Author Archives: Espen

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About Espen

For details, see www.espen.com.

The wonders of free content

A few years ago, Sarah Kaull, currently at ICEX Corporation, and I wrote a teaching case called Catatech. The copyright statement says that the case can be freely used for teaching purposes, as long as the copyright statement is not removed – a sort of early Creative Commons license.
When “egosurfing” (putting your name into Google to see what comes up, a somewhat disenchanting experience) today, I found that the Uganda Martyrs University has taken the case and turned it into a word processing exercise – which I think is just excellent.
Quite frankly, when I hear academics being protective of their teaching material, I just don’t understand what they are talking about – I think it is great when someone can use my material for something – and frequently I get emails from teachers with ideas and thanks. The Catatech case was translated into Spanish and Portuguese by some teachers who needed them, as have some of the others. And over the years they take on a life of their own. Great fun!

Executive Leadership and Information Technology – A Fragile Dance

The AOM All-Academy symposium titled Executive Leadership and Information Technology – A Fragile Dance, described here, was great fun – the participants came at the issues from four different directions that together signalled that IT is both more invisible (at least if you don’t look closely) and yet more important than ever.
Jim Cash started (PDF slides here) by reflecting, based on his boardroom experience and his interaction with CIOs, that there has been a strong evolution in the role and expected contribution of CIOs – at least from the admittedly skewed sample he has. (Jim runs a invitation-only program called the Cash Concours, with 38 CIOs of Fortune 200 companies. The group meets quarterly, and Jim visits their companies twice a year.) CIOs are expected to help the firm with the challenges facing the whole firm, including the “large” issues such as the erosion of trust that lead to the Sarbanes-Oxley act, as well as the shifting definition of shareholder value, with more focus on long-term and risk reduction.
Jim considers IT-business-alignment – the notion that the business should come up with a strategy, and IT align with that – outdated. In the companies he is involved with, there is an IT/business convergence – and no new strategy is contemplated without thinking about the influence of technology and technology evolution on the specific business environment. The winners are the CIOs that are “redesigning themselves” to function as full partners in the strategy deliberation and implementation.
Two issues are particularly close to Jim’s heart, and in his view important for CIOs: One is the company’s awareness of and influence on technical standards. The other is the role of China – for many companies, the IT organization not only tasked with supplying IT for Chinese subsidiaries and joint ventures, but the IT organization is in many ways spearheading the company’s move into China. Understanding the role and evolution of China, including its future as an outsourcing location for IT services, is particularly important for CIOs of multinational corporations.
John Seely Brown (PDF slides here) started by noting that China as a market has important ramifications for US corporations – the challenge of selling their goods there, at 10% of the US price point, will lead to a lot of innovation which will make its way back to the US. Information technology is currently driven by the rapid commoditization in three levels: processing, open source, and open standards. He cited Akamai, Google, and the Internet archive as organizations that are able to provide stunning amounts of technology at 1-10% of the IT price point of regular companies – thanks to provisioning and virtualization technologies.
The main driver, however, is standardization – and standardization drives not only decreases in price but also enables flexibility – which is particularly important since IT frequently is the single biggest thing holding up M&A and other corporate change activities. With commonditized technology we can enable further specialization as well as learning.
The key challenge for corporations is to understand how to leverage resources they don’t own, as well as change their business model from supply push to demand pull. JSB cited Amazon, where he is on the board, as a particularly agile corporation – note that they are setting aside a relatively large portion of their screen space to the sale of used books, which means they understand the concept of reciprocity. A good way of understanding the new technology is to see the Internet not as wiring diagram, through which messages are sent, but as platform for inter-company applications.
Vijay Gurbaxani (PDF slides here) took the economic perspective, noting that information technologies have had a profound impact on labor and multi-factor productivity – and cited a number of companies that have created new dominant designs for business processes in their industries. He sees the new marketplace for outsourcing, which is moving from provisioning of IT towards business process outsourcing, as an important contributor to the commoditization of technology and processes.
Mark Kriger (PDF slides here) underscored the role of leadership, giving IBM as an example of a company that has turned itself around under new management. He wondered whether the problem of IT contribution might not be related to ITs perceived lack of explorative power (as opposed to power to exploit existing resources better), and saw the ability of CIOs to be leaders as the key differentiator.
After the presentations, a lively debate ensued – questions ranged from the security of XML applications to the role of IT in China. When asked by a prospective MIS teacher what he should teach the students which he wouldn’t have 5 years ago, the panel said “social software” and “managing vendor relationships” – the first as a new technology, the second as perhaps the most important supply skill for CIOs today.

