Category: Four pillars

Four pillars: A toast to Beta

Many years ago, when I was working at Burroughs Corporation, we were building software for mainframes with dumb terminals. And then, as now, we would get regular complaints from “users” about the system being “slow”. [An aside: An old friend, David Taylor, recently reminded me at a conference that the term “user” now seems reserved for only two types of people, drug addicts and those who interact with computers. Does anyone know when and where the word user was first used to describe someone who “used” a computer? Or even why?]

When we investigated what the “slow” complaint was about, we found out that it was to do with response times between the sending of particular requests and the receipt of the next screen’s worth of data. So we looked at everything we could do to speed the process up. And there was very little we could do. And it was not enough.

We decided to experiment, and changed one little thing. We stopped buffering up the data for a screen’s worth, and started “painting” the screen straightaway. This way it actually took longer for the full screen’s worth to appear, but the user saw things happening “faster”. And perception ruled.

I think something similar is happening now with software. For many years people have been preaching the value of fast iteration in software development, and for many years the response has been to pooh-pooh the process. If it isn’t Waterfall and Cascade and GANTT Charted and Ten Years Late and Three Times The Budget and with Teams the Size of China it couldn’t possibly be a Real Project delivering Real Systems. There’s no space for Quiche in Programming. Perception ruled.

Now, thanks to people like Google, it’s suddenly OK to ship software with the word Beta attached to it and give it to people to use. Generation M probably haven’t seen ANY software that isn’t called Beta. They probably think it’s a buzzword for Web 2.0 (Yes I know I promised not to use that term, but nothing else will do in this case. Rules are proven by exceptions.)

We have to take this opportunity while we can. Organisation and industry DNA are already bringing immune systems to full alert, and it is only a matter of time before some great and good consultants decree that “using Beta software is a source of great security risk and global warming and anti-take-your pick”. Or much worse, they state that it is “not good practice”.

They couldn’t be more wrong. Practice it is, practice we desperately need, and for good reasons.

Software projects may fail for a zillion reasons. I won’t even bother to point you at the literature, there’s probably a Wikipedia article on Software Project Failure. Or there should be.

I believe that the single biggest reason for software project failure is mismanagement of expectations. Sometimes it’s because nobody knows the requirements well enough, so there are no expectations to mismanage. By the time there are expectations, it’s too late. Sometimes it’s because communications are poor, so expectations aren’t correctly set. Sometimes it’s because the expectation is flawed at the outset, in terms of time or cost or functionality. Sometimes it’s because feedback loops have been cut (a traditional blame-culture shoot-the-messenger environment where it is not done to talk about the impact of change). Sometimes it is just bad expectation management pure and simple.

Now we have a chance. A chance to legitimise the word Beta as part of enterprise software development. Deliver early, deliver quickly, make the fundamentals work, and allow the consumer to prioritise changes and new requirements more actively. And don’t call it fast iteration. Don’t call it agile development. Don’t call it doing the right thing.

Just call it Beta. Make as little fuss about it as you possibly can, but get it in the consumer’s hands.

By the way this is nothing new in organisations, it’s just that IT people haven’t been playing this game well. We are surrounded by draft agendas, draft organisation charts, draft presentations, draft proposals, draft contracts, draft minutes, draft accounts, draft policies, draft everything, even beer. And have you noticed that everyone thinks the work is done when the draft is issued? In fact I’m not sure all drafts go to heaven. But the customer is satisfied.

And remember, blogging is provisional. Always provisional :-)

Flight School Air: Some early thoughts

I’ve been at Release 1.0’s Flight School 06 with Sean for the last couple of days. You can read his early comments here. It was another classic Esther Dyson session, she (along with her team) has this uncanny ability to spot something important going on and then bringing together all the movers and shakers into one room quickly and easily. My thanks to Esther and team.

I don’t have a pilot’s licence, don’t own a plane, and have never invested in anything remotely to do with planes or aviation. Yet I could not stay away, because of a number of things:

One, affordable aviation, even shorthaul aviation, changes lives. I know my life has changed as a result of the availability of passenger aviation. And I believe that this mode of transport, as it becomes more affordable and more ubiquitous, can make a real difference to people’s lives everywhere. Releasing time, increasing productivity, providing timely healthcare, simplifying the process of infrastructural regeneration, allowing people to sample different lands and cultures more easily, increasing our leisure options, the list is endless.

Two, the air taxi business has a number of characteristics in common with the way the World Wide Web started, commonalities that intrigue me and excite me. I feel I am watching something important happening. More of this later.

Three, there’s real money to be made. These are amorphous times for this industry, and we need changes aplenty. Changes to the way we insure passengers, pilots and aircraft. Changes to the way we provide this segment of the aviation industry access to capital markets. Changes to the communications, navigation and surveillance systems we use for doing all this. Changes to the way yield is predicted and managed. Changes to the way we signal our interest and have our demand aggregated. Even changes to the participants themselves as they buy and sell and take over and merge and list and go private. These are heady times.

