Inflection Point

Development Principles

2011-12-20T08:47:00.000Z

At a recent offsite meeting with Bankers Almanac and Accuity, as I was listening to all the suggestions about developments we could make, I started to make a list of principles that I thought we ought to use to guide our technology plans. As it happens, the list came to 10, but I'm sure there could have been more. And the list is in no particular order of importance, just things that occurred to me when they cropped up. See if you agree with my choices:

Retire legacy/shadow systems and simplify as we go along (clean up after ourselves)
Automate wherever possible - and to whatever extent possible
Separate data from the products they go into - don't define data as products
Build to a service based architecture
Hold everything in XML - even it we also hold, for instance, number series elsewhere as well. It is the best medium for an information business.
Everything should be able to be cut by its major attributes - especially geography
Design everything so that analytics can be derived easily. Data about data can be even more valuable than just data
Make everything internet based
Buy don't build wherever possible
Build in performance and scaleability from the outset

That's my list - I'm sure there are other views and I'd be interested to hear them.

China's new management style

2011-12-01T18:22:00.001Z

For several years now – ever since, in fact, I became involved with a Chinese company – I have been fascinated by the difference in outlook and business approach of Chinese businessmen.

Recently, I had something of a “Paul on the road to Damascas” moment when I read a new book by the Frenchman heading up management consultant Roland Berger’s Chinese business, Charles-Edouard Bouee.

Called China’s Management Revolution – Spirit, Land and Energy, the books’ central thesis is that China is developing its own unique management style blending the best of its very long cultural past and modern (American) management theories.

The key difference between the West and China when it comes to management theory, argues Bouee, is that Chinese managers emphasise vision and tactics – not strategy. There are sound cultural reasons for this which I won’t go into here, but if you want to read more, I heartily recommend the book, particularly to those who deal with Chinese management on a regular basis.

But to shine some light on the essence of this management style I will set down what Bouee says are its nine major characteristics.

Dynamism

The environment in China is ever-changing, partly because of rapid economic growth and partly because of the one-party system which can result in dramatic change. As a consequence Chinese management style emphasises tactics over strategy – more surfer riding the wave, than military strategist.

Adapted

Tuning is everything – the key is to be ready for opportunity when it emerges. Partly this comes from the Daoist view that we are helpless in the face of a powerful universe and at the mercy of luck – although if we catch it early enough, we can influence outcomes.

Flexible

Vision and tactics are much more important than strategy. If you have no clear plan you have no “face” to lose if you change direction. Chinese are always ready to take short-cuts.

Synthetic

There is no “not invented here” in China – Chinese managers are pragmatists who will take what works and assimilate it. As Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese premier who started the Chinese economic miracle, said if a cat can catch mice, its colour and provenance are immaterial.

Mutual

There is a strong sense that both the company and the individual should benefit from their collective experience. The concept of reciprocal obligations is strong, and there is a great importance put on intangible outcomes, such as trust, good relationships and loyalty. Bouee says three things are important to employees: Legacy – being part of something lasting; Learning – self-fulfilment and reaching one’s potentia; and Life/Love – a sense of family and a caring environment.

Consensual

The boss is a very important figure in Chinese firms taking the role of “emperor”. But the position comes with obligations. There are top-down decisions which employees expect but only after exhaustive discussions with trusted advisors. (Bouee says the Central Communist Party operates in exactly this way through controlled leaks and internal brain-storming sessions). This need for consensus is why communication is especially important in a Chinese company and, incidentally, why, he says, Microsoft Word is favoured over PowerPoint as the former is a discussion while the latter is a conclusion.

Spiritual

While religion is not strong in China, the rich and very long history of Daoist and Confusion philosophy has resulted in spirituality being very much a part of life. Chinese companies often couch their vision is value-laden metaphors and references from myths and legends.

Disciplined

Chinese companies value discipline and betraying the boss is a sacking offence. Training is emphasised and performance reviews, though less process-oriented than in the West, can be frequently – maybe even monthly. Bouee says Chinese companies can appear quite disorganised at the same time, but don’t be fooled.

