The New Age of Guilds July 22, 2009
Posted by jsteensen in Uncategorized.Tags: Check Card bill, Clorox, EFCA, Guilds
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Last night I attended an excellent presentation/discussion at the SDForum Business Intelligence Special Interest Group by DJ Patil, Chief Scientist and Sr. Director of Product at LinkedIn titled “The Analytics behind LinkedIn: A new model for Analytics and Business Intelligence”. It was a very interactive session where DJ’s openness and insight into the process of thinking about the innovative application of analytics were in sharp contrast to many presentations that I have attended which were basically advertisements for for a product or company.
The room (provided courtesy of SAP) was packed and, as a way of characterizing the audience before the talk began, the question was asked “How many of you are consultants?”. A sizable proportion of the room raised their hands. During the presentation an analytic example was presented as a graph comparing the number of self-ascribed job titles indicating that a person was in business for themselves over time from about 1975 to present. This graph showed a long term upward trend with a substantial rise starting around 2000. At this point someone mentioned the increase in the number of on-demand projects where skilled individuals, often consultants, are brought together for a project and, once the project is completed, are released or reassigned. These “dynamic” corporations are applying the same principles that cloud computing is based upon – you only pay for what you use. And, with plenty of available resources and limited demand, you don’t have to pay very much.
But, in talking with a number of individuals after the presentation, it seemed like many of the “consultants” were not consultants by choice but were unemployed and just trying to find a paying gig. That got me thinking – always a dangerous situation.
There was a lot of irritation expressed at the “business community” for reducing their labor forces and offshoring jobs. So, it occurred to me, “Is this the time for a New Age of Guilds?” A guild is a association that controls the supply and quality of a specific labor resource. In the middle ages there were guilds for almost every trade – butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. By controlling the supply of labor through organizational pressure and by promoting the passage of laws the guilds were able to provide their members some security that their jobs and professions would continue be valued by the society they served. Just as the business community controls the supply of work, and thereby controls the value attributed to that work, guilds for IT, graphic design, accounting, etc. could, if well organized and motivated, control the supply of labor and the value of that labor. Of course, the back channel to other sources of labor such as H1B’s, legal and illegal immigration, and offshoring would need to be blocked by appropriate legal and economic sanctions. In a country where “Change” is the word of the day and each person has (at least) one vote there is a way to change the working relationship between the supply of work and the supply of labor but only if people are willing to spend their time and money to make it happen.
So, what’s the likelihood of this type of movement happening in the U.S.? My assessment is that it is extremely unlikely unless union-friendly bills like the “Employee Free Choice Act” (better known as the Card Check bill) pass Congress without being substantially watered down. As it stands now, most people I know would rather be umemployed but free of another controlling organization. And, given that propensity, the status quo reigns and a New Age of Guilds is not on the horizon.
Cloud Computing 1.0 = Utility Computing 2.0 May 18, 2009
Posted by jsteensen in Uncategorized.Tags: Cloud Computing, Electric Grid, Smart Grid, Utility Computing
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Cloud computing is everywhere – and nowhere. I say that because it seems that no two vendors/academics/professional associations/standards groups (pick 1) can agree on what the term “cloud computing” means. The concept of cloud computing is simple enough – you can have as little or as much computing related “stuff” as you are able to pay for. That stuff can be processing cycles, storage, data transfer, load balancing or whatever a vendor offers as a discrete billable service.
In Dot.Com Era 1 there was the concept of utility computing that offered the same type of services being offered today by cloud computing – reliability, availability and scalability (a phrase made famous by IBM and dating back over 30 years) but without the encumberment of long term contracts and massive infrastructure investment. The datacenter and personnel costs of Dot.Com Era 1 made true utility computing cost-prohibitive.
Now, in Dot.Com Era 2 we are able to materialize the promise of utility computing by riding on the back of the bankrupted network investors of Dot.Com Era 1 coupled with lowering operational and capital costs by offshoring a vast portion of our intellectual and manufacturing base. We now have enough infrastructure to create a computing utility.
