e-gineer

Revving up the Google App(s) Engine

2010-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

Google have just announced their Google Apps Marketplace, a huge step forward for SME’s and forward-looking Large Enterprises.

Google Apps is a powerful, affordable and highly reliable infrastructure. It is delivered at a cost point that is hard for even the largest of enterprises to match. The Google Apps features are still a little limited relative to Microsoft Office, but are improving all the time particularly as Google executes consistently and aggressively on their strategy of speeding up the web (Chrome, Chrome OS, DNS services, Caching) and driving low cost services to the cloud (App Engine, GWT). This is what disruptive innovation looks like

just good enough for low cost customers but quickly moving up the food chain.

Enterprises face notoriously difficult integration and usability challenges for their systems. In recent years we’ve seen innovation, forward thinking and major advances coming in the consumer space while enterprises watch helpless from behind hard to use, expensive to configure and impossible to integrate systems.

A Google App Store for Google Apps based on the Google App Engine will change this space forever.

Applications would be available for instant installation at a reasonable price. The integration and configuration would be much simpler, as organisations live on a predefined Google stack. (For good or bad, sometimes you just need to choose a particular cool-aid to drink for a while.)

Developers will flock to a platform that allows simple marketing and distribution access to SME organisations with a clear stack. It will reduce sales cycles, increase sales opportunities and provide a green field space for rapid improvement and innovation.

Overall, the enterprise software space will be disrupted one app at a time. It won’t start in the largest companies, it won’t be immediate, but it will be fast, continuous and drive corporate productivity to new levels.

Corporate Alumni - Pretend they never leave

2010-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

As much as we’d like them to stay, it’s irrational to think that good people won’t leave the company. The timing of internal opportunities may be out of alignment with their readiness. They may have family commitments. They may just need a change.

The trick is to pretend that they never left, and treat this change as simply a small step on their career journey. Good people will respect and value this approach, choose to stay because you are placing their interests at heart and highly likely return even if they have to leave now.

Build touchstones into their life connecting them to your company and reminding them to come home again soon. Stay in contact with your alumni through Christmas letters and gifts, encouraging them to keep their contact details up to date. Create an equivalent of the Australian Baggy Green cricket cap, a proudly displayed and hard won symbol of their time with the company.

Contact alumni at set intervals to inquire about their career and plans for the future. Offer development planning opportunities, even if they don’t involve a return to your business yet. Show an interest and a passion in their future growth and be honest about true opportunities you may have (or not) for them.

Use your alumni network for job referrals, paying a similar bonus as that paid to internal employees for finding new hires. This keeps the connection, provides an incentive and reminds alumni in a low pressure way that you have ongoing opportunities that may interest them. It also ensures referrals are coming from people who know your business well.

Alumni are like friends living overseas. They are hard to stay in touch with, but one day they’ll move back and we want to pick up right where we left off.

If you love something, set it free.

Comment by Elliot on March 04, 2010 10:00 AM

100% agree. Now the company just needs to the will to implement something like this. I'm sure that you would find that it would pay dividends over the years.

Comments are closed.

Arguing against a fear of open collaboration inside an enterprise

2010-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

Opening your organisation up to blogging or wiki’s is difficult for many organisations. It flies in the face of traditional management control over messages and information. It opens the organisation to all sorts of crazy or litigious things that people may write.

Your milage and details will vary, but the basic argument for the safety of open internal enterprise collaboration goes something like this:

Anything people publish will have their name on it.
Is there anything an employee could write on their blog or a wiki that would create a problem for your organisation but does not breech existing policies around communication, confidentiality, etc? If so, is that a problem with blogs or a problem with your existing policies?
If an employee breaches communication policy, is it more likely to occur in email or on a public forum? Which would you prefer, one you can see and act on or one that is hidden and may surface in the future?

Beyond all the policies and controls, your employees aren’t idiots and should value their job. (If not, that’s two good things to find out ASAP anyway.)

A soft boiled MBA

2010-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

After finishing my MBA at MGSM back in 2005 I’m finally ready to talk about it…

I did 16 subjects, 16 exams, 16 groups, ~48 assignments, thousands of pages of reading. I recall almost none of it.

But, as a result of my MBA, I am self-aware of my style in groups, confident in my breadth of knowledge and able to see business from different view points. I can make hard decisions more easily and am comfortable finding a balance between performance, friendship and opinions.

Oh, and having the piece of paper doesn’t hurt either.

Two worlds colliding: Small and nimble versus Big and efficient

2010-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Two worlds colliding

While running Synop I’ll never forget bidding for a project in partnership with Telstra. We’d worked through a lot of the details and then were asked “Who should we contact from your legal department?”. Given Synop had two employees at that point and we were both in the room, Peter quickly responded “It’s probably easiest to just route everything through us as a single point of contact.”.

Traditionally, small and large companies have enjoyed inherent advantages:

Small companies are nimble and intimate with customers. Big companies have
cost and expertise advantages through economies of scale.

Today, these worlds are colliding and the boundaries are completely blurred.

A natural change for small companies

Small companies can now leverage shared infrastructure like Amazon Web Services or Google Apps to drive down costs and enjoy economies of scale beyond what even large companies can imagine. Small companies can use services like oDesk or 99designs to access unique talent and expertise on demand and at low cost. Small companies can compete for consumer attention in small doses through Google AdWords and learn rapidly through metrics avoiding huge, high risk media spend.

A powerful ecosystem is working to solve these problems for SME’s. That elusive market has offered so much promise yet been difficult to capture and service until today’s models of engagement like SAAS emerged. Expect to see rapid innovation and adoption in this space.

Small companies are naturally hungry for savings and simple solutions to non-core activities. Moving to these new solutions won’t always be technically easy, but it will be culturally consistent for many organisations.

Cultural shift in big companies

Unfortunately for big companies, the changes are more cultural than technical.

Adopting new infrastructure solutions / meeting external benchmarks threatens existing organisations through giving up control or creating order-of-magnitude improvements to existing services.

Social media provides big companies with a unique opportunity to build customer intimacy beyond call center boundaries, but requires fast response and 1:1 service. Internal processes and standards need to change to perform on par with community expectations. Layered decision making through complex policies will almost always be too slow.

Finally, the agility and pace of change required will be slower than proponents expect and faster than resisters can believe. Agility and embracing change are internal cultural parameters notoriously difficult to alter.

Conclusion

Traditional boundaries and advantages between small and large companies are being eroded. Rather than small companies trying to grow up, large companies will try to reach small company standards for cost and intimacy (also see Small is the new big from Seth Godin).

The winners will be those that can iterate change and learn the fastest.

Meanwhile, consumers get increasingly intimate services at lower cost!

UI Design for Non-Designers - From Models to Hypothesis to Metrics

2010-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

Agree on a model

User interface design is filled with opinion and belief - something that many IT teams struggle to resolve (but enjoy discussing at length). A/B Testing adds science to the field, but is relatively late in the process of application development.

We need a better place to start when choosing an approach to application design. After all, our initial designs will set the style and standard of our application in users minds.

For our team, these three questions usually put us on the right path: * What is the end user trying to achieve and what is the simplest possible process to enable that? * What models or patterns can we copy from respected or inspirational sites to achieve that process / interface? * How can we make the experience consistent with our existing sites / applications? (If the new idea is better, how do we update them to match? If they are better, why are we doing something different now?)

The design hypothesis

All our applications go through a design review process during the Implementation phase of the Clarify, Simplify, Implement process.

First we discuss, challenge and agree on these UI models to be used. This is only be effective if the application designers have already been through these questions, asking them honestly and challenging their own design. (Don’t just look around for post-build justification.)

After agreement on these core principles and appropriate changes, the design review moves into a second phase of optimisation of the current design. This is where each field needs to be defended, pixel alignment becomes important and we do everything we can to reduce complexity and increase the aesthetic appeal of the application.

Optimisation with metrics

Now we have created our hypothesis of the best possible design for our application, we need to validate and improve it through A/B Testing, customer feedback and metrics.

The world isn't flat: Use enterprise context to enhance, not control

2009-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

Enterprises are rich in both context and control, while new social media sites start completely flat and without either. By embracing and extending our strengths, enterprises can take a shorter journey to successful and mature social media than the consumer models that inspire us.

Context and control

Most enterprise applications are built around two things:

Context - Who are you? What is your job? What are you trying to do?
Control - What are you allowed to do? What do we want you to focus on?

Public social applications start with neither, but work hard to build both over time:

Context - Who are you? Who do you know? What do you like to do?
Control - We prefer our members to participate and communicate in this manner.

Revolution and Enterprise 2.0

Practicioners attracted to Enterprise 2.0 typically start through a desire for revolution. We want to break out of the context and control forced on us by existing applications and cultural norms. We want new models to emerge, new opportunities to connect with others, new methods of working.

The best examples of these models are available in the consumer space, so our natural tendency is to recreate those tools inside the firewall. This also sits well with our desire for new models and new power. But, it is in direct conflict with the existing norms, powerbase and way of working.

We need to heed lessons on change from Machiavelli:

And let it be noted that there is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than to set up as a leader in the introduction of changes. For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only the lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new. This lukewarm temper arises partly from the fear of adversaries who have the laws on their side and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who will never admit the merit of anything new, until they have seen it proved by the event.

We need to embrace and extend.

Embrace and extend

Revolution towards a consumer equivalent involves the complete destruction or ignorance of existing context and control the organisation has created. This is a huge leap of faith and not one taken easily by any established organisation.

It’s also pointless. Mature social media requires high levels of context (more than enterprises have already) and at least some level of control / agreed behaviour.

A better approach is to embrace the existing context in your organisation. Seed your tools with information that we know to be relevant and expected. For example, when building an internal Twitter, automatically have everyone following their bosses, peers and/or direct reports. When implementing a wiki, setup areas for each existing part of the business. Don’t waste people’s time and energy requiring the recreation of structures that we already know, use and respect.

Don’t give up all aspects of control either. Some groups should have closed membership. Some areas should be locked for editing. That’s OK, the world isn’t flat.

But, extend both of the models above. Allow new context to develop without intervention. Remove controls that stop the development of context. Expect new controls and conventions to form within this community.

Conclusion

The context and control inside organisations is closer to the norms of mature social media applications than it is to new tools. By embracing the strengths of enterprise structures and extending by allowing users to create new context in emergent areas practicioners can drastically reduce the barriers to approval and adoption.

Successful Enterprise 2.0 uses context to seed flat tools, not to control them. Successful Enterprise 2.0 accepts controls on existing areas, but frees the organisation to create new areas, context and information. Successful Enterprise 2.0 knows that the world isn’t flat.

Comment by jilske on June 10, 2009 2:30 PM

Well written article, thanks for the insight Nathan. I can see how the synthesis of the enterprise and application context works as a catalyst allowing new synergies to develop and increase adoption. Did Machiavelli want to heed people to take baby steps and changes like embrace and extend? Does that mean there is no way to think about change more to set it up for success? Does this mean no matter how it goes about it, an enterprise won't succeed in mastering a new 'unmature' social media application as it still looking for its own context?

Comment by Project Pankaj on September 10, 2009 11:22 PM

Great article. We need more analysis on enterprise 2.0 technologies, and how they affect traditional management approches and theories. As someone with a management background, and working in the enterprise 2.0 industry, i can certainly relate to the subject!

Comments are closed.

Lachlan ... And then there were 4!

2009-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

Lachlan William Wallace was born in Sydney at 11:12am on the 2nd March 2009. Weight 3.62kg (8lb), height 54cm.

E2EF 2009 - Janssen-Cilag Case Study

2009-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Here are the slides I presented at the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum today.

Interested readers, may also like to see my detailed posts on these topics:

Removing one way screws from window locks

2009-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

All the old window locks in our house make use of one way screws. Basically, the groove on the screw head is designed with a sharp groove edge for screwing in, and a gentle slope offering no grip on the edge for unscrewing.

Personally, I’m sceptical of their security value. My parents house was burgled when I was growing up and the ease with which people can kick through a deadlocked door left a lasting impression on me. Blunt force trauma on window locks would be highly effective and much more direct than taking the time to unscrew the locks.

My initial removal plan was to drill out the old screw, which is a pearl of wisdom planted in my head from years of watching heist movies and having legend-in-our-own-lunchtime handyman conversations with friends.

After 15 minutes of drilling on a single lock, I began to suspect that my drill bits passed down over the years like family heirlooms may not be sharp enough to do the job effectively. Visiting Bunnings for new tool parts is always tempting, but there had to be an easier way.

I highly recommend using a hacksaw to cut a new groove in the screw. The window locks are raised from the window itself, making it easy to avoid damage. Removing all the locks only took a few minutes after I adopted this technique.

Juice: A user-centric approach to IT equipment and new starters

2008-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Introduction

A smooth new starter process and good day-to-day management of equipment are essential to the reputation and operation of all IT departments.

Traditionally, this is a never-ending cycle of standards, policies, delivery and backend information collection (CMDB). Frustrated users end up expensing high cost, non-standard equipment and building shadow IT solutions.

Determined to find a better way, we started a project with 3 aims:

It should be easier to buy something internally than externally.
Equipment orders and new starters are always urgent, so make that the default case.
IT needs macro-level control of standards and procurement. Users and managers need micro-level control of equipment and cost-benefit decisions.

With one person working on the process and another working on the system development, within 4 months we launched Juice. This case study presents our journey and results 12 months after launch, recognised by our Gold award in the Business Solutions category of the 2008 Intranet Innovation Awards.