Natural

This management style, argues Bouee, is emerging naturally from the Chinese environment. Despite the strong influence of American management thinking which flooded into China as a result of Deng’s reforms, the natural style of the Chinese is reasserting itself. It is organics – grown from Chinese cultural roots.

In summary, this is a great book if you are looking to understand what is going on it Chinese companies – at least it contained many “ah-ah” moments for me.

Thoughts on identity

2011-11-03T23:39:00.000Z

One of these days I will get to actually go to Web 2.0, the famous internet conference in San Francisco founded by Tim O'Reilly who originally coined the term "web 2.0". Each year I promise myself I will go and each year things come up and somehow it never works out.

However, luckily they are far-sighted enough to post the presentations online so at least I can get a virtual update on the latest thinking.

I haven't yet even had time to do even this, but one presentation I have seen - and which I think is very significant - is by Christopher Poole aka "moot". Christopher was the founder of 4chan and of new startup Canvas. He speaks very persuasively about the need for multiple identities online and criticises the push by Facebook and Google + to insist that we only have one facet to our personalities. I heartily recommend a quick look.

Media in the open

2011-09-25T14:39:00.001+01:00

This is the weatherman for ESPN Chicago doing his stuff in a studio in a shop front on Michigan Avenue. It gives new meaning to the term "transparent media".

Brand perils in the advertising economy

2011-09-23T12:22:00.002+01:00

This is a screenshot of the Wall Street Journal daily email that I received this morning.
Clearly someone, somewhere in the venerable WSJ thought it was a great idea to carry some network adverting on the mail shot - after all, why not? Money for old rope.
Problem is that it is old rope that these ads are promoting - actually worse than that. The top ad for weeks had been "6 -Year-Old Mom looks 27" which claims to promote a miracle cure for wrinkles, and the next is selling online masters degrees. Just the sorts of things one would expect the WSJ to be endorsing!

Kabbage finds niche

2011-09-22T11:36:00.002+01:00

One of the really interesting things about the internet is the way that the data which is thrown off creates new and exciting businesses that simply could not have existed before. One such case was brought to my attention by an article in Bloomberg Businessweek about startup Kabbage.

Kabbage - named after the slang name for money - has a clever risk model that analyses data from sites like eBay, Amazon and Yahoo! such as transaction history and user ratings to produce a creditworthiness score.

By doing this they are able to advance money to small traders (they are not a bank so they can't loan) who otherwise would fail traditional financial services criteria.

This is exactly the kind of brand new business (Kiva is another example) entirely made possible by the essential characteristics of the web.

Phone becomes wallet

2011-09-19T12:39:00.002+01:00

I have been reading an interesting post from Springwise (one of my sources of innovation inspiration, by the way) which points the way to an ever greater role for the smartphone in our lives. Navigo is shortly going to be trialling a service in Paris which will allow travellers with NFC enabled smartphones to pay for their tickets with their phones. NFC is already in some Android phones and the chances are the iPhone 5 will incorporate the technology too. Is this the beginning of the end for the wallet.

Scribe - doing the job for me?

2011-09-11T18:26:00.003+01:00

I was reading about the new feature called Scribe on the Blogger in Draft blog. This post is being written using this interesting auto-suggestion system. It takes some time to get used to reading the word forming ahead of the cursor - which you need to do if you are going to really take advantage of the functionality. And for touch-typists it is probably more of a hindrance than a help. But I can see it being quite useful if you find yourself lost for words.
One more example of the spurt of functionality coming from the Blogger team - see my last post on the iOS app.

New Blogger iOS app

2011-09-11T15:18:00.001+01:00

I've just installed the new Blogger App for the iPhone which has just been released. This has been an age in coming - blogging on the go to Google's blogging platform has been painful in the extreme while services like Posterous raced ahead with multiple very easy ways to blog on the go. Perhaps this - and the (very good) redesign of Blogspot - is more evidence of the new found determination at Google to step up the pace in all things social?

