More on the new decade – Facebookisation

After my previous blog, I re-discovered JP Rangaswami’s Confused of Calcutta blog (although he should consider using the newer name, Kolkata). What got my interest was the series of blogs on the ‘Facebookisation of the enterprise’.

In the first part – The Facebookisation of the enterprise – he describes how a business

“needs to look a bit like Facebook. Responsible for identifying, authenticating and permissioning people, making sure that appropriate controls are in place from a privacy and confidentiality perspective. Responsible for providing an environment, a platform, for people to congregate electronically. A marketplace, a bazaar. A place where people converse with each other, share their interests, identify inventories, discover prices, negotiate, trade. A place where the things that need to be recorded get recorded, as in everyday life.

This is reflects the world that Generation M, or Millennials experience through technology and social interaction (read this to learn about generational theory). As they move into the enterprise, how will they change the world of work to match their attitudes and expectations?

In the new world, the worker would have the choice of device, platform, and applications. It would also mean that IT and HR would lose their traditional control over the employee.

In the second part – More on the Facebookisation of the enterprise – he discusses how IT would need to operate to support this work environment by providing:

• simple self-service signup
• a set of directories and tools to classify and filter them
• a range of communication and scheduling tools
• a platform for development

I think something else should be added – access to a library of in-house and external applications which the worker could use to do get their job done.

While the Facebook analogy is a bit far-fetched, if not revolutionary, it’s a good place to start thinking about the direction in which IT should be moving.

New platform for the new decade

I read with much interest Don Dodge’s predictions for 2010 and the new decade. I find predictions a bit of a waste of time – when you look are what people predicted for 2009, about half came true, which is what a random selection would give. However I was struck about the prediction on future computing and mobile computing.

“Your cell phone will become your primary computer, communicator, camera, and entertainment device, all in one … I think in the near future there will be docking stations everywhere with a screen and a keyboard. You simply pull out your phone, plug it into the docking station, and instantly all your applications and data are available to you … Your phone will have enough storage so you can decide which applications and data are stored on your phone, and which will be in the cloud.”

When I look at what I can already store on my cellphone, this prediction seems quite plausible. But if people store applications on their phone, which they will presumably choose themselves, and if they decide to use the cloud to select their preferred applications, how will this impact the role and responsibilities of the company IT function? Their role of deciding what applications are suitable for the organisation becomes irrelevant, but they still have to ensure application and data security and integrity.

 ”Mobile phones are clearly the next computing platform … Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley says Mobile Internet usage is bigger than most people think, and it is exploding.”

Application developers will have to re-consider the presentation layer for a different user interface and experience, and will have to assume that the mobile interface will be the preferred or default one, rather than as a side issue.

Where I do have a problem is the predictions about cloud computing and mobile bandwidth:

The explosion of reliable broadband bandwidth, virtualization technology, cheap storage, memory, and servers, has made Cloud Computing the obvious choice for the next decade … Why buy servers, hire IT admin to manage them, buy operating system licenses, application licenses, pay 20% maintenance fees every year, worry about security updates/breaches, hassle with asset management, etc., when you can just “pay as you go” with cloud computing resources? …
The new 700Mhz wireless spectrum became available in 2009, and will be built out over the next decade … Cell phones will see the same explosion in bandwidth in the coming decade, which will enable new applications and uses.”

This is a simplified view of the world. Firstly, business applications for even small and medium businesses are getting more complex. I’m not talking about simple accounting or CRM solutions, but the complex applications to manage orders, receive and dispatch inventory, schedule and manage manufacturing operations. It isn’t as simple as paying and starting, as the “pay as you go” mantra likes to make out. It may well be that business hands over the management of the application infrastructure to a cloud provider, but every successful business has a particular way of working that is different to others, and that is unlikely to be assisted by a standard enterprise application.

Secondly, the comment about mobile bandwidth is US-centric. Developing countries like South Africa are constrained in all sorts of bandwidth (Internet, radio, cellphones) because they have been already allocated to developed countries years ago. That is not to say that cellphone bandwidith will not significantly increase. What Don fails to note is that the growth of the mobile Internet will probably come more from developing regions like Africa than the US, as reported by Opera and Google.

However you look at it, the next decade is probably going to redefine the way we use, consume and interact with computing resources.

Project management is a serious business

I have used this title because I’m not sure whether new entrants to software development realise what a difficult and stressful job project management is. It seems that some people think that being a project manager (PM) is a ‘cool’ job because they have watched the reality TV program The Apprentice where in each program ‘project managers’ are appointed to manage each week’s activity.

I have been involved in various software and ERP projects on and off for close on 10 years, and unless things are going very well, I found that being a PM is a tough job.