The day the world exploded

Interesting book on the Krakatoa explosion: Simon Winchester (2003): Krakatoa, New York, HarperCollins. Subtitled “The day the world exploded: August 27, 1883”, this is a detailed account of the history of the Sunda straits and the Dutch colonial powers, prior eruptions, and the eruption that blew Krakatoa away and which was literally seen (or, at least, the pressure wave registered) all over the world. Winchester sees the event as the first “global” event – thanks to the newly established telegraphic network, the news was known within days all over the world. He also, less convincingly, sees Krakatoa as a catalyst to the Islamic rebellions against the Dutch colonial powers a few years after.
Most interesting to me was the explanation of the mechanisms of the eruption (the meeting of two tectonic plates of differing composition, water-rich material being pulled under one of the plates and then pressuring its way up again) as well as the sheer size of the eruption. The noise of the final explosion was so loud that it was heard 3000 miles away – on the island of Rodrigues, where people thought it was naval gunnery. This is equivalent to hearing a noise made in New York while sitting in San Francisco. Krakatoa remains largest single natural catastrophy known to modern man, at least by some measures. 38,000 people died, a paddle steamer was lifted 3 miles upland, and a number of tsunamis, the largest the height of a 10-storey building, swept away whole villages, harbors and ships.
Winchester writes in an almost Victorian detail, sometimes overdoing the flowery language – I suppose it is hard to avoide being influenced by one’s sources. The book is very detailed – but I like that. One small irritation, however, was the low quality of the overview charts in the beginning of the book. It took me quite a while to understand precisely where Krakatau was the Sunda strait. A more detailed overview map with some of the places that were eradicated (such as Anjer and Merok) would have helped.
Recommended.

Dante does it

Just as I was beginning to despair and think that another Name of the Rose wasn’t possible (and that we forever are doomed to read the illiterate snippets of The Da Vinci Code,) along comes Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club to rewive our spirits.
This is a very good book – historically correct as far as possible, painting fascinating portraits of Longfellow, Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and other literary figures of late 19th century Boston, and with a proper plot, shades of Sherlock Holmes mixed with modern-day notions of what happens after the conclusion of a war.
One of the critiques of The Name of the Rose was that it seemed a bit after the fact: That the main protagonist had ideas that were several hundred years ahead of themselves, in expression if not in content. I had the same feeling reading this book, but it seems based in the writings of the people involved – and I am continually amazed by how early ideas turn up, and how we seem to rediscover them in every generation.
Nevertheless, The Dante Club is a must read in the historical crime mystery genre (if there is such a thing), and a relief, as I watch the NYT Book Magazine carrying ads for talks on lectures on The Da Vinci Code. Pearl can write, is historically correct as far as possible, and can set up a plot. His book is not very filmable, though. But it is very readable.
Very highly recommended.

Hotels that have understood what they are doing

I am currently staying at the New Orleans Marriott. Like most American business hotels, each room is so standardized that for an experienced business traveller, turning on the light is not really necessary – everything is where it always was, the only variable being whether the bathroom is to the left or to the right.
However, this hotel has a big plus: The Marriott chain – and most other US business hotels – have understood something that most European hotels have not gotten into their heads: That business travellers want connectivity without paying through their noses. European hotels have shoddy and expensive Internet connections and fleece you on the telephone bill even if you are calling free-phone numbers.
This hotel has no hotel charges for 800 numbers, meaning you can have long telephone conversations with your loved ones using cheap calling cards. But even better, they have a 10Mb Ethernet connection (as well as a USB option for those who don’t have Ethernet on their laptop) available for the entirely reasonable fee of $10 per 24 hours. It works beautifully, can be activated straight onto your room bill without fiddling with credit cards, and as an extra bonus the work table isn’t bad either. Meaning I have been able to edit course pages, down- and upload course material, and in general spend the jet lagged early hours of the morning, when you can’t sleep anyway, very productively.
I am just longing for the day when European hotels, business or not, will understand that connectivity should not be a revenue generator in itself, and instead a service that works to make you choose their hotel next time. Hotels should be hassle-free. This hotel is. Bravo.
Highly recommended.

