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Courtesy of wili hybrid, Some Rights Reserved
In adopting IT technologies, IT managers and companies tend to have two kind of strategies.
There are the Late Adopters: they resist resist and resist. They touch their system the less than is possible: what’s stable don’t have to be touched. Less migrations, less change, more continuity to end users.
There are the Early Adopters: they migrate to the new technology ASAP. They don’t want to cope with tails of old technologies, they might be ‘geeks’, they might have demanding users and they prefer to cope with migrations than with service packs or back compatibility. More migrations, more change, more risk, less continuity, more features.
What’s the best approach for you? Are you an early or late adopter?
PierG
To all the sw dev who are reading this post: take some time and watch this video of Seth Godin!
Don’t try to resist, this is an hypnotical command: you have to! 
From: Seth Godin on why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department)
Feedback?
PierG
After reading an interesting post of John Hunter called Dr. Deming Webcast on the 5 Deadly Diseases, I’m wondering if in today’s company we are using poisons to treat the disease of our companies. In Italy, as in many countries around the world, we have sometimes the chance to access to new ideas a little bit after they have been tested in other countries (mainly in the US).
It should be wise not to use what has been proven it doesn’t give good results!
Listen to what Dr.Deming used to say years ago about the disease of our companies and look if they seem like the treatment we have been asked to use today by consultants or managers:
- Lack of constancy of purpose
- Emphasis on short term profits – “creative” accounting, focus on quarterly profits
- Annual Performance Appraisals – management by objective, management by fear
- Mobility of management – [see Toyota for a great example of a company that operates on different principles - where the leadership has been with Toyota for decades]
- Running a company on visible figures alone – many important factors are “unknown and unknowable.”
PierG
Interesting initiative of a group inside Google called: The Data Liberation Front
Their goal is to support and promote an easy move of data from and to Google systems.
Users own the data they store in any of Google’s products.
Our team’s goal is to give users greater control by making it
easier for them to move data in and out.
This is an intriguing provocation as in these days a lot have been written about privacy, ownership and personal backups of user’s data stored in important social networks (starting from the ubiquitous Facebook).
Not clear though what’s up with possible copies of my data if I get them out of Google
Follow the Data Liberation Blog here.
PierG
Another good concept from Google Labs: Read news fast with Google Fast Flip.
One problem with reading news online today is that browsing can be really slow. A media-rich page loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband, which can be frustrating. What we need instead is a way to flip through articles really fast without unnatural delays, just as we can in print. The flow should feel seamless and let you rapidly flip forward to the content you like, without the constant wait for things to load. Imagine taking 10 seconds to turn the page of a print magazine!
PierG
Very very interesting article by Tom De Marco (that I don’t have to introduce) called: Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?
He contributed in starting the Software Engineering science (or so) 40 years ago with many studies, books, articles. Very well known his quote: “You can’t control what you can’t measure”
Well, after 40 years, he has something to say about this quote:
In my reflective mood, I’m wondering, was its advice correct at the time, is it still relevant, and do I still believe that metrics are a must for any successful software development effort? My answers are no, no, and no.
It is a very important article by a very important guru so I just let you go through the article and wait for your feedback.
PierG
Courtesy of iboy_daniel, Some Rights Reserved
Last week, I’ve written about the Lessons Learned by Kent Beck in his post: Putting Max on the Back Burner.
I think this is the part that what might have more impact on some XP-ers/Agilists:
Ship it and fix it. The product needs to provide value from the first, but it doesn’t need to provide everyone with value all the time. Early sales answer questions about the market size. Early users accept some rough edges if they get to be first and you fix the problems. Not reflexively fixing every defect was a hard transition for me, but, often, answering the next business question was my highest priority. I would recommend installing real-time remote error reporting for anyone bringing client software to market. It was nerve-wracking at first to see all the errors, but in the end the feedback was invaluable
Here is what I gather from this topic adding my interpretation / point of view:
- releases can be used to penetrate the market, drive product evolution, check the market size. Eventually fix and change to penetrate another market and loop the process;
- from the users’ perspective external quality is something they might want to negotiate in a market exploration perspective or to gain some ‘early adoption’ advantage;
- new features, especially in innovative or immature markets, have often a disruptive effect no matter as unfixed they are: they quickly generate a chain reaction of new ideas and than new features. Again a way to quickly explore. Timeliness in this sense is driving more than external quality;
- the definition of DONE is not only related to the ‘acceptance’ of features, is when all users can use it (deploy), can communicate back (logging / error reporting) …
What’s your impression?
PierG
Courtesy of annia316, Some Rights Reserved
Who can afford, in today’s markets, the multi million / billion dollars innovation processes?
Someone might want to invest (many) money in innovation, but NO ONE can wait for the end of the project to start earning moneys!
So we have to change the way in which we make innovation exactly in the same way we are (struggling in) changing the way in which we run regular projects: a just in time innovation made of a set of quick wins!
How’s innovation handled in your companies?
PierG
Here we are, simplicity is gaining positions also in the operating systems arena. The “power of less” is making a new announcement: Introducing the Google Chrome OS.
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system [...] We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. [...] The user interface is minimal [...]
And now the best part of the post:
It should just work
These should be the underline assumptions of any modern software project, and this should be the innovation we need!
PierG
Courtesy of Evil Erin, Some Rights Reserved
Yes, IT is too difficult and it’s mainly our (IT professional) fault!!
The story: I wanted to send a small video of my son to my mother … and here starts the nightmare:
- some phone calls to agree on the meeting time for the surgery
- a lot of time and shouting to make her find and push the ‘Accept’ button in Skype to authorize the file download
- almost impossible to determine where the video was saved
- almost impossible to understand the reason why the video was not playing (codec? app? …)
I than decided to use a remote control tool to get her screen and do it myself but:
- I got time to find a free and EASY one
- I failed to use a couple as my mom was not able to connect
- failed to make her install QuickTime
The result: I abandoned the session after around 1 hour and a half!
So … do we need “the next Bing” or an usable IT?
PierG
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