If you want to get an idea about project management, follow the über-PM blog – Glen Alleman’s Herding Cats. He can get quite technical at times, especially concerning US defense and aerospace requirements, but has some great points. He points out the the key to managing a project is the following:

• how do you evaluate what DONE is;
• how do you determine where you are along the way to getting to DONE.

Here are his immutable activities of project management – “immutable because in the absence of these activities in some form, there is no management of the project”.

When I first started as a PM, risk wasn’t an issue we really focused on – if a project went over time or budget that was a problem for the business, IT’s job was just to deliver. But these days, that attitude has changed radically (and for the better). To understand the risk management process, here is a diagram I got from Glen’s blog.

Mary Gerush at her Forrester Blog noted the skills that software project managers need to have in order to succeed:

1. a solid understanding of the business;
2. a solid understanding of technology;
3. a strong foundation in project management practices;
4. most importantly – an amazing array of updated soft skills.

One of the critical soft skills is an understanding of psychology. Projects are all about people – whether it’s the people on the team, or dealing with the stakeholders of the project (the business sponsors). I know some PMs who are very good on items 1 to 3, but fail badly on item 4.

Finally, for a light-hearted look at what project management, here is a great analogy – Five Parallels Between Golf and IT Projects. The ones that stand out for me are:

• it looks simple but is not;
• a very small error can lead to major problems;
• it’s remarkably easy to second guess others – it’s easy to be an expert, with hindsight;
• it’s very difficult to sustain a consistent level of performance.

Are there other aspects of project management, which I haven’t covered, which could be used as a PM primer? In some industries, project management is now taken seriously; banking I know is one (aerospace and pharma are others, I believe). But in too many small and medium businesses, which is where my experience has been lately, the concept of project management still isn’t very well understood or appreciated. The question is – where and how to start the process of education?

Dynamic process management – dream or reality?

I was helping an NGO as they did a food hand-out to hundreds of poor children in Alexandra, Johannesburg. As we were doing the hand-out, the original plan for the hand-out process had to be adjusted on-the-fly as we discovered there were problems with the process. We didn’t stop to review the process in detail, then present a proposal to change it. Someone had an idea how to re-organise some tasks, and we adjusted to it, and continued on.

That experience made me wonder if organisations could ever get to that stage of dynamic process management. In the past, processes had to be defined, documented and agreed, and neither the levels of technology nor communication enabled that to be done quickly in the first place, or when processes needed to change.

However, with the rise of social networking and collaboration in the organisation (the Enterprise 2.0 phenomenon), the speed and channels for communication have increased such that rapid communication across and between groups should not be so difficult. That means that if a problem is found in a process, there should be no reason why the situation cannot be immediately communicated to the people in the organisation who can review and change it.

On the technology side, process management software now allows organisations to graphically create and manipulate processes that will be performed. Software like SYSPRO Process Management connects directly to the enterprise software applications that the business runs, so that as a process is configured, the underlying ERP system is also configured. That means that if a process is found to be problematic, the process management software could be used to re-configure the process and the ERP system more quickly than has been possible before.

There are obviously other issues that need to be considered when changing processes, it’s obviously not as simple as I am describing; for example, there might be performance and testing considerations. But I am starting to wonder whether dynamic process management could become a reality in business, in other words almost real-time process management and change. Or is that just a dream?

PowerPoint Twitter Tool

The guys at SAP have come up with a free tool that allows people giving a PowerPoint presentation to see and interact with Twitter ‘tweets’ in real-time – the so-called Twitter back channel.

Two comments:

1. Have the guys at SAP nothing better to do?
2. The only time I have been in a room in Johannesburg with other people using Twitter was when I attended the 27dinner function.

So while I have downloaded the file, I’m not sure whether and when I am going to use it in South Africa at a SYSPRO presentation.

Cultural extremes in less than 5 hours

There are few cities where extreme affluence and extreme poverty exist in close proximity. Like a number of other developing economy cities, Johannesburg has those examples. In the north-east of the city lies the suburb of Alexandra, which was designated a ‘black township’ in South Africa’s apartheid days. It is now has small, overcrowded and run-down houses combined with shanty-town shacks. Less than 15 minutes drive from ‘Alex’, as it is called, is Sandton, the most affluent area on the African continent.

I was in Alex yesterday afternoon, helping an NGO which is part of my church, Rosebank Union, to host a Christmas party for primary school children in the area. I spend time on Saturday mornings teaching computer studies to kids from Alex, but the teaching college is on the outskirts and so I don’t often need to drive into the suburb. However, driving into the centre of Alex, to the community centre where the party was held, opened my eyes once again to the grinding poverty of many South Africans. Seeing the conditions that they live in made me appreciate all that I have, and less willing to tolerate those South Africans who complain about minor issues. At the end of the party, all the kids got fed, were given a small present, and a basic food parcel.