Curious Incident of book about autism

Light summer reading that is neither shallow nor pointless: Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. About an autistic (at least that is what I assume he is, since all I know about the subject comes from Dustin Hoffmann’s performance in Rain Man) boy who finds his neighbor’s dog killed, and sets out to find out who did it. The journey he sets out on is one of very small and carefully planned steps – those of a person who is extremely smart in one dimension and handicapped in almost anything else. Wonderful insight in into the mind of a child with a psychiatric disorder – or, as the protagonist would say, we don’t know whether it is an insight or not, since we can’t get into other people’s minds. But it feels right, which is something he would not say.
Highly recommended.

Has Microsoft become IBM of the late 80s?

My essay on whether the Microsoft of today has become the IBM of the late ’80s was just published in ACM Ubiquity.
Unfortunately, Ubiquity used an early version of the essay, and there is at least one factual error: The spray-painting IBM employees were not arrested, they just got in trouble with the SF Dept. of public works. There are some misses in language, and the references didn’t make it – so I will include them here:

An American on Norway

Bruce Bawer has an interesting piece in the Hudson review (via Lars Halvorsen) titled Hating America. I disagree with his use of the word “hate” (a bit to strong, I think most Europeans love to hate the USA, they don’t really hate it,) as well as a number of opinions about US foreign policy that he advocates, but it is very interesting to see how he describes Norway and our relationship to the United States. Viewing Norway, he is spot on.
The “American demanding McDonald’s way up in the mountains” story always struck me as a little incongruous, coming as it did during the newspapers’ cucumber season (i.e., the summer slowdown when papers are desperate for news and staffed by interns.) The original piece described a stay at a farm taking in tourists, with some remarks about the churlishness of the owner, which sounded entirely plausible to me. In Norway, willingness to serve the customer is seen as a deficiency of character, a view that is changing, but only slowly (and given the way the economy is going, it will take quite a while before Norwegians will have to.)
P.J.O’Rourke once said that Communism was “been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes.” While flippant, the remark contains more than a little grain of truth. And to all those decrying the boorishness and lack of intellectual curiosity of Americans, I invite them to, say, take a tour of the bookshops of Boston and San Francisco, and then visit similar establishments in Oslo, and check out the selection and conduct a few tests of the quality of the staff. Then sample some museums such as the Metropolitan in NY, the MFA in Boston or (my favorite) the Fogg Museum at Harvard, before trying to get something out of the Norwegian National Gallery (or, for that matter, the Louvre).
Nothing like some data to get your perspectives in line.

Leadership and IT: Invitation to a discussion

One of the perks of straddling the academic/practitioner divide is that sometimes you get to meet, bask in the reflected glory of, and have interesting discussions with luminaries in the same space – sometimes several at once. One such occasion for me is the next Academy of Management conference in New Orleans, where I will proudly lead an All-Academy symposium titled Executive Leadership and Information Technology: A Fragile Dance. (If you happen to be at the conference, it is in the New Orleans Marriott, 10:40am – 12:00am, Monday August 9 2004)
There will be two presenters and two discussants: Presenting the business viewpoint will be James (Jim) Cash, retired professor at the Harvard Business School and now on the board of General Electric and Microsoft (as well as working with the Concours Group). Weighing in for the technology side will be John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and Director or Xerox PARC, and now a celebrated author and speaker on new roles and uses of information technology. The first discussant, from the viewpoint of IT economics and outsourcing, will be Vijay Gurbaxani, professor of IT at UC Irvine. A viewpoint based in strategic leadership processes will be given by Mark Kriger, professor of strategy at the Norwegian School of Management.
The idea with the symposium is to examine the role of information technology and executive leadership in a world of increasingly pervasive and standardized use of technology – or, to be more blunt about it, not discuss whether IT is important or not, but perhaps try to understand why the question even comes up.
Some initial questions I have posed to the presenters are:

  • Can IT and IT use still provide competitive advantage?
  • How is the relationship between IT and executive leadership influenced by

    • Increasing standardization of the technology?
    • Increasing proliferation of the technology?
    • Increasing outsourcing of the technology?
    • Increased consumerization and personal familiarity with the technology?

  • What is the role of IT, both myth and reality, in creating actionable knowledge in organizations?
  • What are the dance steps – the organizational practices and procedures necessary – to make the relationship between business and IT work proceed fluidly and elegantly?

