simondelliott

Architecture principles

To ensure the objectives and expectations of the project are achieved, try and use these principles in the design decision making processes.

• Re-use: Components of the platform that are already in place (e.g. components exiting in the manufacturing chain, etc.) should be re-used where possible.
• Integration: into existing infrastructure: The design should not adversely affect the existing infrastructure, networks or business procedures.
• Cost: To deliver a cost-effective solution which presents future opportunities for re-use and increased scope of operation.
• Openness: The design should be compliant to open standards where applicable in order to support flexibility and a modular architecture (reducing risk and cost of change).
• Performance: The performance of the design is important to the success of the service; it is a key factor to user satisfaction. The design should consider performance in the functional and technical design of each area and component.
• Robustness: The design should ensure service availability in the event of key component failure, the design must also offer a sliding scale of redundancy.
• Operability: The design should support robust and efficient operations management.
• Scalability: The design should be able to support short term increases in load (planned and unplanned), and long term growth in application resources.
• Presentation: The design should be documented and presented in a manner that is comprehensible to all stakeholders.

It is anticipated that requirements may change, evolve or even be de-scoped from the project brief stage to the point of implementation, however you must always endeavor to ensure business objectives are met from an architecture standpoint using the above guiding principles.

Justifying ROI on a wiki.

How to help your boss make a decision to buy a wiki or
Which line do the curly braces go on?

We used to have a big problem with quality, simply put we spent most of our time fixing bugs on old code rather than innovating new products, the problem was code standards.

My team was in 3 countries and we had 3 different sets of coding standards, any collaborations were plagued by technical differences in the code. I wanted to merge the codebase for the main products from all three countries and there for had to get the team to agree to a new set of standards.

I took the traditional approach, got one dev team to make a word document, distribute to all the parties etc … we held meetings to discuss feedback, had reviews and revisions of the document.

After about 3 months we managed to get agreement, and some people started using the new standard ….

However within another 6 months there had been so much change that the standard was out of date, and only a few were following it. Obviously my management team and I tried using the stick, but it just made everyone hate the standard even more. The code was not getting any better and the programmers were still behaving as little teams, rather than as a whole.

So, I copied and pasted the coding standards into our “trac” wiki, which is a free product. I told every one that they must follow the standards, but I also told everyone that anyone could change them. If there was any disagreement then I would make the decision. Over the next couple of months they deleted about ½ the standards, then they had a big row about a whether the curly braces were on the same line.

The end result was that all the developers subscribed to changes of the standards and took an active interest in a) whether they were good and b) how best to follow them.

The difference between wiki and the old “document and versioning” approach was that it allowed standards compliance responsibility to be devolved to a level in the product development team where something could be done about it. I was freed from the mindless task of telling developers to implement the standards, the code was significantly better, there were less bugs and the whole company started making the same products faster.

The investment in installing the wiki (1 day) me adding the standards ( 1 day) the huge row about the curly braces (a lot) was far far out weighed by the reduction in testing and fixing time and the increased revenue by having a better quality product that consumers loved.

About two years after that we started using the wiki for far more important things such as interface specifications, functional specs and architecture documentation.

Why waste time on categorization?

If you store your information in folders or on a network share or even in some document mangement systems then you may be at a disadvantage …

Filing behaviors such as tagging, categorization and placement within a hierarchy are a cost on your time and therefore a form of waste.
However, If the time to recall the item being stored is reduced by more than the cost of filing then it’s a worth while activity.

Hierarchical solutions to information storage have a high upfront investment in waste (the hierarchy itself), where as denormalized “broad and flat” solutions have a low initial investment in waste.

The reason that there is a swing towards the later solution is because modern search engines have a greater semantic understanding of the content and can recall faster, offloading the manual input needed by the operator onto a machine.

If you look to the future you will see that there is a massively increasing number of web based features for authoring and collaboration. These are either very low cost or GPL products. The idea that we would choose not to use this functionality and ignore efficiencies and cost reductions that it offers is unrealistic, the idea that a single supplier can meet the demand for all this new functionality is also unrealistic.