Before Juice

High level standards were in place (e.g. Dell D630 laptop), but low level customisation was allowed (e.g. 4GB RAM instead of standard 2GB) leading to a wide range of parts and supported systems. With standards control and provision approval, ad-hoc decisions were continually required by IT as to what equipment should be supplied to individual users, for example, does this user do enough travel to justify a light-weight laptop? (Of course, in the end users work out to play the OH&S card and get what they want.)

Processes were designed for the best case (knowing weeks in advance about new starters), not the usual case (they start tomorrow). New equipment orders were placed as required, with a lead time of weeks to delivery and deployment. In addition, equipment was owned by and depreciated to individual cost centres throughout the business. This combination fostered a high level of ownership, but lead to protectionism, non-compliance, misallocation of costs and wasted resources as equipment sat in cupboards as departments tried to ensure a smooth entry for new starters.

This ad-hoc ownership and provision meant that broken equipment endured long downtime periods, particularly for remote users, as it was returned, fixed and then sent back. For new starters, equipment like PDA’s may even passed directly from ex-employees to new employees with no review, training or quality check.

Things worked before Juice, because everyone cared about the end user and worked hard to deliver. But, everyone was frustrated, spot fires were common and a lot of excess effort was required to make things run smoothly.

Managing equipment as kits

All equipment is now defined in kit form. For example: Dell D630 Laptop, BlackBerry 8100 Pearl, Lenovo 20” monitor docking station.

Each kit may have a number of accessories. For example: The Dell D630 Laptop includes a mouse, battery, carry bag, power pack and network cable. Whether they are new or previously used, shipped kits always include exactly those accessories. We chose to remove printed manuals, software CD’s, etc.

Lost or broken accessories may be individually replaced through single-click ordering. No approval is required as they are cheap and considered essential to the functioning of the kit. If a kit is returned incomplete, we simply charge the user for any missing accessories.

Each kit has a key item (e.g. the laptop itself). If that item is lost, stolen or broken then the entire kit is replaced. For example, we will send a completely new laptop kit including all accessories and ask for the old laptop / accessories to be returned. This ensures that we are always shipping kits complete and tested.

Where possible we use a “swap & repair” model to deal with problematic equipment and minimise downtime. For example, if a user is having trouble with their PDA we simply configure a new one and send it out immediately. The old PDA is then returned, repaired and reused in the future by another user.

This kit-based approach is highly flexible and allows the system to move beyond IT. We also track corporate credit cards, phone numbers and storage lockers as kits in Juice.

The financial model

We decided that departments must control their own costs, while IT provides standards, service and guidance. If IT is a gatekeeper to individual needs and owns costs we’ll always be crushed by low level decisions, limiting the business with strict policies and eventually worked around through shadow IT or creative business / safety / any reasoning.

Instead, IT must control the standards, options and service. While users and managers must own the cost and have the freedom to make personal equipment choices.

As such, in Juice all equipment is purchased, owned and depreciated by the IT department. Based on the cost and useful life of each kit, they are leased to users at a fixed daily rate. This has a number of advantages:

Equipment can be optimally moved between departments and users. (Items owned by individuals are heavily protected and difficult to relocate.)
Equipment moves from a hidden, uncontrollable cost (depreciation) to a controllable IT cost charged monthly. Managers can now engage in a conversation on how to reduce their IT costs or get better value for money.
Equipment is only required for active users & a buffer, so less capital is tied up in equipment for vacant positions.
Users only pay for a kit while they are using it. This encourages the reuse and return of equipment, and encourages IT to maintain the lowest possible inventory that meets service standards.

If a kit is lost, broken or stolen the residual value is charged to the owner’s cost centre. While harsh in some cases, this provides encouragement to properly care for and safeguard equipment at all times.

If a user chooses to replace or upgrade a kit, they pay half the residual value of the kit they currently own. (This is a deterrent to upgrading early, but also discourages people from just reporting the kit as lost or broken.)

In the end, IT owns macro-level standards, cost control and service levels. Users own micro-level decisions, needs and cost-benefit choices.

Approvals and workflow

New kits (e.g. I need a data projector), kit upgrades (e.g. I want a lightweight laptop), or kit replacements (e.g. I lost my PDA) require manager approval. This single step workflow is fast, effective and completed by the cost centre owner.

Replacement accessories do not require any approval, they are considered essential to keep the kit in good working order and charged immediately to your team cost centre. For transparency, these charges do appear in the managers monthly bill.

Users and managers have freedom, transparency and accountability for their purchase decisions and costs. IT has no involvement in these approval or workflow stages, we are not a gatekeeper. Our job is to maintain an appropriate menu of equipment, agree recommendations of standard kits per role and to provide high quality equipment, service and training.

Onboarding & Offboarding

Without good people control, you cannot have good asset or equipment control.

Juice synchronises each night with our HR system, detecting any additions, reductions or changes to the organisation structure. Juice also stores a position hierarchy for the business, including predefined employee types with standard equipment. We synchronise the HR changes with the position structure to create appropriate orders in the system.

As a result, we have no new starter forms for IT. This is a huge improvement from forms requesting accounts, ad-hoc requests for security access and equipment orders done on a person-by-person basis. For managers, the work has dramatically reduced. For new starters, the process is far more reliable.

Juice also stores cost centre and team information, inherited down through the organisational tree. With this information, Juice simplifies approvals and allocates charge backs.

Order fulfilment, stock management & asset tracking

A key insight during this project was the importance of separating procurement (purchasing equipment) from fulfilment (distributing equipment). In many cases, Juice is actually solving a fulfilment problem since equipment is reused in the constant turn of employees.

The fulfilment team configures equipment, fulfils orders, checks returned equipment and orders new stock. This is a high touch process with considerable side activities to streamline the business. For example, we consider the redirection of phone numbers and the handing out of phones with a full battery charge to be a standard part of our service. The impact on users of this is remarkable – they can walk away with a phone that is immediately ready for business.

Separating fulfilment from procurement allows us to aim for a 2 business day turnaround on all orders. Kits are ready for immediate shipping and stock is ordered in batches using a simple two-bin Kanban system with visual cues. (Tracking stock levels in Juice is tempting, but much more complicated than visual cues.)

An order is only complete after the recipient marks it as received in Juice. This ensures that the delivery loop is closed and the user is satisfied.

Tracking kits in Juice gives us a full inventory of all equipment, along with its current owner and history of movement. This can be used for asset tracking, identifying troublesome equipment and timely upgrade of old equipment.

Business impact

The first impression on new starters for IT and the business as a whole has been transformed. On their first day we can now hand them a computer, mobile phone, mobile broadband, etc all configured and in working order. This truly shows that we are an efficient, organised company who value your arrival and expect you to be productive. In feedback to HR, basic logistics has gone from the number one frustration of new users to the item they are most likely to raise as unprompted positive feedback.

For managers, the new starter process now requires no forms and works well regardless of the managers proactivity or experience in onboarding. This is a huge relief and reduced burden on their time.

For day-to-day equipment purchases the adoption of Juice has been phenomenal. Within a year we’ve gone from no visibility or control of purchases to more than 180 orders being fulfilled each month. That’s 180 times each month that users can stay focused on their core job rather than worrying about equipment choices, shopping trips or doing nothing and remaining less productive.

Beyond the volume of orders, a great measure of success is the requests we’ve received to expand the catalogue into other areas. Not only did users as for data projectors to be added to the catalogue, but soon after we were asked to add a standard offering for data projector screens. High usability and simple ordering is actually driving users to request standard offerings!

For IT, Juice has increased our accountability through transparency, but it has also made it much easier for us to deliver high quality equipment on time. The process is clear, the orders are standard and our metrics are defined. Beyond that, and perhaps unexpectedly, we’ve also found the transparency has made our users more patient when we have stock delays or high demand. They can see their order is in the system and can trust that it won’t be missed or forgotten.

In short, Juice increases both control and freedom. Users have the freedom to choose which equipment best suits their needs, and control over their individual costs. IT has control of equipment standards (the menu), purchasing decisions and quality delivery.

Integration & next steps

The Juice model of ownership, approvals and cost control is highly extensible and flexible. We’ve continued to evolve the “kits” on offer and extend the system to cover non-IT aspects of our employees needs.

Juice is the database driving the people search capabilities on JCintra.

Juice is used for billing of consumable costs such as the SMS send feature of JCintra and our mobile broadband billing. In time, we will integrate per page costs for printer use and mobile phone charges.

We’re continuing to improve the processes around Juice, streamlining various activities. We automatically order name plates for head office staff and manage storage locker information for shipping of materials to field staff. In time, we will automate the ordering of things like business cards.

We will also continue to explore the capability of Juice to make other usually hidden information visible to end users. We imagine permissions and rights like signing authorities or system access controls tracked as visible assets in Juice - automatically triggering their setup for new users or revocation for leavers.

Conclusion

Juice was a low cost project that has had a large and growing impact on the day-to-day productivity of our business. The Clarify, Simplify, Implement approach pushed our team to convert our delivery process, remove the barriers for users and transform the financial model.

With Juice, users and manages have the freedom to choose the service mix they need, while IT controls the provision, standards and delivery of high quality equipment. Jobs are simpler, roles are clearer and we don’t need to fight for freedom or control.

Jitter: Experimenting with microblogging in the enterprise

2008-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Introduction

In February 2008, Janssen-Cilag Australia & New Zealand launched an internal microblogging platform called Jitter. Combined with our intranet’s people search capabilities, this formed an interesting enterprise hybrid of Facebook & Twitter style capabilities. This People Search with Jitter solution received Highly Commended in the 2008 Intranet Innovation Awards.

While our intranet wiki JCintra continues to be highly successful, we wanted to keep building our culture of collaboration by capturing and highlighting the flow of ideas. We also wanted to make it easier for our field force to participate and collaborate.

This post is an overview of our approach and outlines some of the lessons learned for others to consider as part of their journey.

People Search with Jitter

This is the home page of the People Search component. Note the simple search box, followed by a list of recent/common searches and then a random face from the organisation.

On the right hand side you can see Jitter posts integrated with the main site news feed. The last 3 posts are shown as a group, and are injected into the news feed based on the latest post timestamp of the news / Jitters.

Searching for a name (e.g. Nathan) shows results from first or last name matches. This quick view allows immediate use of the telephone numbers etc, and incorporates information from our local company system (Juice) and other operating companies through integration with the Outlook Corporate Directory they populate.

Search results are immediate (no Enter click required) and use an AJAX component to prevent the need for full intranet page refresh.

Users may choose to search for a team name (e.g. Information), which returns a picture wall of faces from matching teams.

Note that team and individual results may be mixed together depending on the search term and matches.

Simple page displaying all information for Nathan Wallace. The latest Jitter post is integrated as a status message.

The organisational hierarchy is displayed, including peers, direct reports and his manager. Clicking on those faces navigates the hierarchy. Green arrows show if a team is present under that person.

SMS sending is integrated into the People Search. Messages can be addressed to individuals or entire teams.

If the sender has a mobile, the message appears to have come from their number. If not, there is no reply number, but instead a short text based name is shown on the recipients phone as the sender.

SMS costs are billed to the senders cost centre through the Juice system.

Users can post to Jitter by clicking “Update status” in the Jitter section of the news feed, clicking “update” in the Jitter section of their People Search profile or by sending a text message to the designated mobile phone number.

Posting is done inline, fast to complete and published immediately. Note that SMS following is also available in the system for real time notification of new posts.

An archive of previous Jitter posts is available for browsing.

Adoption and business impact

So far, 59 different people have contributed a total of 306 posts to Jitter. We’re excited that about 17% of people have tried posting, but disappointed that posting remains so infrequent and experimental. Here are some examples:

State of our public hospitals June 2008 report now available at: http://www.health.gov.au/ahca
Neuro Specialist Team your cycle meeting accreditation guide can be found on the Topamax specialist team private space. Please review prior to cycle!!
Suffering from glute meltdown…
Whoo-hoo! This weekend Trudi became the new Australian Swing Dance Balboa champion.
XYZ still appears to be down - I have requested ETA on when this may be back and will notify the business when I have an answer.
Please come and get some friday snacks from my fundraising box in downstairs kitchen. These are to buy new toys and equipment for my baby’s daycare.
Dear colleagues, I need a lift to Gordon or Pymble for the next 3 days. Anyone live that way ?
Jitter, Jotter, Blotter, Blatter, Matter! Does it?

Jitter has settled into a pattern as our informal news channel. It’s used for public congratulations, for sharing links and for short news flashes. This is a communication need that is infrequent, but not served by email (too intrusive) or JCintra news (too formal).

As a comparison, our SMS message sending tool has seen 104 users send 1852 messages to 5162 recipients. It is commonly used for announcements to the field force and individual messages from office based assistants to travelling executives. Usage has continued to grow each quarter since it was launched.

Lessons Learned

The flow of news on JCintra has been hugely successful and filled a natural need for the organisation. But Jitter wasn’t responding to a need, it tried to create demand. Open collaboration and idea sharing are common organisational goals, but that doesn’t mean there is latent demand among the people of the business for the tools that enable it. With any new organisational capability, always stay focused on end users and helping them to solve a problem.

While Jitter is a highly flexible tool that people are already using for a wide range of purposes, we didn’t do enough to position this new communication medium or to demonstrate the business value. People didn’t know how to use this new tool. Some feedback was negative, but overwhelmingly people asked “What do I post to it?”, “What’s the business value?”. Without clear answers, people just waited to see what others would do.

