Avo Reid on CTO

Product Tours

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 19:54:00 +0000

"What makes people passionate, pure and simple, is great experiences. If they have great experience with your product and they have great experiences with your service, they’re going to be passionate about your brand, they’re going to be committed to it. That’s how you build that kind of commitment." – Jesse James Garrett

Cloud application developers would all like to think that their user interfaces are intuitive enough for people to understand without external guidance. But in the real world, as the application feature set grows in number and complexity, unassisted discovery and explanation of these features can become a problem. In complex applications it can be common for technical support to receive an enhancement request for a feature that already exists because the user either couldn't find it, or didn't understand it's purpose. So a primary challenge that all Cloud application developers should take seriously is making sure that people understand how to use their products.

One approach to helping users understand how to use a product is to provide product tours that enable the user, at their own pace, to discover the product. Product tours don't have to be monolithic tours of the entire product but can be more granular feature tours or concept tours made available to the user when feature or concept explanation is needed.

Check out this product tour example at easel.io. Easel.io is an online web site designing tool that enables designers to design in a browser which is a sure way to ensure pixel perfect execution. It uses modern tools like web fonts and CSS3 but doesn't require the designer to shift back and forth between a text editor and the browser. Other team members, like Product Management, can stay ahead of the next sprint by using the tool to prototype the next feature. Easel can can import elements from an existing site so it's possible to make a pretty good clickable prototype and test it all without the help of an engineer. And developers can just export the designer’s actual choices for pixel dimensions and colors and eliminating the work of turning an image into a website.This is a pretty complex design tool but as you can see if you visit their demo, the Product Tour lets the user explore at their own pace, and hand holds the user through actually using the product to build a page. Simplicity may be embedded in your design but until the user "get's it" the user won't be able to use your product effectively.

There are four fundamentals of effective product tours:

A product tour is a journey, not a destination - each step in a product tour should build on the previous step move the user down the path to understanding.

One bite at a time - each step should highlight one important aspect of the product or feature that is easy to digest and understand.

Don't make me think - the tour should take perceived complexity and make it brain dead simple. After all your UI is elegant and simple why would the explanation require the user to think.

Short and to the point - the overall tour should be succinct and deliver key points for the user to understand. Respect the user's time and break up monolithic tours into multiple tours.

There are 2 great product tour libraries for Bootstrap, one is BootStrap Tour and the other is HopScotch. Each has it's own product tour that explains the features and capabilities so check them out.
There are also other techniques of presenting product tours using slides and videos. Check out "Seven Exceptional Product Tours, And the Best Practices They Teach Us" by Morgan Brown.

Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Resiliency

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 18:03:00 +0000

“Court disaster long enough and it will accept your proposal.” Mason Cooley

Independent Software Vendors (ISV's) like any organization must engage in the activities of Business Continuity Planning (BCP) also called Business Continuity and Resiliency Planning (BCRP). This is especially critical for ISV's that provide Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions to their customers. The process identifies exposure to internal and external threats that can disrupt or worse interrupt the operations that are the lifeblood of the business. Once these risks are identified a recovery plan is developed to return the business back to full operations. Once a recovery plan is in place the business can evaluate, with the knowledge of the risks identified, what hard and soft assets can be applied to prevent a disruption from occurring in the first place, improving resiliency of the business.

Some objectives for the BCRP we listed in our last planning cycle:

Identify risks, critical production components and the impacts of their failure.
Establish systems to monitor the health of these critical production components.
Document recovery procedures to restore critical production components in the event of failure in a time frame that does not breach the customer End User License Agreement (EULA) or Service Level Agreement (SLA). - These recovery procedures also assist in avoiding confusion experienced during an outage.
Identify personnel that must be notified in the event of an outage.
Create a plan to communicate with key people during the recovery and an escalation procedure.
Establish a testing procedure to validate the recovery plans.
Establish a process in which the plan can be maintained, updated and tested periodically.
Serve as a guide for the IT or Network Services Team.

The BCRP process should be considered cyclical, something that should be executed at least once a year. The BCRP Cycle is composed of 3 main phases (the 3 R's), Risk Analysis, Recovery or Solution Design and Resiliency or Maintenance. At a more detailed level we can define the BCRP Cycle using the diagram below.

Risk analysis
This phase should identify exposure to internal and external threats that can disrupt or worse interrupt the operations of the company. Establishing 'Severity Levels' is useful in this phase. For example:

Level 1 Disaster Recovery - Severe Outage
This level is assigned to those risk scenarios where the disruptions are as the name implies disastrous and affect the availability of any component that interrupts operations completely and cannot be fixed at the production site and operations have to be moved to a new location. These disruptions by definition cannot be resolved at the Production Site and will result in instant escalation (chain of notification and approval) o move the Production Site to the Disaster Recovery site, a significant declaration. Think of a meteorite hitting your data center, or as actually happened this year at a local data center here in DC, a back hoe cutting your data centers internet trunk. Here the potential for EULA/SLA breach is high depending on the fail over time to the new site.
Level 2 Operational Recovery - Outage
This level is assigned to those risk scenarios where the disruptions affect the availability of any component that interrupts operations completely but can be fixed at the Production Site. Rhe recovery plan for these risk scenarios should be well within the time that might lead to a breach of any customer EULA/SLA. There will be an escalation procedure in place that will move a Level 2 risk to a Level 1 risk should recovery take longer than expected.
Level 3 Offline Recovery - Redundant Outage
This level is assigned to those risk scenarios where the disruption has no effect on operations, i.e. a pooled web server goes down and the load balancer automatically takes it out of circulation. The minimal impact of these outages are usually due to built in resiliency, never the less the outage must be addressed to bring the system back to complete health.

Recovery / Solution Design
First it's important to define the two types of recovery planning that were outlined in the Severity Level definitions above:

Disaster Recovery
The process of establishing procedures to recover operations in a location other than the primary production facility after a declaration of disaster.
Operational Recovery
The process of establishing procedures to recover production in the same location and does not require a declaration of disaster.

This phase should produce procedures and identify soft and hard assets to recover from the disruption and bring the business back to full execution after a disruption in both the Disaster and Operation Recovery scenarios.

It is also important to define 2 important numbers which in the end will have a significant impact on the solution design:

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - the acceptable latency of data that will not be recovered (usually driven by transaction volume and speed).
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - the acceptable amount of time to restore operations (usually driven by EULA/SLA financial impact).

Implementation
This phase should establish the necessary monitors, documentation, communication protocols, testing and fail over environments to successfully execute and test the Recovery / Solution Design. Disaster Recovery will require a fail over operations site be put in place at a different location, this site might be a good candidate to conduct testing and validation of the Recovery / Solution Design rather than jeopardize production.

Testing and Validation
This phase should execute the Recovery / Solution Design through forced disruptions (on the fail over or test platform) which if successful will validate the recovery plans and provide metrics for impact on customer EULA/SLA. Part of the validation process is to benchmark your Disaster recovery fail over site to make sure it's performance and through put are acceptable, remember your recovering for all your customers, not just a select few.

Maintenance and Resiliency
This phase is a post mortem, what did you learn from the Testing and Validation Phase, what parts in the Recovery & Solution Design had to be modified because they didn't work, this information should update the BCP. It's also useful here since you have become so educated on your operations, and risks that can impact your operations is to use this knowledge to identify production components that may be candidates for resiliency improvements. Where these improvements include capital expenses these should be included in the next budgeting cycle using your BCP to make the business case for the expenditure.

Good Luck!

Moving Legacy Applications to the Cloud - Hybrid Approach with Virtualization

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 21:22:00 +0000

In my last post, "Moving Legacy Applications to the Cloud - Transposition versus Rewrite", I discussed a challenge many ISV's and Corporate IT departments are grappling with today, and that is moving legacy applications to the Cloud. One effective option discussed in that post was the approach of transposing code based on frameworks and tools that are available today versus a monolithic rewrite of the code. Another option available today is the Hybrid Approach using Virtualization.

The term Hybrid in this case means a cloud application that has two kinds of components that produce the same results as if there were only one kind of component. Specifically a value-add cloud application can be built around the legacy application replacing some of it's parts that leverage the Cloud capabilities while other parts of the legacy application can remain as is and exist in the cloud and be streamed down to the user on demand.

As an example consider a real world example, a hybrid cloud offering we just delivered to the market we'll call the The Tax Planner for the Web. Tax Planner is a desktop application that is the #1 market leading product in professional tax planning software. The product was first delivered to the market as a programmed chip for the HP Calculator, yes you read that right. It was then rewritten to run on the personal computer. It is a very complex application with many of the characteristics of a legacy application that I won't go into here. The application must be updated each year for new tax legislation and retains the previous years tax calculations, in fact it supports tax calculations going back to 1987. In addition, numerous spreadsheets or worksheets are used for data entry, basically mirroring the information you would enter into a complete Form 1040, so think Schedule A, C, D etc. The customer being tax professionals and accountants are comfortable with the spreadsheet metaphor for data entry and this is challenging to replicate well in a Cloud application before HTML5. So a monolithic rewrite to move the application to the Cloud to meet market demand is a challenging project.

The solution, a Hybrid Cloud Application that leveraged the Cloud to provide features customers were looking for in a Cloud Application and leveraged the desktop to run the remainder of the legacy application to provide rich and responsive user experience. The legacy application uses a file metaphor to store clients planning data, so there wasn't the rich Client Management that customers were requesting. Customers were interested in having backup capabilities that didn't require keeping track of files. Customers were interested in collaboration and workflow capabilities across their client data. So these were features that made sense moving to the Cloud. On the other hand clients were not interested in learning a new user interface to enter plan data, think navigating the worksheets that comprise a complete Form 1040. They were happy with that part of the program.

To develop this Hybrid Cloud Application we needed a capability to stream down a virtualized version of the shipping program to the desktop on demand. The overall concept was to develop a native Cloud application that would include login/security, robust Client Management and other value add features we could easily develop for the Cloud and then when the user navigated to the client and clicked on it to open we would stream down the data entry part of the legacy application with the client data. In fact, the same shipping desktop application would be used in the Cloud application as shipped for our conventional desktop customers, we would just deal with File Open and Save through a new DLL that would make web service calls to the Cloud to display,open and save clients from the Cloud server.

To accomplish the virtualization and streaming functionality we conducted a broad market search for an appropriate technology. I won't go into all the available vendors but we chose technology from Spoon previously Xenocode developed by Code Systems Corporation, founded by by former Microsoft engineers and researchers. The technology enables application virtualization, portable application creation, and digital distribution.

We use Spoon Studio which packages software applications into portable applications, single executable files that can be run instantly on any Windows computer. It only emulates the operating system features that are necessary for applications to run to reduce resource overhead. Virtualizes portable applications run independently from other software, so there are no conflicts between them and other programs, ie no DLL conflicts.

