simondelliott

What happend whilst you were Whilst your on the golf course.

Ive just read this article and …. this point of view is totally out of date

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/silicon/news/20/~3/398719685/0,39024673,39289155,00.htm

The author of this article says that there are only three successful collaboration technologies that penetrate the boardroom Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and the BlackBerry.

He has omitted the Internet, the penetration of which is so complete that it is easy to overlook it. If you include it, you will see that it shows the results of many millions of different collaborations using tools like wordpress, joomla, svn and good old notepad.

The generation of people who make the 99% of this content not only reject playing golf as a way to communicate, but they also reject the notion of a boardroom.

The exclusive and location static nature of the “boardroom and golf” means of communication is in comparison to the “basecamp and msn” form of communication, far slower, which all things being equal places the boardroom style of business at a commercial disadvantage.

If the author of this article is looking to the future of business, then he (Im guessing he is a he) should be looking to the technologies that are going to replace the boardroom not those that are going to get past its security coded doors for the short time that it still exists.

I do enjoy golf

Technical architecture drawings

Firstly I am a big fan of pen and paper.  A blank sheet is the best tool for a clear mind.

Secondly, index cards …. I use these almost every time that I am designing, you can CRC card with then, you can story card with them, you can plan a presentation with them, you can use them to carry water, you can support heavy objects with them …

For flow diagrams or software component diagrams I deliberately try to keep it simple and just use shapes in Visio, or Open Office.

I do however have a large number of shapes that I have made over the years, its a good idea to start collecting these as and when you make them. It really cuts down the time to make a diagram if you have a good libuary.

After a traditional flow diagram, the diagram that I find best describes a step by step procedure is a sequence diagram.

These diagrams are great for both software and people process and can often help to find glitches that cannot be seen with a traditional boxes and lines style flow diagram. I also find that when you talk someone through your thoughts with a sequence diagram, it really gets them to lean forward and understand the concept that you are trying to convey. I used to just draw these with either Visio or a proper drawing package (Flash, illustrator or Photoshop), but now I use umbrelo.

I recommend to any professional that uses diagrams to convey complex ideas, that they simply learn the standard drawing package, which is adobe illustrator. It is reasonably accessible to the beginner, but it can go much, much further.

Your diagrams will look much better
and as diagram styles change faster than drawing packages, over your whole career you will have less learning to do.

I prefer to use a wiki to publish the diagrams so that when others see them it invites them to comment and contribute to the problem that is being described. When you do this you invariably find that you have to render the diagram to an image so that it displays on the web page.

To make life easy for the possible contributors I have found that I have had to simplify the tools that I used to create the diagram, photoshop is a good choice as nearly everyone knows the package, but I guess visio would do just fine.

Computer architecture?

What is the difference  between an architect and a programmer?

The metaphore of considering a large system to be a building a very close, and extremely accurate simile. However real architects have spent many thousands of years defining and expanding their craft, but in essence a computer architect is performing the same role as building architect, it just that all his or her tools are only 30 years old.

Gaudi did not know how to fire a brick or join a staircase.
Burnell did not know how to weld a joint or lift an key stone
Eiffel did not know how to roll an RSJ or pin a steel plate.

They designed using abstraction, and the forms they designed are a meta abstraction on the skills of the craftsmen that made them. Computer architecture is the meta design above the logic of coding, integration and configuration. Programmers and script kiddies are artisans rather than architects. The currency of the architect is form and function. The architect has to trust the artisan to implement his or her vision.

Using a Wiki to create a bid responce

A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are used in business to provide intranets and Knowledge Management systems.

When you read some ITT response documents you can see the joins,
i.e. you can see the writing style change when you look at the deferent sections

This is because the bid manager breaks up the response into chunks and allocates a team member to each chunk. The team member then works independently on the chunk. And if you are traveling fast then sometimes its last minuet … the cracks never get pasted over.

I am looking for a better way to create a response document and I think a wiki could be it.

Instead of breaking it up into chunks the bid manager creates a frame work in a wiki, all the team members have visibility of the whole response all the time, they can make changes to any part of the doc.

Bada bing – you have your response doc at the end of the process. It then goes to a graphic designer so that the copy can be typeset.

This is better because

1 Ditch the baton method
Or the “you do your bit” method, which creates a culture of “ive done my bit” rather than “what’s next to-do?”

2 Visibility of everyone  else’s style
When working on the doc you will be able to see what has gone before, this is the first step on the road to getting the writing style in sync.

3 Abstraction of content from presentation

This is the biggest problem with the old word and powerpoint  tool set. Loads of effort is spent mucking round with tables, merging documents, getting the bullet formats right. Content authors should not be concerned with this, they should just say … here is bullet points … here is a diagram. The formatting should be done by the professional type setter, if the content is designed using a wiki then you can export to word/pdf etc and then apply formatting.

4 collaboration with the customer
If you have the response as a wiki, why not share it with your customer? They can make comments directly, they could even be involved in the design and editing process.

5 vitalizing the team

This style of collaboration tool is awesome when you have a virtual team, it will give you a real advantage over your competitors, you can bring people in and out of the fast, and you can get the most from them when they are there.

Integrating information systems in a corporation

Have you ever tried to get everyone using the same information system, are you wondering why its so hard?

This is why,

1. Different regions will refuse to use the corporate backed solution, for almost any reason they can find.
2. Different development groups will chose to hide their systems rather than spend time learning/migrating to the corporate solution, because they dont want to give up their indipendance
3. Systems that may have started as small information repositories will have organically grown, and had turned into business critical systems, to replace them with the corporate information solution is just too risky
4. Acquisition of new business will caused dilution as the new units existing information systems will be too expensive to change.
5. Multi language content (and character sets) will cause issues during migration leading to the previous system remaining in place.

Just like King Canute you cant hold back the tide. Give up and instead implement and publicise a search facility that provides a single place to go to find content rather than have a sing place to go to author content.

How to make the most of your enterprise wiki

Top tips and tricks for the for the new wiki user

So you’ve installed a wiki in your company and some people love it but other don’t … dont worry here are some tips and tricks to get you going.

1. You may wonder why people are not visiting your project or team wiki, use the news or blogging feature to keep people coming back.
2. Make it look great, make your wiki look better than the other ones at your company, If you can afford it hire a graphic designer to do it for you.
3. If you want to author content quickly ditch the rich text editor – use the wiki markup instead, its really easy and much faster.
4. If you want to bring a team together quickly – create a new wiki for them
5. Once you have a wiki for your team, create a blog, get some discussion going
6. If you see a page you like, open it, look at the markup and copy it
7. Use pictures to emphasise points
8. look on the web – there are literally millions of how to articles
9. If you cant do it then someone has made a plugin that will
10. Instead of emailing the content, send a link and ask for them to add comments to the page
11. Leave empty links in your content so that others can help fill out the content

remember, some people just dont like collaborative working … try and support them, but dont give in.