People have no idea what Twitter is. People have no idea what microblogging is. Most people don’t know what wiki’s, blogs or social networks are either. When explaining Jitter, one user was even worried that this meant that all the SMS text messages they sent to anyone would now be published on the Intranet. These technologies are natural and well known to people like us, but for the vast majority of people in the world they are new, confusing and weird. Remember to design your solutions and train people as though your mum is the key user!

Microblogging is particularly difficult to position as a business tool since it’s so hard to say anything worthwhile in so few characters. For an organisation starting the journey of sharing ideas and thoughts, blogging may be an easier starting point. Posts can be more serious and business like. Blogs are better known, and at worst look more like normal web pages. Authors can craft and position their entries to meet the political challenges and communication realities of the enterprise. Even if your organisation is ready for fast thoughts and short posts, authors can evolve towards really short blog entries.

Conclusion

In a recent post on microblogging in the enterprise Ross Dawson said “It’s a learning process. We must discover what a whole array of new communication technologies allow us to do as organizations. We don’t know yet. But we do know that they might make a massive difference to how effective we can be. So those who are the first to work it out will be ahead. No doubt about it.”.

At Janssen-Cilag, we’re a step or two closer to working it out.

Comment by Martin Bohringer on October 21, 2008 12:53 AM

Nathan, thank you very much for sharing this great insights with us. I am writing my master thesis about Enterprise Microblogging and are part of the communote-Team (http://www.communote.com). Maybe your users are just overwhelmed by the increasing number of available tools. It could be usefull to name a leading tool. In my opionion the Microblog could be this leading tool where i.e. new updates in the wiki or the personal profiles or the hierarchy are posted. You could also increase Jitter's usage in making it be policy. I.e. a project milestone is not finished until this was announced in Jitter and so on.

Comment by AbigailLB on November 04, 2008 11:30 AM

Hi Nathan, just got a report on microblogging that you might be interested in - will connect thru J&J with you. Abigail

Comment by Toby Ward on January 08, 2009 1:49 PM

Fantastic case study Nathan! I shall promote it on IntranetBlog.com. Any update you want to share? How many users now? And how many total employees do you have now?

Cheers,

Toby Ward
toby(at)prescientdigital(dot)com

Comment by Russell on January 13, 2009 9:40 PM

Thanks for sharing - I've added this to The Parallax View Social Media Case Study list:
http://theparallaxview.com/social-media-case-studies/

Comment by Yancy Lent on March 01, 2009 2:57 AM

Great Info!

I love the honesty, you're right many people don't get it. For those that do, and want to try it out in the enterprise, start with Broadcastr, a turn-key microblogging solution delivered on a VM: http://www.broadcastr.net.

Comments are closed.

Clarify. Simplify. Implement.

2008-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

Working through a wide range of projects, our IT team has settled into a consistent project methodology: Clarify, Simplify, Implement.

Clarify: Work with key stakeholders to understand drivers behind the process. Question motives and key assumptions. Turn over all the rocks to see what lies underneath. (In traditional software terms, this is requirements gathering.)

Simplify: Relentlessly question, review and challenge the processes and solution being developed. Drive for consistency. Search for well-known models or applications you can copy. Don’t be afraid to change basic assumptions, where simplicity can be enhanced. Always challenge the value of edge cases and try to eradicate them. Work hard to remove every single process, click, page view, icon, etc until you have something so simple that it feels right to everyone involved. (This is the primary value adding activity for IT.)

Implement: After the requirements are clear, and the solution distilled to its simplest form, start implementing. Do not start with a preconceived solution. Continue to loop through clarify and simplify while performing the implementation. (Use your preferred development methodology, provided it supports constant change and rapid prototyping.)

Tough love adds value

Consultants can gather requirements, and programmers can deliver code from anywhere in the world. But, tough love is only available from those you know and trust. This is the advantage and importance that internal IT teams offer.

External service providers make money through complexity and increased scope. It’s in their interest to understand your desires, validate them and then do more work to deliver the wish list. IT needs to reject this model, and help prevent the organisation from becoming as complex as it constantly tries to be.

Simplicity is making hard decisions up front so users can save time and effort in every interaction for all time. Assumptions must be challenged. The status quo should not be accepted as always correct. Trade offs must not be avoided.

Tough love and simplification change IT from a human power tool into a true business partner who provides both leadership and support. Tough love is different to just being tough, it includes love. IT should never be a blocker and will occasionally need to be forgiving. IT should be open in communication and have the best interests of the business at heart.

An essential part of Clarify, Simplify, Implement are design reviews. These form the ongoing basis for a loop of improvement beyond the initial pass of requirements gathering, simplification and implementation.

A design review includes the application/process owner, the key implementation team and a set of trusted peers. They systematically move through and challenge every process, screen, button, decision, layout and definition. Pixel alignment is important. Removing every excess user decision and superfulous design element matters. Entire pieces of the process or application may need to be redesigned or thrown out. Consistency is critical.

Design reviews are hard and tiring, but ultimately hugely rewarding. Project deadlines and a desire to move onto new problems make it hard to continually refactor your solution design and implementation. It’s tempting to stop at good enough, when great is just around the corner. Hours spent discussing alternative user interfaces and nitpicking over definitions can seem like wasted or unproductive time, particularly when your not sure if anyone will notice.

Design reviews take good solutions and make them great.

Zero training

Every user is time poor. They have no interest or time for attending training sessions. Training is the first and biggest hurdle to adoption of your new system and process. While complexity exists and training is required, users can always reject or work around the process with a politically acceptable excuse - “It’s too hard”.

Our aim, through simplification, is to make people’s life easier, reduce the burden on their time and remove all the excuses. The reward is adoption, engagement and relief that that finally it’s been done the way everyone always thought (individually) it should be.

Staying simple

After launch, when everyone loves the new system because it just seems to easy, is when discipline becomes truly critical. Feature requests, small changes and extensions will flow from users and every single one “should be easy to add”. The hard part is deciding which requests are worthy while ensuring that the system remains simple and consistent.

Clear, simple solutions challenge traditional project economics

With a robust process of clarification and simplication, two things happen:

The implementation phase is much easier. (e.g. multi-step, parallel workflow problems become one level approval).
The solution becomes very agile and iterative, since it’s only through the project process that new clarifications and simplifications become apparent.

Traditional enterprise software projects start with large, feature rich solutions that cover the complexity of features and organisational behaviour that appear to be “requirements”. Clarify, Simplify, Implement refuses to engage in projects until the status quo has been challenged leading to changes or understanding.

For example, we recently set ourselves the IT procurement challenge that “it should be easier to buy something internally than it is externally”. On our journey to achieving this, the obvious first step was inclusion of a shopping cart (we were using Amazon as a benchmark). But, when we saw it working we realised that using enterprise context (e.g. cost centres tied to individuals using single sign on) we didn’t even need the complexity of a cart. One click ordering is now the default process.

Project economics and style change to become:

Focused on user experience. All projects and features must provide a significant improvement to the user experience or process. If the cost of implementation outweighs that improvement, then keep looking for a simpler approach that is not so expensive to produce.
Just in time development and design. Accept that clarity and simplicity are a journey, no one has the vision to see that far in advance. Be disciplined enough to realise that sometimes small feature additions need large architectural change just to keep the overall application as simple and consistent as possible.
Optimised for lifetime value. The cost of an application must include the cost to end users of training, inconvenience and usage. For example, the cost of implementing single sign on must be compared to the cost of X users performing Y logins over Z years.

Small, simple projects are fast to prototype, easy to justify and responsive to business needs. Combining Clarify, Simplify, Implement with an iterative improvement process like the Continuous Application Release Cycle sets a journey of positive dissatisfaction and continuous improvement that will quickly change your organisation for the better.

Take the time to write short letters

Lack of time, politics and ego drive enterprises towards complexity. Complex solutions reflect our perception of the difficulty of our jobs, they reflect the important differences of every department involved and are an inevitable result of looking for quick wins by not challenging ourselves upfront.

As Mark Twain once wrote “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”.

Unfortunately, most project teams take this approach, saving on delivery time and hard conversations and effectively hiding lifetime project costs in lost productivity, frustration and training courses.

Clarify, Simplify, Implement challenges this process and demands the writing of short letters. Users will thank you for it.

Comment by lookielouie on February 24, 2009 10:58 AM

This is excellent advice, though I am not in IT, I teach beginner computer users, often seniors making the great leap, windows coverts tired of that difficult and unreliable platform, or those wishing to upgrade to an newer operating system or simply want to more fully understand, and use the existing system they own.

Was looking for an image to illustrate an article on this very topic, and got caught up reading your blog. Perfect. Would like to use it in Mac computer group newsletter, which I edit and publish, Full attribution will be given.

Write on!

Comments are closed.

Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum - Janssen-Cilag Case Study Presentation

2008-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

Here are the slides I presented at the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum this week.

Interested readers, may also like to see my detailed posts on the same topic:

Continuous Application Release Cycle

2007-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

Introduction

The Continuous Application Release Cycle is a simple process for providing predictable, stable releases in a rapid and sustainable way. It is not a detailed methodology for release planning, development or testing.

Agile methods, open source development and online applications (often in perpetual beta) have established the power of fast iterations and release of minor versions. Release early, release often! I’ve successfully used the Continuous Application Release Cycle with high velocity applications ranging from publically downloadable software (Sauce Reader) through to internal enterprise web applications.

The Continuous Application Release Cycle

Adopting this cycle brings certainty and momentum to end users while ensuring continuous improvement and low risk release management for developers. Developers move seamlessly from one version to the next, with only a small cross-over for bug fixing during the Beta period.

Release planning is a high level determination of the features and bug fixes that will be incorporated into the release.

Feature development & Bug fixing is the rapid development of wide-spread code changes to implement the planned features.

Design review & Feature freeze is a formal examination of the design and implementation of features for this release. Ensure they are neatly integrated into the application and do not compromise its integrity or simplicity. Build a final design / development plan to finish integration of the features, or delay their release until a future version.

Final development, Help & training and Bug fixing is a finalisation phase, with consolidation and review of the code base. New capabilities may be added to finalise features, but major surgery should be avoided. Help and training materials for new features are constructed in parallel.

Beta launch puts the application through standard test suites and launches to the Beta user group.

Beta testing & Bug fixing has Beta users installing, trying and testing new application features. Appropriate bugs may be fixed with careful control and testing.

Launch puts the application through standard test suites and launches to all users on production.

Production is wide-spread use of this application version. Bugs and feedback are collected for integration into the next version.

The CARC in practice

The length of the cycle varies depending on the type of application, but I’ve found that monthly releases work well in practice. The development phase lasts about 4 weeks, with 1 week of Beta testing before launch. Each version is in production for about 4 weeks.

The fast development cycle means each release has fewer changes, facilitating a short testing cycle and removing the heavy crunch that typically accompanies software releases. For developers, the key delivery date is the release to Beta testing. With experience, the release to production becomes increasingly routine.

Regular, planned releases keeps developers close to customer needs and allows rapid response to application problems or competitive features. End users enjoy a sense of momentum from the application, and become increasingly engaged as their suggestions, feedback and problems are quickly addressed.

Building Enterprise 2.0 on Culture 1.0

2007-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

Introduction

JCintra, our Intranet Wiki, has seen incredible levels of adoption and participation, with a positive impact on the way information flows in our organisation.

Over 18 months, JCintra amassed 23,335 content contributions from 239 (~70%) people. The number of contributions per month continues to increase steadily.

But, JCintra continues to function as an incredibly easy to use Intranet, rather than as a genuine Wiki. In fact, 85% of our 3000 pages only have one contributing author. (Interestingly, this behaviour occurs even at Atlassian, who build Wiki software as their business!)

This article documents our cultural journey so far, and outlines our ideas for driving the next phase of change.

Technical and Cultural Maturity

What does success look like?

Decisions about information sharing in organisations like Janssen-Cilag are complex. Some information should be open, but isn’t. Some information needs to be closed and controlled. Some ideas should be discussed in the open, while other ideas need to be carefully communicated.

Success is defined by what we do, not what we have the opportunity to do. Implementing a Wiki isn’t success, building an organisation that will take collective ownership and collaboratively edit content is. Technology creates opportunity for changes of behaviour and helps shift the conversation away from excuses (it’s too hard) to reasons (it’s too risky).

Frankly, at Janssen-Cilag, we don’t yet know exactly how we should be communicating and collaborating. But, we do know that the steps we’ve taken so far have improved communication, increased our flexibility and given people the power to run with ideas. We want to continue this journey, pushing more power to the edge of the organisation.

The Enterprise Collaboration Maturity Model

All knowledge work is either individual or group based, and it is always performed in an individual, shared or open environment.

The Enterprise Collaboration Maturity Model depicts these work models, and incorporates the cultural journey that enterprises take to reach each stage. Currently, Janssen-Cilag provides an open Wiki (high capability maturity) but primarily uses it as Groupware (medium usage maturity).

To continue our journey, Janssen-Cilag needs to become comfortable with the idea that published content is not finalised. Specifically, we need users to:

Make contributions in an open space that are not policy or announcements.
Edit work or information that is owned collectively.

Successful Enterprise 2.0 style collaboration requires both technical and cultural maturity. While technology opens immediate potential, organisations must grow towards new patterns of usage and collaboration.

The two cultural barriers to collaboration

There are dozens of reasons and millions of excuses as to why people won’t share knowledge; but they all fall within two areas:

Sharing knowledge adds more work (“I don’t have time to share”); and
Sharing knowledge increases personal risk (“I don’t want to share”).

These negatives cannot be eradicated, but they can be minimised.

Reducing additional work

Collaboration and knowledge sharing take time. The technical process takes time, but more significantly, wording your thoughts takes time.

