thingamy

my life as a bug tester

For every new line of code, for each new feature added or cleaned up I'm on the front line. Firing it up, poking around and stumbling over bugs, then carefully trying to recreate.

After creating functionality, ease of use is the focus. And bugger me that's the real hard part! What is ease of use?

First step is easy (duh), minimise number of clicks, right balance of number of features, speedy reaction and no scrolling please.

Second step being the elusive "intuitive" - and that I'm always giving up on. Ask a chap who's used to Windows and get one answer, then ask somebody running Gnome and you get another.
So I'm trying my best to not-think-computer-interfaces and reach for the moon; the other stuff we do on a daily basis. Wish me luck and ask me in fifteen years how it went!

And don't get me started on "pretty"! Anyway we outsmarted that one - all css files are open, please feel free to change!

The first part is going well, and for the second area I'm in luck as most terms in my system are user-defined so I'll let each user decide, with a little help of course. Not only terms, but process flows as well. Despite many existing standards, reality is different; each organisation has it's own ways and good is that. And believe me, reality in most organisations is usually quite different from the internal and neat flowcharts once created.

But I've found one quite unexpected effect when the system gets easier to use:

I get sloppy!

I'm invited to become sloppy and god knows I grab that invitation with both hands. The easier and faster I can build the sloppier I get, most unfortunate.

My system requires good and solid logic; it's after all a Business Model I start out to build, processes and report templates - the engine, chassis and control of a car business. Omit a small but important step, do the wrong sequence and lo and behold - it does not work very well.

If you'd been around me you would hear the occasional muttering of "bugger, bugger, another bug" - then followed by a slap on the forehead and a relieved "ouch, how stupid am I??". Yep, I am relieved when I find out it's me and not the system that is stupid.

So how can I fix me? Not that easy if you ask my family. I can try to hold my hand of course but then I end up in "intuitive" land again, a lose-lose situation that.

Thing is that when I buy a car I find it easy to use, but the good folks that designed it and built it were fastidious, precise, organised and thorough. Sloppiness not accepted. I the driver is allowed much more leeway.

Thingamy as a system for an end-user is like the car, but building the Business Model therein requires more of the attitude displayed by the engineers of an F1 team than the local drivers of battered Renaults.

Business builder view of what he can build.

End user view of the system.

I'll do my best to supply the very best tools for the Business Model building engineers, but I have to insist on fastidiousness, precision and focus. Sorry, life requires it sometimes.

Cannot really see how I can avoid that. But I can promise a huge surge of pride with a job well done with end-users going about their daily work in a uncomplicated fashion, just like me in my modern car.

problem solving app in 17 minutes

When the phone rings, when an e-mail arrives - how often is it an issue that needs solving?

Can you count how many times that happens in a week?

Any idea how often you forget to follow up?

And can you tell me, honest now, you remember ten months later how you solved that particular problem?

Or, do you have an inkling how your co-workers solved a similar problem last week?

For some industries all of the above is their core value adding process - consulting, health - for the rest it's a daily nuisance.

The classic and omnipresent Barely Repeatable Process that can be given a proper framework to ensure accountability (nobody can blame bouncing e-mails) and knowledge increase from every step done (capture the data by the task itself).

Built a simple and generic one in thingamy captured on video here. Took me 17 minutes to build. Including testing.

Nothing fancy of course, and tweaking it to something useful for a specific organisation would take a few minutes more...

stop organising, please

Organising, or rather the reason for organising - finding stuff - is the focus and raison d'être for much software development: From search - finding stuff in huge heaps of more stuff, accounting - organise by event, to collaboration software - keep stuff somewhere where all will find it and can work on it.

So give this a thought: It's barking up the wrong tree(structure), it's counterproductive.

Well almost.

Look around you where you are just now. I have my desk in a corner of our living room where there are two sofas, opposite each other, two very comfy chairs, paintings on the walls, books in bookshelves and a plethora of little things residing on countertops, tables and on the footstool.