Dangerous ways to celebrate

2011-08-22T19:25:00.001+01:00

The BBC just answered a question I often find myself asking: how dangerous is firing a gun into the air? The answer, apparently, is "fairly dangerous". It seems obvious that if you fire a bullet into the air it will come down to land somewhere. And research from 1962, quoted by the BBC, shows falling bullets can reach a terminal velocity of 300 feet per second, 100 feet per second more than is required to penetrate a human skull. In populous areas where a lot of this celebratory gun-firing seems to take place, the chances of falling munitions hitting the unsuspecting must be quite real and often presumably fatal.
The BBC cites a number of cases of known deaths; for example, these:

When the Iraqi football team defeated Vietnam in 2007's Asia Cup, three people were killed in Baghdad amid widespread gunshots as fans celebrated. Celebratory gunfire in Kuwait after the end of the Gulf War in 1991 was blamed for 20 deaths.

So now I know and it doesn't make watching the celebrations in Tripoli any easier. I just watched BBC footage of a man firing off anti-aircraft rounds into the air to mark the liberation of the city (the firing happens at about 2.02 minutes in). Someone somewhere probably regrets that he chose to show his enthusiasm in quite that way.

Update: Another article in today's Guardian has more on the subject. If you are shot in a regular way your chance of death is between 2% and 6%, according to the article. If a falling bullet lands on you it is closer to one third. There you go.

Time to get back to blogging again

2011-08-21T16:21:00.000+01:00

Blogging has been pushed into the background lately owing to the enormous popularity of Facebook, Twitter, Google + et al, but I've noticed a bit of a reappraisal going on. The latest example was Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void who put his decision to cut out Twitter and Facebook to refocus on his blog thus:

Why? Because Facebook and Twitter are too easy. Keeping up a decent blog that people actually want to take the time to read, that’s much harder. And it’s the hard stuff that pays off in the end.

Besides, even if they’re very good at hiding the fact, over on Twitter and Facebook, it’s not your content, it’s their content.
The content on your blog, however, belongs to you, and you alone. People come to your online home, to hear what you have to say, not to hear what everybody else has to say. This sense of personal sovereignty is important.

I am having similar feelings. I realise I first started blogging on August 11th 2005 which means there is a lot of me invested in my blog. But for the past year I've barely blogged at all, keeping up with what is going on through Twitter, Google + and, to a lesser extent, Facebook. That, I sense, is about to change a bit.

How to succeed at product design

2011-02-02T11:14:00.000Z

There is always a lot of mystery around why one product succeeds and another, pretty much identical one fails. In a very honest post Isaac Hall, founder of Recurly.com sets out to explain. His product pre-dated Dropbox but ultimately failed to be anything like as widely known or successful.
The main reason for this boils down to overcomplication. As he says:

If you're starting a new company, the best thing you can do is keep your feature set small and focused. Do one thing as best as you possibly can. Your users will beg and beg for more functionality. They will tell you their problems and ask you to fix it. My philosophy is that they're right if their feature request is right only if it works for 80% of your customers. Until you have a lot of resources, stay focused on your core competency.

Of course there were some other clever things Dropbox did, which Isaac mentions:

closed beta - creates pent up demand while allowing the company to scale the back end to cope
having a Mac client - many of the commentators are on Macs even if PCs still dominate the world
creating an early product video which created viral buzz around the product

I would also add - having a very fashionable brand design in tune with the Web 2.0 design ethos.

Bowtie vs. Diamond

2010-09-22T18:49:00.001+01:00

I have a theory that there are two basic shapes of organisation when it comes to organising IT - bow-tie and diamond.

A bow-tie shaped organisation aims to keep the "business people" on one side of the bow-tie and the "techies" on the other side. The "knot" is where the two are supposed to meet, to exchange instructions.

The diamond-shaped organisation, on the other hand, has no such pinch-point in the middle - just a thick middle where business and techies intermingle, speaking pretty-much the same language. Most start-ups are shaped like diamonds - whenever I have walked into a Silicon Valley start-up, for instance, I am hard-pushed to tell who is responsible for what.