Tools for collaboration must do everything possible to reduce the friction of contributing. It needs to be so easy to use, that you can literally laugh at anyone who tells you it is too hard (in a nice, let me show you, kind of way). In practice this means single sign on, one-click editing and instant gratification on saving. Hurdles like slow technology, login screens, workflow approvals or training kill collaboration before you even start.

The time taken to correctly phrase thoughts and distil ideas is unavoidable, but can be minimised by changing our expectation of shared content away from “finished product” towards “work in progress”. Publishing information early and often (rather than infrequently and completely) moves authorship away from essays and succinct conclusions towards sharing of insights and decisions. The ultimate method for sharing without increasing work is to move the work in progress into an open environment (share everything by default).

Policy opportunities exist to move (but not reduce) the work of sharing knowledge. For example, information is shared verbally on the condition that the recipient will publish it for wider consumption. He who asks, documents. A solution like this rewards the giver with time, builds knowledge on-demand and provides learning reinforcement for the recipient.

Collaboration and knowledge sharing increase personal risk by creating a published, traceable flow of inputs (My mistakes are permanently recorded!) and making past information less valuable than new ideas (What if they don’t need me anymore?).

Risk can be offset by increased rewards, such as recognition for contributions or performance objectives based around knowledge sharing. In practice however, these are hard to implement or judge.

In fact, most people are comfortable with publishing or sharing “finished product”. At Janssen-Cilag we’ve seen this through high usage of news announcements and publication of documents. Unfortunately, most knowledge work is a constant work in progress without a clear end-point and thus never reaches the point of being shared.

The solution is to encourage content contributions that are finished enough to be low-risk publishable, but are not so big as to never reach completion. Encourage people to contribute to a flow of insights and decisions that are made as part of larger projects. Adding to the flow of information (I’m adding to the discussion) is far less risky than publishing final knowledge (I own the final decision) or changing existing content (I’m changing the company position).

Own the flow and the stocks will come

News announcements have been the most successful part of JCintra. Open for publishing by anyone in the organisation, they have replaced email for announcements ranging from major organisational change through to baby announcements.

Through this flow of news, JCintra has become the trusted source for the latest information. “Did you see the announcement on JCintra?”, is not an uncommon question around the office. As a result, users also expect JCintra to have the latest policies and information. By owning the flow of news, we’ve created the trusted source for information stocks.

There are three critical information flows, each of which creates its own stock over time:

The flow of news becomes a stock of facts and decisions.
The flow of projects becomes a stock of investigations and outcomes.
The flow of ideas becomes a stock of potential and experts.

A focus on capturing the flow has many advantages:

The system always contains the latest information, building trust and adoption.
The process is easy to enforce and success is readily measured (by monitoring email announcements, the only alternative).
Work and risk is minimised for contributors.
Through search, archived flows become a rich and readily available stock.

Over time, the flow of decisions and insights washes over the organisation, helping each person refine their mental map and build a personal body of knowledge. When new items fit their mental model, they can be increasingly confident and aligned in decision making. When news doesn’t fit their mental model, they can seek clarity or raise an area of concern.

Focus on owning the flow of information, then have the patience to watch the stocks gradually compile.

Manifesto for Collaboration Tools

Shamelessly stealing from the Agile Manifesto, I propose the following values for building Enterprise 2.0 collaboration systems:

*Individuals and interactions *over processes and tools.
Ease of use over comprehensive training.
Flexible tools over completeness.
Responding to needs over creating demand.

(That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.)

We are building processes and tools to help with collaboration, but should never forget that the main thing is that people actually work together and talk to one another. We don’t need to capture every conversation or every piece of knowledge, we just want to strengthen weak ties.

Training in systems is important, but only after we’ve done everything possible to design for zero training. In an enterprise, your Mum really is the end user; design for her! Always sacrifice features and power for ease of use. The minute you have to train people you will lose them to the “more work” excuse.

It’s tempting to aim for tools that deliver exactly what people need in different scenarios. To always take tools that one step further to capture their exact requirements. In reality, people like to push and abuse tools that are comfortable, flexible and part of their every day work (e.g. email, Excel). Wiki’s, blogs and search are great examples of simple tools that can be used for a myriad of purposes without needing a million customisations or extensions.

Finally, deliver solutions that meet an existing need. If you build it, they won’t come. But, you can build it around where they already are.

Next steps for Janssen-Cilag

At Janssen-Cilag, our Wiki has settled into a steady pattern of news publication and simple intranet editing. It is well established and respected for these tasks. Our aim is to build on the strengths of JCintra, while expanding into new areas of knowledge capture.

First we will make internal blogging available to all employees. Links to new posts will be interspersed with news on the home page, creating a flow of ideas in the trusted location but not taking valuable attention away from the full content news items. The people directory will also have direct links to recent posts.

Second, we’ll add a Twitter / Facebook style status capability to the people directory which has a history and can be updated via SMS. This is a powerful micro-blogging solution for our field personnel and will be integrated with the Office Communicator Note field. Recent status updates will also be incorporated into the home page news feed, but in a very lightweight way. (The Jitter screenshot shows our early experiment in this area, which we have decided not to launch but instead integrate into the people directory.)

Finally, we hope to expand our internal project management offering with something in the style of Basecamp, which can create a feed of project related milestone news for the home page.

Overall, the aim is to build on the strengths of JCintra by adding ideas and project milestones to the flow of information that washes past people on the Intranet home page. With time this will build a powerful stock but, most importantly, it immediately provides ideas and stimulation to drive interactions between individuals.

Conclusion

Successful Enterprise 2.0 style collaboration requires both technical and cultural maturity. Janssen-Cilag has adopted an open Wiki with the potential for collective ownership, but usage remains dominated by individual contributions to a shared space. This is reflected in the high usage of JCintra’s news column for announcements and the regular publishing of team and policy information.

To encourage an organisational shift along the enterprise collaboration maturity model, Enterprise 2.0 leaders should focus on capturing the flow of information. Over time, the flow builds not only a stock of searchable knowledge but also a reputation as the source of fresh ideas and trusted up-to-date content.

Building on the success of our Intranet Wiki, Janssen-Cilag plans to introduce internal blogging and personal status updates to encourage the flow of individual insights and decisions.

Note: Here are some of the articles I read while writing this post. Thanks also go to my team without whom this would all be theory.

Comment by sandy on December 05, 2007 8:21 AM

Glad that my post on ebizQ was helpful in researching your post. That post, and all of my subsequent ones, have been moved to my own domain at www.column2.com.

Comment by Wax on December 06, 2007 2:16 AM

Wow! This Janssen-Cilag tool seems to be so complex! I'd rather stick to Wrike, which is lightweight and simple. I have a small business and Wrike has been a perfect solution for me so far.

Comment by hbflynn on December 06, 2007 6:22 AM

great post... love the association to Agile, that has given me some great ideas.

Comment by Marcel on December 14, 2007 7:57 AM

Thanks for sharing all of this. Some great lessons.

Marcel

http://www.shapingthoughts.com

Comment by Stewart on January 09, 2008 11:49 AM

@Nathan - this is excellent. Maybe the best assessment I've seen so far of the challenges involved in changing an organization's culture. The stats on JCintra sounds excellent!

BTW, is it just me or does that same poster keep popping up on quite a few wiki related blog posts and shilling for Wrike? This is the third or fourth time I've seen that thinly veiled marketing pitch in a comment. Note to @wax - comments like that are easy to see through.

Cheers,
Stewart

Comment by Jenny Ambrozek on June 07, 2008 10:31 PM

Interestingly your SERIOUS wiki case appeared in a search for Enterprise 2.0 Open Boston that I'm attending next week. I wonder if you've submitted to Andrew McAfee's Cases 2.0 wiki so it is more readily available.

Your comments on 'culture" resonated. My blogging colleague and I have a piece coming in Effective Executive Magazine that was inspired by Bob Buckman's March 2007 comment to the AOK Yahoo Group:

"but I never did try and manage knowledge. What I really tried to manage and nurture was a culture that would encourage and expand the flow of knowledge.".
~ Robert H. Buckman
http://tinyurl.com/5czyo8

Fortunately we were able to interview Mr. Buckman for our article and he reiterated:

"If you look at it from the standpoint of how much effort it takes to achieve and effect knowledge sharing across an organization, you will find that the technology piece is about 5 to 10 percent of the effort, changing the way work is done is the 90 to 95 percent of the effort. You can define the effort as time or as money, it still comes out about the same" ~ Robert H. Buckman

Best with all your endeavours.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Comments are closed.

Metaphors for interface design

2007-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Over the last few years, user experience has become my primary focus when building processes and systems. But, I never truly understood the importance of interface design until I read this post by Andy Rutledge.

Andy intelligently draws a metaphor where words represent content (what you are saying) and body language represents interface design (how you look as you say it). He also beautifully illustrates that a huge component of all communication is non-verbal, although it is less than the sensationalist 93% that people inaccurately extrapolate from Mehrabian’s communication study.

What is your interface design saying?

Our Intranet, the Wiki: Case Study of a Wiki changing an Enterprise

2007-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Introduction

Janssen-Cilag is one of the fastest growing, research based pharmaceutical companies in Australia. It has more than 300 employees, split across Australia and New Zealand with around half based in the field. It is one of 250 Johnson & Johnson operating companies, which total about 121,000 employees across 57 countries.

In 2006, Janssen-Cilag completely replaced our simple, static HTML intranet with a Wiki solution. Over the 16 months since launch, it has dramatically transformed our internal communication and continues to increase in both visits and content contributions each month.

History of Janssen-Cilag’s Intranet

Janssen-Cilag’s previous intranet, InfoDownUnder, was a static HTML site, originally developed in 2001. Content was maintained using FrontPage, with only a handful of active editors throughout the company. IT was involved only to upload latest versions of content files from the development site onto the production server.

While some areas were lovingly maintained to a high standard, large sections of content were out of date. There was no search capability. Trust in the information was very low. News was distributed via email, not the web. The site featured excessive use of the blink tag, and New! icons highlighting content that was up to 3 years old.

Latent demand for change was strong.

Intranet requirements gathering

The culture at Janssen-Cilag is highly consultative and relationship based. As such, gathering information and buy-in is often achieved through a series of conversations and discussions, building a coalition of support.

Requirements for a new Intranet site were collected through 27 interviews with a variety of people from all levels of the business. Three themes emerged:

We need a trusted source of information
Whatever we do has to be simple
Just do something!

Each conversation varied widely in focus, but the format usually went as follows:

The floodgates open with a dump of information the user considers vital for the Intranet, which lasts about 15 minutes. (What can I get?)
They highlight search as a key requirement.
I would steer the conversation to questions about how content should be maintained. (What can you give?)

Pitching a Wiki to the business

With many years of experience building one of the first large scale completely open collaboration platforms for the web and then building heavyweight enterprise CMS systems for large organisations, I’ve personally come full-circle to the idea that the best collaboration systems are incredibly simple and open. Wiki’s are a powerful starting point for any organisation, but latent demand at Janssen-Cilag created the perfect environment.

As such, I used the requirements gathering session as a chance to pitch the idea of a Wiki as the solution to our Intranet problem. After bringing the conversation to understand our content maintenance requirements, I’d talk through the Wiki approach and how it may work for Janssen-Cilag. My sales pitch went as follows:

We need a system where editing is immediate and very simple.
Getting people to contribute at all is hard, so we need to concentrate on letting people do things rather than worrying about what they shouldn’t do.
The risk of letting anyone change anything is low, since we’ll keep a complete history of changes so we can quickly undo mistakes and we can hold irresponsible individuals accountable for anything improper. (Reactive moderation rather than Proactive moderation).

In general, the response was incredibly positive. Predictably, the main argument against this system was fear of improper changes to content, particularly for information subject to regulatory control. I would counter this argument in two ways:

There are two ways to control people’s behaviour: social forces and technical forces. Currently, we successfully rely on social forces to control a wide range of things like who calls or emails the CEO with their latest crazy idea. Technical forces are powerful, but with each technical feature we increase training and raise the bar against collaboration. Surely, we can see if social forces will be enough for all but the most critical of content?
Anyone can choose to monitor any content that they are concerned about (e.g. automatic email alert with changes). So, they can quickly jump in and correct any mistakes.
For exceptional cases, we may choose to lock down critical content and define clear ownership and responsibility for its maintenance.

At the end, showing people around Wikipedia was an incredibly powerful way to seal the deal, particularly since they have often used it to find information in the past.

There were no major objections to trying a Wiki-style concept.

Implementing a Wiki for your Enterprise Intranet

We purchased, customised and launched a pilot Wiki Intranet within two weeks and with a budget of $11,000 AUD. This included all graphic design and single sign on integration.

After evaluating a wide range of alternatives including MediaWiki, Twiki and FlexWiki; we selected Confluence by Atlassian. Our main concerns were support for a hierarchy of pages, strong attachment capabilities, news features, LDAP integration, high quality search and a decent rich text editor.

Our customisation focused almost completely on usability. People shouldn’t know or care that they are using a Wiki. All that matters is that they can easily browse, search and contribute content. (In fact, after 16 months, only a small set of Janssen-Cilag staff would think of our Intranet as a Wiki. To them, it just seems natural that Intranet software would have evolved to something this simple to use.)