We deploy the virtualized application in Spoon Server which we call when the user selects a client to stream the application down to the users desktop. Spoon provides browser plugins for all popular browsers that handle the client side of receiving and launching the streaming application. Once launched we create a communication link for our web services back to our Cloud application for further processing. A couple interesting features here, the initial download is fast but subsequent launching of the application can be almost instantaneous because the plugin is smart enough to determine whether the current sandboxed application is up-to-date, if it is it just launches the application rather than streaming it down again. This also insures that the application is always the latest up to date version which is critical for Tax Planners.

The Hybrid Cloud application was a big hit with our customers, they loved the cloud features and were amazed they didn't have to learn a new interface. We were also recognized by the industry earning a finalist position in the CPA Practice Advisor 2013 Innovation Awards.

You can learn more about Spoon on their website and you can try a virtualized application yourself their as well.

Moving Legacy Applications to the Cloud - Transposition versus Rewrite

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 09:25:00 +0000

Moving legacy applications to the cloud is an issue many ISV's and Business IT departments are grappling with today. Although there are a variety of technologies available to create new cloud applications, engaging in a monolithic rewrite of a legacy application in new technologies may not be a viable option both from a cost and time-to-market perspective. In addition, the modern target platforms for the next generation of the legacy application is much more complex than the original target platform when the legacy application was first built. New target platforms are characterized by multi platform access, device independence and mobile enabled user interfaces.

There are two options that are worth considering to address this challenge, neither of which requires a rewrite but both can be supported in agile best practices and continuous deployment.

Transposition versus Rewrite

The first option is to approach the legacy application as a real estate developer might approach an old house purchased as an investment. Although I am not a real estate agent I would assume the questions might be similar to questions we ask when considering the evolution of a legacy application to new target environments. Is the house in such bad shape that it must be torn down and built back up from scratch, ie is it riddled with termites, is the foundation cracked. Also combined with this analysis, is there really a budget to build a new house and still be profitable?, was there time factored into the investment to build a new house, or was a quick turnaround built into the investment returns. Alternatively if the answer is no the house isn't a tear down, then the question is what needs to be done to the house on a more limited time frame and budget to modernize it to have the features that sell in the new real estate market of today?, ie does it need the kitchen remodeled?, should some walls be removed to increase the size of the master bedroom?.

Now lets put these questions in the context of a legacy application. Do we need to start from a clean slate because nothing is salvageable, ie the application is so buggy and unpredictable with crashes so frequent as to render it useless. In addition we need to ask if we have the budget to rewrite the application and does the time to market fit in the investment case. Alternatively if the answer is no, then the question is what needs to be asked what can be done to the legacy application on a more limited time frame and budget to modernize it to operate in the new target environments of today. And that is the idea of transposition, a unique paradigm that combines concepts from migration, rewrite and virtualization combined with a set of supporting technologies and integrated development environments into a single solution that reduces the time to market and budget required to transpose the legacy application into a new modern application that can run on the modern target environments of today. The leader in transposition techniques, a company headquartered in Israel - GizMox, refers to transposition as 'computer aided rewrite that reproduces an application that runs on one computing architecture, to an equivalent HTML5 application that will work multi-browser on multiple devices.

The transposition magic is contained in their product Instant CloudMove and Visual WebGui. Below is the full transposition process.

The Transposition Process

The first phase of transposition is an assessment phase. GizMox has made available an assessment wizard that you can download and run on the source code of your legacy application. The tool analyzes the source of the legacy application using a virtual compiler to identify flow and dependencies which it uses to build an Abstract Syntax Tree or AST object model. It then employs out-of-the-box syntax translation and mapping of the tree functions to new functions or packages, native to the new target environments where possible to provide metrics . The assessment provides a comprehensive report including: an automation level assessment and a breakdown of the required resources and packages.
Following this assessment report GizMox offers a more thorough analysis of your application which outlines accurate costs & establishes a detailed work plan including recommended personnel and Time to Market. Also offered is a free trial of the Instant CloudMove which actually transposes the application so you can develop your own Proof of Concept (POC) or you can contract GizMox to develop a POC based on a representative module of 10,000 lines of code, GizMox will even help you create a representative module from your application..

The Instant CloudMove set of tools transposes most of the original legacy application and user interface code to its new (web-based) environment automatically, approximately 80-85%. The transposition is executed by a sophisticated engine that translates source language into intermediate target language. By transposing into intermediate language the original legacy application code and the target code are isolated from each other, so work can continue on with the original legacy code and be translated back in should a merge be necessary eliminating the need for code freeze of the original source application. This frees the transposition team to work iteratively at their own pace to deliver the highest quality application. It's also important to mention that using intermediate code enables a 'push button' generation of code for the desired target environment. So working the intermediate code new retargeted applications can be generated at any time.

And because it integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio IDE, it provides the flexibility to customize, upgrade and add pieces of code as you go. There are even sophisticate pattern matching capabilities you can use to create your own mapping packages for the 15-20% of the code that is not automatically transposed.

Using simple drag and drop actions, you can redesign legacy user interfaces to new front-ends such as HTML5 using another GizMox product Visual WebGui (VWG). VWG extends ASP.NET APIs to support rich user interfaces and incorporates Ajax connections for further enhancements. By targeting VWG, you are practically targeting an enhanced ASP.NET application with an HTML5 user interface. Once your application is transposed into VWG HTML5, you will be able to inherit part or all of the generated forms and redesign them into mobile and tablet form factors using the VWG Visual Studio integrated designer.

I have been involved in many rewrites of legacy applications for many target environments over the years and these are the kind of tools and translators that each development team would create in-house to 'transpose' the legacy application to run in a new target environment. In most cases legacy applications have embedded rules and calculation engines and in the extreme cases the engines have a time dimension that is built up over years. Rewriting these rather than transposing them can be a risky proposition, especially when the customer can't tell the difference.

Here are some tables from the GizMox site that make the case for transposition over standard rewrite.

Comparing Instant CloudMove to a standard rewrite.

Factor	Standard Rewrite	Instant CloudMove
Quality of code	High	High
Level of automation	Low	High
Time to market	Long	Short
Ability to estimate resources, costs and completion times	Low	High
Built-in capability of adaption to tablet and mobile 'touch' devices	Requires multiple skillset	Built-in drag 'n drop simplicity,
Level of MS Visual Studio integration	Varies	Very high
Risk	High	Low
Cost	High	Considerably Lower

Below is a dollar-for-dollar comparison of smart rewrite against traditional rewrite showing rate of progress and cost per line (LOC)

Source	Rate of Progress in Lines of Code per Developer per Day	Cost per Line $

Cutter Consortium	185	12.3 - 18.5
Gartner	170	N/A
BNA Software	284	N/A
Tactical Strategy Group	50	$15
Forrester	N/A	$6-23
Fedora Linux	N/A	$52
HP	100	$10-30
Gizmox Instant CloudMove	3,000 - 6,000	$0.35 -1.2

Published Figures for LOC a Day and Cost per Line for System Rewrite

How many lives can VB6 have?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 20:41:00 +0000

The “It Just Works” compatibility for Visual Basic 6 applications will guarantee VB6 lives at least through the full lifetime of Windows 8, 10/01/2023. Visual Basic 6 first shipped in 1998, so that will make it's applications at least 25 years old before they see the end of supported lifetime. Compare that to applications written for the early version of iOS or the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.0 release in 2002, which is incompatible with Windows 7 release in 2009.

This seems strange when you consider that all versions of the Visual Basic development environment from 1.0 to 6.0 have been retired and are now unsupported by Microsoft. In fact, it's difficult to find a copy to install in the event you need one. The required runtime environments are unsupported too, with the exception of the Visual Basic 6 core runtime environment which as stated above is supported through the lifetime of Windows 8. What's even stranger is that many third party components that developers used to make their applications richer and easier to use are no longer available or supported.

The main reason Microsoft won't kill the unkillable is that there are too many business applications out in the market that have yet to be upgraded to a modern language and technology. If they release an OS, like Windows 8, and didn't support the VB6 runtime, many businesses wouldn't and couldn't buy it, because their applications would break.

Microsoft is shackled by the incredible success of VB6, having to make concessions in how far they can go in technology shifts for a particular OS update. See the Windows 8 Desktop where all legacy applications run outside the new modern looking Metro Suite. Microsoft has also made many missteps in handling the VB6. Rather than bring the VB6 code base along with incremental changes and upgrades to support new versions of the operating system, like Apple does with both iOS and OSX, Microsoft waited and tried to force a complete rewrite with the introduction of .NET, in a different language to boot (VB.NET). This just doesn't work for an obviously change resistant customer base.

VB6 is going to be around for a while but it won't be around for ever, 25 years might just might be enough. Any reasonable business or ISV should consider moving their business applications from VB6 to some other language and technology.

Forget the VB6 cult perspective I would venture to bet that any application currently in VB6 is running into issues on several fronts. First it is probably getting harder to find software engineers to work on the application. Look at this graph roughly representing the popularity of VB6, it looks like the heart monitor of a dying patient.

Click here to visit page...

Second it is probably becoming more difficult to add meaningful features/ui to the application because of the lack of support 3rd party world, practically no one develops or maintains, much less creates new VB6 widgets or components. Third, your application is not enjoying a favored nation status anymore in the current desktop OS Windows 8. Sure you kind of blended in through Windows 7, even though the application looked different when it launched, now you launch in a separate area provided specifically for the legacy applications like you. Finally the gap between your application and current application technology is starting to look like the Grand Canyon, ie what is your mobile strategy with VB6?

If you are looking for an innovative way to transpose your VB6 applications check out GizMox, I am looking into them now will let you know what I find out.

Look Mom No Coding

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:49:00 +0000

Creating Websites without Coding

There are several sites on the market that enable anyone to create a web site, yes even users that have no idea what HTML is and think java script is a dialog over coffee. Here's a Clipset on Meaki of some of the most popular vendors. Recently I put one of these sites to work on a volunteer project. The goal of the project was to update and expand the usefulness of McLean Youth Athletics Association web site. I am a on the Board of MYA which has the simple but important goal of enabling any youth that wants to play a sport in the McLean Community to be able to play that sport by providing the foundation and support for sports leagues to form and thrive.

The vendor I chose is named Moonfruit . Moonfruit is a UK-based web hosting company. They employ a website construction tool called SiteMaker, which is designed to make website development simple without sacrificing on design or functionality.

The tools is polished and has a rich feature set. You can start with a wide range of clean, modern predesigned templates and use the drag and drop tools to build your site.

There are some really nice social features in the tool set and if you know a little about embedding and HTML you can add HTML Snippets which opens up another world of possibilities.

A benefit of using a tool like this rather than hand coding it yourself or outsourcing the work is that the tool implements the latest best practices and technology when it publishes your website. You design your site the way you want it and the very qualified engineers at MoonFruit make sure it is published correctly for web, mobile and social targets. That's right, mobile and other form factors. MoonFruit automatically creates a mobile optimized version of your site, and can even push your site into Facebook with just a few clicks.

The MYA site isn't finished yet, there may be broken/incorrect links etc., we're still testing and the url is still at MoonFruit, but it provides an example of what a tools like MoonFruit can help you do in a few hours of work. Here is the old site and here is the new site built using MoonFruit.