Most large corporates are bowtie shaped. There would be some merit in trying to at least thicken out the "knot".

Posted via email from Inflection Point v2

Innovation and big companies

2010-09-21T13:48:00.001+01:00

I watched an interesting video interview with Tim Weller of Incisive Media yesterday in which Tim explained one of his top priorities was returning the company to the innovative, risk-taking culture of its early years. I think most big companies spend a lot of time puzzling over how to increase agility and innovative spirt in their organisations, and most don't really make much of a fist of it.

One reason, I believe, is that as companies grow complexity increases. In a start-up mode everybody does everything (more or less) but later specialisms emerge and so getting things done involve large groups of "experts".They are already busy, so co-ordination becomes a real challenge and progress slows, a process Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, founders of 37 Signals, offer an antidote to in their book Rework.

Another reason is IT complexity; multiple systems are "upgraded" and added to over long periods of time so that integrating with them becomes a mammoth task, and doing so only increases the complexity and inter-dependency.

So is there a way to cut through this? I don't really know, but I do believe that the recent developments of cloud computing which allow small pieces loosely joined but running on other people's infrastructure do offer real hope here. If you are renting computing cycle time and storage from Amazon for a few dollars, it is much more easy to imagine lots more innovative small projects getting off the ground outside of the corporate spaghetti. It is (relatively) easy for start-ups like 37 Signals to keep the agility and simplicity in their businesses - it's much harder for corporates who have spent years building up complexity and the organistional structures which keep things complex.

Posted via email from Inflection Point v2

The Great Paywall Experiment

2010-08-16T13:49:00.002+01:00

I have been watching with interest the Times' experiment with paid content - or rather cutting off non-paying customers from stories. This chart from Alexa today tells the traffic story - stable traffic for The Guardian and The Telegraph and sharply declining traffice for The Times. The FT perhaps provides a paid-for benchmark, although The Times has sailed on down through these levels - at least as of today.

Posted via email from Inflection Point v2

The Power of Big

2010-08-11T17:18:00.002+01:00

I remember quite vividly years ago failing to convince anyone in my circle of acquaintances in b2b that Linkedin would have a future. The problem was that, though they were getting quite popular, they didn't have an obvious business model and without revenue, it was argued, they had no future.

Of course, as things panned out LinkedIn discovered a revenue stream in recruitment head-hunting, got really big and then added lots of other ways to make money including lead generation. Few today can ignore LinkedIn as a power-house of social media.
The same was also true of Facebook - which used to be associated only with students comparing notes on parties and sexual partners, and where the only revenue seemed to come from people buying each other virtual gifts.
The news that Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, has linked up with Facebook for social recommendations suddenly changes the picture. Of course Facebook was already making money from advertising (in fact is the largest display advertising site in the world now). But the direct link to ecommerce points the way to real monetisation of the 500 million customers the site now has.
All this has prompted Google to re-think its privacy policy and beef up its social efforts as it tries to find ways to compete - it now has Microsoft and Facebook as its twin rivals.
There is real value in being the biggest even if it isn't always obvious where the money is coming from early on. And there is real danger in focusing too narrowly on the business model before you have the audience to support it. Being broad minded and playing the long game - provided you have the funding to afford to - does pay off.

Posted via email from Inflection Point v2

Personal domain site up and running

2010-07-15T19:36:00.001+01:00

I'm pleasantly surprised to be able to report that my personal domain is now functioning with Posterous. It's not that it's particularly complicated to redirect DNS, it's just that one does it so rarely it's easy to get lost in the detail. Now to see whether changing my blog platform will mean I post more often. I hope so... time will tell...

Posted via email from Inflection Point v2

Posterous

2010-07-15T18:01:00.000+01:00

I sat through an inspiring presentation from Christian Payne (aka Documentally) yesterday in Quadrant House and it has prompted me to spring clean my online presence. So today I started to look again at Posterous where I set up an experimental blog some time ago which has been languishing ever since.