Nothing is organised in rows or columns, nothing is labelled nor tagged - still it all makes perfect sense and I'm never in doubt where to find what I need when I need it.

The location of all the little and slightly bigger things have a meaning - they're where they are for a reason, not to follow a strict system, plainly how the things are used; where it's good to sit to watch the television, where one might find a quiet spot out of traffic with good light for a quiet moment of reading. Everything relates to something else because each thing is unique and have a purpose. Things have a meaning.

Now do a mind experiment. Say you brought in your three shoe boxes of pictures that never found their way into an album. Now empty the boxes onto the floor and see if you can find the picture of your son and yourself from summer 2003 when he was horse riding for the first time.
Not easy. Not a fluid search about to happen while you shuffle through the heap, turning over those which came face down in the kerfuffle.

What's the difference?

1. The physical things around you are singular, unique and have a purpose as in relationship with some other physical thing or activity.
2. Your pictures or documents are not singular, they each represent many objects, activities and situations. They're narrative in form and as such will have a whole range of meanings and relationships. And with that no natural place nor connection. They need organising. We think.

Every day we read about new ways, better ways sometimes, to organise such narrative objects - new and interesting search algorithms, newfangled taxonomies, semantic webs, artificial intelligence or efficient hierarchies. Not to forget tagging and other ways to add labels or meaning - all dependent on the system constructor's logic as well as the understanding of the user, in other words a clearly set system followed by well-trained users.

All well meant and seemingly important so we can make better use of knowledge amassed by others - a never ending quest for humanity.

But why this narrow focus on only one of the parameters of the equation?

Information Usefulness = ƒ(Information Format, Distribution)
and Distribution = ƒ(Capture, Availability, Assimilation)

And as we know - all focus is on "Availability" as in how to organise and find. If not organised search is the last resort. Add tags, categories and labels and some organising helps the last resort search. Add hierarchies and we reach the tipping point where training and understanding of the rules are required.

I do not really understand why this focus and complete blindness for the three other parameters. But of course, we've learned that "organising is the right and good way to manage life and it's components". A culture thing I suppose.

Forget that, unlearn that, think living room instead of shoe boxes full of pictures, think in "what" form we capture and keep information and how it can help the issues of Availability and Assimilation of knowledge.

Step 1: Instead of mashed up information bearers, cut them into singular representations all linked with meaningful relationships. Just like my sofa.

But hang on a sec, what about the "well almost" in the start you might ask.

Stories - on paper bound by cardboard, on newsprint or in electronic form, on canvas or sculpted from marble or etched into celluloid - those are not made for "cutting up into unique pieces bound by relationships". Or are they?

Are art galleries organised? Last time at the Guggenheim, were the paintings organised by size? By year painted? Not always so. Are the theatres grouped by what kind of plays they do? 

In other words - information comes in two forms - narrative or direct representation; content of a good book or some data representing a widget in the warehouse.

What happens is that we're interested in the timeline as well as the actual facts, what happened to that widget. And when. The solution when we only had paper was "write a story" as the narrative delivers the timeline.

And there we are, factual data represented in narratives, the ubiquitous documents.

Step 2: Enable the information bearers, the unique representation of reality to capture and hold the timeline, the process, as well.

Then we're in control of the other parameters of the equation - a must if we want to create more value using less resources and in general better our life.

And we have to start with the first parameter: Format, then proceed with the second: Capture - then Availability and Assimilation will follow.

We just might have to learn that what we learned can be unlearned for even better results.

[Wee bonus: Charlotte did some organising, Thomas was bemused - excellent!]

DID or PID

Business is social - gather a group of good people for a purpose. Let information flow uninterrupted amongst the participants wherever and whoever they are, that is the requirement for the most efficient creation and delivery of value.

Enter Social Software - perfectly aligned for that quest, efficient distribution of information in the format we currently keep it:

Narrative and post-event format (aka forms and documents), manipulated facts still posing as "information" for good or bad. Manipulated facts, dubious information.