Health Care and Mobile Devices

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 02:03:00 +0000

When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.

- Billy Graham

Regardless of where you come down on the Health Care Debate, there is no debating that the advancement in mobile networks and devices will have a significant impact on the Health Care Industry.

Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse made the case at the annual conference of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society on March 1.

Today, on a planet of 6.8 billion people, there are more than 4 billion active cell phones—more mobile phones in the world than TVs, PCs and cars combined. The cell phone is the most rapidly adopted technology in the history of this planet... High mobile phone penetration provides an incredible opportunity for us to work together to improve health care and health care access, regardless of location, age, gender or disability.

Mobile devices may be on their way to replacing the characteristic stethscope hanging from every doctors neck or pocket. Today 64% of U.S Physicians use smartphones and is expected to reach 81% by 2012 according to the health care consulting firm Manhattan Research. With the introduction of iPhone 3.0 OS just over a year ago Apple set the stage for increased penetration of the iPhone into the Healthcare industry. Features included in that release made this possible, such as the External Accessories API, allowing external accessories to interface to the iPhone via the dock connector or wirelessly over Bluetooth. Apple used a blood pressure cuff as an example so I guess the stethoscope analogy isn't that far off.

In fact, Apple seems to have always had it's eye on the Healthcare market, partnering with Dr. Geoffrey Rutledge, chief medical officer for Epocrates Inc., to reformat a huge medical database into a downloadable app known as Epocrates RX, before the iPhone was even launched. Today, Rutledge claims Epocrates RX is used by one in five U.S. doctors as a drug reference and to prevent interaction problems between a patient’s multiple medications.

In India, the iPhone is being used to cure a disease called Retinopathy of Prematurity (RoP), an eye disease that affects thousands of prematurely born infants and can cause blindness if not swiftly treated. This type of disease is especially a problem in countries where there is a lack of adequate facilities, long distances to travel, illiteracy and low accessibility to quality healthcare. Laboratory assistants take pictures of the retinas of prematurely born babies and transmit them via broadband to pediatric eye surgeons, many times hundreds or thousands of miles away. The surgeons, use the iPhones high resolution graphics and pinch-and-drag capabilities combined with special software to diagnose and then determine treatment.

Currently there are hundreds of mobile applications in the AppStore's "Healthcare and Fitness" category available to businesses and consumers. Many more applications will be needed by the growing Healthcare Industry. Device manufacturers are improving their operating systems and SDKs to appeal to application developers designing tomorrows Healthcare Solutions.

A few application areas that apply to Healthcare include:

Medical Spanish or Medical translation capabilities so doctors can communicate with Foreign language-speaking patients
Fast medication facts, alternative medications, multiple drug interaction data, health plan insurance guidelines on medications.
Remote diagnostic and treatment recommendations, bringing Healthcare to the patient.
Receive and analyze laboratory test results.

The iPad, where I thought it might fit...

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 02:05:00 +0000

The Matryoshka Doll

Sometimes products aren't as good as you might imagine they will be from the pre-release hype and rumores that precede their official launch. I was thinking this the other day about the iPad and the difference between what I thought it might be, and what it turned out to be. And thinking more about it, it would have been more appealing to me, if it had been what I thought it might be. Don't get me wrong the iPad is a phenomenal product and it's launch a runaway success but I thought it was going to be something much more.

I thought...it might be a device that had a more appealing fit between the iPhone and the Mac notebook, both of which I owned at the time of the iPad's announcement. More specifically it would follow the "nested doll" or "matryoshka" design principle.

This design pattern describes an "object-within-similar-object" and appears in the design of many natural and man-made objects. For something like the iPad sitting between the iPhone and the Mac notebook this would be extended to be an "object-within-similar-object" with added inheritance/leverage of the embedded object.

So what if the iPad was a middle doll in a matryoshka doll set. What if the iPad served as the 15/17 inch screen of a Mac Air, Mac Book or Mac Book Pro notebook when it was embedded. It would have all the features it has today in it's standalone state but it could also embed into the Mac notebook and serve as the screen. When it was docked the combined object would use the Mac OSX and all the applications and you could use the Mac keyboard. All all the resources (folders, documents, contacts etc.) on the iPad would be available to the Mac notebook and potentially applications written for the iPad would be available also. When it was undocked the iPad would run on the iPad OS and function as a standalone iPad.

This would allow you to select the form factor that made sense for the task as hand. If you wanted to goto a meeting or you were on the run or you were sitting around the house and wanted to surf the internet or check your email you might just grab the ipad (the screen) from the notebook and leave the rest behind. For more serious work requiring a keyboard and a more powerful operating system and applications (OSX versus iPad OS) you would plug the screen back in and use the Mac Book as a notebook.
Taking this a step further to the smallest doll, the iPhone, what if the iPad had a docking station or slot where the iPhone could be inserted completely.

So when you inserted the iPhone into the iPad you could make phone calls/use telephony from your iPad or your Mac Book. Using Internet Tethering would be seamless as well. Of course each device would sync data and portable applications when nested.
In this model there is a clear fit for the iPad in the form factors, and it would have been much more appealing to me, as an iPhone and Mac Book Pro owner.
Anyway that's what I thought.

Waiting for Moore's Law to Work

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:03:00 +0000

Reading the "Mobile Web Application Best Practices" a W3C Recommendation from 14 December 2010, I was struck by the similarity of the resource management challenges faced by early Personal Computer developers and those faced by mobile device developers today.

Here are some of the best practices for early PC Development that are arguably non-existent today.

Keep programs small (especially true for the Basic Interpreter, and then compiled programs that had to be shipped and installed on Floppy Diskettes. Smaller programs loaded and ran faster. Later with overlay managers it was important to optimize overlay segments for application start-up time.

Use memory very, very efficiently. First there wasn't much of it, and later when there was more, memory management and disk swapping caused performance issues, especially when multiple applications were running.

Keep your code footprint small. Early on this even meant keeping your variable names very terse (x,y,z were good candidates), there were even utilities that would convert your code before compile and reduce your nice long readable variables to terse variants.

Optimize the User Interface to be responsive or at least appear to be responsive to the user. This meant coming up with strategies to improve performance or at least hide slow running tasks, and when all else fails put up the hour glass and appear responsive.

Here are some of the best practices for mobile development from the W3C, "Mobile Web Application Best Practices".

Use Cookies Sparingly - information stored in cookies is sent to the server for every request and so using them for excessive amounts of data can negatively impact performance on a mobile network.

Use Transfer Compression - compression like HTTP 1.1 compression, which uses the gzip and DEFLATE algorithms which are widely supported, reduces bandwidth of each payload and increases transport efficiency. But...decompressing and compressing use up time and battery so this is a balancing act/ Alternative compression formats (such as EXI [EXI]) may be worth looking into.

Minimize Application Data and Size - obviously the smaller the better, faster downloads and execution time.

Minimize Perceived Latency - device limitations can lead to latency in page views, page reloads can frustrate even the most patient user.

As you can see we seem to be faced with similar resource management challenges as those faced by developers of the early PC. But why is this? Are we waiting for Moore's Law to raise all ships in Mobile Bay. Remember Moore’s Law?, named for Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, states that the number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months. That rate of progress means that the semiconductor industry will far surpass that of nearly all other industries over time, or from the flip side, other industries can't keep up. So the mobile device as a system, with components from several industries, batteries, network towers, displays, is going have resource management challenges and limits to growth directly related to the slowest advancing component.

We saw this with the PC, the integrated circuit was only one component of the overall system. And until recently we had some really, really fast computers with some really, really big monitors, that took up most of a normal size desk, now we have smaller, flatter monitors, we even have entire PC's the size of the old monitors.

The mobile device is more than the integrated circuit and it is experiencing the same disproportionate growth of it's individual components. Although if you look at the first "smartphones" you would have to agree that the iPhone in totality shows an amazing evolution in a short period of time. But you would also have to agree that certain components and sub systems are not as impressive in their rate of advancement and this can be seen in the familiar resource management issues mobile programmers are faced with today.

Looking Back...BP Oil Spill and Mobile Devices

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 22:13:00 +0000

The BP Oil Spill is a disaster of epic proportions. Responding to the disaster has required innovative minds to use all available technology to craft quick and effective solutions. It's interesting to note some of the solutions that have been crafted using mobile technology.

Oil Spill Crisis Map

The Oil Spill Crisis Map was created using the Ushahidi, a free open-source software created specifically to enable people with cell phones to contribute during a crisis. Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili, was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout in 2008. Students at Tulane University in conjunction with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade have used Ushahidi to give the citizens of the Gulf Coast a voice to give testimony on the how the Gulf oil spill is impacting their lives and environment.

Reports can be made in four ways:
1. Send a text message or call (504) 27 27 OIL (7645),
2. Send an email to bpoilspill@gmail.com
3. Via Twitter with the hashtag #BPspillmap
4. Filling out this form (http://oilspill.labucketbrigade.org/reports/submit/ )

iPhone Applications

These applications were built taking advantage of the iPhone SDK features enabling the creation of forms, back end web data storage, GPS and RSS feeds. As I write this there are over 20 apps in the app store about the oil spill. There are apps in several categories, heres a sample:

News - keeping users up to date on all the news available across the many internet resources including community sites like Twitter and RSS Feeds
Utilities - enabling users to report location, size and severity of oil contamination
Travel - tracking all world oil spills so you know if there is oil where you plan to vacation
Games - of course there are games like "Fight the Pipe" where you compete with others around the globe to plug the hole with your finger for the highest score.

QR Codes

QR Codes or Quick Response Codes are 2d bar codes designed to be decoded at high speed. A QR Code can handle many times the amount of information of a conventional bar code, 7,089 characters can be encoded in one symbol containing, URL's, web service calls with parameters, text etc.

QR Codes are most commonly used in "mobile tagging" sometimes referred to as physical world connections or "object hyperlinking", basically connecting the internet and it's resources to the physical world.
QR Codes, popular in Asia, have are becoming more popular here and have made their way into Sports Illustrated magazines, Pepsi Bottles and Times Square to name a few.

ScanLife the world wide leader in barcode scanning applications, has partnered with the celebrity backed "Be The One" campaign to get signatures for their petition, which states: “I demand that a plan to restore America’s Gulf be fully funded and implemented for me and future generations." Using QR Codes, the campaign enables mobile users to scan the code which automatically takes the users to restorethegulf.com where they can watch the Be the One video and sign the petition. The "Be The One" QR Codes have shown up in Times Square and availble on T-Shirts.

Text Messaging

Several organizations have launched campaigns to make it easy for mobile users to donate money to aid in the cleanup of the Gulf.
Examples include Mad Mobile, a mobile marketing company, has launched the “Oil Spill Relief” campaign, users can text the keyword GULF to the short code 50555 to donate $10 and the National Wildlife Federation has established a "Gulf Oil Spill Restoration Fund" which users can donate $10 to by texting "WILDLIFE" to 20222.