Here were our implementation decisions:

Integration with LDAP and use of NTLM for automatic single sign on is essential. We even hacked someone’s starting point and open sourced our improved version.
Rich text editing must be available and as Word-like as possible.
Users like hierarchy and structure, the Wiki should not feel disorganised or completely free-form. (Confluence supports this with an exact page hierarchy capability.)
Sacrifice power and flexibility for simplicity. For example, our page design is fixed into a title, alphabetical list of subpages, page content, alphabetical list of attachments. While it would be nice to be able to change this at times, or order the attachments, or change the look and feel; it’s far more important that everyone can contribute and clearly understands how things work.
Remove as many unnecessary features as possible. For example, labels are a great idea, but we already have hierarchy and most users don’t really know what labels are.

Launch & user training

We started the new site as a pilot, launching as the source of information for a relocation of our head office. (Nothing drives traffic like the seating plan for a new office!) Information around the relocation was fast moving and changing daily for the two weeks between announcement of the move and our actual relocation.

Building on that success, we obtained executive approval to replace the existing Intranet. Over the next two weeks we worked with key content owners (most particularly HR) to show them how to create pages and migrate appropriate information. We made the decision to not automatically migrate any content, mostly because it was so old and trust in the existing intranet information was so low.

Our launch was timed with an informal head office monthly meeting, where around 100 people stand and listen to an update from senior management. We switched the site to live during the meeting, and had 5 minutes to present:

1 min: Highlight the desire for a trusted source of information that was simple to use.
3 mins: Full training that showed how easy it was to view, search, edit & maintain.
1 min: Point out that responsibility for building that trusted source is now in your hands!

That launch presentation remains the only formal training we’ve ever provided on how to use the system.

Continuing training has been provided through short one-on-one demonstrations (we only show, we never do) and a detailed help section (I’m happy to show you now, but for future reference here is the help page).

Adoption, statistics & business impact

The adoption of JCintra has been remarkable. After only 3 months, 111 people had contributed more than 5,000 changes. After 12 months, we had 18,000 contributions from 184 people within the business.

Most significantly, our contributions per month has continued to grow since launch. People are engaging and collaborating more with time, they are not losing steam as you might expect.

To drive adoption, we’ve primarily focused on owning the flow of new information. Early on, we established a policy that all announcements must be on JCintra. When necessary, they may be sent via email in addition to posting as news on the Intranet. Today, announcements ranging from major restructures to new babies for employees flow through the news page without clogging up email inboxes.

Owning the flow of news has established JCintra as a trusted source for the latest information. This translates into an expectation that the stocks of information (e.g. policies) will be available and up to date. Own the flow and the stock will come.

Business information that was previously scattered in email (e.g. Business Planning presentations) is now collected into a permanent, secure online space. We have a growing reference and history of information to build on and make available to newcomers. Knowledge management, previously a big concern, has moved off the agenda for the time being.

Content ownership model

For many Intranet owners, the model for content ownership is a key point of focus. With JCintra, our philosophy (successfully so far) has been:

If someone isn’t willing to maintain a piece of content, it can’t be that important to the business.
We happily show people how to do things with the site, but we don’t do it for them.
Occasionally we highlight sections of the site on the home page, which is a great way to drive the defacto owners to clean it up a little.
We encourage people to have high expectations for content on the Intranet. If something is missing, please report it to the appropriate area of the business, or better still, add it for them.
The answer to verbal queries for many departments has become, “it’s on JCintra”. This reminds people to search first and ask later.
In the end, the quality of content in an area is a reflection on the defacto department owner, not the Intranet itself.

As a result, we’ve seen some departments embrace the Intranet in a big way, while others don’t update content as much as we’d like. As expected, service areas of the business have been strong adopters, which means the main areas of Intranet content have been well maintained.

We’ve not yet adopted a formal content review process, but believe this will become more important in the next year of the sites life.

Keeping momentum & next steps

The primary barrier to continued success of JCintra remains the same as our initial barrier: encouraging a culture of collaboration and transparency. Some areas of JCintra have been highly successful in this regard, while other sections have never gained clear ownership or momentum.

JCintra works best when it is established as the source of truth for information and becomes the place where the work is done on a day-to-day basis. While ever the Intranet is a place that has to hold a published copy, it will remain as “extra work” and struggle in the competition for people’s time.

Conclusion

Implemented with usability and simplicity as the key focus, a Wiki is a fast, cheap and highly effective way to run an Intranet. Users do not perceive our Intranet as a Wiki, with all the anarchistic overtones that brings. Rather, they see the simplicity and flexibility as a natural evolution of Intranet technology.

In a culture full of all the typical trust, transparency, workload and security concerns common to big companies; the simplicity of this system and its content ownership model cut through. Problems of driving collaboration and content updates remain, but they are exposed as the cultural and people problems at their heart since the technical and workload “excuses” have been stripped away.

Note: Our Intranet has evolved significantly from the screenshots above, which were taken from the time of launch to avoid business confidentiality issues in this public forum. The site now includes a wealth of content and tight integration with our data warehouse, CRM and internal operational systems. Read more in Building Enterprise 2.0 on Culture 1.0.

Comment by jon silvers on August 21, 2007 7:44 AM

Hey Nathan, this is an awesome case study. Thanks for posting it! It's interesting how you didn't use the word wiki when you launched the intranet, avoiding a lot of questions, getting people focused on the task, not the technology.

Comment by Mark Wiseman on August 21, 2007 8:15 AM

Nathan, I liked your focus on simplicity and utility. All to often when new technology is introduced the technology champions want to focus on the technical issues. Well done!

Comment by Stephen Collins on August 21, 2007 8:02 PM

Nathan, have you considered posting this to cases2.com? cases2 is run by Dr Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School. He originated the Enterprise 2.0 term and is doing a lot of work to evangelis successful implementations like yours.

I think you have an ideal example here.

Comment by Anonymous on August 25, 2007 11:41 PM

Didn't find a contact page on e-gener, so I'll post this here.

Looking for some info on php, I stumbled upon this page:

http://mythink.wordpress.com/2007/06/14/php-first-principles/

Seems a non-credited copy-paste from

/v1/articles/php-hackers-paradise-revisited.htm

to me, so I thought I'd let you know.

Regards,
anonymous

Comment by Mnementh on August 28, 2007 1:47 PM

Hi Nathan. This post really struck home, particularly the sales pitch. So often, issues with control end up stiffling projects like this. And all that ends up happening is a lot of works goes into an intranet that nobody uses.

Comment by Patrick on September 20, 2007 2:38 PM

Nathan, I posted this on actKM Forum, where I think people might be interested in your response:

Nathan, I wonder if you'd oblige by answering a few questions here on the forum as several members are not active in the blogosphere? Let me suggest upfront that anyone participating in the conversation is ok with you reposting the conversation on your blog if you want to, with attribution to the forum? I have three questions:

1). I think your sales pitch is incredibly powerful - I'd like to understand a little bit more about why the adoption decision happened. I'm assuming that there were four main factors at play:
(a) your argument
(b) the consultation process
(c) your team's credibility - trust
(d) price vs perceived risk (ie ease of undoing the decision)

I know it's a difficult question to answer, but how would you weight those factors in what actually happened? Which were the most important factors (or were there others that I have missed)?

2). What were your three biggest challenges/hurdles in the whole process from consultation to successful active use of the intranet?

3). If a public sector agency (which tends to see itself as more conservative in accountability, record keeping, control) were to be thinking about using a wiki for an intranet or another use, what would your advice to the KM/IT team be?

Thanks Nathan

Patrick

Comment by Tony Branfort on September 21, 2007 10:34 AM

Nathan - Thank you for an incredibly well written and smart study. Great job.

Comment by Jennifer Kelley on September 25, 2007 10:38 AM

Nathan, Thanks for this case study! It's comforting to know there's another company out there who has successfully used a wiki as their intranet. We're aiming for the same ourselves, in a global company with over 5000 employees. It seems the only way to leverage the incredible popularity of our wiki, where we have witnessed our users rebuilding the intranet themselves (unprompted). Your experience is especially useful! Could you update on your experience with integrating other the other business, CMS systems with the wiki intranet?

Comment by Anonymous on September 30, 2007 6:38 PM

Hi Nathen,
I'd like to adress the issue of editing on the wiki platform.
editing in wiki is very basic using objects such as tables and other graphical elements become quite difficult.
How did you adress the issue that the users want to have 'interesting pages' with murquee, spaces, tables, images etc. and the low "out of the box" abilities of the wiki?

Thanks,
Galit

Comment by Nathan @ e-gineer on October 23, 2007 5:32 AM

Anonymous: Thanks for the tip off, unfortunately there are a huge number of rip off copies of that article.

Comment by Nathan @ e-gineer on October 23, 2007 5:41 AM

Anonymous #2: Your question about editing is an important one, and usually overlooked by Wiki builders.

The browser-based WYSIWYG editing in Confluence is not as good as I've seen or as good as we need. This would be my primary feature request or feedback to Atlassian about the product.

It's interesting to see what people expect to be able to do with the editor, my favourite common question is why they can't simply paste an email or document into it.

In general, the editor is good enough to support lists, simple tables and picture insertion. We've seen these features work well in team pages (first created by business users) which include details, photos, etc.

In the end, I want people to focus more on what they are writing and less on making it look pretty with pink borders. The simpler their content, the easier it is to maintain and the better it will work with search results.

We had some complaints about the restrictions at the start, mostly from people comfortable in FrontPage etc. But, those have died down completely at this stage.

When people want to focus on funky design they simply create a Word or PDF doc and attach it.

Comment by Nathan @ e-gineer on October 23, 2007 5:53 AM

Jennifer: Through (clever) use of IFRAME's, design for small inserts and silent authentication, we now have the appearance that many of our systems are tightly integrated with the intranet. This includes sales figures from the data warehouse, our CRM, People Search, IT process & asset management.

I cannot stress enough what an amazing difference it makes when you convert numbers or graphs from a report 3 clicks away into a good looking chart immediately visible on the home page of your Intranet!

Design integration remains our current focus for next steps with the Intranet Wiki. I'll write about this more in the coming months as our ideas refine (and we have a small competitive advantage through leadership).

Comment by Anonymous on October 28, 2007 10:08 PM

Nathan, this is an awesome thing. Thanks for posting it! New technologies is important thing. Well done!

Comment by Scott Abel on March 02, 2008 1:27 AM

Nathan:

I'd like to get permission to reprint this post (wiki case study) on TheContentWrangler.com. Let me know what you think. You can reach me at scottabel AT mac dot com. I'll gladly include your bio, headshot, and information about your blog.

Let me know.

Scott Abel

Comment by Nathan @ e-gineer on March 04, 2008 6:51 AM

Hi Scott ... Sorry, but I do not want this article reprinted on other sites. Thanks for asking, Nathan

Comment by Yulna on July 01, 2008 10:18 PM

Nathan,
We are also considering Confluence but I get resistance for the basic layout. My HTML knowledge is not that good. How can I improve the basic look of Confluence? I like the look of your site.Did you use Adaptivist? Do I need to develop it in Javascript? Can you give me your email that I can mail you?

Comment by Steven Noble on July 17, 2008 9:59 AM

Hey Nathan,

Great to see you quantifying the uptake of the tool. (Number of contributions, etc.)

Have you also quantified the business impact? (Knowledge retained; time saved; etc.)

Regards,

Steven.

Comment by K9 on August 18, 2008 7:18 PM

Nathan, thank you for sharing your experiences. For people like me who think IT is a tool that brings people closer together rather than a cost this is inspirational. Nayan

Comment by Nathan @ e-gineer on August 29, 2008 11:42 PM

@Yulna: Modifying the look & feel of Confluence is doable, but non-trivial as the changes tend to be spread through many files. We implemented the changes in a few days through experimenting and changing various source files. Maintaining these changes through releases has not been easy however.

Having said that, I cannot stress enough the importance of working hard to improve the usability of your Wiki.

Comment by Nathan @ e-gineer on August 29, 2008 11:54 PM

@Steven: Business impact is always more difficult to quantify, particularly in terms of qualitative measures like knowledge retained. Hence our focus on quantitative metrics.

But, as an example, let's take email saved. Each time we post a news item to JCintra rather than sending it via email, we effectively avoid 300 copies of that email being received & stored. JCintra averages about 3 news items per day. 3 items * 300 people * 50 weeks * 5 days = 225,000 emails.

So, not only does JCintra reduce our email received & stored by more than 200,000 per year. It also builds a searchable collection of 750 news items or facts for future reference as "knowledge".

Comment by Mark on October 07, 2008 9:19 AM

Thanks for sharing your experience! My organization is extremely resistant to change, but I like your argument that the (imagined) potential for misuse is far outweighed by the (real) benefits of collaboration. The site's role should be 'Get out of the user's way!'

Comment by Daniel on November 21, 2008 7:59 AM

Hi Nathan,
I'm trying now to push a wiki in out company, but I'm facing some resistance. This post will help me very much to show some actual experience.

Daniel
http://design-to-last.com

Comments are closed.

Getting your Blogger blog listed in search results

2007-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

3 months after her birth and simultaneous notification to the Google Crawler for indexing, Elimena.com was still not showing up in Google’s results (or other search engines for that matter). I was shocked it was taking this long, and had resubmitted multiple times.

In desperation today, I thought it might be related to the Javascript trick I’m using to show the Flash Movie Header as a link that doesn’t require activation to use. Looking at the source code, I noticed this fatal tag on every page of the site:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"/>

being added automatically by the Blogger template tag:

<$BlogMetaData$>

I was confused, since my e-gineer blog, also powered by Blogger, doesn’t add this when using the BlogMetaData template tag.

To fix this check the following Blogger setting:

Login to Blogger.
Go to Settings, then Basic tabs.
Ensure that Add your blog to our listings? is marked as Yes.

If your blog is suspected as spam by Blogger, and they force you to enter a captcha code everytime you post, you can submit your blog for review by Blogger staff which should fix the problem.