I have tried to modify Posterous so that my personal domain points to it (can't tell if I have been successful until the DNS propogates) and if that works I'm going to start blogging through this site instead of my faithful old Blogger blog.

The reason? I had forgotten how power the post-anywhere from anything functionality of Posterous was. If my DNS experiment is successful, watch out for an increase in general activity.

Amateur thoughts on immigration

2010-07-10T17:07:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I went to my son's school for the annual Prize Giving ceremony. In all there were 134 prizes awarded to boys from all years in the school. What struck me was the number of pupils who were not from white British ethnic stock.

According to my own amateur stab at the maths (and judging only from what I could see) 31% of the children getting prizes fell into the category of 2nd generation immigrant and of those getting the prize for best academic performance in each form, more than one in five fell into the category.

Britain, and the rest of the West, has a major challenge finding its competitive place in the world in the 21st century and it seems to me that we will need all the help we can get from new, ambitious, eager blood arriving on these shores. It was immigration (added to resources and opportunity) which propelled the US to the top of the global league table. Bringing down the shutters is about the worst thing we could do.

Life in the Cloud

2010-05-08T07:44:00.001+01:00

This may be the year that Cloud Computing really starts to take off - mainstream coverage has started to appear like this piece on the BBC website and it is appearing on corporate IS agendas.

I've been thinking quite a bit about this shift recently and I think under cover of this there is a much more profound change taking place - the shift from document centricity to web centricity.

By this I mean that the old client-server model which dominated the latter years of the last century gave way in this to a web-centric view of the world. Let's call them the "Microsoft Way" and the "Google Way" since those two giants dominate each approach respectively.

The Micosoft Way focusses on the individual, sitting at his or her PC, loaded with software which empowers personal productivity, but in a off-line way. This was sensible - internet connections were slow and hard to come by and the best security came from having your documents on your machine.

Of course collaboration in this model was difficult - you created a document, emailed it to some colleagues, they each changed a bit and sent it back and you were left with the task of combining the results. This means multiple versions out them, many part-finished versions languishing on file and print servers, and email inboxes clogged up with documents.

The solutions, often quite complex and hard to use, were then bolted on top - Track Changes to version documents, Sharepoint to store official version of documents, LiveMeeting to allow collaboration over the internet etc etc.

The Google Way is different. It starts with the internet - Google was born in a age when ubiquitous connectivity was becoming a reality. The document in Google Apps starts life as an online document with the presumption it will be shared. Multiple people can edit the document simultaneously and all these edits can be tracked and rolled back seamlessly. Spreadsheets come with forms which can be emailed or embedded and which can update online spreadsheets which can be published onto intranets through Sites. Presentations can be instantly shared both in creation and play-back mode. Person-to-person communication through chat, video and VOIP is built in. Storage is no longer a problem - quotas are huge and growing.

Much of this can be achieved using the old paradigm but usually at an additional cost in licences (Sharepoint, Infopath, Livemeeting etc) and more often than not with the required help of internal IS staff who are needed to configure these complex add-ons.

This of course works for the IS community in corporations, creating jobs and a meaningful role in companies. But start-ups are not using these products - they are jumping straight to the cloud solutions - the Google Apps, 37 Signals, Saleforce.com solutions which are much simpler to use, and much more configurable by the users.

The result of this is dangerous - it has the capacity to create a real competitive chasm - building on a platform like Apps can empower ordinary knowledge workers to create quite sophisticated solutions without the intervention of programmers. The more they build the greater their propensity to build. And all of this extra functionality is coming at a very low cost and is increasing their agility.

In my view this is the real cultural shift at the heart of the Cloud Computing debate. Just putting your old apps into someone's datacentre misses the point. Changing the way you work is the really smart move.

Trying out MarsEdit

2010-05-07T06:59:00.001+01:00

I'm trying out a new blog editing platform for Mac called MarsEdit. So far so good - very easy integration with many blog platforms, rich text edit and it promised seamless integration with iPhoto and Flickr. We'll see. I'm only on the trial version at the moment.