Text messaging is also used to sign up for alerts from the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command

Legacy Applications and Technology Change

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:12:00 +0000

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. ~W. Edwards Deming

Independent Software Vendors (ISV's) inevitably, and then repeatedly, grapple with application technology changes. Sometimes these changes are modest, new compiler or component upgrades that need to be fit into the product road map. Sometimes these changes are better described as paradigm shifts, mandating significant changes in products and practices and in most cases absconding the product road map. Examples of such changes include the introduction of .NET and the move to Software as a Service model, or cloud computing.

Although in each case, as with paradigm shifts in other industries, the impact to the those products lagging behind is not immediately fatal, users of these applications demand that the laggers be provided a lifeline, to continue operating at least until the vendor has enough time to adapt the product to the new paradigm or the customer has enough time to find a replacement. Eventually, if the ISV does not adapt to the new technology the product begins to suffer, the user interface may begin to look outdated, performance may suffer, integrations with other applications that have adapted may become impossible, opportunities for the product to expand in it's market or enter attractive adjacent markets.

The business case to adapt the product becomes the focal point and sometimes the paralysis point of the action plan. This is development cost hoisted onto the unfortunate unsuspecting ISV by forces outside of its control, but it is the price of doing business in the commercial software industry.

For product lines where there is a critical revenue stream based on a renewal rate associated with periodic or annual updates, tax preparation products tied to state or federal legislation are an example, the paralysis can be severe and the stakes very high. For these products absconding the roadmap is not feasible, since the majority of the roadmap has nothing to do with features or technology, but everything to do with updating business rules and calculations with legislative changes. As an example of the effort involved, the IRS recently blamed congress for delaying the filing season by passing the recent tax law changes so late in the year, claiming they will need time to reprogram computers forcing refund processing to be delayed until mid-to-late February. So for these ISV's the strategy is to reduce the legacy roadmap to the minimal legislative changes to secure the renewal revenue, jettison all features, and stand up a new development team to work on the next generation application, merging the tax law changes back in before shipment. This of course is an expensive and risky proposition, but a necessary one.
For those ISV's that aren't bound by update timing the strategy if much more straight forward.

In either case the resource issues are similar, new technology, new skills, new designs, new metaphors, new environment new opportunity. It's time to retool and think outside of the box again, the process can be rejuvenating for an organization but it can also lead to some internal tension and critical market mistakes.

Internal tension can occur between the legacy group and the next generation group for obvious reasons. Keeping cross communication channels open and communication events frequent and meaningful can remedy this situation. Also providing a clear skills development path for the legacy developers to join the next generation team is key.

The most common market mistake is to overshoot the current market. Even though the application technology paradigm shift has occurred, rocking the foundation of the product line, doesn't necessarily mean the same thing has happened to your customers, they may be perfectly happy with what they have. And because the next generation product may take some time to build, there is a danger of undershooting where the market will be when the product if finally shipped. A mentor of mine, Jim Petersen - founder and CEO of Best Software (later purchased by Sage Software),used to say, "shoot the puck to where you customer is going, not where they are now". This is critical for the current customer base, but even more important for the prospect customers and markets.

After you've done a thing the same way for two years, look it over carefully. After five years, look at it with suspicion. And after ten years, throw it away and start all over. ~Alfred Edward Perlman, New York Times, 3 July 1958

Strategic Planning - the Cleansing Power of Facts

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 02:37:00 +0000

"There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other." -Douglas Everett

Strategic Planning, if done honestly, objectively and with no predispositions to the outcome, can be an enlightening process. Enlightening because of what it reveals about an organization and its Raison d'être. Revelations may include:

the organizations perceived message versus what the customers hear
the organizations real position in the market as opposed to the proclaimed position
the organizations real image in the market as opposed to the image posited by marketing
the delta between the internal measure of the quality of its products and services and the real satisfaction levels of its customers
the hard facts about what the competition is doing as opposed to the anecdotal information gleaned from sales competition and technical support feedback

Strategic Planning can also be a liberating process, enabling organizations to free themselves from the internal urban myths that can become debilitating by their self enforcing nature. Urban myths like "our Product X is the number one product in the industry", based on a reviewer making the statement in a magazine in which the company spends significant ad revenue. Over time internal urban myths may rise to the level of a physical law of nature if repeated enough times and make their way into the on-boarding scripts for new employees.

The strategic planning process should uncover facts, facts reflecting an honest evaluation of an organization. Some facts may not be pretty. Finding these flaws may create instability within an organization because these are flaws that need to be fixed, which in turn may require change. Change is not something most people are comfortable with so successful Strategic Planning also requires leadership, encouragements and team building as the facts are uncovered.

“Leaders establish the vision for the future and set the strategy for getting there; they cause change. They motivate and inspire others to go in the right direction and they, along with everyone else, sacrifice to get there.”
- John Kotter

The Newspaper Industry and Adobe Air - ?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:24:00 +0000

According to the 'Industry Forecast 2007-2011' from private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS) Communications, Internet advertising is on track to top Newspaper advertising by the year 2011. "We are in the midst of a major shift in the media landscape that is being fueled by changes in technology, end-user behaviors, and the response by brand marketers and communications companies," said James Rutherfurd, EVP and Managing Director at VSS, in a statement. "We expect these shifts to continue over the next five years, as time and place shifting accelerate while consumers and businesses utilize more digital media alternatives, strengthening the new media pull model at the expense of the traditional media push model." So even though spending is rising less and less of the money is going to traditional media providers as attention shifts online.

Newspaper advertising and subscription revenues have been declining for years and newspaper companies are scrambling to develop strategies to replace this revenue anyway they can. Some newspaper companies like the Washington Post have found fertile ground through diversification. Looking at the first quarter of 2007 the revenue for the company was $985.6 million a modest 4% increase year over year. Almost half of that total came from the Kaplan Education Division with $475.8 million in the same period, an increase of over 16% year over year. The Newspaper Publishing Division made up a little over 20% of the revenue at $219.2 million for the first quarter of 2007, a 10% decrease, worse division operating income was down 53%. Print advertising revenue at The Post declined 16% to $125.1 million. In general, Kaplan has now replaced the newspaper as the revenue and profit engine at the post.

Other newspapers are trying to find ways to make revenue from the shift in attention from print to online, attempting to keep their readers engaged and eventually shift their ad buys to these new active channels. The New York Times Company is one of those companies. "We see a future for device-independent media, with convergence around the user experience and not any particular delivery platform. Developing services that allow users to access content wherever they are and on whichever device they choose is an important part of our strategy." said Michael Zimbalist, vice president, research and development operations, The New York Times Company.

So its not so surprising to see the name New York Times Company behind an Adobe case study for a cutting edge technology like Adobe Air. The product ShifD is an application that provides users the capability to seamlessly shift content between their computers and mobile devices. ShifD is a new RIA that allows users to shift content between computers and mobile devices. ShifD works on — and between — the Web, mobile devices and through a downloadable AIR application, giving people an easier way to consume media on the go. Developers used Ajax technologies to build both the browser-based version of ShifD and the desktop version deployed on Adobe AIR. The New York Times Company is also developing a sophisticated blog reader on Adobe AIR.

“ShifD solves the problem of shifting data between all of a user’s Web-enabled devices,” said Michael Zimbalist, vice president, research & development operations, The New York Times Company. “We see a future for device-independent media, with convergence around the user experience and not around any particular delivery platform, which is why Adobe AIR is an excellent choice for ShifD.”

Check it out at www.shifd.com.

Everyonce in a While a Technology Comes Along...

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:06:00 +0000

Everyonce in a while a technology comes along that makes sense. Adobe Flex 3 and Adobe Air are such technologies.

Flex is a highly productive, free open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. The Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems. The importance of RIA's, a term Adobe coined several years ago, is the promise in the near term to eliminate the usability and functionality boundaries between desktop and web applications. And more importantly, for the long term, RIA's promise to eliminate those same boundaries between mobile, desktop and web applications. The concept of coding an application once and deploying it everywhere, seamlessly running it as a web application, desktop application and a mobile application is quickly becoming a reality. I have a blog entry about the impact on mobile programming at RingTones, a mobility blog I write for DDJ, you can see it here.

AIR has been in the works for several years under the guidance of Kevin Lynch, recently announced as Adobe's Chief Technology Officer. Something that should bolster the confidence of developers, the company plans to build AIR versions of many of its Web applications. According to Lynch, "This is a very, very important time in Adobe's history. We've made some big shifts--Postscript, multimedia, the Web," he said. "Rich Internet applications is one of those important transitions."

Keep Up With The Start-ups

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 03:08:00 +0000

Everyone has to stay on top of trends in technology that may have beneficial or detrimental impacts on the business, the sooner you spot them the better. One great source of information can be found reading news on start-ups. Reading about start-ups will enlighten you into the very cutting edge of technology, new ways to use our current technology "mashups", and innovative approaches to old problems.

There are several sites on the web dedicated to following start-up news and information.

KillerStartups reviews 15-30 internet start-ups per working day. This is a great site to visit to understand the diversity and sheer volume of internet startup activity...15-30 per day?

TechCrunch, founded on June 11, 2005, is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies. In addition to covering new companies, they profile existing companies that are making an impact (commercial and/or cultural) on the new web space.

MobileCrunch is Mobile 2.0. is a weblog dedicated to identifying, profiling, testing and even help developing the technologies, applications, services and devices that will define the next generation of connected mobile computing.

I have been compiling a list of start-up companies as I find them on a Microsoft Live Labs site called Listas Tech Preview, my list is called bittabeta and I have included it below.