To have more business agility and lower costs a company must embrace a heterogeneous environment.

The death of the desktop

It is not news that nearly every application is browser based (notable exceptions are high power games, and desktop apps like word). Another trend is that browser applications are becoming more highly functioning. When preparing content for the web most people use a combination of google doc and wordpress.

Printing a document is becoming seen as socially unacceptable and is more often than not more inconvenient than reading on the screen.

Do these different forces spell the end for MS Word?
and if word dies will the rest of the desktop software also die?

TV is Dead Long live the Stream!

Have any of you tried to use the internet in the UK around 20:00 in the evening?
Did you notice that the under 20 demographic dont discuss TV shows any more?
What do you think people are using the iPhone 3G’s to do ?

If you work for an ISP you may have access to the bandwidth usage metrics, and if you have seen them (as I have) you will notice that people are seriously into the iPlayer. The basic consumer TV behavior of settling into a TV programme is still there but the method of programme selection and distribution is totally different.

If you work for a telco and you dont manage to get your existing TV audience into the new streaming delivery then you will loose it to your competitors. As someone who has spent the last 15 years working in TV I dearly want this to not be true, but the tide has changed?

Marketing your products in a down turn

Remember how I said that the profile of tenders was going to change because of the downturn?
The bell curve of opportunity value compared to frequency of deals will be squished, out in two directions.

Lets take a look a just a single company.

A large company has to speculate to accumulate. This is reflected in the internal purchasing mechanisms of the company. Roughly speaking there are sign off boundaries, the most influential people at each of these boundary levels are indicated in the above diagram. Even though a VP may have to sign off a purchase of 300k it will probably be a couple of directors at a lower level who make the real decision.

The down turn will reduce costs and therefore the whole curve will be smaller. However operations must still go on. You will see that the directors now control most of the spending rather than the VP’s. Because directors are still intouch with the delivery and are younger you have to change your marketing.

• make it more funky – remember your playing to the google generation
• make it about delivery
• dont dress your sales materials in the old school terminology – i.e. have a summary instead an exec summary

List of products that have been successfully marketed using social networking

This is a list of things that social networking has successfully helped to market

• Knitting – and all the associated bits and bobs
• Scrabble – I dont care what any one says, facebook was good PR for scrabble
• Live Music – Its inconceivable to imagine a live gig that is not promoted by facebook and myspace
• Ubuntu – The support for this product and the Buzz is all on the social networks
• Print media – Although nearly every book is available online the cumulative effect of visual book shelf, amazon wish list, etc … is massive

The commonality is that the brand is not important, nor are any brands from the days of mass media in the list.

A 360 Degree Viewpoint for the Downturn

This is an article is based on an article written by myself and Stephan Folan.

Background

In 2009 the goal is to keep the business in a condition so that it can revive quickly when the opportunities arise. The business must balance cutting costs, retaining people and providing good service that needs to reflect micro-demand.

What is micro-demand? A micro-climate is where you can travel 1km and experience a completely different set of conditions (hot, rainy, fog, snow) at each point but in each location. Micro-demand will be like a local economic zone (over time) where each economic scenario differs from the surrounding period with little warning. The ability to adapt quickly will determine if the business can survive through to the end. The ability to speed up to take opportunities as well as to reconfigure the business to reflect demand is
essential.

Many businesses are at what Andy Groves of Intel calls a strategic inflection point, the time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. This inflection is an economic one and only the most
adaptable will survive. Simply adopting new technology or fighting the competition as you used to may be insufficient.

Taking a 360 degree evaluation approach (what to stop doing, start doing, continue doing) is a simple method that will reflect things that could improve the health of the business. The list below is based on technical and project experience that you can find within your organization and it is intended to provoke other areas of business review that could generate similar results.

Stop Doing – ‘Less Is More’

Is the business as lean as it can be? Old habits die hard and there may be customs dressed up as processes, multiple authorizations required for business as usual events and inherited systems that should be discontinued. Any new processes that are designed need to anticipate that they need to
be flexible to accommodate future changes.