In other words:

Social Media is Dubious Information Distribution - DID

We need Precise Information Distribution - PID

Distribute the facts separate from the logic, then slap logic to the facts - your own or that of others if found viable.

Note that "Distribution" is the same, that is not the crux, it's the information format. Facts and logic are two separate parts - keep them that way. Then manipulate when needed.

Clarification: Do not think the very structured and "precise" methods and systems are any better at it - accounting is DID as well. Somebody applied personal logic when deciding what account an item was assigned to.

[Nod goes to JP, Balaji and Alan for inspiration :)]

thingamy is social software, duh

When using the term "enterprise software" about thingamy I am met with much blank stares and urges to change theme - enterprise is boring...

As said earlier - "boring is good" as it attract much less fluff as in money-willing-to-be-lost and fifteen competitors a week after you've launched a new service.

Looking at VC portfolios I cannot but shake my head - "how on earth do they think me-too products can yield the highest reward-to-risk ratio?". A mystery no less. Or a different economics professor than the ones I've listened to.

Add the size of the market being bigger by a double digit factor - and enterprise software seems to be a good place to be even when it never gets any "oohs or ahhs".

Quite a few started-in-consumer software firms have found out and are hard at making an effort to enter the enterprise market, typically among the "social software" crowd. And who can blame them? Not much willingness to pay for services coupled with a online advertising market about 1/20th of what banks alone will spend on IT this year, and where Google have like 77% of the market - that is tough. While at the same time, enterprise is social per definition.

Social software is thus interesting, so allow me throw out a few traits often used to define it:

• Allow users to interact and share data with other users.
• Social technologies or Conversational technologies used in organisations.
• Web-based.
• Knowledge creation and storage that is carried out through collaborative writing.
• Conversational technologies seen as tools to support work units and the individual knowledge worker.
• They create actual communities.

One particular paragraph that interests me in the Wikipedia entry is:

"Communities formed by "bottom-up" processes are often contrasted to the less vibrant collectivities formed by "top-down" software, in which users' roles are determined by an external authority and circumscribed by rigidly conceived software mechanisms (such as access rights). Given small differences in policies, very similar software can produce radically different social outcomes."

Precisely!

That's almost like defining the difference between ERP and BRP - where the last actually requires less rigid policies, the typical situation for the knowledge worker. Every step in a Barely Repeatable process has to be "free" in the sense of having a waste number of choices leaving the operator freedom to judge earlier results and choose next step from there. Passing the bucket kind of process; "Hmm, no sign of fracture in this Xray, time for a blood test." - but within limits of course, the MD would not suggest "...time to change mufflers". As enterprises have a purpose they will have some underlying structure, obviously.

This is precisely what the thingamy is good at, all of the above, including adding a snippet of structure - as little or as much as you want - tweak those policies to have radically better results.

Hmm, thingamy is in fact "Social software"... and solidly so.

• It needs no hierarchy nor any rules or policies (but you can have them if you must).
• It connects people when things needs to be done.
• It goes beyond sharing of data, it moves the data you want to have moved to the people you want at the time you want.
• It allows any kind of transparency.
• It captures all that happens and increases knowledge by every thing done. Nothing is lost.
• It automates the boring stuff like reports - that can be generated automagically from real activities.
• Web-based, check. Tweakable and changeable at any time, check. Social, yah.

Wonder if my focus is too narrow on the enterprise space, perhaps there is a consumer play hidden therein as well? Could it even enhance my social interactions with non-enterprisey folks? Time for some reverse idea-engineering for the fun of it? (Don't think there's any money in it though - but could be fun, good for learning, straddle the divide, sneak in backdoors, etc.)

But on the other hand, conceptually, better to be the enterprise Social software with the by far deepest well of features than being the simple (on the surface) Enterprise software that still have not produced a chocolate bar ever, not to talk about a million per hour that some of my bigger competitors can brag about.

Food for thought on a Tuesday morning... ah well, back to reality and testing semantic process engines and other radical goodies!