I think this will be a very interesting discussion – and would welcome comments and questions on any of these aspects, the better to sharpen the viewpoints and backgrounds – what do you think of these issues out there? What questions and issues would you see brought up in a discussion on the relationship between IT and strategic leadership?

Dan Bricklin’s 200 year software

Dan Bricklin (one of the inventors of the first PC spreadsheet, Visicalc) has written a very interesting essay entitled “Software That Lasts 200 Years.” He argues that we should take the same approach to software as we do to public infrastructure: Openness, standards, inspection, public inquiries to learn from failures – and not relying on volunteerism alone.
Dan’s writings page is a pleasure to peruse – for instance, he wrote an essay on the future of the music industry in 2002 ago which shaped much of my thinking on the subject – especially the notion that record sales may be down less for downloading than because youngsters were spending their disposable funds on mobile phone services. Enjoy.

Alan Kay and the state of computing

There is an interesting column in Fortune about Alan Kay and how he decries the state of computing (via Slashdot).
I have only met Alan Kay once, in 1989, when he gave a talk at the Norwegian School of Management showing videos of a virtual seabed (with self-guided fish swimming about) and a truly impressive video of his little daughter (still in her diapers) using an Apple Macintosh. She was so small that she had to hold the mouse upside down and use the mouse ball as a trackball.
The opinions of Alan Kay (and I must caution that they are filtered through the columnist, David Kirkpatrick, here) on the state of computing makes me think of a number of things:

  • Every media technology (just remember radio and TV) is seen as a vehicle for education, creativity and human development, and then ends up, at least for a while, as a fairly mundane and seemingly mindless extension for what one did before. For instance, desktop publishing, word processing and email are automations of existing technologies – blogging and wikis are truly new ways of communicating and creating, which take advantage of new attributes of the technology
  • In computers, we have been hampered with the vendors seeming inability to transfer the infrastructurial aspects of one technology generation to another – when the PC came, it didn’t include the good things of the mainframe, when new, user friendly applications come along, they lack the depth and technical strength of prior applications – I just wish the computer science field was better at putting words to its principles, making them simpler to understand and to automatically implement. However, we are getting there – and much of the lack of creativity is really the lack of deep tools
  • When Alan Kay says that companies should be simulating their corporations with computers (or, as my friend Richard Pawson likes to say, every business simulation should have a “Make It So” button), I actually think at least some corporations are doing that. Wal-Mart’s RetailLink, UPS’ and Fedex’s direct interactions with customers, and of course Dell’s pull-based configuration system can be seen as early implementations of this. So can come of the more advanced ERP systems, such as I2. Perhaps. At least they are moving in the right direction.
Things are happening, but too slowly, and Alan Kay, of all people, is certainly the person who has the right to say it.
Time to go and get creative…..

Translation of Cory Doctorow’s speech on DRM to Microsoft Research

Since I liked the speech, can use it in my teaching, and want to show what Creative Commons licensing can do, I decided to translate Cory Doctorow’s speech on DRM to Norwegian (text here).
This is a quick translation – I have not linked it fully, formatting is rather basic, eErrors and omissions are entirely my fault. Of course, everything is always better if read in the original language……
Update July 12: Added lots of explanatory links and fixed quite a few errors – thanks to (among others) Martin Elster.
Update July 13: Replaced text with link to entry in Norwegian blog.

OR – the hidden science

Virginia Postrel has written a great little intro to operations research in the Boston Globe (which, incidentally, must be the world’s best “local” newspaper.) Brad Delong and Virginia seem to have started a discussion about the links between OR and productivity.
OR really is the hidden science, but with this and other articles it may be possible to reawaken interest for it. I am, for a number of complicated reasons, president of the Norwegian OR Society (as part of heading the IT group of the Norwegian Polytechnic Society.) This is an honorable title (previous presidents include Kristen Nygaard, Turing prize recipient) but NORS in itself does not have much activity at all. Anyone interested in reawakening it?