I prefer the term utility computing because it more closely parallels the experience we will expect from such services. By comparing cloud or utility computing to an electric utility I believe we could make the average Joe (or Josephine) understand how it works. For example:
- You house or business is connected through a metered device (electric breakers and a meter) to recieve electricity. Your house or business is also connected through a metered device (bandwidth-limited routers) to connect to the cloud.
- You have little of no idea where the eletricity coming into your house or business is being generated (coal, nuclear, hydro, etc.). You also have little or no idea where the data being served up to you is coming from (data centers, governments, businesses, etc.).
- You have no idea what to do when the electricity quits flowing into your home or business other than call your utility provider and wait to have it fixed (a very common occurrence in California). You also have no idea what to do when the data packets quit flowing into your home or business other than call your ISP and wait for them to fix it.
- If you want to guarantee that you have electricity 24×7 for your home or business then you have to invest in an expensive UPS and generators. If you also want to guarantee that you have data processing capabilities 24×7 for your home or business then you have to invest in the servers, data storage, and software / people to make that happen.
So, in almost every way, cloud computing is more like the promise of utility computing than any other computing paradigm. But, lest we forget, ”Cloud Computing” is about selling a billable service and I am sure most people would agree that your average gas and electric utility isn’t very sexy.
In my next posting I’ll continue to follow a few of what I believe are the more pertinent parallels between cloud computing and the traditional utility business model.
The Complexity Ceiling May 12, 2009
Posted by jsteensen in Uncategorized.Tags: Deprecated Features, Feature Creep, Open Source, Software Complexity
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Software systems are some of the few human endeavors that seems to defy basic rules about how complex a system can become before it loses the ability to adapt and survive. If a hundred features are good then a thousand features must be much better. There seems to be almost no ceiling on the complexity that software developers are willing to inject into a software product. Every line of software used to be viewed as both as an asset AND a liability. But with modern QA and regression testing tools it has become relatively cheap to carry legacy features and the code that embodies them. Legacy features, like gene pairs gone bad, can have devastating effects when interacting in unexpected ways with new features.
Pride Cometh Before a Rise
Every feature has a story. And that can be a problem. When the primary currency paid for developement effort is attribution then the system surrounding and supporting that effort must have a well-managed and promoted attribution mechanism. For example, in the open source software development community that mechanism is the possibility of rising to the “inner sanctum” of developers that have final approval for which features and implementations will make it into the “core” code line. This group is, of practical neccessity, a relatively small and elite group. So, while there are certainly those individuals who donate their efforts for the “common good”, I suggest most expect some form of attribution from the community they are contributing to. And when this attribution mechanism is effective and well-managed then the number of contributors will increase. In the commercial world monetary compensation takes on part of the role (stock, salary, bonuses) but attribution to the individual and/or team is still very important. So the addition of features keeps on coming.
Aggressive Feature Deprecation
Experience has shown that the apriori feature selection process often results in software features that of limited practical value (not discounting their marketing value) or are implemented in a less than optimal fashion. This “plant 1,000 flowers and let them bloom” approach may have utility in allowing the evaluation of many different features but only works if the ecosystem has a mechanism to get rid of the “ugly” flowers. Although software feature utility could be determined by surveys and polls those polls could lead to “feature support groups” pulling a “50 cent army” on the community. We need a way to systematically organize the deprecation of features with little utility. Note that “little utility” is different than “little used”. For example, a data recovery feature may be (hopefully will be) little used but could have very high utility.