23andMe - first personal genome service - unlock the secrets of your own dna today
5min - 5 min or less video solutions to solve every question
8Hands - brings social networks to your desktop
AdMob - world's largest advertising marketplace
AOL Beta Central - aol beta site
All of Me - israeli software and internet startup - stealth mode, put yourself together
AmazonMechanicalTurk - human intelligence tasks (hit) site
AmericanTowns - local link to the people, issues and activities that matter most in your daily life
AppJet - instant web programming just type some code into a box
Augme - make a tshirt that links to your website
Avvo - lawyer search and ratings
Babelgum - the instant enjoyment of full-screen TV meets the unlimited potential of the Internet
bCode - the future of mobile ticketing, coupon, loyalty and payments.
BeeTagg - mobile tagging, physical world connections
BitTorrent - find thousands of movies, tv shows, games and mp3s
Channel 9 - all about the conversation cluetrain style
Channel 10 - place for enthusiasts with a passion for technology
Clearspring - the widget platform
ClickTale - record visitors' every action as they browse your website later sit back and watch
ClustrMaps - see at a glance where your site's visitors are located
Dash - the future of personal navigation
DimDim - world´s first free web meeting service based on the open source platform
EnterpriseDB - run most applications written for Oracle unchanged, at a fraction of Oracle’s cost
Fon - share some of your wifi and get some back all over the world
Gigya - widget distribution network
Gigaom - leading daily online news for key influencers in the emerging technology market place
Google Finance - google beta search site targeted at finance
GoogleImageLabeler - mob intelligence to help google classify images
Google Labs - google labs - beta projects from google
Google Scholar - google beta search site targeted at scholars
Google Suggest Labs - google beta to help with search string creation
Google TiSP (ha ha) - ever heard of power line - its hard to explain
HelpfulVideo - all helpful videos in one place
HelpHookUp - social networking for volunteer projects
Hulu Beta - find and enjoy the world's premium content when, where and how you want it
iLoop - mobile advertising
Inkling - prediction market platform companies tap the collective wisdom of everyone
Innocentive - mob intelligence, where the toughest problems meet the brightest minds
Innovid - stealth mode startup developing out of tel aviv israel-innovation with online video
Instructables - worlds largest show and tell
Journeys - journeys will be a revolutionary social online game – for everyone
LinkedIn - career-oriented social networking site
Make: - brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life
Medis - world's first consumer fuel cell for portable devices
Microsoft Labs - microsoft beta site
Microsoft Lincoln Research - linking physical objects to the web
Microsoft Office Live Beta - an online extension of microsoft office
MTIMicro - cord-free rechargeable power technology
NEJMBeta - new england journal of medicine beta site
Nokia Beta Labs - nokia beta site
Nuconomy - go beyond the old page view model and start to measure engagement.
OpenSpan - expect more from your applications (legacy or not), the new enterprise desktop
PageOnce - making the Internet experience much better and much more relevant.
PlyMedia - development and deployment of an interactive, multi-dimensional web video platform
Predictify - tap into collective wisdom, make money by predicting future events
Powerset - next google? natural language search
QLoud - music for social networks
Qoof - first video commerce platform that maximizes the commerce potential of online video
Radio-Locator - radio station search engine
RockYou - the best slide show ever
Scanr - scan, copy and fax with your camera phone or digital camera
Scilpo - broadcast your skills
Scrybe - groundbreaking online organizer that caters to today's lifestyle
Semingo - in stealth mode so we can’t say much about it until the end of january 2008
Shotcode - offline weblinks, physical world connections
Skype Beta Center - skype beta site
Slide - help people express themselves and tell stories through slide shows
SnapTell - snap a picture of an ad with your phone, sms text, get information back
Soonr - keeps you securely connected to your computer files so you're free to go mobile
Spock - people search engine
Squidoo - everyones an expert on something, share your knowledge and passion with the world
Strikeiron - data as a service
SuTree - whenever you want to learn anything, watch, meet, create
Symantec Beta Center - symantec beta site
TeacherTube - online community for sharing instructional videos
ThePudding - free web phone calls with context sensitive ads
ThreadBanger - an end to fashion dictated from on high, live and die diy (do it yourself)
TopCoder - social software development
TrickLife - how to video site
Triggit - why code when you can create
Twipster - geocentric mobile publishing platform
Velingo - collects search activities and creates social knowledge
Videojug - life explained on film
ViewDo - video tutorial site
Woot - one deal per day
Ximmy - social review site, pays you to share top news, videos, pictures and websites
Yahoo Beta Center - yahoo beta site
Xobni - makes microsoft outlook better

Cheers

The ClueTrain Manifesto

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 22:00:00 +0000

"We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal. " Theses #85 Clue Train Manifesto

I read the Clue Train Manifesto some time ago, but recently re-read it and found some interesting insights into Web 2.0 in the book.

The Clue Train Manifesto was written by marketing specialists Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searles and David Weinberger and first posted online in April of 1999 and then published as a book in January of 2001. It proclaimed the coming of the internet and the end of business as usual. Their premise laid out 95 theses that proclaimed markets are conversations, conversations among people, conversations that can't be controlled by business, conversations that change the old mass marketing strategy of control and replace it with the new Web marketing strategy of influence.

The Web has enabled these conversations to happen in ways simply not possible in the era of mass media. The Internet makes it possible for everyone to participate in the "great converation". For business the opportunity is fostering, learning from and understanding these conversations than slicing and dicing these conversations to drive business growth.

The ClueTrain Manifesto states:

"A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies. "

The ClueTrain Manifesto goes on to warn the business owners unwilling to change.

"You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures. Or you can join the conversation. "

As Jacob Nielsen puts it a little more drastically:

"The ClueTrain Manifesto lists 95 reasons Internet business is different from traditional business. Much overlap with my own comments on Web design over the last five years. Despite the fact that this manifesto and my own writings are online for everybody to read, I predict that most big companies will still not get it because their internal management structures are too well built and capable of resisting customer-centricity until it's too late. 80% of the Fortune-500 companies will be gone in ten years (unfortunately I don't know which will be the 100 companies to change in time)." useit.com: Spotlight link March 27, 1999 — Jakob Nielsen

The ClueTrain Manifesto was certainly an insight into the phenomenon of Web 2.0. Although Web 2.0 is hard to define let's look at some of the definitions and how closely they resemble the principles of the ClueTrain Manifesto.

According to Tim O'Reilly,
"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."

An IBM social networking analyst, Dario de Judicibus, has proposed a different definition which is more focused on social interactions and architectural implementation:
"Web 2.0 is a knowledge-oriented environment where human interactions generate content that is published, managed and used through network applications in a service-TR

So what we have learned is that if you own a business you have to understand that Web 2.0 is about conversations. These conversations can be about your company, about your employees, about your products or about your products in a blender. Web 2.0 is about product and service offerings that foster conversations. FaceBook (this is who I am), YouTube (video communication) , LinkedIn (this is my network) all of these Web 2.0 phenomenon foster conversations. Microsoft has come great sites that foster conversation for their developer community at Channel 9 http://channel9.msdn.com/ and home user community at Channel 10 http://www.on10.net/Default.aspx, I think the Channels go up to 11, where you can find a remake of Spinal Tap.

If you are an existing business than your challenge is making your current products available for conversations or creating new products that will foster conversations. A favorite example of a successful company that has made the transition to Web 2.0 is the Motley Fool. The Motley Fool has a simple stated goal: to educate, amuse, and enrich their readers and help them make better financial decisions. Headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, the privately-held multi-media company today has nearly 200 employees in the United States and UK and is a top provider of investment advice and financial information. Recognizing the early power of the Internet, the Gardners moved The Motley Fool online to AOL in 1994. Three years later The Motley Fool migrated to its own award-winning website, http://www.fool.com/. Today The Motley Fool reaches millions each month online through its own site and partnerships with such leading portals as Yahoo!, MSN and AOL.com.

The Motley Fool introduced a new feature on their site called CAPS targeted at the market conversations behind the Web 2.0 phenomenon. I believe CAPS stands for Capital Asset Pricing System.

Motley Fool CAPS operates from a simple premise: Working together, we can improve our investing results. This revolutionary new service pools the resources of the Motley Fool Community to help you identify the best stocks at the best times to buy them -- and which stocks to avoid, too!

I am a user on CAPS and it really has all the attributes of the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

So how does CAPS work? (this taken from their site)

1. Players rate stocks.
At the heart of CAPS are thousands of predictions. Players predict whether stocks will outperform or underperform the S&P 500 and over what time frame this will happen.
The Fool compiles the data, showing all the picks you have made and all the picks for individual stocks.

2. The Fool Keeps the score.
As stocks change in value, they evaluate players' predictions. Players receive an accuracy percentage, indicating how often they make correct predictions and a score, which is the percentage by which their picks beat the S&P 500.

3. Players receive CAPS ratings.
Based on the performance of their picks, CAPS players receive a percentile rating (from 1 to 100). This rating indicates the percentage of people that player is outperforming. The higher the rating, the better!

4. Stocks receive CAPS ratings.
A stock's CAPS rating is the aggregation of every prediction for that stock. The rating indicates whether or not players think that stock will outperform the S&P 500.
Important concept to follow... pay attention!! Here it is:
Players with higher ratings have more influence on a stock's rating.
If you're a great investor with a great track record, than you are weighted heavier than others what you think is very important. So, your given more weight. However, if you don't know the difference between a stock and a parking ticket, your not going to affect the company rating very much.

5. CAPS gets smarter
Every CAPS rating is updated every five minutes. And with each additional prediction, CAPS recalculates and recompiles the data, constantly refining the community sentiment.
Over time, the best investors will naturally work their way to the top and will gain more influence over the stock ratings. Conversely, the less successful players will have less impact.
And then the cycle repeats. Players make more predictions, which affect their player ratings, which affect the stock ratings, and so on. The result is a service which will help you find better stocks and follow the best investors.

This is a great example of a company navigating the Web 2.0 world to introduce a new product offering. The Motley Fool has created and is fostering an ongoing conversation with CAPS. This is a conversation in which their customers are fully engaged and has legs to expand into many different areas.

Web 2.0 is also about access, access to your company and products to enable conversations. I'll talk about this in the next blog but some technology to check out before then MS Astoria and MS IM bots.

The Importance of Passion

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 21:33:00 +0000

“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.”
Friedrich Hebbel (German Poet and Dramatist, 1813-1863)

There is no greater motivator for the workplace than to create passion around people's work, that's when great things are accomplished. And the deepest passion comes about when people feel that the product or service they are working on helps the customer in some tangible way.

Out of college I worked for a software start-up that developed tax preparation software for both consumers and businesses. The founder and owner of the company was one of the greatest people I have ever met on many different levels, his name was Jim Petersen. One of his most important skills that contributed to the success of his company, was an ability to create passion around people's work.

We were all young, right out of college, all of us wanting to make a mark on the world but not knowing exactly where to start. We didn't mind working late into the night. We would to gauge the level of dedication using a metric called 'turn around time', this was the time it took you to go home, grab a quick bite to eat, shower, maybe grab a little nap and get back to work. It was grueling and motivation was the key to sustain the tempo.

Part of the passion for the work Jim generated was by sharing in the experience, just being there showed the staff that this was important to him, so important that although he couldn't make the product happen himself, he could be there to cheer people on and share in the experience. Jim would always be there checking up on the activities into the late night and early morning hours. Sometimes he would just sit in the hall and chat with people as they walked by. At other times he would walk in with a couple bags of snacks to refresh the snack table. At the beginning the snack table was always stocked with high sugar snacks and candies. As we began to put on weight and exhibit the other side effects of too much sugar there was a general revolt against the snack table offerings, I was chosen as the leader to inform Jim that we wanted, no demanded, health food to replace the sugar snacks. Needless to say he was surprised but more than willing to make the changes. At the end of the project we ended up at a happy equilibrium between apples, tea, and and nuts on the health food side, with M&M's, sodas and taffy to balance it out.

For the most part, Jim would generate passion through his pep talks, sometimes coming out in some strange segway in a meandering conversation. From Jim’s soap box a simple tax preparation program became something that would change thousands of peoples lives helping parents to send their kids to school with their tax refunds, a payroll program made it possible for people to pay their bills and feed their families, and a fixed assets application enabled companies to grow and create new jobs for the unemployed. Granted at times it was a stretch, it created a passion in everyone's work that was above and beyond the work at hand. For young people trying to make their mark and do something important, this was very powerful stuff. (to read more about Jim Petersen see my blog entry here).