I then drove north to Fourways, an area which has developed in the last 15 years to the Design Quarter shopping centre, for a 27dinner evening. The experience of walking in to the centre was almost surreal, it felt like I had suddenly jumped to somewhere in Europe or North America. I wondered whether any of the affluent (mainly white) people sitting in the restaurants around the centre knew how life was being lived in a run-down suburb a few kilometres away.

The cultural extremes between Alex and Fourways kept running through my mind during the evening. For foreign visitors, I would now strongly recommend that they include half a day during their trip to go through Alex and then drive to Sandton.

Farewell ProActive

I was shocked recently to hear that a previous employer, ProActive Integrators, one of the larger SYSPRO VARs in South Africa, had closed its doors. As with a large Sage VAR, the MIS Group in the US, it seems that a combination of market conditions and financial issues forced the company to cease business. I wish Duncan, Eugene, Bev, Ray and all the other people there, all the best and trust in God’s blessing for them.

My Office Home experience

For at least ten years I have worked on PCs that use Microsoft Office productivity software (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint), at work and home. However, the PC at home had an old version of Office (either 2000 or XP) and did not have PowerPoint; this became a major problem for my youngest child who needed PowerPoint for some school work. So she took matters into her own hands, got a CD of Office 2007 from a friend and loaded all the Office software on the home PC. Unfortunately, she was unaware that Office needs a product key, and since we could not find one, my eldest child decide to uninstall the software, leaving our home PC without any Office software at all (the CD of the old Office version was long lost). That created a difficulty for me as my Outlook .PST file, with six years of personal email, was on that PC.

No problem, I thought, I can buy a new version of Office from a local retail outlet; that was where my first lesson in Office started. Lesson 1: The cheapest version of Office – Home and Student Edition -  has Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, and currently costs about R900 in South Africa (list price). When I asked for a version that includes Outlook, I was astounded to learn that it would cost over three times as much, and the version that has all the Office software (including Visio and Groove) costs over seven times as much.

I remembered that I could use Outlook Express as that came standard with Windows, so I bought the Home and Student version and thought I had all my problems sorted out. Then came the next lesson, in fact two. Lesson 2: Outlook Express did not have an import option for Outlook, so I went searching on Google for a solution and found out that you cannot import an Outlook .PST into Outlook Express unless Outlook is installed on the same PC. Lesson 3: I also found out that Microsoft had replaced Outlook Express with Windows Live Mail.

Thinking that I might get better support for my problem with Windows Live Mail, I downloaded the Live Mail installer, and was impressed that it was less than 2Mb. Lesson 4: The installer is only a stub, when you run it, the following files are downloaded from a Microsoft site (note: I also opted to install a Microsoft application called Family Care):

• - Application Error Runtime
• - Visual Studio Runtime
• - Communications Platform
• - Junk Mail Filter
• - Live Update Tool
• - Live Sign-in
• - Installer
• - Choice Guard
• - Mail
• - Search Enhancement
• - Synch Framework Runtime
• - Synch Framework Services
• - Toolbar
• - Family Safety

After I got Windows Live Mail set up and running, I discovered Lesson 5: Windows Live Mail does import from Outlook Express, but has no import from Outlook. I thought I was screwed, until I realised that my work laptop (which is still on Windows XP) had Outlook and Outlook Express. This lead to Lesson 6: how to finally import my .PST file into Live Mail, the steps were:

1. copy the .PST file from the home PC to the work laptop using a memory stick,
2. create an Outlook profile on the work PC to use the .PST file,
3. start Outlook Express and import data from Outlook using the profile I had just created,
4. copy the Outlook Express storage directory (it’s not a simple file like Outlook) from the work laptop to the home PC using a memory stick,
5. start Windows Live Mail and import the Outlook Express data from the storage directory on the memory stick.

By this time, I had finally recovered my history of emails, but from the time of buying the Office software to having emails available again took me over five hours.

Now I am ready to start being a Windows Live Mail user at home, and also wondering whether or not there is value in moving to a web-based mail service like Gmail.

My blog stats

I am pleased to see how my blog is being viewed. While I’m not in the same league as Dennis, Ray, Michael or Vinnie, I am more than happy to see the number of views I am getting on a regular basis.

Some personal data lost

I have received a letter in the mail from Zurich Insurance that they noticed that a back-up storage tape with some of my personal data has been lost during a transfer.

The fact that the transfer happened last year but they only recently discovered the loss is a bit disconcerting. What’s also concerning is that I don’t recall ever having had any kind of policy or investment with Zurich.

It just goes to show how much of our personal data is held by organisations we have don’t deal with, even on an occasional basis.

It’s times like this that I appreciate why countries enact data privacy laws – South Africa doesn’t have any yet. Then maybe I would known that Zurich also kept personal information about me.