I believe a process I call Aggressive Feature Deprecation or AFD (not to be confused with AFD – A F***ing Disaster) should be applied to all large software systems. AFD would be implmented as a standardized, very-lightweight, mechanism to record the use of each tracked feature into a log file in an industry standard format. This log file, under the complete control of the user or, in the case of commercial software, the license holder, could be viewed before it was sent, either automatically or manually, to the software creation or management entity. By the automatic monitoring on the use of specific features there could be objective and usage-based discussions about each and every features utility. By adding quantitative information to community-based information better decisions could be made about which legacy features should continue to receive support and which should be deprecated and how fast they should be deprecated. And so, if there is a complexity ceiling, we can buy some more headroom before we hit it.
Plug-in’s for Humans March 7, 2009
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Often when I’m working on a novel I push myself into a “free association” mode. This is where I try and meld recent experiences, exposure to new knowledge and my extensive collection of random knowledge (a cranial land fill – not necessarily a good thing) to try and derive some new yet plausible extensions to everyday situations or technologies.
Earlier this week I had been working on an IT audit at a very innovative company in the East Bay that helps reduce the cost of moving empty cargo containers from where they are to where they are needed. As you can imagine the cost of repositioning empty containers adds significant overhead to the cost of moving goods just like empty trucks returning to the depot to be refilled. While I was doing my part of the audit one of the accountants kept repeating about how he wished that Excel 2007 had a mode where the older Excel 2003 menus could be used instead of the new “Fluent User Interface ribbon” (did it occur to Microsoft that, just like the abbreviation for Graphical User Interface or GUI is pronounced goo-ey, then the Fluent User Interface or FUI would be pronounced foo-ey???). This sounded like a product idea that must have been addressed so a little googling turned up my old friends at Mr. Excel whose macro solutions I have used for years. They had a product Classic Menus in Office 2007 that immediately solved the problem for under $30.
Now here’s where my Cuisinart©-like brain punched frappé and some new associations spilled out.
Wikipedia states “In computing, a plug-in (also: plugin, addin, add-in, addon, add-on, snap-in or snapin; but see also extension) consists of a computer program that interacts with a host application (a web browser or an email client, for example) to provide a certain, usually very specific, function “on demand”". If you consider that many people believe a human to basically be a “meat popsicle” with a biologic computer called the brain the question becomes “What plug-in’s are available to extend the capabilties of humans”. Your first thoughts go to Borg-like extensions but I thought that there are many experiential plug-in’s already either in-use or available to use.
For example, earlier this week I talked in my blog about a program at my alma mater called the Engineering Entrepreneur’s Program or EEP . This program allowed students to add a real-world knowledge plug-in to their coursework that would give them specific experiences they could then draw from “on-demand”. In my coursework at North Carolina State University I worked at the Hybrid Computing Laboratory started by Dr. Don Martin, one of the university’s visionaries of education in both computer science and chemical engineering. This real-world experience provided me multiple “plug-in’s” to my academic coursework.
In one project at the lab Dr. Martin obtained a research grant from IBM to develop system software and applications to enable an IBM System/7 to control and monitor X-ray defractometers, gas chromatographs and various other laboratory equipment. In this project I got to design and build a monitoring panel that allowed a visual display of the various software modules as they loaded into memory, executed and exited the system. IBM required an immense amount of documentation to be produced to document our research and this was an important real-world lesson that I would have never seen without this project. One of the benefits of this project was that the crystalline structure of materials could be analyzed at 10-100 times faster than had previously been possible. Laboratory automation in the making.
I believe programs like EEP can be plug-in’s that change a student’s life in a very positive way. Working in Dr. Martin’s Hybrid Computing Laboratory was my “mini-EEP” because I got to work in areas such as process control with IBM, cartographic analysis of training expenditures with NC Department of Education, simulation of human interaction with medications with the School of Pharmacology, hardware diagnostics, programming an infinite precision computation library for the School of Nuclear Engineering, and many more that I never would have had without the HCL.
The roots of EEP run deep at NCSU – a belief that broadening a student’s exposure to real world experiences will grow a student in ways that classes and projects cannot do alone.