My worst demo

Slashdot has a thread on What Was Your Worst Computer Accident?. I have had a few disasters myself – but my real trial by fire came in 1986, in front of 250 of my colleagues.
I was 25 years old, recently graduated, and working in the IT department of the Norwegian School of Management, where I had also been a student. The school’s president had decided to haul the institution, kicking and screaming, into the modern world of computers and electronic communication – so we had installed PROFS, an IBM email and calendaring system, on our mainframe computer (a 4381 running VM/CMS, in case you’re interested.)
We then arranged an end-of-semester all-employee meeting in the grand auditorium, with 250 of the faculty and administration – colleagues and former professors of mine. My task was to convince this rather skeptical audience that email was the wave of the future, demonstrate how easy it was to use and how it would simplify your life. We had rigged an unpredictable and expensive projector, and I demonstrated how to log in, how to start PROFS, how to enter appointments into your calendar, and for the grand finale: How to arrange a meeting. I selected seven people (IT department colleagues with updated calendars) and a meeting room, asked the system to find a suitable time over the next ten days, picked one of the available times, wrote a short invitation, and pressed the F12 button to send the invitation and book the meeting.
The screen went blank, then a CP message (from deep in the bowels of the system) with incomprehensible error codes appeared. Our system programmer, who was sitting in the back of the auditorium, turned white, stood up and ran out of the room. And there was no response from the machine.
It turned out that I had found an undocumented error in PROFS – when choosing 7 people, for 10 days ahead (and some other conditions I don’t remember), PROFS would crash your virtual machine, in a way that had to be recovered from the system console. (This, incidentally, was very hard to do – VM/CMS was extraordinarily stable.)
Of course, I had to do this in front of all my colleagues.
We somehow recuperated, and PROFS became, over the next 2-3 years, a common tool (though, given its poor interface, nothing like the email we have today.) I have since had many instances of the “demo effect” (things breaking when you demo them), but this was the first major one. It inoculated me against technical embarrassment – things just can’t get much worse that bombing in front of the whole company.

The Economist on blogging

The Economist has an article on blogging and newspapers, concluding with InstaPundit’s Glenn Reynolds that “the threat to big media is not to its pocketbook but to its self-importance.”

This review should matter

John Stuckey has written a good review of Nicholas Carr’s Does IT Matter? in ACM Ubiquity.
Carr’s 2003 HBR article (called “IT doesn’t matter”, an aggressive title that the content did not reflect) and even the book is rather tiresome. One thing is that this discussion is a repeat – in 1990 it was Max Hopper (a man with real IT pedigree and understanding) with his “Rattling SABRE: New ways to compete with information” (Harvard Business Review (May-June): 118-125.), in which he made an offhand remark that owning the technology didn’t matter any more and got flack for it. Hopper was right, of course (though he managed to get a few more years out of owning SABRE). So was Mata, Fuerst and Barney, who analyzed the competitive impact of IT (Mata, F. J., W. L. Fuerst, et al. (1995). “Information Technology and Sustained Competitive Advantage: A Resource-Based Analysis.” MIS Quarterly 19(4): 487-505.) arguing that it was not technology, but the way you use it, that matters. Not to mention Erik Brynjolfsson‘s many excellent articles on the measurable effects of the technology (see, for instance: Hitt, L. and E. Brynjolfsson (1996). “Productivity, Business Profitability, and Consumer Surplus: Three Different Measures of Information Technology Value.” MIS Quarterly 20(2): 121-142.)
That Carr should get so much out of repeating the tired old truth – that it is not the technology, but how you use it, that matters – in a sensationalist packing in 2003 just indicates how shallow the understanding of technology is with investors and many managers. As one manager told me during the go-go dot-com years: All the investments we see in IT now are not really in IT – they are in misdirected marketing, buying market share you can neither defend nor make money on.
Oh well. Plus ça change…

Blackbored – the disappearing future of technology in learning

According to Red Herring Blog, Blackboard.com is now worth over $.5b. Truly depressing. The best thing that can be said for their product, a course management system for universitities, is that the competition is even worse. Why anyone would want to value a company that sells shoddy software to universities (not known for willingly parting with huge sums for stuff they can either do themselves or get cheaply somewhere else,) is beyond me. Software-as-service is an excellent concept (not that Blackboard compares to salesforce.com, since they license software much as anyone else,) but the business model is shaky in the long term. The last time it was bandied about it was called ASPs, and it didn’t work then either. The reason is simple: Software concepts are copyable, and ideas spread, so prices fall until you no longer make money unless you manage to establish and defend some sort of network externality. For course management systems, the only direct network externality I have been able to find is in plagiarism detection – and even there it is only slight, as the effect of plagiarims is mostly preemptive.
So why don’t I like Blackboard and other course management systems? Here is a list (modified from this talk):

