Good job HP!

Not quite such a good job Citylink.

HP have been doing pretty well in the PC market recently. Looking around my house there are 5 computers, 3 belonging to us and two belonging to my employer - they are all HPs. I can't answer for my employer, but in the case of our machines I didn't go looking for an HP, it just seemed to be that the best deal I could find was an HP. Now it turns out that the after-sales service is just as good.

My son has an HP laptop, abut 9 months old, which recently started forecasting the demise of its hard disk. So we called HP and they said they'd pick it up on Wednesday. On Monday we got home from work to find a card from Citylink saying they'd tried to deliver something, and if we wrote on the card where we wanted it left they'd have another go on Tuesday. So we wrote some instructions and left the card for the Citylink driver, and when we got back from work we found a card saying that he was actually trying to collect the laptop. On Wednesday, as arranged, we were in to hand him the laptop - he had a specially designed transit case for it with lots of foam padding. On Friday he reappeared, with the transit case again - I wondered if a routing error had just returned the broken machine to us. But no, the computer had a new hard drive and a reflashed BIOS and seems to be fixed - all under warranty. I think this is pretty good service - if Citylink had managed to turn up on the right day I'd say it was perfect service.

Target-driven management

Once again, I am inspired by Simon Caulkin of the Observer. The context of his rant is the health service, but the lessons are far more broadly applicable. It's long been the case that you could trace the ills of most organisations back to the performance-related pay schemes of its managers, but the problem has got worse (at least in the UK) since our government's enthusiasm for 'proving' what a good job it is doing by 'meeting' targets.

In our business, I have seen many instances of damaging targets. I once worked in an organisation where it was decreed that we all should be given a target of contributing a certain number of pieces of 'intellectual capital' to the knowledge bases every year. Unsurprisingly the knowledge bases soon filled up with utter cr*p, but hey, we met the targets so the bonuses were paid. To deal with the quality issue, someone came up with a cunning plan - all contributions had to be rated by one's peers, and only those which had a high enough score would count. So a system of 'you rate mine and I'll rate yours' arose, the knowledge bases continued to fill with rubbish - and we continued to get our bonuses, effectively being paid for wasting the companies' money and time. Other instances are paying people a bonus based on bugs fixed, which leads to the deliberate introduction of easy-to-fix bugs and a nice little earner, or rating people by lines of code written, which leads to an orgy of cut-and-pasting.

Caulkin points out

if enough pressure is applied, people will meet targets - even if they destroy the organisation in doing so. As quality guru W Edwards Deming put it: 'What do "targets" accomplish? Nothing. Wrong: their accomplishment is negative.'

At a high enough level of abstraction, targets are fairly benign. It is when they are chosen just because they are measurable the damage really starts. They also usually encourage short term thinking, erode trust and therefore the feeling of personal responsibility for outcomes. Targets are set top-down, in advance - the management equivalent of waterfall development. Human nature being what it is, targets trump thinking - and if we've learned one thing about software development in the last 40 years it is that thinking generally helps the process.

The agile movement tends to avoid numerical targets in favour of more woolly but also more useful aims such as delivering value to your customer. My experience is that when we trust people to do a good job, and remove the obstacles to them doing so, the results are invariably superior than when trying to coerce that behaviour by the use of targets.

Open Source Lessons

Writing in The Observer (a UK Sunday Newspaper) Simon Caulkin suggested that open source development represented a new way of working with wider applicability than software development. Commenting on a new book by management guru Gary Hamel, he points out that existing top-down management structures are both expensive and inefficient, and then continues:

But internet-enabled networks offer a credible third way, Hamel believes. The prime exemplar is Linux, the open-source operating system developed by a self-selecting band of volunteers linked only by the web and their motivation to contribute. There are now 150,000 open-source projects using the freely given energy and initiative of 1.6 million people, according to estimates. While many of these are not-for-profit enterprises, the lessons that they embody have wide application...