Plug-in’s can occur at any time in life and include participation in sabbatical’s such as those offered by Intel which let employees pursue areas of research or interest that may or may not be directly related to their primary jobs at their employers.
Like every computer plug-in which provides a new set of functionality there is also a cost in money or memory or both. So choose the experiential plug-in’s you use, or you provide your employees (or your children – summer camp may not always be a good thing) carefully to get the benefit without the bloat.
P.S. I just thought – Borg-like plug-in’s are already in use – they’re just called Ipods.
We’re in Good Hands March 3, 2009
Posted by jsteensen in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
Last night I had the opportunity to dine with a great group of students from my alma mater, North Carolina State University. They were a select group that gets to participate in a trip to Silicon Valley as part of the Engineering Entrepreneur’s Program each year.
As we dined on great pizza at Pizz’a Chicago in Palo Alto I got to remember what it was like to be an undergrad student at NCSU and yet it was clear how much different that experience was today.
Before dinner I shared a few thoughts on things they might start thinking about today that I didn’t learn until later in my career. The first was the realization that your career and your job are no longer the same (maybe they never were). I told them that over their careers they would probably have 10 on more jobs at 6 or more companies. I suggested that they keep a record of every major project that they work on, including school projects, as a way to keep their accomplishments in perspective. And with each of the projects note the things they thought they did well, what they learned, as well as the things they thought they could have done better. I reminded them that all improvement is incremental so just keep moving forward. And don’t be shy about promoting yourself – they should each be their own biggest fan as well as their own PR agent. For engineering students this doesn’t come easy.
Second, I suggested to them to constantly reinvent themselves. By this I meant to learn new technologies, new approaches to problem solving – especially when they are most comfortable in their current jobs. Change comes hard and fast and you almost never see it coming. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be prepared for it. If you’re a programmer learn a new language or technology every year. If you’re a sales executive learn a new sales technique or sales tool every year. No matter what your job never stop learning.
Finally I told them that the realities of life were different from when I was a student. Back then mistakes, both in judgement and behavior, were relatively private. This is no longer the case. A friend of mine, Walter Fiegenson, who specializes in Internet Branding, recently sent me a post from Seth Godin, who is a well-known VC. It was titled “Personal branding in the age of Google”. I took a moment and read it to the students:
A friend advertised on Craigslist for a housekeeper.
Three interesting resumes came to the top. She googled each person’s name.
The first search turned up a MySpace page. There was a picture of the
applicant, drinking beer from a funnel. Under hobbies, the first entry
was, “binge drinking.”
The second search turned up a personal blog (a good one, actually).
The most recent entry said something like, “I am applying for some
menial jobs that are below me, and I’m annoyed by it. I’ll certainly
quit the minute I sell a few paintings.”
And the third? There were only six matches, and the sixth was from the
local police department, indicating that the applicant had been
arrested for shoplifting two years earlier.
Three for three.
Google never forgets.
Of course, you don’t have to be a drunk, a thief or a bitter failure
for this to backfire. Everything you do now ends up in your permanent
record. The best plan is to overload Google with a long tail of good
stuff and to always act as if you’re on Candid Camera, because you are.
The point was that now is the best time to start building your Internet Brand with the best of what you are and do. And always remember that a billion cell phone cameras are clicking at all times. I probably sounded like their mother when I said “Good reputations are hard won and easily lost”. But that is more true now than ever before.
We finished dinner with some great discussions about their senior projects like how to deliver health care more efficiently and at a lower cost to the populations of under-developed countries and how to improve battery utilization and efficiency in electric or hybrid vehicles. Projects that will make a difference.
During the week these students will visit some of the most innovative companies in Silicon Valley and will have to opportunity to see how their contributions can make a difference.
I felt pretty good about what was happening at the school that started me on my own path and went to sleep last night a little more comfortable knowing that the future was in good hands.
See additional comments on this innovative program at EEP Testamonials.
