all-too-human individuals, to SET norms. (On the other hand I suspect we have all encountered bosses who felt they could, and should, set norms!) Finally, I continue to hold that the norms of the workplace do not always align with the norms of our leisure time

Sean riposted:

This is probably true with respect to the babyboom generation, and probably wrong with respect to the digital generation (or generation ‘Y’). I’m gen X so basically my norms are unclear!

And it made me think, what are the norms of my generation? And at least one emerged:
Norm Peterson.

Shahidul Alam is a fine photojournalist, just take a look at his recent works on his blog. The photo-essay on the recent flooding in Bangladesh is particularly powerful.

My thanks to Rageboy for the tip-off. Apparently Shahidul got in touch with Chris about something or the other; which makes me wonder, is Chris Locke really Kevin Bacon in disguise? Scratch that, I don’t think I know anyone who is six degrees separated from Chris, it feels like everyone is closer to 2 degrees. Anyone else feel that way?

There’s been a lot written recently about the interaction between real and virtual worlds, by people far more knowledgeable about the subject than I could ever be. Yet, something that happened to me over the past couple of days made me think harder about the days to come.

What happened was almost trivial. Some of you know I had had a heart attack last Christmas, and that I wear a pacemaker. (An Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator, to be precise). This wee tim’rous beastie they call an ICD has a little built-in alarm. And said little built-in alarm went off in the early hours of Monday morning.

It was an unusual feeling, having an alarm go off inside you. A small part of me went into immediate panic mode, while the rest of me looked at the “facts” as I could see them; I reasoned that I’d never felt better, I was working out every day, I was learning to swim, the weather was hot and gruelling, my recovery rates were good, I was eating well and sleeping well, God was in His heaven and all was well with the world.

And so I carried on through Monday, determining to check things out after I returned to London. There were little voices whispering irritating things to do with having to have another operation, but I wasn’t listening.

Then the same thing happened Tuesday morning. This time I could not let it be, so I woke up early and called my cardiologist. Waited for his call back, resigned myself to not exercising or swimming until I knew better. He called back, and the answer was what I had hoped for.

What mattered most was how I felt. The alarms could have been caused by a number of factors, the key issue was how I felt. And I felt fine.

The incident made me think about the intersection between real and virtual worlds, and how more and more we live in that hybrid world. With hybrid signals. Lots of signals.

The signals need interpreting. Which means we have an increased reliance on people who can do the interpreting, although in most cases the final call will be personal.

This reliance on people doing the interpreting is what concerned me. It requires people to give honest open professional advice, making themselves extremely vulnerable. We need the “valuable but vulnerable” professional advice that Michael Power spoke so eloquently about in The Risk Management of Everything. Yet all the signs are that we are moving into a more and more litigious society, with (as Professor Power intimated) the small print outweighing the valuable advice.

Trust is going to mean something else as the real and virtual worlds collide, and as the sources and devices for signals and alarms increase exponentially. Trust is going to mean vulnerability on both sides, both trusted and trusting. That vulnerability is going to require covenant relationships in order to do away with the garbage-net of litigation.

Unless we do this, unless we move to covenant relationships between professional parties and the public at large, we are going to be overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the noises we hear rather than the signals we should be listening to. Not waving but drowning.