Bars and Business - social objects and business objects

Hugh's post on social objects the other day resonated with many, and I still remember Jyri bouncing a beach ball around at Reboot a couple of years ago.

Allow me to quote Hugh reporting from a social setting:

"Increasingly I've been using a term, "Social Marker" to describe a certain type of Social Object. I've found it especially useful for explaining certain ideas to marketing folk.

When two people meet, the first thing they try to do is place each other in context. A social context. So they insert some hints into the conversation:

"I used to know your Uncle Bob."
"I work at Saatchi & Saatchi's.
"I've been reading Malcolm Gladwell for years."
"I'm a member of Soho House."
"I was reading Doc Searls' blog the other day."
"I was college roommates with your ex-girlfriend."
"You're a Red Sox fan too?""

Social objects - the stuff that connects us, objects that spurs a common interest, the nodes in the social fabric. Not to forget basic knowledge about each other as expressed by relationships to known objects.

With some common nodes connected the social flow can start - discussions, much nodding and trust between the bar patrons is established with the knowledge yielding a feel-good sense of connection while downing another beer.

Allow me to quote myself from a less frivolous setting:

"When a patient arrives at the hospital, the first thing the physician tries to do is to unearth the main "business object", the medical condition. So he inserts some questions in the conversation, exploring (in this context) "business markers":

"Where does it hurt?"
"When did it happen?"
"What did you do when it happened?"
"Have this happened before?"
"Who's your physician?""

Soon he will be on track to establish what the issue is, or issues are; the main "business object(s)" in their "business" relationship, the thing that he as an expert might add value to by curing it.

When the first connecting nodes are found the value creation flow starts - medication, X-rays, tests - leading to the establishment of a core "business object", the medical condition. With that the physician can go about and create value by manipulating that object, curing it through surgery, plastering and medication.

Now, let's expand that to a more "commercial" business proposition - a sales situation. Let's follow two kind of sales people on a sales call for, say, enterprise software:

Sales person 1: Straight into presentation of product, pushing brochures over the table while pouring out a well-learned sales pitch.

Sales person 2: Asks questions - "could you please describe your business?", "any areas that does not work perfectly?", "any daily issues that annoy you?", "could you tell me a user story?" - quite the physician looking for that particular node where he and his expertise connects with the customer.

Would Hugh's bar patron go off on a rant about his excellent career or name drop or brag about his cars and boats and houses? Yep, some would - the social version of sales person type 1. The bar bores. "Sorry, have an appointment in five...".

The one - it be bar patron or sales person, social setting or business setting - that seeks out the markers to find the core connecting nodes will win. Every time. Same thing for business and social life - explore the social or business objects and find the node(s) that connect!

It's what Seth Godin always says about sales - you have to establish a relationship first! Quite, but not quite:

The relationship have to connect through the relevant business object(s) - a patient and physician connecting by a common support for Arsenal would not mend a broken arm.

sexy or boring - investing in the software industry

If you're an investor, there are two basic industry traits that you should look for:

1. Big market
2. Boring

Boring?

I've been an investor in many business, of which some have been of the oh-so-cool kind: Yachting, sports equipment, fashion, electronic games...

And then I've been involved in the bugger-how-boring kind: Pulp and paper, cans (yep, the fish and paint containers)...

From my many years in business I learned one thing about this dichotomy:

Cool and sexy industries attracts a steady flow of new entries, players and investors. A kind of margin influx of money that is willing to be lost and people that are in it for the wrong reason. That makes it extremely hard to earn money, if anything at all.

Boring industries are the completely opposite, the people involved stays and know what they do, the influx of new entries and money is at most a trickle. Margins are stable.

So if you want to earn money, find a boring industry!

And now I'm in software. There you have two kinds:

Consumer software: The cool and sexy stuff, especially anything web based and 2.0'ish.

Enterprise software: The boring stuff nobody sees nor gets you anywhere when striking up a conversation at a cocktail party.