Twitter stopped

2010-02-28T17:39:00.000Z

Today my Twitter timeline stopped updating and as I write it hasn't started again. It seems I'm not alone in this - there have been a lot of people complaining of a similar thing over the past eight or nine hours. This incident got me to thinking just how important Twitter has become to me as a web tool.

I was an early user of RSS and have been very keen on Google Reader for years. However, in the last six months my usage of Reader to keep up with events had virtually stopped. My "web radar" these days is definitely Twitter.

I used to worry that I was missing a lot by relying on Twitter. But on the occasions when I did devote the time to ploughing through my thousands of accumulated posts on Google Reader, I seldom found anything I found I didn't already know about.

I must say I'm a bit surprised to find how central Twitter has become - I wasn't really aware of it. The disappearance of my timeline today brought it home.

The Long Nose of Innovation

2009-12-30T08:41:00.001Z

I came across a very insightful article by Bill Buxton in Business Week called The Long Nose of Innovation which basically argued that innovations which make a difference are in fact based on technologies which have been around for a while. Buxton argues that innovation is really about the application of things already in existence as much as it is about inventing entirely new things.

This resonated with me as I thought about something Ray Kurzweil, the futurologist, said in a recent lecture (which I can't now find!). He argued that since technology is growing exponentially, if you are building something (in his case computer translation software) you should design for what computers will be able to do by the time you are ready, now what they can do now.

It seems to me you could distill some good advice from these two: look for technologies and capabilities that are around now, but which have failed to reach their potential because computers or mobiles aren't powerful enough - then design something which will be truly impressive once the power catches up - which it will.

Augmented reality - likely to be all the rage in 2010 - falls into this category. The technologies have been around for ages (camera, compass, GPS), but it wasn't until they were combined into relatively cheap, powerful phones like the iPhone and Android that they could take off.

Recruiting by example

2009-12-29T16:01:00.001Z

Techcrunch has an interesting piece about a job ad seeking a "Twitter Expert" in Greenwich Village, New York. The job ad, in Craigslist, explains how the applicant should apply:

1) Email me two tweets. The first should be about your experience. The second should by why you’re perfect for this job. If you exceed twitter’s allotted character count, you’re done.

2) Email me your Twitter name in link form (e.g. http://www.twitter.com/YOURNAME)

3) Tell me how many followers you have and how many people you follow.

4) Tell me who’s the best person you follow and why (in tweet form).

5) Tell me what’s the best way to get more followers (in tweet form).

6) Specific salary requirement.

They haven't asked for a CV or a letter explaining qualifications or relevant experience. Instead they've gone right to the heart of the issue. If you can apply convincingly then there's a very good chance you are perfect for the job.

I often think we should be recruiting our new journalists the same way. After all, we know what we are looking for these days - the ability to blog, to communicate two-way, to build a following - why not just limit ourselves to the evidence. We probably need a reference or two just to satisfy ourselves that the potential recruit isn't a mass-murderer, but apart from that the evidence should speak for itself.

And think how much easier it was for the recruiter to assess all those job ads - total size 600 characters each applicant!

Is bootstrapping killing innovation?

2009-12-09T12:11:00.000Z

A lot has been made of the game-changing way new start ups can now test their ideas with very little money using free, online tools and pay-as-you-go computing like Amazon's EC2 and S3. But now Clive Thompson, writing the latest issue of Wired, has challenged that idea, suggesting that this bootstrapping fashion is limiting the vision of new start-ups.

These days, Valley entrepreneurs tend to pick a cool (but niche) idea; bootstrap it with minimal staff, open source code, and rented server space; and then build a user base until some lumbering technosaur buys them up......This system is more fiscally responsible than the con-job IPOs of the dotcom boom — but it favors entrepreneurs with modest ambitions.

However, says Thompson, maybe it's just that truly revolutionary ideas are just plain hard to spot.

People sniffed at Google because they thought AltaVista and Infoseek had already “solved” search. Microsoft, too, was seen as a joke: Real men built hardware, not software. And as for eBay — dude, who’s gonna buy someone else’s cast-off Weebles?