thingamy

CTO, CIO, CMO, CPO, C3PO?

The CIO and CTO titles have been around for a bit…

And I can sympathise with that, after all IT used to be something magical hard-to-grasp stuff for many in the upper echelons of the organisations. And much of that obscure technology was brought in the door and had to be operated by somebody in-house, so better have some focused expert for that.

But does that still apply? IT is fast becoming just a component, a rather boring component, of some service that brings value to the organisation.

Cartoon by Hugh Macleod of Gapingvoid fame

So here's the obvious question:

What about those other technologies that are important to our organisations? Motors? Paper? Electricity?

Do we have CMOs? A Chief Motor Officer who has the final say when anything incorporating a motor is procured or used. Who oversees the Motor Department and spends half his time visiting motor conferences and worrying about what quadrant that new engine for his trucks has been assigned.

Or a CPO, a Chief Paper Officer? The chap who impresses the other managers flaunting terms like paperweight, basis weight, blotting, and bristol and tag. The chap who spends his days on paper strategies for the organisation and who has the final say on what caliper to procure for the copy machines.

Just wondering…

Hugh's hat

Just had to - fresh from Skype chat:

a humble request

Not often I blatantly use this space for a request, but as a father one tends to reach beyond the usual limits:

My son's off to university next year, hopefully London (even if I've been heartily supporting my old school in Zurich, ETH - guess the preparatory German lessons were wearing him down...)

As he's now in a gap year he spends all his time, and not only all his nights, programming - so if anybody out there could use his skills please give him (or me) a heads up!

Any useful work in or near London would be appreciated - part time, full time, contracting... and if it works out he'll be able to stay on part time when studying.

More on what he can do here.

Thank you for hearing a father out, his mother would be eternally grateful too - she thinks he needs some real life experience now ;)

what's with numbers?

I'm puzzled, have "everybody" forgotten how to calculate?

The long sigh of the week:

Yesterday in a shop something cost 26.40 so I gave her a 50 note. She asked if I had -.40 so I gave her a 50 cent piece. She tapped the incoming into the cash register, but then I gave her another 1 Euro piece so she could give me 25.10 back, less coins I thought.
That rattled her no end, after much use of a calculator she came to my conclusion though.

This morning I read about Sarkozy starting his battle with the unions and how he'll want to push the current pension age of 50 (at certain state enterprises) back up to 65.
My brain goes "hmm, now it's 25 years working, 25 years pensioned thus half their annual work income should go to pension funds - wonder if the union ever accepted that simple fact?". But not so, unions up in arms of course saying "any change is not fair, the money is there". Sure the money is there as long as everybody else is willing to pay for that, but fair, no.

Last week a story about the loss of hours by FaceBook users in the UK spread like wildfire, some consultant had made some calculations and most UK papers picked it up and printed (Daily Mail censored my calculation comment there, cowards) it as a wow story without a question (blogs questioned though).
Good story yes, but if any of those editors knew how to add two and two they could have found that the number meant that most FaceBook members who works in the UK spends all hours at work and more on FaceBook. Not likely.

We're good at detecting political lies, but pure bullshit presented as figures - nah, no detection at all.

How can our societies survive if this is the norm?

little demo

After my morning bike ride up to Col d'Ecre (fantastic weather today!), I was bored...

So I recorded a small demo, the usual hospital demo so some of you might have seen that already.

It's on the thingamy site, direct link here.

If you find it boring, put on the lycra and protective hat and get out on your bike instead! :D

thingamy manifesto

In these day of New Year Resolutions, Five Things You Do Not Know About Me and Hugh’s rapidly increasing list of Manifests I crumbled under pressure (thanks Hugh!).

Actually, manifesto? Well, more like a summary of reasons why we’re doing the thingamy:

1. The Organisational Hierarchy is kaput - as single purpose executor of the Business Model it requires reorganisation every time you need to get better, an utterly futile exercise most of the time. Replace it.

(Some more here, here, here and here.)

2. Managing is a waste of time. Leadership I need, getting out of bed in the morning I can do myself.

(More here, here, here, and here.)

3. Legacy software models the "way we always did things" - usually a model from the days of paper, quills and desks. Model reality instead.

(More here, here, here, here and here.)

4. Tree-structures are faulty. "Where it resides" is only two dimensional and suitable only for places. Use tags and any other means to enhance the knowledge and make finding easier.

(More  here, here, here and here.)

5. A report is simply logic applied to raw data. Apply when needed and keep all data in raw form. That will do away with applications, middleware, complexity and deliver far better reports.

(More here, here, here and here.)

6. Accounting was “invented” in 1573 1494 using paper and quills, dump it and let the IT system that delivers the flows capture the real data and display it any way you want real-time.

(More here.)

7. Budgets are completely silly. You know nothing about the future so forget it and leave such to soothsayers and magicians.

(More here.)

8. Think of processes as "what happens to things", not "what things happen".

(More here and here.)

9. Documents and forms are bad - they only document "what things happen" creating reconciliation, errors and rigid processes. Let the thing itself capture what happens to it.

(More here.)

10. Process is not a track, it's a football game where you see the goal and look for and try openings all the time. The ball is the flow.

(More here, here and here.)

11. Flow is everything - flow is relationship, flow is knowledge, flow is context and flow creates value. Your business is all about flows, never forget it. Build the flows, then better the flows to better the value and your margins. Do it, then do it again, then do it more. Think extreme Business Planning.

(More here, here, here, here and here.)

Here's an earlier twist to the issues if you care - You Know Something Is Wrong :)

tagged to disclose five things

1) I'm no fan of anything "popular", hopelessly contrarian so herewith admitted; sorry guys, doing this only because you guys are nice guys and asked me to do it!

2) I've got vertigo.

3) I do a lot of sports for several reasons - obviously I like some and stay with them for ages, but overall I like the learning curve and the stuff you need. So if you need some fly fishing gear I have nine Hardy carbon rods with all the accessories gathering dust.

4) Helped my kids school in Norway to introduce IT - with complete focus on communication and no application training at all. This was nine years ago so news groups and forums with teachers and kids participating without limits instead of Word and Powerpoint training was frowned upon, but the tide changed in my favour.

5) Always worked during school breaks: Sailor on a freighter in European waters, brewery worker, sports shop salesperson, ski instructor, teacher. Enjoyed them all, but teaching (7 to 14 year olds) I loved.

6) My favourite time of the day is the morning - go out and smell the nature, a dip in a lake/pool/ocean, birds chirping, long breakfasts with fresh newspapers... ahh.

7) Cannot shut up so my counting to five goes to seven.

"24"

Saw that Mr. Gates was hoping for the new season of the 24 series on DVD as Xmas present, so being curious I sat down with season five to check out what passes as geeky-corporate holiday entertainment.

My two cents':

65% Dysfunctional organisational hierarchies (could have been the selling point for some viewers, fuzzy "feel at home" perhaps?).
20% Blatant unethical behaviour among the heroes.
14% Standard bad guy behaviour.
1% Suspense.

Boy, what crap.

[Update from further studies: 80% of all sentences that marks a plot twist or that are supposed to heighten my pulse contains the words "report to". Nerve gas and guns are mere props, "who's your new boss" is the truly threatening stuff. Scary, scary... :)]