Consumer software is big, but not that big. Online advertising, the income that has to be shared among the most sexy ones like Google, new media and Web 2.0 kind of stuff is approximately 20 Bn $ per year. For an indication about the rest of the consumer software market ask yourself, how much did you spend last five years on non-professional, pure consumer software (not games mind you!)?

Banks will spend about 390 Bn $ on IT next year. Banks only. Enterprisey that.
[Thanks to Dennis for the figures]

In sum:

Consumer software
Is a smallish market, has a steady influx of new entries and willing money to ensure ruined margins (work a VC packed drinks party and you'll get the drift). But that cute long legged lady at the last cocktail party was really impressed.

Enterprise software
Huge compared to consumer market, has a very restricted flow of new entries to rock the boat nor the margins much. But you need a make pretend answer to "what are you doing" when partying.

Would suggest "ski bum" to impress socially and enterprise software to impress financially. With one exception; if you're to see a VC next week, refocus your enterprise stuff to the consumer section and do not forget the colour scheme and Ajax while you're at it!

One would think that investing in enterprise software is a no-brainer, but not so, seems one actually needs brains to make no-brainer decisions. Lets hope it stays that way. Stop the calls for making enterprise software sexy, leave us alone, and bugger my lack-of-investor-interest motivated string budget.

Blink, rapid cognition, Categories and Relationships

Being out of fresh reading material over the holidays I picked up some previous read books from the bookshelves - one of which was "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell.

Must say second-time-over-reading has it's positives - you know when you're in a boring or not so interesting part so you can happily fast-forward.

Following my recent post on Categories vs. Relationships I guess my mind was skewed when I hit a good story on some strawberry jam testing experiments:

In short, from the book - a group of food experts ranked 44 types using their usual arsenal of specific measurements like texture and taste. Taste of course split into many subcategories. Texture could be "adhesive to lips, firmness, denseness, slipperiness" and so forth. Each of those again getting a number from 1 to 15. Pretty complex, but we're talking about people with long experience and a second nature of how slippery a jam is.

Then they simplified and took the first-, eleventh-, twenty-fourth-, thirty-second-, and forty-forth-ranking jams and gave them to a group of college students. And lo and behold, their relative ranking was pretty close to the experts.

Then they repeated the same with a different group of students, but this time they gave the students a questionnaire and asked them to enumerate the reasons for the ranking. Now the results were dramatically different from the two earlier ones.

This Mr. Gladwell argues is another proof that rapid cognition or "blink" thinking is pretty good, and will be immediately ruined by too much thinking unless you're a highly trained expert.

Sounds plausible indeed, and he has lots of other examples supporting the theory. I agree, but I was lacking a good explanation as to why we're so good at rapid cognition and bad at the "long thinking".

Thus, allow me to try to add something to his theory: The third experiment was for me a classic example of using a complex system of categories or taxonomy by the untrained, a given that it does not work. Categories requires education and training. Slipperiness of jams as felt in the mouth surely more than other taxonomies - as can be witnessed by the training period for food taste experts and perfume designers, not much of four week training courses there, more like twenty years internships and much sniffing and spitting. No training and chaos ensues. As always.

But what about the second one? Or rather what's connecting the first and the second so the results becomes similar?

Taste and smell, both having very strong emotional memory (ever get flashes of memories when you pass some flowers or blossoming tree?), would give immediate relationships - "that reminds me of my grandmother's jam and sunny days during summer vacation", a sure measurement of "good taste" I would suspect.

Or the "yech, that's like the cheap stuff I have to buy on a student budget" - probably not getting high marks in the taste department.

And obviously, the whole idea about the "taste-taxonomy" would be to recognise what triggers the "good" relationships, those that triggers the good memories and the natural linking to strawberries in a field on a sunny day. Relationships thus being the common base for one and two.

If you have the book, check the other experiments and examples of rapid cognition or blink moments and you might suspect the same as me - if conscious or unconscious relationships exists in our experience we'll have a quick and easy path to decisions. Try to explain the decisions by using categories (as we're usually meant to if "thinking") and you'll find that nobody but the experts will have a chance. Obviously.