Four, much of it is about IT, yes Information Technology. Air taxis, as a concept, will serve to bring aviation into the digital world. [An aside: Have you ever been tempted to look over the shoulder of an airline assistant while your booking is being checked or amended? It is incredibly saddening to watch the hybrid greek gobbledygook double-dutch they enter into the green screens, and the machiavellian sequences of meaningless keystrokes they enter as punctuation and even screen navigation]

Five, have you ever met a child who wanted to be a lawyer? A pilot? I rest my case.

Another aside. I was sitting on the porch of the hotel in my wicker rocking chair watching the sunset over the bay, and the table next to me was taken by a set of raucous holidaymakers obviously enjoying themselves. They consisted of three generations of one family. And they were talking about how things had stayed constant at the hotel while much around it had changed. And in this nostalgic vein, someone asked the paterfamilias how things were in comparison to how he expected things to be, forty years after his children were born.

The first thing he said was that he really expected to see flying cars by the time the 21st century came along, as in the Jetsons, that the absence of flying cars was the single biggest disappointment he had had.

So why do I think there are commonalities between the World Wide Web and the air taxi business?

  • 1. The infrastructure is largely there as a result of people providing for the public good, even if defence and aerospace and academia helped make it happen.
  • 2. The operating model was that everything happened at the heart of the network, with hubs and spokes and satellites as needed.
  • 3. The people who made iteration 1 happen were infected with a sense of wonder, a sense of adventure.
  • 4. Access to the first iteration was privileged.
  • 5. All control processes were built on a very Taylorist Assembly line basis.
  • 6. It was all very capital-intensive.
  • 7. It needed a lot of collaborative cobbled-together standards and agreements to make it work.
  • 8. The whole space was surrounded by regulatory and labour implications.
  • 9. And as with the Web, the incumbents under attack were conspicuous in their absence, they had other things to worry about, a classic Innovator’s Dilemma a la Christensen in the making.

Sure, there are material differences.

  • 1. Safety and security have life and death consequences in this space.
  • 2. The regulators are more open to the changes required, and even broadly supportive.
  • 3. Unlike the incumbent telcos ten years ago, incumbent airlines are largely losing money hand over fist.
  • 4. The incumbent does not think he owns the infrastructure.
  • 5. We have all learnt from Web 1.0

I’ll post something more detailed once I’ve had a chance to gather my thoughts and to get feedback. I’ll leave you with this thought:

Watching aviation become passenger- and craft-centric, seeing the implications for communications, navigation and surveillance, understanding the nature of software and hardware and communications innovations that will happen, extending all this to new relationships and conversations and transactions, putting all this together is really exciting. It’s a market crying out for Web 2.0 models and processes. And even dreaming about how customers can co-create when you give them access to these tools is uplifting.

And this time around, we have the chance to get identity and authentication and permissioning and real-time intention and attention aggregation right. Because this time we have the learning of the past, and a compelling incentive. Getting it wrong kills people.

More later.

Four Pillars: On expertise

I guess it behooves me to document the genealogy of this particular snowball. I’m privileged to belong to a mail list on internet economics moderated by Gordon Cook of the Cook Report. Gordon referred me to a piece by Peter Nicholson, President, Council of Canadian Academics. You can find the speech here. And Gordon in turn was referred to Nicholson’s speech by Bill St Arnaud. The Cluetrain gang, and more particularly Doc and RageBoy and David Weinberger, have been making similar points for some years now. And the work that Andrew McAfee has been doing at Harvard tracks this from an enterprise viewpoint.

It’s worth reading what Nicholson has to say. Even if I have seen some of it in other forms and media before, I found what he said and the way he said it useful.

The World Live Web, as Doc and David like to call it, has a lot of active information. We use a lot of tools to try and create the right filters on that information. PageRanks a la Google. Link weights a la technorati. Blogrolls of people we like and trust. References in blogs written by people we trust, that lead us to new areas. Collaboratively filtered signals a la StumbleUpon. Peer-review. Serendipity. Wisdom of Crowds a la Surowiecki. Emergence a la Steven Johnson. Google and Wikipedia themselves.What Larry Sanger is now doing. Even IMDB.
And then we mash it all up at high speed within our own brains. Matt Webb gave us his own take on all this at reboot, with a presentation on Making Senses.

In a strange kind of way, we are evolving attention sensors and antennae, new reference frames for analysing that which grabs our attention, new ways of learning which attention-grabbers are worth giving attention to.

Control of attention is disaggregating; this makes all centralised expertise models shiver and shake. Which is why, as Doc says, blogging must remain provisional.

Blog posts are but a small group of inputs to this process. The output, emergently and crowdedly peer-reviewed, is measured in snowballs. It is this exciting and alive peer-review process that prevents propaganda and dogma, that nips snowballs in the bud. Far more efficiently than any previous iteration.

