Tuesday  2004-03-30   Policy, Process, Mechanism

Death marches to the waterfall

Lately the waterfall methodology has been roundly criticized for being too heavy-handed and expensive. Developing in the Internet time meant waterfall was past sell-by-date by many a lifecycle. Needless to say for certain kinds of software waterfall methodology may be useful: for example desiging and implementing languages and their backwards compatible successors. However for the most commercial software development waterfall has been an embarrassing failure. The rise of agile methodologies (the most famous among them XP) seems to confirm the waterfall's disfavor among the technorati at last.

Or does it? Despite lip services paid to faster, nimbler software engineering practices, the industry hasn't changed its habit. Anecdotal evidences still depict wide spread analysis paralysis, slipping deadlines, worsening regressions, uncontrollable mutations, sinking morales and "death marches."

 
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Monday  2003-11-03   Policy, Process, Mechanism

CIO under siege

CIO's prestige has been falling fast lately. The position of CIO has been a rather curious job. Unlike other CXOs -- CEO, CTO, CFO, COO -- a CIO usually has little or no mandate for future direction of a company. Neither board of directors nor shareholders are interested in what CIOs have to say. Not only that the other CXOs can divide up CIO's portfolio: CTO can deal with technology planning, COO day to day operations, and CFO financial reporting. It is hard not to caricaturize CIOs as glorified IT department manager with no role in leadership of at CXO level, whose business unit is that of support (mediocre and costly one at that). After ERP, Y2K and e-commerce extravaganza CIOs are nowadays fallguys.

However an observant CIO should spot a chance for redemption as corporations are changing to be more open and transparent. This is a chance to show how technology can drive corporations towards better corporate governance, corporate citizenship and public relations. Astute CEOs will support smart CIOs to achieve these goals (after making sure the board of directors would not take on their new protege!) making other CXOs jealous. [The last link is from the former CIO of state of Utah Phillip Windley's blog]

 
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Wednesday  2002-09-18   Policy, Process, Mechanism

Why startups are interesting

That was the team: the group of five. In time it expanded, but to start with, these five alone made up the famous cadre, and to have been one of them, said [one of the five] afterwards, was "like holding a Communist Party card with a single-figure membership number."

from "The Honourable Schoolboy" by John Le Carre.

All five are members of fictional British Intelligence during Cold War trying to rebuild the service betrayed by a traitor a la Kim Philby.

 
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Monday  2002-08-05   Policy, Process, Mechanism

Everything's explained in SOP

In many organizations, the design process still follows a classical "military" model. A small number of "officers" do the "noble" task of analysis and design, plan the overall work load, and assign implementations and test tasks to the "simple soldiers." This way of working has several drawbacks.
...
But today, even the military no longer works like this, at least in the British SAS or American SEALS and probably other elite military forces as well. ... Most interesting to us is the account of the mission design. After being given a broad view on the mission objective [...] all eight members of the SAS patrol meet to cooperatively design the details of their mission (what, when, where, how, and with which tools). They do not start from scratch but instead identify the problems to be solved and their contexts, and then borrow and customize solutions from the Standard Operational Procedures (SOP) handbook: for example, get to this point behind enemy lines with enough food and ammunition for the mission and without anybody else being aware or have a cover story ready in case of a capture). The very same eight men then "implement" their design, being fully aware of all the implications. The bottom line of this approach is that these special forces consistently rate from five to ten times better than classical ones--and military efficiency measures, albeit somehow macabre, do exist.

[The benifits of this approach are:]

... The most striking point is the team's reliance on patterns of organization and behavior for the big picture and on SOP for the implementation details. These patterns are used as small building blocks that everyone knows and understands: The design activity can proceed at a quite high level, in terms of patterns instead of implementation details. ...

Another interesting point is that, because those who design the mission are also the ones who implement it, they tend to come up with implementable designs and realistic schedules. ...

Finally, because all of the implementers are responsible for the design, a strong team spirit is created to make the implementation possible. ...

From "Design Patterns and Contracts" by Jezequel, Train, Mingins (ISBN 0201309599)

 
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Tuesday  2002-06-11   Policy, Process, Mechanism

Knowledge Management 101

IBM Systems Journal Vol. 40, No 4, 2001 is dedicated to knowledge management. A few overview papers are especially interesting:

• Where did knowledge management come from? by Prusak
• Views of knowledge are human views by Dueck

Some of the papers discussing actual technical implementations leave an impression that top-down technology borrowed from traditional AI, data management (usually RDBMS), etc may have reached a limit. Will klogs (blogs used for knowledge management) and P2P like Groove do better?
 
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Tuesday  2002-04-23   Policy, Process, Mechanism

Policy, Process, Mechanism

Unlimited, extensible mechanism devised without principles of policy spelled out, invites directionless policy and orderless process.

 
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