After all, relationships - between, and the actions involving, objects - is the basis for all our learning until we're put in school - and a damned good method it is. And here's good indication that categorising is fools way if you're not specifically trained so why not leave categories methods alone, accept the relationships method as better and develop it further for education and for practical daily use?

As said earlier - awast ye scurvy categories!

educators vs. enterprise and JISC

Having been to many enterprise, blogger and ideas conferences, now participating in a conference consisting of nothing (almost) but educators was a refreshing experience indeed.

As a sum-up let me list some superficial observations by a non-member of said profession:

Knowledge, learning and make meaning

"Make meaning" was a term I heard a lot. And it makes sense. Duh. Captures so much more than the usual "semantic", "knowledge" or even "search" that we usually engage in.

It could be seen as the core of what we all seek (finding the right stuff at the right time), here from an education - i.e. learning - viewpoint where it would be a core issue.

The enterprise world is slightly more skewed towards the squirrel approach to knowledge; gather and store. (Just chew on the term "knowledge management" a bit...)

A most refreshing reminder this "make meaning": Just "having" is not enough, "being" as in "assimilating it" is even more important. This I will keep close to my heart for my next enterprise knowledge management discussions! Make meaning of what we find... or make clear what we're looking for.

Best practices and business rules

Hmm, did not hear much of that. Nuff said...

Bottom up "admin" issues

Education being much less top-to-bottom run as organisations I saw a clear bottom-up need to ease everyday tasks and issues, and a willingness to try new solutions seldom seen in the enterprise world of central buying decisions and strict policies.

The need is felt everywhere, nobody likes the admin chores (who does in the enterprise world by the way?) - more time for research, teaching, mentoring and further development of pedagogic methods are where these folks wants to spend their time. Admin is hygienic and not a purpose.

I can see the wisdom in having a JISC that supports conferences like this; let the users find out and suggest, then support with funds and more. Directly.

Technology and pragmatism

Although much of the conference was highly technical, the session on Semantic Web was more technical and enlightening on the core technical and philosophical issues than anything else I ever heard. And the crowd enjoyed it and participated with gusto, perhaps slightly skewed to the philosophical side - an approach I fully support. If the underlying thinking is wrong, perfect coding and exact modelling will be moot anyway.

Still all were highly aware, and said so in comments, that although theoretical discussions are enjoyable and important, finding practical solutions that are easy to implement and allows for practical testing had to be the immediate purpose.

Typically, Scott leading the Business Process session, started out with four quadrants along the Hard-to-change/Easy-to-change x High impact/Low impact axes - pointing to the lower left quadrant - High impact + Easy-to-change as the sessions target area:
Find some processes, their drivers and impacts, that belongs in that quadrant and take it from there. And lo and behold, at the and of much fun bantering and some extremely messy sheets of notes produces by the participants he ended up with no less than 13 processes to start with. Not a bad result! Have to admit, that suits me enormously having a system with quick prototyping as a built in core feature ;)

JISC CETIS

Nope, not a conference about a new pharmaceutical molecule.

Had the pleasure of being invited to two days of discussions about IT among English educators - a first time for me, hopefully not the last! This is fun, wall to wall folks who thoroughly enjoy a good discussion, remarkably free from any entrenched viewpoints about IT.

Joint Information Systems Conference Committee - Centre for Educational Technology & Interoperability Standards. Quite a mouthful. JISC by the way is the body who allocates funds for IT all through the English higher education system.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of joining the Business Process thread (what else you might add) led by Scott Wilson of JISC.
Four hours of discussions (and I had the opportunity to bounce a beach ball around - thanks Jyri for the idea - and talk about singular objects and object-drivenness) - all expertly shepherded by Scott into a nifty action list of processes worth spending some time on, and perhaps one day build systems for.

Next few days I might be found prototyping a few of these... ;)

Logging off, have to join to the next one, Semantic Web and learning no less, goodness.