Leaving aside that the primary purpose of management books is to sell management books, there is clearly a grain of truth here. The self-organising teams of the agile movement, and the open source community have shown that it is possible to manage complex endeavours without a huge management overhead, and often in a way that is far more enjoyable for the workers than conventionally managed efforts. The main objection that I can see is that the members of successful agile development teams and open-source projects are largely self-selected and drawn from a very thin layer at the top of the development gene pool. Translating their experience to the wider working world will be challenging; and of course, getting management to support it will be like getting turkeys to vote for Christmas :-)

Why did he jump?

That's the big question he doesn't answer, but apart from that this interview in the Microsoft Architecture Journal with Don Ferguson, ex-Chief Architect for IBM Software Group and now a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, makes interesting reading. Some selected nuggets of wisdom:

You should never underestimate the importance of a social network. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know what someone may say to you that can push the reset button in your brain and make you think differently.

...communication skills matter. They really do. It's really important to understand how to write well and how to present well.

Secondly, many people who work in technology suffer from the "endgame fallacy." We are all pretty bright. We see a lot of customers. We see what they are doing and then plot a trajectory for where they will be in a few years. Once you do this, however, it's too tempting to build what they will need in five years, and not what they need next or are ready for.

Still wish he'd explained what was behind his move from the top technical job in IBM software to Microsoft though.

SOA still struggling

I don't want to be a luddite about this, but it has been apparent for some time that the hype about SOA was out of all proportion to actual implementation. I've formed this view based on talking to customers, partners and competitors about what they are actually doing, but this report seems to confirm my observations. Apparently,

Only 10 per cent of respondents believe that their business understands SOA 'quite well' and 22 per cent pointed to a 'medium amount' of knowledge.

and

A third of respondents to the survey have started to design and implement systems based on SOA principles, and a further 16 per cent are in the planning stage.

However, this still leaves a significant number of companies which have yet to embark on this route. Some 16 per cent are planning to look at SOA 'sometime in the future', and 23 per cent have 'no plans' to use SOA at all.

Since SOA has now been around for several years, but a very large proportion of the people who claim to have actually adopted SOA turn out in reality to have implemented a bit of EAI or used a couple of Web Services inside a single application, I think it may be time to ask whether it will ever deliver the goods.

Playtime

Working for an IT consultancy can be tough. The hours can be long and you can be away from home for a long time. For most of us the variety of the work and the quality of the people we work with make up for the privations of the job. But however keen you are it is important to get away from the screen occasionally, to refresh your mind and body and to reset your perspectives.

Some people become gym rats and choose their hotel by the quality of its exercise facilities. Personally I can’t stand gyms so I look for something different. When I was working in Singapore for several months I bought a very cheap mountain bike, and believe me you haven’t lived until you’ve tried mountain biking in 34 degrees and close to 100% humidity. If you are on a long term assignment you can probably find somewhere in or around your hotel where you can keep a bike, and particularly at this time of year it is a brilliant way to get the office out of your head.

An assignment in Ipswich gave me a perfect opportunity to learn to ride a unicycle - the staff at the Marriot Courtyard became used to seeing me falling off it in their car park, and as I got slightly more competent I ventured further afield and the denizens of Ipswich were entertained by my attempts to keep vaguely upright. Unicycles are great because they are really easy to sling in the back of the car, and if they aren’t too big it isn’t impossible to carry them on the train - I guess it helps if you have a slight exhibitionist streak. I’ve since unicycled all over Twford Down while on assignment in Winchester (the only time I’ver ever met another unicyclist while on an after-work ride) although I bottled out of taking the uni to Dallas.

If you can’t manage the wheels (or for some inexplicable reason you don’t get on with pedalling) then what about your feet? Sling a pair of lightweight walking boots in your luggage, buy an OS map of wherever you are and start exploring. Even cities can be interesting places to walk - the Thames path goes right through London, and the City is very different out of hours.