If all else fails, simply copy all the code you need that is produced by the <$BlogMetaData$> tag and paste it into your template in place of the tag itself.

Cost allocation model for shared services

2007-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

Introduction

Earlier this year we conducted a review of the cost allocation model used to charge our local operating companies for support centre services like helpdesk, IT procurement, server management, etc. This post outlines the model we came up with and draws key principles for any agreement of this type.

The key is to keep everyone focused on costs, not on cost allocations. (Cost allocation just shifts costs around.)

When allocating costs from a shared service, the key aims are:

Provide customers with transparency and control over cost drivers.
Provide flexibility over the way resources can be used, while keeping a single consistent allocation model.
Leave choice over resource allocation and daily control with the service provider.

The costs for a shared service can be divided into 2 components:

Infrastructure
People

Infrastructure costs

Infrastructure costs should be completely separated from overheads and people costs. Examples of infrastructure include data transfer, rack space charges, outsourced server monitoring, etc.

Each infrastructure item has a total cost, which must be divided among the customers according to an allocation model that best represents the cost driver.

Example: Allocation of Infrastructure Costs

Data transfer into the data center for July cost $100. The allocation model for this infrastructure item is bytes transferred by each customer company. Foo Industries generated 75% of the traffic during July, while Bar Incorporated generated the remaining 25%. As such, the data transfer bill for Foo is $75 and Bar is $25.

Racks for housing servers in the data center are depreciated at a rate of $50 per month. Costs are distributed based on the number of servers used by each company. Foo has 10 servers in place, while Bar has 15. As such, Foo’s rack charges is $20 for July while Bar pays $30.

Server monitoring is compulsory for data center servers and is charged at $200/server/month. This is billed directly to each company based on their servers in place so Foo pays $2000 and Bar pays $3000.

In the end, we have this equation to give the operating company cost for each infrastructure item:

ItemCostToCustomer = TotalCostOfItem x (CustomerUsage/TotalUsage)

People costs

People in a shared service spend their time on 3 things: 1. Project work 2. Ad-hoc tasks, maintenance and incident management 3. Managing other people

Each person working in a shared service has a specific cost. This will typically include:

Salary & benefits
Building and space costs
Equipment costs

Time spent on project work and ad-hoc tasks can be directly allocated to customers, but time spent on people management is harder to quantify. To solve this problem, we calculate the cost of time spent on people management and allocate it among all reports under the manager.

Example: Allocation of people costs

Alice is the manager of the shared service and spends 100% of her time managing people. She does no direct project work and does not complete any ad-hoc tasks. Her cost, including salary, building and equipment costs, is $100.

Alice has 5 direct reports, each of whom have 4 reports, giving a total of 25 staff in her team. Alice’s cost is divided evenly among all 25 reports, adding $4 to the cost of each person.

Alice has no time to allocate among customer companies (she’s done no “real work” afterall). But, her cost is effectively distributed by the work completed for customers since it is allocated to staff who do “real work”.

Bob reports to Alice. His cost, including salary, building and equipment was $80. With the management allocation from Alice, his cost is now $84.

Bob spends 50% of his time on people management, 25% on projects and 25% resolving ad-hoc issues. Per the model, 50% of Bob’s total cost of $84 is evenly distributed among his 4 reports ($42/4 = $10.50 each). The 25% project work ($21) and 25% ad-hoc work completed by Bill are billed to the customers directly.

Chris reports to Bob and spends all his time on ad-hoc tasks. His cost, including salary, building and equipment was $60. With the management allocation from Alice and Bob, his cost is now $60 + $4 + $10.50 = $74.50.

Of the ad-hoc tasks performed by Chris, 50% were done for Foo Industries and 50% were done for Bar Incorporated. As such, Chris’s cost to Foo Industries is $37.25 and to Bar Incorporated is $37.25.

In summary, the allocation of people costs follows these principles:

All people costs are allocated and paid on an individual person basis. So, a company that uses 25% of Derek’s time will pay 25% of Derek’s cost. This is not the same as using 25% of total time spent by the shared service team and paying 25% of their total cost. For example, if we use resolved calls as the metric to determine ad-hoc time spent and include both L1 (average 300 calls) and L2 (average 50 calls) engineers in the cost calculation there is no potential reward for moving calls from L2 resolution to L1 resolution.
Time spent on people management (an rough estimate for each manager) is added to the cost of the people being managed. So, you are only charged for actual work being done but we recognise that part of the cost of using those resources is the management team in place.
Time spent on project work is directly allocated and billed to the customer requesting the project. It’s important to appropriately separate these tasks from ad-hoc time. This ensures that we can see the real cost of project activities and keeps ad-hoc tasks reasonably consistent in complexity (thus evenly cost distributed).
Time spent on ad-hoc tasks is assumed to be the remainder after calculating time spent on people management and time spent on projects.

It’s only a model

As always, this model is an approximation of reality. It will never be perfect, nor should we aim for it to be perfect. It’s important to remain pragmatic and remember that a lot of the small inconsistencies and errors will correct themselves. (Two slightly wrongs can make a right in this context.)

You’ll need to think about how to handle events like extended sick leave or annual leave.

The key is to remember to keep all cost drivers transparent and controllable. Try not to let generic buckets like “overheads” or “maintenance” creep into the model.

Conclusion

After 6 months use on a team of 25 people divided among 5 operating companies over 2 countries, we’ve found this to be a simple, flexible model that has given us unprecedented insight and high level of control over cost drivers.

We’re now dealing with the hard (and important) problem of seeking real process improvement and cost control rather than looking for temporary advantage by playing with cost allocations to get temporary local advantage.

Comment by Anonymous on November 01, 2007 5:24 AM

How do you address,measure,and allocate increases in server usage and storage the shared server environment? For instance, in the event that one client's needs exceeds the available capacity on an existing server but only needs an additional 15% of an additional server do you pay for and assume the cost of the server? Is there a % or assumption in the planning stages that allos for or creates a bufer zone for growth?

Comment by Nathan @ e-gineer on November 01, 2007 10:05 AM

For idle server capacity there are two choices, either the 3rd party provider builds a cost structure that includes growth capacity (e.g. Amazon EC2) or the exact costs are dynamically shared among the users. We use each of these models in different cases.

When dynamically sharing costs we calculate the total % capacity used and allocate the total cost on that basis. For example, there is 300% available capacity through 3 servers costing a total of $300/month. Company A uses 75% of a server while company B uses 150%. So, company A pays 33% of the total cost 75%/(75%+150%) which is $100. Company B pays $200.

This may mean that company A has a cost increase due to actions taken by company B. This is less predictable than a fixed cost model.

Unfortunately, in the end, someone must pay for spare capacity. The key thing is to find a model where actions to reduce my own cost (in this case reducing capacity) are the same actions that we need to take to reduce the total cost. That way companies are discussing cost, not cost allocation.

Comment by Anonymous on January 15, 2008 9:40 AM

I like your model but was wondering how you treat un-allocated capacity that occus from time to time, i.e. what if an existing FTE is not being fully utilised in a particular month on ad-hoc or project work? Where does that piece of his/her total cost get allocated? Is it a fair rule to simply allocate out any residual costs evenly across businesses?

Comment by Nathan @ e-gineer on January 15, 2008 10:25 PM

There are two cases of time to be paid which has not been productive, idle time as you suggest but also periods of extended leave.

We've not seen idle time as a problem, as that gets absorbed into the "issues time block". So, those issues are particularly expensive that month, but at least the costs are split by the companies usage (even if high).

With extended leave periods, we typically split the cost based on recent allocations of that resource. So, if you normally use them a lot you will pay the majority of their cost during the unavailable period.

Of course, in the end hopefully these are the minority of your allocation costs so an even split may be a simple & fast way to achieve a similar result. If idle resource costs are a large part of your allocation, then there are bigger problems at hand than the allocation of costs ;).

Comment by Anonymous on January 16, 2008 1:01 PM

Thanks for the clarification Nathan. I agree that if you have large unallocated porsions of time - something is wrong. Where I work we're surrounded by accountants, so the focus is more on transparency of every minute cost basis for our businesses, so even small portions of time are relevant.

Comment by Anonymous on February 17, 2009 5:09 AM

I am in the process of developing a cost allocation policy for my I.T department. Currently all computer and server costs were paid by I.T. We now plan to allocate costs to user departments in an eqitable manner. My questions is...how can i measure cost allocation by some metric or index of sorts. This is to show that we have made some improvement in allocating costs to some industry standard or something.

Comment by Nathan @ e-gineer on February 24, 2009 3:35 PM

Benchmarking not the costs themselves, but the model and process of cost allocation...

I've not seen any information about this and imagine its an area ripe for best practice rather than benchmark comparisons as it's all about making costs transparent without adding to them just to track funny internal money.

Other than that I guess you could benchmark against billing services that providers (e.g. telco's) provide to customers. Is your bill timely, clear, etc?

Would be interested if anyone has any links or experience to share on this...

Comments are closed.

Promotion helps turn flows into authorative stocks

2007-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

Before the Web, the availability of information was tied to the ubiquity of the promotion medium. Today, all information is equally accessible¹, but promotion can accelerate its distribution.

Before the Web, information was strictly divided into stocks (books) and flows (newspapers & magazines). Today, through the power of search flows are immediately converted into stock resources.²

Before the Web, promotion could only be used to maximise exposure through flows. Today, promotion is used to speed up information flow. Speeding up dissemination of your ideas allows you to set the agenda, frame the context and establish yourself as an authority. In effect, speed helps establish your flow as the stock resource.³

When executed correctly, promotion today provides far more potential for long term value than previous mediums ever enabled. Establish the context and conversation and you will become established as the authorative stock.

Footnotes:

All information lives on a web page, and can be seen by simple distribution of a link. In that way, my lowly blog post is equal to CNN’s biggest story of the year.
Background on stocks and flows.
Search engines are complex beasts and continually evolving, but this is roughly true of how they work.

Creating a flash movie header or banner for your site

2007-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

Rather than use a typical image header for Elimena’s site, I wanted to try something different and use a flash movie instead. Here are complete instructions on how to create your own…

All the ActionScript code required is in a single block at the bottom of this post, but don’t be too hasty as it won’t make much sense without the options and other info I’ve described.

Import the video into Flash (FLV) format

First you need a suitable movie that can be looped in some reasonable way (i.e. the first and last frames of the movie have a reasonably similar appearance). I simply bought a short video from iStockPhoto. I selected the large web size, which provides good movie quality at a width of 640px (just wide enough for an effective site header).

Using Macromedia Flash Professional 8 (just download a trial version to get started), I created and new Flash document and imported the iStockPhoto movie (File > Import). In the advanced import settings you can crop the imported movie to 640x200px and trim the timeline down to something that loops smoothly and keeps the size reasonable. This process creates a Flash Video file (FLV) that can effectively stream as a simple static HTTP served file.

After importing the movie, we must set the background Flash document to the exact same dimensions and position. First, select the main Flash document (click in the drawing area, but outside any objects including the FLVplayback object) and then click the Size button in the Properties tab setting the dimensions of the Flash document to match the movie (e.g. 640x200px). Second, click on the FLVplayback object in the drawing area, then edit the X, Y position of the FLVplayback object to 0, 0 (perfectly aligning it with the document).

At this point we have a simple flash file that will play the movie end-to-end once.

Prepare the Flash container for ActionScript code

Before doing any coding, we need to prepare the FLVplayback object. (These will make sense below.) Click the FLVplayback object inserted above and then:<ol><li>Change the Instance Name in the Properties tab to be video.</li><li>Set a cue point (Parameters tab > cuePoints) called EndFadeIn 1 sec into the movie.</li><li>Set a cue point called StartFadeOut 1 sec before the end of the movie.</li></ol>

Making your video loop

For continuous video, we need to both setup the FLVplayback object to loop and create a small fade effect to hide the jump from the last frame to the first frame. Unfortunately, and unbelieveably, there are no “make my movie loop” or “fade” checkboxes in Flash. Believe me, I looked for a long time in disbelief.

The ActionScript code below simply listens for the complete event on the FLVPlayback object and triggers the object to play again. This will cause it to loop around and around.

Using fade for a seamless loop transition

Unless you have a movie designed for seamless looped play, you’ll most likely need to join the start and end together with a short fade sequence. This keeps the continuity of play, but hides the frame jump between the end and start of the movie.

Scarred by the lack of loop checkbox, but still optimistic I only spent half as long looking for the fade in and fade out video effects. Again, no such thing. To add fades to your movie, you need to add some ActionScript. Constant use of the onEnterFrame event leads to high CPU consumption (on my old laptop anyway, not so much on the brand spanking new desktop), so I brushed off my coding skills and put together something that achieves the effect with a very low CPU load.

The ActionScript code below catches the cue point events, using StartFadeOut to register an onFrameEvent handler that performs the gradual fade out and fade in of the movie loop. The EndFadeIn event deregisters that handler, reducing the CPU usage required to play the majority of the video clip. (I think this is a fairly neat & important trick that I didn’t find used elsewhere.)

All good site headers should link back to the home page. Still optimistic, I looked for the add hyperlink capability in Flash (which also doesn’t exist). I then tried wrapping the Flash object in an anchor tag (also doesn’t work).