There is an old saying, "When we are passionate about what we do our passion gets translated into creativity, into the amount of effort we devote to the business, and into many other factors big and small". Passion has a beneficial impact to our success and in the end the success of the businesses we work for. So if you want to be successful in your project or business find a way to create passion around the work you and your staff are doing.

“There is no greatness without a passion to be great, whether it's the aspiration of an athlete or an artist, a scientist, a parent, or a businessperson.”- Tony Robbins

Training Completes Effective Customer Support

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 03:34:00 +0000

“...to better train our customer base will drive higher levels of customer satisfaction and reduce long-term support costs.” James Hanley

Training is an important component of an effective online support offering.

1.Enhances Customer Support

Educates the customer to answer their own questions before they open a ticket.(“How do I questions…”)
Educates the customers with “just-in-time” training on changes and how these changes are implemented and can be used in the applications, avoiding calls.
Educates customers on “what’s new” in the application at release time, avoiding calls.

2. Drives Customer Success

Customer training enables buyers to effectively utilize BNA Software products. The better a customer understands how to use our products, the higher their level of success and overall satisfaction.
Customer training increases customer retention, new training is a reason to stay in contact with customers, and a reason for customers to come back.

3. Increase Sales

Customer training enables buyers to deeply understand how to use, apply, and customize products. As they better understand the details of the products, they identify new opportunities to buy more and they become advocates within their organizations.
As new product features and models are announced, highly trained customers can more rapidly adopt them

4. Makes Money

Customer training is a high-margin business itself. IBM, Microsoft, EMC, Lawson Software, and hundreds of other high-technology companies use their customer training businesses as a profit center. Education offerings are viewed as “products” – some are high value, high priced products; others are given away to enhance customer satisfaction. Every software company can and should promote a premium support offering

5. Reduce Costs

Reduce Issue Management Costs – training drives down issue management transactions by educating the customer first before the call is made.
Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs – training is a compelling offer to use in promotion campaigns

Keep your Customers Close - Online Support

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:06:00 +0000

"In an era in which the competition is one mouse click away, the need to solidify and deepen relationships with valuable customers has never been more important. This need is creating enormous opportunities in the market for customer relationship management applications."
Mary Wardley, director of IDC's Customer Relationship Management Applications research. "

Online Customer Support software is quickly becoming an even player with sales automation and marketing automation in the triad of offerings making up a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. Both sales automation and marketing automation are critical to modern business management but now Customer Support is coming to center stage. Customers are taking advantage of and expect all available technologies to be made available to them for problem resolution and self service.

In addition everyones customer base will be changing drastically in the next 10 years with Baby Boomers retiring and the technology astute Millenial generation replacing them. This new generation is comfortable with new mobile and internet technologies and expects to interact with companies in a much different way than past generations.

Here is a case for implementating Online Support and Training (which I argue in my next entry must be an integral part of support) if you haven't done so already.

Business Drivers:

1. Online support lowers average cost of support resolution.

The cost per transaction is this:

email $28.57
phone $27.68
web $3.75.

*The Economics of Online Support published by The Association of Support Professional

2. Online support optimizes resource usage.

This optimization occurs because online support drives problem resolution and other tasks from telelphone channels to self-service channels. Enabling self service and providing answers to common questions result in customers binding their own answers and avoids the calls to support they would have otherwise made.

With a reduction in calls, customer service representatives are freed up to:

concentrate on higher-value tasks and issues
contribute to revenue generating product features
keep up with application domain changes and stay current with customers and how they use the applications in their business

3. Online support increases customer satisfaction

Increasingly more and more customers want online support as an option. Demographics show the Baby Boomers retiring and the Millenial generation taking over who are comfortable with new technology and expect different online support technology.
Customers value an option off hours and online support eEnables real 24/7 support operations. Customers can self service 24/7 by using Knowledge Base, FAQ’s, Open a Ticket item to get into queue.
As online support use increases, phone support is decreases and phone lines become available for those customers requiring phone support

4. Online support improves the Top and Bottom Line.

The Bottom Line - Cost reductions:

With each phone transaction avoided cost reductions are realized.
Online support enables other cost savings support options – chat and instant messaging Chat and IM offer a less-expensive solid alternative to the phone. Many customers prefer it as their next line of support after online self-service support. A Customer Support Representative can handle multiple chat sessions simultaneously, speeding time to resolution for a larger number of customers.

The Top Line - Revenue increases:

The top line improves through increasing revenue by redirecting support agents to revenue producing work. Increase in customer satisfaction positively impacts customer retention and additional sales. Online support can be used for cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, and enables targeted marketing campaigns.

5. Online support increases Customer Intimacy

Online support enables options that provide an opportunity to make customers part of the BNA Software community – Forums, Surveys, Feedback etc.

Customers can make contributions:

Improve support processes
Improve the content
Develop better products and services
Find opportunities for new products and services.

Collaboration with customers creates truly customer driven products and services increasing sales and customer loyalty.

Reduce Risk – Online support enables the understanding and anticipating of the customer’s interests providing insight into where markets are headed. Efforts to enter new markets are based on clear insights, drastically reducing the risks of entering and competing in those markets.

In a Web 2.0 world, you should be leveraging the Web to not only reduce your support costs by giving customers other options besides placing a call, but also to learn what your customers are saying.

Knowing When to Pull Your Head Out of the Sand

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 02:38:00 +0000

"To learn more and more about less and less, until eventually we shall know everything about nothing." Motto of the Bonehead Club of Dallas

History is littered with spectacular business failures caused by bonehead managers (BMs). Most of these failures come about by BMs refusal to come to terms with business reality, which many times requires them to admit to making a mistake. BM's don't like admitting to mistakes, or dealing with problems caused by their mistakes. BM's also don't like being caught with the deer in the headlights look when they are informed they have missed a major paradigm shift in the market or recieve the news that their competitor has just introduced a new product or just completed an acquisition to capitalize on the paradigm shift. No, BM's like to look smart and competent at all times even if the ship is sinking they won't flinch until the water reaches their eyebrows.

The most common way BM's cope is to put their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is wrong. There is positive reinforcement here, because 9 times out of 10 the problem is minor and goes away, they can eventually return to the surface and resume their BM activities.

But it's that one time out of 10 where the spectacular failure happens. This is the major strategic issue that needs immediate attention, the bad organizational change that is causing rot from the inside out and has to be fixed fast or any one of the multitude of other serious issues which if not addressed with clear, honest and intelligent thought will inflict a mortal wound.

“We can't put our head in the sand and ignore it. By the time we emerge, our world will have changed beyond recognition...” Alan Johnson

Let's take a look at a few examples in recent history.

AOL-TIME Warner Merger

This was the future, the convergence of new technology and old media that would revolutionize the business world.

"By joining forces with Time Warner, we will fundamentally change the way people get information, communicate with others, buy products, and are entertained," America Online founder Steve Case said of the merger of his Internet pioneer with old media publisher Time Warner in January 2000.

Two BM problems here, first not dealing with the reality of the situation after the merger. At the end of the day the companies weren't really compatible, Time even refused to use AOL as their E-mail provider. There was a significant failure to realize synergies anticipted in the deal. Second, the deer in the headlights look when there was a complete collapse of the online ad market and the AOL model/vision of how users would evolve with the internet.

New Coke

Coca-Cola executives concerned about the market errosion being caused by Pepsi and well aware of the fact that their overall market share was nearly half of what it was in the 1950's came up with a plan to introduce a Pepsi competitor, New Coke. Within hours of its rollut it was clear something was wrong. The BM's response was to put their heads in the sand, they call such compaints "relatively insignificant". Within 3 months there were 400,000 angry calls and letters. New Coke was quietly removed from the market.

XEROX

"Future Days" 1977, the product of nearly a decade of study at the company's Palo Alto Research Center was introduce for the first time to Xerox's top managers.
The paperless electronic typewriter that displayed text on a screen, could store it with a click of a button, and send it around the office for review and edits, and print our hard copies.
The managers didn't get it and turned it down, leaving Xerox out of what would become a trillion-dollar industry.

Meanwhile Apple Computer's founders copied most of the technology in their Macintosh PC. And for those who worked at the Palo Alto Research Center like Bob Metcalfe, who had invented the Ethernet local area network, they were understandable PO'd and left and started their own companies.

IBM

The remarkable popularity of the Apple II computer forced IBM to rush their own PC to market, so fast that they decided no to build it from scratch but build it with off-the-shelf parts. They needed an Operating System and Bill Gates was happy to help them.

The first BM move wasn't by a manager at all but by Kildall's wife who sent IBM packing after refusing to sign their multi-page nondisclosure form. So Gates told IBM about his friend across town that had a "quick and dirty operating system" called QDOS. What they told IBM was out of a Dr. Seuss movie, according to Steve Balmer "We just told IBM, 'Look, we'll go and get this operating system from this small company, we'll take care of it, we'll fix it up, and you can still do a PC".

MS purchased QDOS for $50,000 with unlimited rights, made some minor modifications and sold it to IBM for $80,000. MS only provision was that they would retain the right to sell the renamed MS-DOS, IBM had no problem with that, they couldn't imagine who else would want the operating system.

By the way if your looking for a BM award to use in your office you can purchase it here. This is a picture from their catalog, the bone for whatever reason actually glows in the dark.

What's in Your Toolbox

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:06:00 +0000

“You can't expect to meet the challenges of today with yesterday's tools and expect to be in business tomorrow.” Anonymous

Legacy applications don't just afflict the Corporate IT departments of the world, commercial software companies have their fair share. In a software company a legacy application can be a shipping application. The characteristics of a legacy application are the same for both the IT department and the software company. Here is my top 10 list of Legacy Application Characteristics:

1.) Legacy applications were originally written in a language whose modern day syntax and semantics are considerably different from the original version, or worst case the language is extinct. Procedures such as sorting, certain math functions, string manipulation functions may have been developed from scratch in the old language but are now available in a more optimized form in the current language built-in functions. More importantly, these language subsumed functions are for all intents and purposes bug free, portable, scalable and don't need to be maintained.

I have experience with legacy applications originally developed in a language that is is extinct, Quick Basic. Much of the application had been ported to Visual Basic 6.0 but the calculation and validation areas were not ported (I say areas because this was a tightly coupled non layered application so the use of component, module, or layer would be misleading). This was due to the fact that after the original calculation and validation code was written in Quick Basic it was processed by a homegrown converter that converted the code into 'C' and then compiled to a DLL for performance optimization. So rather than update this tool the developers left it as a converter for Quick Basic code, and the calculation and validation developers continued to write the code in the Quick Basic language, which can only be called a meta language at this point since there is currently no commercially available compiler or IDE for Quick Basic.

In addition, the application may predate modern language design techniques of type safe variables, parameter passing and the limiting of global variable declarations resulting in a high number of globals, scopeless variables, and routines that seem to conjure up variables out of thin air making it impossible to trace the variables state as it travels through the code.