  • All they aim to do is put paper-based courses on-line – without no vision of what teaching should be like beyond Powerpoint slides. They justify this by saying they need to pander to technology virgins – saying that to facilitate learning and increase acceptance they have to use the tired metaphors of “classrooms”, “group areas”, “documents” and other hogwash. Hobgoblins of little minds, I say.
  • They dumb down the user interface for the course creator (and for the student, I should add) to unusability, and justifies this by talking about user-friendliness and how the system can be used by almost anyone with a minimum of training. That is well and good, but it is now 37 years since Smalltalk 67 was invented, with a graphically oriented object browser, and since I manage not one course, but about 10, I would very much like to do that in an interface that allows me to behave like a technologically competent and moderately literate adult, rather than forcing me into dealing with an interface designed for an airline check-in machine catering to moronic, alcohol-marinated charter tourists.
  • They are built on a systems architecture that, while using a relational database, does not let the capabilities of the database show through to the user, thus treating every course as a separate entity with ensuing duplication of content. So I end up with 6 different copies of an article because I have 6 courses, and an updating nightmare

  • They are not built to interface effectively and intuitively with other systems. This is rather odd, given that the data for the one task that justifies a course management system – namely, identity management, that is the linking of student to learning material – comes not from the course management system itself but from student administration systems

  • They arrange everything into courses, not making any allowance for the course creator or creators to have draft areas, repositories of learning modules, conditional access to course material or alternative interfaces to, say, non-students.

In short, Blackboard and its ilk are bad systems, because they do not have the capability in them to drive use of IT in teaching forward. All they do is take half a step, and in doing so, making sure we won’t get further.
This is an area where open source/free systems really ought to shine, where componentization, blogs, wikis and a rolling technological evolution – including, as the report Thwarted Innovation: What Happened to e-learning and Why by Robert Zemsky and William F. Massy says, evolving a dominant design for learning components – is critical. But it won’t come from the commercial providers. We have to do it ourselves. For instance, what if MIT took their OpenCourseWare initiative and created a way for people to specify their courses in the same format, even creating learning components by themselves the same way they do it?
Boy, wouldn’t that be fun…..

Ratting on chattering

Stupid management books (from what Andy Pettigrew calls the “Heathrow School of Management”) are irritating. It seems to me that the more moronic the book, the more it sells. And if you think they are irritating as a reader, imagine what they are to serious academics.
Head of this trend has been “Who moved my cheese”, a leadership tale with mice scurrying around, spouting wisdom about being open to new ideas. Now there is a copycat (copyrat?), I suppose because the author was open to new ideas, called “Squirrel, Inc.” by Stephen Denning. The Economist has given this “book” the treatment it deserves:

ONCE upon a time there was a lemming called Stephen. He was a very clever lemming: top rodents would ask for his advice before setting off to lead their fellows on long and difficult journeys. One day, however, Stephen woke up with a start to find that the left-hand side of his brain, the part he used to analyse his fellow rodents’ problems, had gone completely dead. He was reduced to using something that he hardly knew existed: the right-hand side, the part that allows lemmings to do wildly dotty things without rhyme or reason.
And it was then that it came to him in a flash: he would help to save the whole lemming race by writing a book. It would be a short book, but it would look like a long one because it would have lots of blank pages and many quotations in big type. It would be an allegory about animals, because Spencer had done one about mice that had been a huge hit, and George, of course, had transformed the genre into literature with his tales of life down on the farm. […]

The irritating thing, of course, is that books like these are being read by the management meatballs of this world, to quote P.J. O’Rourke. Incidentally, I suspect The Economist’s Global Executive page, which among other things summarizes noteworthy journal articles and books, is a holding pen for stuff that for some reason or other didn’t make it into the magazine. There are nuggets to be found there, as the rodent review shows.
But the question remains: Why do stupid and simplistic management books – books that the thoughtful and well grounded managers I tend to talk to wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot grounded earth excavator – sell so well?
Grrrr.