The solution is to create a button in flash and use ActionScript to link to your chosen page:<ol><li>In the Timeline panel, click the icon to add a new layer. This layer will be used to house the button without affecting our other content.</li><li>Make sure the new layer is selected.</li><li>On the Insert menu, choose New Symbol…</li><li>Use the Button type, name it Button Symbol and click OK. This creates a canvas on which we can make the button template that will be added to the library. (We have to add it to our document later.)</li><li>Select the rectangle tool and set the border to none and the colour to have an alpha of 0. You can now draw an invisible rectangle in the middle of this canvas. Don’t worry too much about the size & position at this point.</li><li>Use the select tool and select your rectangle by clicking on where you know it will be.</li><li>In the Properties tab, set the width to 640px, the height to 200px, the X position to -320px and the Y position to -100px.</li><li>The Button Symbol is now in your Library, but isn’t in the document yet.</li><li>To return to the main stage, click Scene 1 in the Timeline panel (should be just to the left of your Button Symbol link).</li><li>To add an instance of Button Symbol to the document, drag it across from the Library pane on the right.</li><li>Use the Properties tab at the bottom to set the instance name to btn and align it exactly by setting X and Y both to zero.</li><li>Make the button link to your chosen URL by adding this code to the ActionScript section:</li></ol>

on(release) { getURL("http://www.e-gineer.com", "_self"); }

Initially I thought this wasn’t working either, as the link in the sample I copied was to an outside website which seemed to get blocked for security reasons in IE (silently) and in FireFox (with an error message that finally helped me understand what was happening).

Removing the “click to activate control” (Eolas patent) requirement

The final challenge is working around the Eolas patent. By default, your Flash object requires a single click to activate the control. This is very annoying when you actually want the whole object to act as a simple link.

The workaround to remove the activation click is fairly simple. Just create a Javascript file (e.g. header.js) that programmatically ites out the header HTML for embedding the Flash file. Here is example content of the Javascript file:

// Use external Javascript to load the object so it // doesn't require the user to click to activate it. // See [http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/activating_activex.asp](http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/activating_activex.asp) document.write('<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" width="640" height="200" id="Your Header Title" align="middle">\ <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain">\ <param name="movie" value="/url/to/YourHeader.swf">\ <param name="quality" value="high">\ <param name="bgcolor" value="black">\ <embed src="//url/to/YourHeader.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="black" width="640" height="200" name="Your Header Title" align="middle" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"/>\ </object>');

And then use this code to include it where you’d like the Flash header to appear in your page:

<script src="/url/to/header.js"></script>

The ActionScript code

I added all ActionScript code to the Flash document itself (there are many possible locations, this one seemed cleanest to me). Select the Flash document by clicking in the drawing area outside all existing objects, expand the ActionScript task bar and insert this code:// This is the length of time at the start and end of the movie // used for the gradual fade. fadeTime = 1; // The frames per second of the movie. fps = 12; // Calculate the alpha increment to use when fading in or out. alphaInc = Math.abs(100*fadeTime/fps); var listenerObject:Object = new Object(); // To make the flash movie loop, upon completion the movie // is set to start playing again. listenerObject.complete = function(eventObject:Object):Void { video.play(); }; video.addEventListener("complete", listenerObject); // To achieve the fade effect on each cycle (except when the movie // first starts playing) we use an onEnterFrame event. Because of // the high CPU load this causes, we use two cue points to set and // remove a listener on this event as appropriate. EndFadeIn is // set 1 sec after the start of the movie and StartFadeOut is set // 1 sec before the end of the movie (These intervals must be the // same as the fadeTime setting above. listenerObject.cuePoint = function(eventObject:Object):Void { switch (eventObject.info.name) { case "StartFadeOut": // We are near the end of the movie, so register the onEnterFrame // listener which will control both the fade out and fade in tasks // as the movie loops back and until the EndFadeIn cue point is reached. video.onEnterFrame = function() { if (video.playheadTime<fadeTime) { video._alpha += alphaInc; } else if ( (video.totalTime - video.playheadTime) < fadeTime) { video._alpha -= alphaInc; } else { // Shouldn't be needed due to cue points, but just in case. video._alpha = 100; } } break; case "EndFadeIn": // We have faded in completely, so set the alpha to 100 for // certainty and remove the onEnterFrame listener for the time // being. video._alpha = 100; video.onEnterFrame = null; break; } } video.addEventListener("cuePoint", listenerObject);

Comment by Jehanzeb on March 08, 2009 8:40 AM

Dear Nathan,

I was looking to create a flash header for our website as well and while searching on google I stumble upon your site.

Let me tell you, you have the best explaination in the world. no one could be that simple :-)). I have checked the link and it amazed me how nice and interesting header looks like with the flash embeded into the html.

As a result I am going to try and set one up for our site.

Many thanks for a great post

Regards

Jehanzeb

Comments are closed.

Elimena joins the clan...

2007-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Elimena Margaret Wallace was born in Sydney at 11:48am on the 9th May 2007. Weight 3.51kg (7lb 12oz), height 52.5cm.

Comment by Matthew Sheppard on May 10, 2007 11:51 AM

Congrats :)

Comments are closed.

The myth of train the trainer

2007-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

In the majority of cases, train the trainer is doomed to failure for 3 reasons:

Training the wrong people
Pushing work downwards
Playing Chinese whispers

Online training and video is the only solution that provides on-demand availability, consistency of quality and clarity of message all with a relatively low time investment.

Training the wrong people

By definition, train the trainer does not include training the average user. So, two alternatives remain, train the superuser or train the non-user (e.g. team manager). Unfortunately, both make lousy trainers.

Superusers are very knowledgeable about the system, but overwhelm average users with their skill, jargon and speed. The result is an impression that the system is best left to the experts, one of whom happens to be readily accessible and now assumed available for 24x7 support. (The same problem faced by computer nerds when helping their family setup a PC.)

Non-users don’t have the ongoing interaction with the system to keep their skills fresh, or even the basic system knowledge needed to conduct training. The result is shallow training sessions with an impression that the system must be difficult to understand if even the trainer can’t use it properly.

Pushing work downwards

Train the trainer is a beautiful trick that allows project owners to tick the box on training while handing over ongoing responsibility and ownership for use of the system. Arriving with hopes of a nice buffet lunch, the new “trainers” leave with a few PowerPoint slides and a major new unexpected component to their job.

Project owners are given time and resources to raise the bar and change behaviour through the implementation. If they can’t find time to prioritise training, there is no way that users or managers swamped in their day to day tasks can do so. The result is a gap, which no one owns and everyone will eventually refer to knowingly as “the training issue”.

It’s proven again, you can’t get something for nothing.

Chinese Whispers

Training is important in terms of showing people how to use the system. But, it’s vital in terms of convincing people that the system is useful and helpful. Teaching someone a skill is not the same as motivating them to use it.

Unfortunately it’s this motivation and drive that is most quickly lost and distorted through the train the trainer chain. Each generation of trainer interprets the usefulness of the system and the important parts of the system differently, adding their own spin.

Exacerbating this loss of knowledge through imperfect copying is the natural inclination in a casual training session to skim through the material, downplay it’s importance and just skip the parts we don’t understand ourselves with an embarrassed laugh.

Train the trainer is like being in high school and asking your friend to talk to the cute girl across the room. They mean well, but feel silly doing the task, are vague in their message and don’t share your commitment to the outcome.

Alternatives to train the trainer

Typical turnover for a business is 20-25%, so new people are starting continuously and every single one requires training in the system. The need for training is relentless and always urgent.

In my experience, on-demand training packages (e.g. online, video) is the only viable solution giving the required flexibility and control over message while keeping resourcing to a minimum. These don’t need to be highly professional or polished, but do need to be reasonably easy to update and maintain.

Making train the trainer work

Despite the common problems above, train the trainer can work when:

Trainers are actually trained in how to lead the training (not just taken through the training themselves). Materials should be prepared and core messages clarified for consistent and continuous delivery to new recruits. Make it simple and time efficient to conduct training.
Trainers are chosen who have some interest in providing training. Whether this interest is intrinsic (I love to share knowledge) or extrinsic (increased chance of bonus) it must keep the motivation level high to conduct quality training with the core messages intact.

Comment by Anand on February 12, 2009 10:47 PM

I found this article useful.

Comments are closed.

Project Insulation

2007-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

I spent all of last weekend crawling around in our attic, cleaning out 70 years of dust and laying insulation batts. Total project cost (batts, tools, safety equipment) was $570 for an 82sqm ceiling.

By far the hardest part was removing all the dust from the attic. Our tiled roof does not have any sarking installed, which increased the amount of crap that is able to find its way in. Worst of all, our original ceiling is lath and plaster, resulting in a concrete ridge every few centimetres creating nice little gathering spots for dirt. It’s worth noting that this ceiling dust is nasty stuff, full of lead and other contaminants so you may like to consider a professional cleaning service. (I’ve heard this costs about $1,500AUD and is probably the route I’d take if I ever have to do this again in my life now that I’ve proven my stupidity.)

First, I tried using our household vacuum cleaner. After only a few square metres the bag was full and the machine would overheat. Cooling it back down in the attic environment was difficult, making this a slow process.

Second, getting more desperate, I tried our outdoor blower / vacuum. Predictably, and not as spectacularly as I expected, it was only able to pickup a small amount of the gunk which it then promptly spewed back into the air through it’s course filters.

I then spoke with Kennards about hiring an industrial vacuum ($68/day), which I’m sure would have worked well and is the solution a number of my friends took. (I would have done this earlier, but picking up an industrial vacuum is non-trivial when you don’t own a car.) Unfortunately, we have an unusually small manhole that the vacuum would not fit through. I considered removing roof tiles and battens, but this seemed like a high risk strategy particularly with forecasts of rain on the weekend.

So, in the end, I spent a day and a half removing many kilos of dust from the attic using a dustpan and broom on my hands and knees. I refined the process down to brushing along each 2cm x 40cm plaster crevice towards the beam, and then lengthways along the beam. This gathered the most dust and piled it for an easier lengthways brushing over the plaster ridges.

All in all, brushing was reasonably effective, but is definitely not recommended.

Compared to cleaning out all the crap, laying the actual insulation batts is fast and easy. I settled on Bradford Gold R3.5 batts, which were not at strong as the R4.0 I wanted, but were immediately available off the shelf at Bunnings.

Understanding as much as I could about R-values, it appears that the typical recommendation in Sydney is R3.0. The primary problem in our house is loss of heat during winter combined with 12’ ceilings, so I wanted as much protection as possible. In Sydney, we have a habit of believing we live in a warmer climate than reality suggests (hence no central heating and constant comments of “I should have brought a jumper”). BTW, don’t be confused when the US uses imperial R-values rather than metric R-values. R3.5 (metric) is approximately R20 (imperial).

The one area I still don’t understand is the use of vapour barriers with bulk insulation batts. I know that the vapour barrier is important to stop the build up of condensation. I know that it should go on the warm side of the insulation layer. But, I could never work out if I need a vapour barrier in simple pitched roof with batts on the flat ceiling. I couldn’t find any instructions for vapour barrier installation in this scenario and in the end, it appears to be something people worry about more in environments with an extreme difference between inside and outside temperatures than they do in a Sydney style location. So, I didn’t install a vapour barrier.

There are 4 things you need to know when buying batts: desired R-value, gap between your beams (450mm centres or 600mm centres), total sqm to be covered and how the hell you are going to get all these massive bags back to your house. The beam gap is easily measured in the ceiling and the total sqm can be estimated from ground floor level. I’d definitely suggest buying extra batts, so you can shove them in around the edges and not be stuck in the roof covered in crap wishing you’d had just one more bag delivered.

Delivery of the batts is an obvious choice, particularly when without a car the alternative is to pile them into a taxi or walk them home bag by bag. Unfortunately, on this particular night at this particular Bunnings the task was all a bit much. We got there, but only after they (impressively) called in the store expert from his holidays to help with the computer. $35 for a huge pile of batts delivered next day delivery after 4pm.

Opening a packet of batts is like pulling the cord on an inflatable raft. In one of the few home handyman lessons my father has passed down, I didn’t make his error of opening them inside a small bathroom before taking the pack into the ceiling. But, our tiny manhole struck again as I squeezed, pulled and wobbled 10 packs through.

Laying the majority of your batts is dead simple. They fit perfectly between the beams and are fairly easy to throw around. Even with the recommended face mask and overalls I ended up fairly itchy on my arms, so be sure to invest the $20 in this gear. The only slight complication is making sure that you don’t cover all the electrical wiring, I just loosened any fasteners and laid it across the top of the batts.

Batts around the edges require some trimming. I bought a retractable knife which worked OK until I woke up to the idea of cutting them with a beam as the “chopping board” at which point it worked brilliantly. Our roof has a fairly high pitch, so even laying in the corners was not too difficult.

Basically, with some preparation (i.e. buy batts & safety gear) and a little determination you should be able to completely clean and insulate your ceiling in a weekend.

One week later I’m finally able to kneel down again. More importantly, over the 40C weekend our house stayed cool during the day (great) and then relatively hot at night (not so great, but proves the effectiveness of the insulation).

Comment by Vacuum Cleaner on July 12, 2007 5:21 AM

Wow. Quite a tale. But also quite a useful explanation of the overall process. I have been considering doing my own attic for a few weeks now, but haven’t gotten up the courage and/ or energy. While you certainly gave me a good sense of how to do it, just reading about your experience wore me out, so I’m not sure if it did anything to get me over the hump to actually do it. Part of my problem, though, is that my attic is currently filled with boxes and boxes of stored junk, which, judging from your post, you didn’t seem to have to deal with. Not only will I have to move them all out before I can start the task of cleaning the gunk and laying the insulation, but once I’ve gotten them down, I can’t just leave them there, or put them back in the attic as they were. I’ll have to sort through them one by one and figure out what I can get rid of. Then I’ll have to hold a garage sale and put together packages to take to the goodwill drop-off point. All in all, it seems like a project that will require true commitment, and I don’t know when I’ll be ready to make that.