2.)Legacy applications were originally developed for platforms with significantly less memory than modern platforms available today. Strategies to deal with memory consumption are proliferated throughout the code, ie. short non-descriptive variable names, developing in-house memory management routines for allocating and de-allocating memory blocks and splitting large related array data into multiple arrays because the old size limits of a single array were exceeded. These strategies provide opportunities for memory corruption and in general make the code unreadable and far from understandable.

3.) Legacy applications were originally developed for platforms with significantly less power/processor speed than modern platforms available today. Strategies to optimize performance such as the use of alternate language DLL's for optimized calculations leaves the code disjointed and many times unmaintainable as can be seen by my reference in #1 above.

4.) Legacy applications have a set of homegrown satellite tools and utilities the original developers created to expedite certain maintenance efforts. These include tools to generate screen coordinates, define data models, process meta data, convert meta data etc. These tools many times have been replaced by modern IDE's, such as the form designers and data model designers in the Microsoft Visual Studio line of products. This leads to a separate maintenance projects for the tools that can sometimes rival the main application maintenance effort. In addition, these tools are sometimes the limiting factor to "what" can be done in the application because the "how" is implicitly immutable in the tools itself, the utilities dictate the applications future feature set.

5.) Legacy applications have limited applicable bandwidth Or put another way, there is a huge learning curve/time sink for engineers to get up to speed on the application in order to make any kind of meaningful contribution to legacy application development. This results in an inability to apply engineering resources when market needs demand, there is no burst mode, that's limited applicable bandwidth. Legacy applications are usually handed down from one development staff to another. They usually suffer from a lack of consistency in coding standards, comments and coding styles. This results in large parts of the application not being understood by anyone, knowledge silos have moved on and an understanding of how and why the code works the way it does left with them. This also results in the satellite utilities mentioned in #4 being unmaintainable or changeable.

6.) Legacy applications have redundant sometimes no op calls to routines. The first 1 or 2 calls don't get the desired results, the current developer has no idea how the code works, so a couple more calls and the number comes back correct. I have seen this in production applications and I am sure you have seen comments in code where it may say "Not sure why this works but..."

7.) Legacy applications are good at what they do, that's why they are still around. They have a maintenance cycle with accompanying maintenance team to keep them up to date with whatever core functionality they provide, ie changing rates, changing laws, changing report formats etc.

8.) Legacy applications are difficult to rewrite. Many of the characterstics mentioned above such as no one knows how the application really works, lack of coding standards and documentation and knowledge silos have left, all make a rewrite more than a porting excersise.

Usually the first phase of a rewrite involves creating some type of requirements or product backlog to define what the rewritten application needs to do, understanding all the intricacies of what the application does from the users perspective and coming to some kind of understanding of how these features are implemented in the code.

Usually there is a need to temper the level of change to user experience/user interface primarily because this is a production application, there is no value proposition to bringing production to a halt when the rewritten "improved" application goes live. This is especially true for commercial software applications where you can lose a significant number of "power" users because after they install the new version they now find themselves in the exasperating position of being unable to accomplish tasks they used to complete in their sleep.

9.) Rewriting legacy applications is difficult to justify.
The cost for rewriting a legacy application can be daunting, especially when considering the learning curve of understanding the application from a customer and engineering perspective as mentioned above. Management assumes there is intimate engineering knowledge of the application, after all this is considered an asset it's part of the company's Intellectual Property (IP), so how could we not know. After tallying up all the costs, including keeping the legacy application running in production which dictates that there be 2 team, one maintaining the production version and one working on the new version, rewriting a legacy application is hard to justify. If the end result is no new features which translates to no new revenue than it's just cost. Quantifying future cost reductions in easier maintainability, or future revenue potential through easier feature development is difficult and usually discounted.

10.) Most important for modern day software, legacy applications are closed architecture, no SOA or SAS concepts here, they are standalone islands that perform their function. Integration opportunities using the application as a process in a larger workflow are not possible. This leads to some very ugly integrations involving import and export to some common intermediary such as a spreadsheet.

So what's in your toolbox to manage and extend legacy applications?

Of course there is always the re-write, but thats not really not a tool, thats a strategy demanding a pretty robust business case to justify the significant cost as mentioned above.

A tool would be something you could apply with limited work on the legacy application to extend it and make it able to capitalize on new revenue generating opportunities. These opportunities may be integrations with partner applications, integrations into common customer workflows, or simply to extend the application to do something new, a new feature that the market demands but which due to the architecture and implementation of the application are impossible to achieve.

There are design patterns which can be stretched to apply to legacy applications, the stretched version of the Adapter Design Pattern can be a useful addition to your toolbox. The basic motivation for the adapter pattern is to enable wider use of an existing system. In the legacy application world this would be an application that does a particular job, and does it well. There is a need to use this legacy application in a larger workflow or set of integrated applicationa, but it just doesn't fit all the requirements, namely there are no integration interfaces. We may want to expand its features, or combine it with some other applicaitons/services to provide additional functionality. The bottom line is that we must adapt this existing legacy application to fit the new requirements. This is what the adapter pattern does; it allows an application to use an existing legacy application by converting or establishing an interface into one that fits the new context. An important point to remember is that the existing legacy application isn't significantly modified, but an adapter application that has the right interface uses it or extends it to provide the necessary functionality.

An example from Oreilly.com in their Safari Books Online Section;

A good example of an adapter is the toilet seat adapter used by toddlers that fits on top of a traditional toilet seat. Let's take a look at the context. We have a legacy object that is the toilet seat, whose basic design hasn't changed in years. It functions well for its original adult users (probably why the design hasn't changed). Let's look at the new context in Figure 5-1. We now need to adapt it for use by a toddler. The problem is obvious - incompatible interfaces! The legacy toilet seat was designed to fit an adult's bottom, and we now need to convert that interface to fit a toddler's smaller bottom. We need an adapter that presents the correct interface to fit the current context. The toilet seat adapter was built to do precisely that. We get to use an existing object whose interface has been converted to one that the client expects.

I have used the Adapter Design Pattern to integrate a legacy applicaiton into an enterpise production system installed on over 4000 desktops. The adaptor, written in C#/.NET established a modern set of services for the enterprise production system to
interface with, the legacy application written in VB6 had minor modifications to fulfill some of the service requests but for the most part remain unchanged.

Another interesting tool to add to you toolbox follows the adaptor design pattern and comes from a company named OpenSpan. From the OpenSpan website their technology offers to:

Integrate - rapidly integrate applications
Automate - automate business processes
Extend - add new functionality to applicaitons
Build - Create composite applicaitions

Well that seems to sum up what we need to do in a nutshell, so how does it work.

OpenSpan takes a unique approach to integration. By leveraging the communications between applications and the operating system, OpenSpan is able to integrate with an application’s objects and events directly. The event-driven architecture minimizes any impact on application performance and is relatively non-invasive, meaning there are few if any changes to the application required. Interacting with an application’s objects and events at the operating system level means that OpenSpan can integrate “closed” applications without an available API, adapter, or web service.

Maybe there is hope.

Running with an Anchor

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 20:27:00 +0000

“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
Eric Hoffer quotes (American Writer, 1902-1983)

In a software company with mature and aging products, selling into competitive and saturated markets where new unit growth is restricted to partnering and integrations, the once heralded flag ship applications, the cash cows, can become anchors to growth. These companies also become favorable targets for venture captial firms and competitive acquisitions who value the cash flow of an existing customer base but also understand the weight of the legacy technology. They understand that the investment needed to rewrite or otherwise reinvent the cash cows in modern technologies is out of the reach of the companies financial capabilities, to survive they have to sell.

The pace of technological change increases with time, and the time between a technology being deprecated and then unsupported is becoming too short for slow moving companies to respond effectively. Software companies that have not incrementally invested to keep their products up to date may find themselves isolated on an island at high tide, with the bridge washed out and no where to go.

In addition, technology refresh projects are difficult to justify, frequently there are no visible differences between the old technology and the new and they seldomly generate any new revenue, so all you are left with is cost. Justifications that are sound and tangible only to the engineers, such as upgrading a vendors technology because it will be unsupported by the end of the year, fall on deaf ears.

Cash cows can become anchors when the industry trends dictate that an application be capable of some capability that is only available in a modern technology. Software as a Service (SAS) or Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is an example. In a saturated market, where new units are flat, partnerships become the focus of the business development activity.

When the partners products have been developed in modern technologies, which is usually the case for innovations that happen around the cash cow as it sits stale in an continually growing and changing market, the proposal for integrating is based on modern technologies and practices. To have the cash cow act as a service or engine in an overall workflow or solution may be impossible since the cash cow has been written in a closed architecture. There are no integration API's, there is a proprietary data model, the business model, ui and controling logic are coupled to each other, the application is an island. So the partner will most likely walk away. New business development activities become useless as there are partners interested but none of them are interested in a clunky integration.

Now the cash cow is an anchor, the weight of neglect and outdated technology and architecture prevent it from evolving into new markets and opportunities. The company finds itself ill equipped to live in the new world, with it's cash cow still perfectly equipped to dominate in a world that no longer exists.

Icebergs in the Water

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 19:28:00 +0000

Big ships in general turn very slowly. Changes in direction can be imperceptible when sampled in the short term. An inability to change directions quickly would seem to dictate a need for far sighted vision to avoid collisions. But business history is littered with the downfall of large successful organizations that lacked the far sighted vision to makeup for their inability to change direction in a competitive landscape. But even the clearest vision of the path ahead can be misleading as the Titanic discovered on it's fateful voyage. Iceberg's in the water require the ability to change direction quickly to avoid what cannot be seen, to avoid what cannot be anticipated.

As a CTO I have been fortunate to work in a multitude of organizations, small start ups that went on to become medium sized businesses before completing an IPO to grow even further, and large enterprise organizations where stability was favored over growth. There is a correlation between organization size and the ability to execute and absorb change and the level of risk that is acceptable in any new venture proposal that responds to change. In general the larger the organization the slower it is to change direction and the higher the aversion to risk. I say in general because there are always exceptions, Microsoft and it's response to the Internet comes to mind as an exception to this rule. It's important in my job to understand these dynamics in order to successfully propose and execute changes in direction and manage to an acceptable level of risk in the process. In larger organizations venture activities generally take two forms:

Business Case

The most common form is putting together a business case for a venture.

Let's say you work for a media company that is very slow to change, in fact in the last 2 years they have come to the conclusion that they have to come up with a strategy for the Internet. Most of their content is currently delivered in print or online in text formats. You have market data showing that 75% of your customer base will retire in the next 10 years to be replaced by prospects (hopefully to be customers as well) coming from the XY Generation. These prospects have a very different relationship to technology, they live and breathe it, and they are accustomed to information being delivered in multimedia formats. What is needed here is a new venture to move the companies products to the next generation technology. This will be a significant investment and involve many touch entrenched and slow to change members of the organization. This fits the business case profile, where a positive ROI will have to be demonstrated to many stakeholders in the organization. You should expect the business case process to take some time.

First the appropriate business case has to be developed, than the decision makers / stake holders have to be identified. The value proposition, or the specific highlighted value proposition, may change depending on the stake holder(s) audience.