Reality disrupting SOA sales effort

I’ve had conversations about the practicalities of SOA with various people over the past couple of years, and the gulf between what we expressed in relatively private forums and the public pronouncements was striking. It was apparent to most of us that the pre-requisites for successful SOA were significant, and unlikely to be present in any organisation we had ever encountered. It was also clear that there were huge challenges in delivering adequate quality of service from SOA-based systems.

For whatever reason, people seemed reluctant to express these concerns in public. Perhaps they didn’t want to kill the goose that might lay the golden eggs, or perhaps they just didn’t want to be seen to be out of step with the rest of the industry. Something seems to have changed, and the first items of dissent are appearing. The lead article in “Information Age”, March 2007 issue (not yet online - I’ll edit and insert the link when available), is called “Structural Hazard - The Pitfalls of Service Oriented Architecture” . The article discusses the difficulties of governance, infrastructure and culture, as well as the potential SOA has to make the organisation’s IT even more complicated, rather than simpler. Steve Jones, in his Service Architecture blog, points out the implications SOA has for availability, and also notes the potential for complexity. There are other examples - Googling for “SOA pitfalls” gives 691000 hits.

I don’t know what has prompted the new realism (perhaps people realised that the goose didn’t appear to be laying any golden eggs), but it can only be a good thing and will likely lead to a healthier relationship between the IT industry and its customers.

Blue, and big...

I used to work for them, and I have some good friends who work for IBM, and the company does a lot of things really well. Doesn't mean you can't poke a bit of fun at them now and again, and this post by FSJ (Fake Steve Jobs) is just brilliant. In fact, FSJ is well worth adding to your blogroll for his entertaining view on the IT business.

Software companies are stupid

Mike Magee at the Inquirer has been chatting to some hardware guys - serious hardware guys, the one who design and make chips. He says that they are muttering that all the software indstry has done with the power that the chip manufacturers have given them is use it to allow them to make stupid software. I think they've got a point, but I'm not sure that the software companies are the villains here.
I'll use storage for the following argument, since it is easy to compare like with like - it is a lot harder for processors, although similar logic applies. I am old enough to remember when 2GB of storage took up the space of a large wardrobe and cost £100,000. I just checked and today 2GB of storage can be had for £0.61 as part of a 200GB disk, and if you put it in your wardrobe you'd probably lose it. At the time, as a programmer, I was paid about £8000 a year. On that basis, it was worth spending quite a lot of my time making my software as smart as possible if that saved hardware spend. 2GB of storage=12 man years of effort. I reckon an equivalent junior programmer today gets about £25,000 p.a. which makes 2GB of storage worth approximately 3 man minutes of effort. This fundamentally changes the economics of software development and means that the advances in hardware are just used in an attempt to do the same stuff more cheaply, rather than to innovate and really take advantage of what is possible.
To go back to a familiar theme for this blog, we once again see how a focus on price alone has negative consequences for the society and individuals alike. Just imagine what we could have achieved if we had decided to explore the possibilities of the computing power we now have - HAL 9000 could have been a reality in 2001. On second thoughts, perhaps that wouldn't have been such a great idea.

Software developers 'abandoned' by management

I think I'm getting kind of obsessional about poor quality and the choices our society is making. This article at vnunet is yet another example of how the current obsession with low price as the only differentiator in fact leads to lower quality of life and higher real costs for most of us. I don't think, in 20 years in the industry, that I've ever worked in a software development organisation where management saw quality as an important aspect of their job. Price, and schedule were the main drivers. Quality was 'what can we get away with?'. I don't blame the managers - the reality is that no-one is demanding quality as their priority measure, so in our market economy we get what the market demands which is 'faster, cheaper'. But as the old saying goes: "you can have it good, cheap, or fast - pick any two". As a developer it is depressing to be constantly pressured to release code that you aren't happy with - and as a customer, it's pretty depressing to pay for buggy software. But that seems to be the choice we have made as a society.

Mark's Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far

Sony is just so wrong here. Performing criminal acts against ones customers is not generally thought of as being a winning commercial strategy. The record lables must hold the moral high ground if they want to survive, and this kind of idiocy is so counterproductive. Great work by Mark to unearth the skulduggery.