Do all businesses need availability of four nines (99.99%)? Each 9 adds an additional 30% to the cost of managing and running operations. Not just hardware and software costs but support, documentation, reviews and the all the regulatory/compliance processes and reporting that goes with it.
A restructured business can get rid of unnecessary hardware and software and reduce the costs. Each process, software application or piece of hardware attracts audit, compliance and regulation costs that increases the overall cost of business.

Renegotiate with your hardware and software support and downgrade all non-client facing activities. Are your Service Level Agreements still relevant for your current level of business and client response? Can you share services with other companies? Reduce regulation costs by eliminating compliance re-work. Consider how many times each project, each person and each piece of hardware gets audited. Establish what it costs in terms of disruption, displacement activities and the distraction from business as usual. This is a street digging metaphor where the same road is dug up monthly for the gas, electric, water and other
inspections. Coordinating these inspections will reduce disruption, time, costs and raise morale.

A prototyping approach will result in cost effective R &D results and identifying more opportunities. Too many template business cases cost almost as much to develop as undertaking the project itself. Reward fast
failure and initiative rather than ‘me too’ decision making. Responding to change takes priority over following a plan and working software over comprehensive documentation.

Allow more downloads, more storage, less firewall policy, more access to external partners and materials. Spend less time policing staff and more time freeing them up by providing resources so that corporate knowledge is built up from a variety of source. Security should prevent bad people and bad software getting in, but too much time is spent asking for additional email storage and access to download legal software, unauthorized by central authority.

Start Doing – Start Small, Stay Small, Move Quickly

Create a culture of collaborative, small projects that have a 3-6 month timeline. Promote customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Train people to start up, complete and kill off projects quickly. ‘Good enough’ technology will be designed to last for 6 months – 1 year maximum before replacement. Longer business cases do not make sense and disguise an inability to change the business.

Smaller motivated teams will always beat large off-shore factories in getting to market. Design and ingenuity cannot be outsourced and getting from the idea to market requires that your design team are able to collaborate effectively (instant messaging, file sharing, peer-to-peer software support this behavior). Once a project is up and running it can be outsourced to a trusted partner to manage and operate.

Open Source technology is still being resisted by some businesses as they believe that it is untried and untested, this is wrong. There are now many technologies that are low cost, fully powered alternatives to the more expensive mainstream technologies. PHP, Java, WordPress, Drupal, Ubuntu, OpenOffice, VirtualBox, BackPack and Alfresco are examples of applications that have been taken up and championed by businesses.
Furthermore there are a large number of our technologists are enthusiastic about pushing and supporting these technologies, if asked.

Continue Doing – embrace technology, more information

Keep using dashboards to monitor business performance but ensure that you are measuring the things that are relevant to predicting client change, business change and market changes in a down turn. Using the same performance indicators that were used when the market was growing will be like driving by looking in the rear-view mirror – except that things will be closer than they appear in your management view.

Google Apps, Virtualisation, Outsourcing, Mobile Computing, Cloud Computing and Social Networking (Search Engines, Blogs, Twitter and Instant Messaging) should be part of your business already. If you have
resisted the urge to use these technologies then this would be a good time to investigate how they can reduce your costs.

Tele-working, flexible hours and increasing employee choice should be encouraged to increase employee retention. It is a way of customising the employer-employee relationship to build loyalty and flexibility from the employee and reduce the amount of command and control required from the business.

Business Review

Regular business reviews should indicate where each business function sits in terms of their responsiveness to internal and external change. By looking at the organisational behaviours you can identify where your business is on the matrix below and what needs to be done to get where you need to be.

In less turbulent times all of the categories will produce a good return on investment with the “Well Prepared” being the most effective. In less certain times its rigidity and lack of responsiveness will make it the most vulnerable as they are unable to adapt as well as the “Inertia” and “Chaotic” categories
that will have learned how to muddle through a different degrees of efficiency.