Second the funding source needs to be identified. Even though the stake holders have been identified, or perhaps there is an Investment Committee that serves as the stake holders, the funding source may be a different set of people. In large organizations the funding source isn't necessarily an account sitting at the bank with a stack of cash in it, it may be a business unit whose investment in the venture comes at the expense of the bottom line, with the organization as a whole sanctioning the investment by relieving the requirements for budgeted profit contributions. A prototype and market verification is usually required, especially in risk averse organizations. This will necessarily be a limited, fraction of the final investment but will drive risks associated with the venture to the lowest level possible.

Finally, attention should be given to budget cycles. Large organizations rarely take on unbudgeted investments during the year, waiting instead until the next budget cycle to include them. This could mean failure for ventures relying on time to market and sales windows with defined calendar cycles. Even though the prototype and market verification are a resounding success and prospects are beating down your door with preorders, if you are out of the budget cycle you may have to wait until next year to request the funds. During the funding of the prototype it's always good practice to request an earmark in the budget for the full funding should the market react positively to the prototype.
Skunkworks

This from Wikipedia - Skunkworks is a term used in engineering and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.

Or alternatively a skunkworks is a team that works on a project in a way that maybe outside the rules and maybe under the radar of management, they do it by leveraging their expertise to achieve success for the company for which they work. A good example of a skunkworks that had a huge impact on a large organization can be found in an excerpt from the book Inside Out , a book written by and for Microsoft employees that highlights the products, people and culture that transformed Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's vision for personal computing into reality. In this excerpt titled ""I Found a Cool Little Problem That I Just Couldn't Resist Solving", David Weise, Project Leader, Microsoft Research recounts the skunkworks project that led to the ground breaking introduction of Windows Protected Mode. As he puts it "...putting Windows into protect mode was more of a personal project. Hey, it was Bill and Steve's company, and if they had wanted a protect-mode Windows, they'd have asked for it. But they didn't. My scheme was to get it running, then tell Steve, and if he wanted to kill it, he would."

Skunkworks projects don't necessarily circumvent all of the bureaucracy that causes large organizations to change direction so slowly, but it does jump start the process and acts as a catalyst for change, moving the ball much farther down the field than if the venture were proposed in the business case approach.

"When you are finished changing, your finished", Benjamin Franklin

Mobile Technology...A Bridge Too Far?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:06:00 +0000

“We are told never to cross a bridge until we come to it, but this world is owned by men who have 'crossed bridges' in their imagination far ahead of the crowd.”
Author Unknown

The Digital Divide splits the world in half, those people who 'have', and those people who 'do not have' access to digital information technology. Or put it another way, the 'haves' are those people around the world who have the:

Wealth - to afford devices to access the Internet
Education - to operate those devices effectively
Opportunity - to live near or be able to commute to an area that has access to the Internet.

In his paper "Wireless and Mobility Defined", Adam Kornak defines mobility this way: " The application of mobile devices and wireless technology to enable communication, information access, and business transactions from any device, from anyone, from anywhere, at anytime." So how does mobile technology offer a bridge for the Digital Divide, a bridge for the 'have nots' to access the infinite resources of the Internet.

Wealth - Mobile devices are less expensive than personal computers and so are much more affordable and available for subsidized mass distribution.
Education - Mobile devices, in part because of their low cost, can be tailored for specific functions, take the Fed Ex driver and his mobile package scanner as an example. This enables them to deliver high quality functionality with intuitive and simple to operate user interfaces.

Physical World Connections (see my ddj blog 'RingTones') enable realworld objects to be connected to information about them on the internet. 2D barcode tags can easily hold enough information for a url and parameters to a web service. This empowers people that may not understand an operating system or desktop to simply point their camera phone at an object, take a picture and have the device connect them to the world of information. An aid worker in the plains of Africa can point their camera at a medical supply bag dropped from an airplane and get information on how to distribute, apply and help the villagers with the medicine. The tag may even connect them to a live online physician.

The education deficit is all but eliminated.
Opportunity - Mobile coverage will extend to more than 90% of the global population by 2010. In the GSM Association's white paper "Universal Access" the paper states "There will remain, however, some areas that will never be economically feasible to serve. In most countries this will be the last 2–5% of the population, which corresponds to 20–30% of the geographic area."

Mobility has the promise to bridge the digital divide in even more meaningful ways. Try this, launch iTunes, go to Podcast's, select Education from the Categories menu, than select Higher Education from the More Education Menu below. Now look at the list at the right "Today's Top Podcast's", as I write this there are entries from lectures given at Yale, Harvard, Standford, Chicago School of Law and the list goes on. When I was growing up the only way you could listen to a lecture from one of these professors was to be there. This is liberating stuff for the 'have nots', now armed with an iPod for less than $200 they can learn Spanish, Math, Reading or enter into the world of higher education and be taught by the best.

In fact the only thing the iPod lacks that keeps it from being a real Digital Divide bridge is wireless connectivity. If the iPod could access the iTunes store on it's own and sync the iPod with any updated content or subscription feeds it would be a digital divide killer. Than you could really have students in an impoverished area of Africa downloading the latest lecture from Harvard Business School and sitting down to listen to it as they watch the sun go down over the plains.

Of course mobility has many other touch points in business and consumer life but its capacity to bridge the digital divide is very real and happening now.

It's All About Good People

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 13:40:00 +0000

“The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.”
Harvey S. Firestone (American industrialist founder of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co.,1868-1938)

Software companies, especially start-ups and fast growing companies, depend on good people to keep them going and growing. It's always amazed me how many good people are attracted to these companies. It may be that the 'nine to fivers' see too much risk or too much work to seek out employment in these organizations. The individuals attracted to these companies are eager, energized to compete and win, to work for growth and reward, these are the conquerors, the winners who see the promise of a small organization with no where to go but up. More importantly they see the American Dream at work in these companies, a way to share in the rewards that come with growth if you work hard to contribute to that growth.

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."
- Plato (427-347 B.C.)

Good people know how to act (they don't need a 'code of ethics' stamped to their forehead), they know respect for each individual is critical to team work, and they know debates/arguments are healthy among individuals that respect each other. Good people are worth training in those areas in which they lack experience or education, and it is critical you enable them to train others in those areas in which they have experience or education.

Good people don't wait for the ball to hit them in the head to know it needs to be picked up. Good people don't meander around with the ball and put it down somewhere and forget abou tit. Good people not only pick up the ball and run with it, they go find the ball.

One of my business career mentor's once told me "you don't have to like the people you work with, it's not a marriage, it's a business relationship". I have found that good people almost always are people who will confide in you and you will feel comfortable confiding in them, good people are friendly people.

Good people stand on their own, they are defined by their achievements and level of effort. They don't stand on other people's shoulders without proper credit to those who lift them up.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Isaac Newton, Letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675

Good people don't covet or steel others achievements. They don't scheme and plot, they are not political, they are simply good people.

Good people are hard to find, and hard to keep if you are not of the same ilk. Good people are not attracted by mediocre managers, the only situation in which you will find good people working for mediocre managers is when mediocre managers inherit good people as a result of a poorly designed reorganization or as a result of blatant cronyism.

To better describe what good people are all about I have included an eulogy for a good person that has impacted my business career, he sadly passed away from a brain tumor, prematurely ending his life and contribution to the human experience. I hope that through my expression of respect for this good person there may be found a definition of what a good person is.

A mentor in my life, James "Jim" Petersen, founder of Best Programs Inc. Jim established Best Software in 1982 with the goal of developing business software solutions that would capitalise on the power of the emerging PC. Under his direction, the company grew from a start up to a leading provider of corporate resource management solutions. Today more than 50,000 businesses throughout the world are using Best Software's products to better manage their people, assets and planning.

A publicly traded company with annual sales approaching $100 million, Best Software was typically first to market with innovative, business application software solutions distributed through a variety of sales channels. In March 2000, Sage Software acquired Best Software for approximately $445 million in cash. I was Chief Technology Officer for Best Software.

Jim was a good person, better than most, but he new that good people were the secret to success in business, and he knew that respecting, mentoring and growing good people was "the highest calling of leadership".

My eulogy to Jim:

It’s both an honor and a great challenge to be asked to speak about Jim Petersen today. It’s an honor because Jim was such an important figure in my life. To me he was a mentor, a courageous leader, a gentleman, and a friend. It’s a challenge because its difficult to summarize Jim’s impact on my life, it happened on so many different levels.

Jim had a special kind of charisma that attracted extra-ordinary people to him, people of high character and impeccable integrity like himself. If you look around you these are the people that fill this room, the people you don’t know would probably become your fast and good friends given the opportunity to know them. I know this first hand, because I fell in love with and married one, my wife Sarah, we met at Best in its very early days, and our mutual friend was Jim.

Jim was one of those rare leaders loved by those he led, and his presence was always embraced in a great deal of respect. His genuine concern and respect for the teams of people that worked long hard hours to deliver on his vision, fostered a level of effort that went far beyond the norm. He was a good listener, an honest broker and always went the extra mile to ease the strains of working in a start up. He didn’t have to do many of the kind things he did, but it made all the difference to a young team of people working late into the night.

Jim was a tough leader. He was always dealing with the plague of start ups that expenses always rise to meet revenues. He made tough choices but he was always fair. He didn’t hesitate to let you feel the heavy responsibility that comes with great opportunity.

You would never find Jim on the sidelines he was always in the game. Jim had a contagious energy about him, he bounced on the balls of his feet when he walked around the office, you could gauge his excitement level by the height of his bounce. When there was a success he didn’t stop at a pat on the back. His face would light up, he would break out in a smile, and sometimes he would clench his fist in a victory sign, if he had a football he would spike it. We all shared in Jim’s vision for the company that he freely shared with us, and we all climbed the mountain because he was always up ahead of us challenging and cheering us on.

Jim was a master at encouragement. Many times late at night Jim would show up and sit down with the team and set the efforts at hand into an almost glorious context of a much larger goal that impacted not only the company, but sometimes he made it seem like we were changing the world.

From Jim’s soap box a simple tax preparation program became something that would change thousands of peoples lives helping parents to send their kids to school with their tax refunds, a payroll program made it possible for people to pay their bills and feed their families, and a fixed assets application enabled companies to grow and create new jobs for the unemployed. Granted at times it was a stretch, it was effective and encouraged the team to succeed so others could succeed. For young people trying to make their mark and do something important, this was very powerful stuff.

In thinking about what to say today, I came to the realization that Jim’s greatest gift to me was opportunity, the opportunity to participate, to work hard and to succeed. There isn’t a greater gift. It’s a difficult gift to repay…in fact, the only way to repay it may be best described by the words so aptly placed in today’s program, you have to pay it forward. Jim was an entrepreneur and a visionary, a dreamer, a believer in the impossible, and his place in history is firmly with that elite group of entrepreneurs that have fostered and made the American Dream possible for so many. Jim’s life was like the American Dream, it was a tide that lifted all ships, and how fortunate were we to be lifted up by the life of Jim Petersen.

For a good article on the traits of good people for startups see "The Blue-Chip Blues" by Jeff Dennis.