Copernicus and Galileo and Newton and even Einstein would have had a far easier time if they were able to blog. Because good snowballs can’t be suppressed.

Four Pillars: EAI and DRM continued

Kris Tuttle makes a very interesting point in his comment on my last post.

I have watched with awe as my children share their buying rationales with me, for devices as well as “content”. What they see value in, what they abhor. The polyphonic ringtones example is a classic.

Even if we got conned downstream, many of us were attracted by adjectives like “green” and “organic”.

Generation M will look for different kitemarks. Shareable. Copiable. Mashable.

Note that they don’t look for Free as in Gratis. It has always been Free as In Freedom for them.

While we mope around trying to look for just Playable.

I look forward to seeing things marked SCM for Shareable Copiable Mashable. Or maybe the Creative Commons CC already does this…

Thanks, Kris.

Four Pillars: EAI and DRM

Imagine this. Imagine you are part of a household of three people, living in the same house. Make it simpler, assume you are related by blood and marriage (or its civil equivalent). You have a bunch of 33rpm vinyl albums, some cassette tapes, some videotapes and quite a few CDs and DVDs. Maybe some lacquer 78s as well, and a host of 45rpm singles.

Imagine you have paid the new market price for all those things. In effect, you have done your bit to meet the business expectations of all those people involved in writing, publishing, recording, manufacturing, marketing and distrubuting all those things. You have never allowed anyone else to make a copy of those things; you may have burned the odd CD for parties or for the car, but that’s all.

Everyone’s happy.

Now to play all this you have all the necessary gadgets as well. Which you have also paid the ruling market price for. You have a Victrola, a turntable, a cassette tape player, a videotape player, a CD player, a DVD player and a gazillion iPods. And maybe some MP3 players, half a gazillion computers and something that aspires to be Sky+ or Tivo.

With the advance of technology, you can now digitise all this and make it available to yourself to watch or listen to wherever you like. Any room at home, and even while on the road.

And someone stops you. Stops you from watching or listening to the things you’ve already paid full market price for, using the devices you’ve already paid full market price for, stops you spending your own time and money converting all these different formats into one elegant whole. Stops you despite your having ponied up at every stage already. Stops you despite the investment you made in getting broadband and ethernet and broadband wireless and Airport and whatever else you may have acquired.

And calls it customer choice, somehow insinuates at the same time that you’re stealing money from the artists you already paid by doing anything with the stuff you paid for.

I guess you’d get slightly irritated. And rail at Apple or Microsoft or Sony or Hollywood or everyone else involved in this mess. And then meekly put up with it.

Is that harsh? Calling us meek? I don’t think so.

Why ever not? Today, that’s how it feels to me when I look at information in any organisation. First we pay for creating it or acquiring it, but it stays with the “devices” that are lock-stepped with the “content”. Our devices. Our content. Then we pay for a whole pile of EAI and “middleware”, to try and release from lock-in what we have paid for at least once already, probably much more than that. Then we pay for making this humongous beast “secure”, and in the process ensure that we spend even more money trying to extricate from our own dungeons what is ours in the first place. And, just in case we feel we haven’t spend enough money on this, we start introducing more and more DRM, which makes a fine art of data/device lock-in.

We do this meekly today. And the enterprise IT equivalent of napster and downloads and kazaa and everything else is called opensource. Commoditised future-proof bug-free scaleable attractively-priced infrastructure. Infrastructure which has created an ecosystem that allows us to move our information around without EAI and “data mining” and “business intelligence suites” and whatnot.

[An aside. Think about who pays to bury in six foot of concrete that which you later “mine”. Think about who gets the gold that you mine.]

The truth is, it has taken time for us to be able to work on a common infrastructure with market-driven standards and the possibility of operating without device or other lock-in, and EAI was an opportunity for people to make money while we got there.

But surely not now. Not now when we don’t have to. Not now we have the technology.

Yet we put up with it in every enterprise.

Generation M is round the corner. They perceive value differently, they perceive time differently, they perceive many things differently.

And they’re not going to put up with it. EAI or DRM. They’re not going to put up with paying premium money to do things that are fundamentally closer to deckchairs and Titanics and arrangements than anything else. That’s why Napster and Gnutella and Kazaa and Skype and BitTorrent. That’s why Linux. [Another aside. With all the supergazillions spent on R&D in the technology and telecoms space, just how many of these things came from incumbents? Why? I wonder. Clayton Christenson come back all is forgiven.]
We don’t have to do anything. But if we believe that people are our most important asset, if we believe that the social cost of implementing systems is a magnitude greater than the physical cost, if we believe that we have gained anything at all from Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder, if we believe there is a war for talent, and if we believe that the best business strategies begin with “First Get Good People”, then we may have to do something.

Because competition for Generation M is just one layer of DRMlessness away. One layer of EAIlessness away.

Think about it. What these things represent is equivalent to your being told your ability to drive on a particular road should be tied to the age of the road and the age of the vehicle….

Just a thought.