Recommendations

Identify at a business and operational level where you are on the matrix and identify and manage key indicators that can provide a dashboard on momentum in moving to a more agile approach. Typical measures could include:

• No. of active clients, new clients and renewed business
• Demographics of client base and their key indicators (price,
  service…)
• Costs of attracting new client
• No. of projects completed on last 3 months;
• Average cost of project;
• Average no. of reviews of each project;
• No. of servers under direct management

These indicators will vary from context to context and need to be easily
captured from the existing systems and processes and capable of being
displayed in a dashboard format that everybody can access and keep score.

Conclusion

The concepts outlined above are continually debated within any company. Such business transformations are inevitable in 2009 and a judicious application of tools and approaches will support an adaptable
business in a changing environment. Technology skills, design expertise,
project management skills and implementation craft will all be needed in
small teams that can hit the ground running and then alter direction to follow
where the client needs to go. The disruption that these changes will cause
must be minimised and managed to advantage of the upturns in demand
when they occur.

Technology predictions to 2030

Ive been gazing into my crystal ball, thinking about the future and trying to make some sense of whats happening in the techno world. The long and short of it is that I have come up with some technology and social predictions.
They are based on market analysis, trend extrapolation and good old fashioned intuition.

Some of these predictions are contraversial (deliberatly so), but times are changing and things happen fast.

• 2010 Microsoft give up on vista
• 2010 Ubuntu is home standard
• 2011 IT becomes all about mobile
• 2011 silverlight dies
• 2011 3d standardization
• 2011 Windows applications disappear
• 2012 Hacking event causes world turmoil
• 2012 Cloud replaces servers
• 2012 Diverse office computers is standard
• 2012 International security database
• 2012 Designers take over from developers
• 2012 Email becomes obsolete
• 2012 flexible screens on packaging
• 2012 low cost genetic sequencer
• 2012 MRI scanning in doctors surgery
• 2012 News papers will die out
• 2013 Online democratic systems
• 2013 AI services emerge
• 2013 removable media becomes obsolete
• 2013 Systems Integration de-skilled
• 2013 Television replaced by online
• 2013 Google not top search provider
• 2014 Media overtake computing companies
• 2014 VB script dies
• 2014 all software is either service or open source
• 2014 Virtual worlds used by business
• 2014 Apple becomes biggest content provider
• 2015 brain pace makers become common place
• 2015 Employees use their own computers
• 2015 flexible screens become standard
• 2015 getting lost is impossible
• 2015 Google is top enterprise software provider
• 2015 governments stop buying servers
• 2015 handheld genetic sequencer
• 2016 Human lands on mars
• 2016 implants into humans become common place
• 2016 IT services becomes about data meaning
• 2016 It will be possible to index video
• 2016 Linux becomes is standard OS
• 2017 Full scale cyber war
• 2017 opensource hardware
• 2017 programming is obsolete skill
• 2017 Relational databases are obsolete
• 2018 business delegated to AI services
• 2018 Imagination more valuable than skill
• 2018 The office becomes history
• 2018 Call center becomes the past
• 2019 Automomous robotic toys
• 2019 Printers disappear
• 2019 Mobile phone becomes history
• 2019 weather news mega important
• 2019 Semantic web services
• 2019 Opensource car
• 2020 Talking computers
• 2020 HUD is fashion item
• 2020 Petrol Engine abolished
• 2020 Tabacco smoking illegal
• 2020 riding a bicycle becomes the norm
• 2020 Office blocks repurposed
• 2021 Ubiquitious internet
• 2021 Intelligence in almost all devices
• 2022 global state controlled media
• 2022 the depression is over
• 2023 Paper outlawed
• 2023 All knowledge electronic
• 2023 Autonomous vehicles
• 2024 natural language programming
• 2024 English replaces all lanuages
• 2025 world covered by CCTV
• 2026 querty keyboard dies
• 2027 most work from home
• 2027 Writing not taught
• 2028 Astro Holidays

Blog not working so great

Sorry for the interuptions, Im having a tincey bit of technical trouble with the blog

(and thankyou for all the Hillarious comments and emails … I having a touch of the dentists childrens teeth here)