Eyeballing the circuit switched network

Bob Cringely is going against the grain, as usual (and quite refreshingly so, too), in his recent column on why telcos should keep their circuit-switched network. I am not sure how this is done in the US, but at least in Norway, the seemingly circuit-switched POTS network is actually fibre-based and packet-switched in the background, the only circuit-switched bit being the “last mile”, so I am not sure how his arguments would work here. To me it seems, like it does to Techdirt, that this is an argument for telcos hanging on to their dying technology as it is being disrupted – though the “super-customer” forcing the incumbent to hang on to the old technology seems not to be there.
Anyway, the interesting part is Bob’s argument that it should be possible to reduce the bandwidth needed for sending video by mimicking the protocol of the optic nerve, which according to Bob has a capacity of 100 Kbps. Now, I am no expert in optics or anatomy of the eye, but it occurs to me that one of the reasons the eye can do with relatively limited bandwidth is because so much filtering takes place before the picture gets transmitted. When I look at a movie, I don’t take in the whole picture at once – I focus on some part of it, and am only dimly aware of the rest. I do this by positioning my eyes towards what I am looking at and then focusing it – in the process selecting just a few bits of all millions of “bits” the world insists on sending towards me in analog form. What I focus on comes through in glorious detail (at least when I have my glasses on) and the surrounding stuff is out of focus (and there are different physical sensors in the eye to handle this – two protocols, if you like).
Now, since no two people focus on the same part of the video picture through a movie, you either need to send the whole picture with the same quality, or you need to establish some form of two-way communication, so that only what the eye actually will look at will be transmitted towards it. So in other words, to send video down a 64Kbps connection, you need it to be two-way, with almost zero latency. Moreover, you would need one connection for each viewer.
The eye selects what to see, in communication with the brain. The world, which sends images to the eye, has unlimited bandwidth. I may be wrong, but in order to send video over 64K, as Bob proposes, it seems to me we need to extend the selection properties of the eye into the server rather than the send the whole image into each person’s home – and communicating eye-tracking with focus information from each individual viewer back to be processed in time for the image to be selected and transmitted in optimized format seems to me to be a formidable challenge, circuit switching or not.
So, to me it looks like packet switching is the way to go, also for technical reasons. A second argument is that telcos make money when users talk to users, not when they connect to a central feed (that is the domain of broadcasters, and for telcos normally only a way to get users to subscribe to their network, until talking to each other takes over for talking to a central source). And packet switching allows for video-to-video sharing (legal or not). That is the future, and whether the telcos and broadcasters make the transition, I don’t know and I don’t care. I know I, as a user, will. The circuit switched network will not.
Update June 30:
David Isenberg has a rather more direct take on this in his “I[diot], Cringely“.

Blogs and Wikis as Corporate Collaborative systems

Together with Jay Williams (who, incidentally, I have now worked with for three years and only seen in person once – I didn’t know what he looked like until April this year) I did a Concours Group CIO Staff Meeting on collaborative systems yesterday. One of the parts was a discussion of blogs and wikis in the corporate space – what can they be used for and how do you manage them? Some thoughts:

  • To make shared self-publishing work within a corporation, you need a purpose (why are you doing it, aside from self-expression) and a shared set of norms and values. According to this article in Business Week, Microsoft now has let loose blogging within the company (made visible through Channel 9), but (at least as far as I can see) with no stated purpose and the only rule being “don’t be stupid”. Where is the purpose, and, though that may not be visible on the outside, where is the space for development of shared understanding of what is OK and what is not?

  • Blogging and wikis (incidentally, the latter I think will be most important in the short run) is emerging as tools for corporate use very much like the Web did in 1994: As something that is first done for academic reasons, then by individuals, then by corporations. In the process, a number of expensive knowledge management and content management tools will disappear.

  • The chief problem for IT shops will not be the technology (that is trivial, especially since much of the management is taken care of through simple forms of version control) but the softer parts of the equation: How do you establish a culture for sharing and for making your (half-baked) ideas visible? Unless IS has a voice (and I have seen a number of IS departments hiring communications people lately) it will have little power to manage the use of the tools. Shared spaces are managed through norms rather than rules, and the usual remedies of user access restrictions and various meta-data based automated rules will be counter-productive.
I look forward to a lot of corporate Wiki’ing and many internal blogs – both are examples of how our uses of the technology are catching up with the technology’s capabilities. (In other words, both have no counterpart in a paper-based world, unlike email, databases and mailing lists.) They will evolve, they will be used inside corporations, and someone will make money on adding the corporate flair that makes those of us who execute for a living comfortable in the knowledge that we are in control. Or seem to be.