Comment by Nathan @ e-gineer on July 12, 2007 5:46 AM

Although I get a huge sense of satisfaction everytime I can dispose of old junk, I don't envy your storage removal task...

If you are feeling demotivated, just remember that the whole (epic) tale was completed in a single weekend and that only halfway through winter it has already made a huge difference to the warmth of the house. Unlike last year, we don't need to hand out polar jackets when people come to visit!

Comment by oil paintings for sale on April 30, 2008 7:38 PM

You did all of those by yourself? Cool! You’re wife is lucky to have you. I think it’s high time for you to start a Do-It-Yourself or DIY site for dads at home. It may contain projects which you’ve done so far so that dads can learn how to do thing on their own especially during weekend or when they’re on vacation.

Comment by AK Wong on June 10, 2008 12:16 PM

Hey, just stumbled across this post. Thanks for the detailed story, it was a great read! It just confirmed that I couldn't be bothered doing it myself though, so I'm going to get my insulation installed instead :-)

Comment by Anonymous on September 22, 2008 5:35 PM

Interesting read. I'm about to tackle this project myself but at this stage am still looking into what I'm going to use, i.e. Wool V Synthetic. Did you do any research into that topic?

Also, how did you find reaching into the far corners of your roof? That alone is almost enough to pay the extra cost of installation.

Cheers,
MK

Comment by Nathan @ e-gineer on September 22, 2008 9:49 PM

@MK: I'm lucky to have a fairly high pitched roof so the corners were not too problematic. For me, this installation part was still very easy relative to the cleaning task.

I did research the material type, but quickly became overwhelmed and decided to go with the mainstream brand / solution available at my local Bunnings hardware store. My main concern was ensuring the highest R-value that I could easily obtain.

Comment by IT Certification on January 31, 2009 11:06 PM

Great post in real. I really love both the comments and the blog itself.
Thanks

Comments are closed.

Standard response framework for technical problems

2007-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

Something goes wrong and people in the business either reported it or found out. Fixing the problem is important, but not as important as keeping everyone informed and reassured that your team is on top of the situation.

Basic level emails always answer four key questions about the problem:

What happened? (e.g. Sales calls have been underreported)
How bad was it? (e.g. Minor, 150 calls lost out of 10,000 thousand - 1.5%)
Why did it happen? (e.g. Calls are awaiting validation of customer details)
What have we done to stop it happening again? (e.g. Validation status added to dashboard)

Good emails also include plenty of information and context to help reduce fear of the unknown. Working intimately with a system everyday it’s too easy to forget that even frequent users often don’t understand the language, acronyms or situations that you take for granted. Always try to answer the questions above but also take this opportunity to help learn more about their system.

Great emails recognise the fact that, as a service group, problem resolution is one of the limited opportunities we have to make a positive impression on the business. Good communication and fast resolution of problems usually increases customer perception and loyalty.

Within the framework of those questions, there are a number of common situations to address:

Investigating

This email is sent early in the problem resolution process and the main intent is to let people know that your team is aware of the problem and taking steps to resolve it.

The key messages are:

We’re aware of a problem in this general area.
We don’t have any specifics yet on the extent of the issue.
We’re currently investigating the issue and will update you by XXX.

This is your chance to make readers feel your team is communicating clearly and dealing with the problem with appropriate urgency. That is, you’re doing most of the worrying for them.

Monitoring

This approach is used in situations when you know what happened, but are unable to work out why.

The key messages are:

Problem A has been identified.
After investigation, it appears to have affected the areas B, but not areas C.
We’ve fixed all affected areas.
We’ll continue to monitor the situation, please let us know if you see any further problems.

Rather than highlighting the fact that your team can’t understand why this problem occurred or guarantee that it won’t happen again, this email should highlight your understanding of the business issues, ability to fix problems and vigilance in ensuring ongoing good service. That is, you’re not bothering them with the technical details.

Fixed

Use this approach when the problem is well understood and has been permanently resolved.

The key messages are:

Problem A has been identified.
After investigation, it appears to have affected the areas B, but not areas C.
We’ve fixed all affected areas.
We’ve done XXX to stop this problem from happening again.

This email should highlight the skill of your team in recognising and fixing the problem for minimal impact on the business. That is, the world is a better place because this happened (and was fixed).

3 Things & more from Naomi

2006-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

It’s hard when all of the talent and the good looks in the family go to one of your siblings. The songs below are all composed and performed by my sister Naomi Wallace, recorded at home using GarageBand.

True, This Is Love! (6MB mp3)
Strong (6MB mp3)
Crucial Ingredient (6MB mp3)
Peaceless Sigh (9MB mp3)
Only Direction (5MB mp3)
3 Things (8MB mp3)

3 Things was written as a wedding gift to Bianca and I, so clearly it’s my favourite.

Comment by CentralHollywood on December 24, 2007 3:15 PM

Loved Naomi in Wiggle Bay. She's a treat to watch and now to hear via her music. Thanks for posting.

-Billy "Flabber" Forester,
Big Bad Beetleborgs, on FOX Kids, U.S.

Comment by Mike on March 29, 2010 12:16 AM

Such a lovely lady, and a lovely voice. I saw her on 'Wiggle Bay', which is one of my son's favorites. Does she have any upcoming film or TV roles? Her own site?

Comments are closed.

Source of authorative video content

2006-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

One thing that really pays traffic dividends on the web is being the “authority” on a topic. For example, Wikipedia talks about almost immediately having become the authority on Pope Benedict XVI.

Using media centre for the last few months you quickly become aware that TV is becoming an on-demand medium. We have a huge degree of freedom in recording, watching, time-shifting etc all TV. We’ll often just continue what ever we’re doing and wait for a program to get about 20 minutes in so we can watch it in almost real time but without any advertisements.

The other impact of this is that shorter programs are no longer a problem. It’s too expensive to schedule the watching or manual recording of these for them to have made sense in a broadcast world. But, when attention spans are decreasing and we have access to quick browsing and watching of shows short-format TV makes sense.

The introduction of video for mobile devices (e.g. iPod video) will only accelerate the need and demand for this type of content. I don’t want to watch a full emotional hour of TV on my iPod. But, 5 or 10 minute grabs make a lot of sense while travelling.

There is an opportunity for someone to combine authorative source with the on-demand short video format. Cooking shows are great, but imagine working along with it when you are ready to make the meal. Turning to IMDB on a wireless laptop for a quick background on an actress you just saw in a movie is fun, but imagine just pulling up a short bio video right there on your TV.

Who will run the defacto home for short authorative video content?

Will it be commercial or a Spoken Wikipedia style set of video content?

Cleaning up after a golden shower

2006-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Australia’s golden shower fetish has finally been sated for another four years, but the mess will last at least a week as we grapple with the one-off changes to daylight savings.

While the support response from vendors like Microsoft has been minimal, eBay gave up completely and simply decided to ignore the change.

I was strongly tempted by the eBay approach, but it seemed a bit hardcore to create my own official time. Instead, I’m taking the half-assed Microsoft approach and apologising in advance for being -1 to +1 hours incorrect with any meeting time this week. (Between work computers, home computers, EPG’s and Windows Mobile I’ve got no idea what time it is. Confusing things further I spent the weekend in Queensland where daylight savings is not observed at all.)

Inconvenient at first, the stupidity of this one-off change was only truly evident as we realised that only the final day of the Commonwealth Games calendar would have been affected. Even if athlete’s or spectators had forgotten to change their clock they would have been an hour early!

Safety around the home

2006-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

This amazing table saw can detect the difference between cutting wood and cutting your finger. The video demo really is worth a watch.

Years ago, my grandfather was teaching me how to use a chain saw. Unfortunately he didn’t know that the chain was very blunt and was using hand signals to try and explain the failings of my amateur chainsaw technique. With him getting so close, I became too scared to move the saw at all. Turns out I didn’t need to; he waved the webbing between his thumb and pointer finger right into the chain.

Very fortunately for us, this accident just took a small chunk of skin off (probably because the chain was so blunt).

While I have no plans to ever go near a chainsaw again, I’ve had many exciting moments with non-powered saws too. On holidays, I’d usually spend a day acting as a human powertool for my grandmother in the garden. In particular, this meant scaling countless huge trees to remove branches obscuring their beautiful view of the coastline.

One day I was about 15m up a pine tree to remove a particularly large branch. Unfortunately the only saw access was from a branch below. Unpeturbed, I tied a rope to the branch so my grandfather could pull it away from the tree (and me) at the critical moment.

Let’s just say that slow sawing and overzealous grandfatherly protection from a falling branch resulted in an exciting sling-shot style ride for me when the branch broke free. With the tree whipping back and forth while I held it with one hand, and tried to prevent serious impalement from the saw with the other, I didn’t really have time to notice my grandfather diving out of the way of the branch that he had pulled so enthusiastically down onto himself.

Now, just one last story to honour his memory. Taking the boat out one day, we were having trouble getting the trailer to slip down onto the towball. I stood on the trailer front for weight while Grandpa drove the car forward a few centimetres to get the alignment right. The dolly wheel on the trailer ensured that, should the trailer come off the ball, it (& me) didn’t have far to go. All went according to plan and the trailer plopped on.

At this point, my grandfather thought he’d just drive forward about 20m up the sloped driveway to get the boat on the grass for a wash down. Again, no big deal as I was used to riding small distances on the trailer rail in between the car and the boat.

Unfortunately, just as he was stopping the car we reached the crest of the hill. The dolly wheel, left in for safety during the tow ball engagement, now touched the ground and lifted the trailer back up off the tow ball.

We should have used the safety chain as well.

The thing about my grandparents block is that its basically a really long, sloping block (say 150m long and a 25m drop). Starting from the top, I’m now riding a free-falling boat and trailer.

That day it was proven that I have both more brains and less courage than my grandmother. As I jumped off the moving boat, she ran along for an extra second attempting to hold and / or steer it down the hill.

The boat rolled straight down the middle of the driveway missing the BBQ on one side and a large tree on the other. Crossing a flat section of the concrete driveway, the metal keel at the bottom of the outboard motor was sheered off completely.

Continuing to accelerate, the boat stayed on the concrete driveway (or runway at this point) now going past the side of their brick house. Two large LPG cylinders providing gas for the kitchen were torn from their chains (set into the brick wall) and sent flying.

Set into the wall of the house was a very small window providing limited light to the basement. Somehow, probably slightly slowed on that side by hitting the gas cylinders, the boat steered just enough to wedge its back corner right into the brick windowsill, stopping dead in its tracks (without even breaking the window).

Meanwhile, the gas cylinders rolled more than 100m down the hill, crushing plants, crossing a road and settling to rest in the neighbours frontyard. Try saying this in a nonchalant manner “Hi there! Don’t mind me, I’m just looking for our gas cylinder”.
Believe it or not, these stories highlight a few of the great things about my grandfather. His adventurous, can-do attitude created a multitude of exciting projects and outings. By actively involving me in each one, I received great gifts and lessons that no one else could have given. Finally, and weirdly, the problems above were primarily created by his vigilant efforts towards safety and correct technique.

I only hope that one day I’ll be teaching such great lessons in life.

The 15lb burger

2006-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

Inspired by these guys, and in keeping with a family tradition of “Christmas surprises”, I invited my family over on Christmas Eve and attempted to make a 7kg (15lb) burger.

Comment by Victor on February 02, 2006 9:56 AM

Gold! Did you finish it?

Comment by Nathan @ e-gineer on February 02, 2006 10:20 PM

Nup ... even with seven of us eating there was way too much!

Comment by Chris Kaeser on February 03, 2006 2:41 PM

Burger-rific!!
What, no fries (chips)?

Comment by Anonymous on February 05, 2006 1:42 PM

I always thought my 2+ pounders were impressive looking.
So, how long did that thing take to cook?

Comment by Anonymous on February 05, 2006 8:32 PM

Your burger is on dvorak,org/blog and digg.com. Look out!

Comment by Anonymous on February 05, 2006 10:33 PM

see aus kills america so hard - we have 7 kilo burgers
metric system rules! lol
heard there was a restaurant that sells the largest burger in the world - i am yet to find it
good on ya, u brought every mans dream to life

Comment by Anonymous on February 05, 2006 10:59 PM

It is a thing of beauty *sob*

Comment by Nathan @ e-gineer on February 11, 2006 9:49 AM

It took about 90 minutes to cook everything and assemble the result.

Comment by Anonymous on February 16, 2006 6:45 AM

You received mention in E-Week, so the septics are on to you and no doubt will eclipse your record.

Greetings from Canada.

Comment by Anonymous on February 24, 2006 6:37 AM

Man u yanks (i pressume u are american) make me sick dont cook what ya cant eat is an impressive burger dude but 7 of ya cant eat it what are ya the pussycat dolls dude cook somink next time u an ya seven dwarf mates cant eat yeah

Comment by Anonymous on February 24, 2006 6:56 AM

No there from Oz i recon i watched video still we all came from britian i guess

Comments are closed.

Big corporate world

2006-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

In December, I accepted a job as an “Information Management Manager” for Janssen-Cilag, a pharmaceutical subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. Primarily, my time will be spent scoping, designing and running implementation projects for a wide range of information management systems.

After pouring so much energy and time into Synop, and loving every minute of it, the decision of what to do next was very difficult. In the end, my decision came down to two things: emotional energy and inflection points.

Starting a company requires a huge level of commitment, self-belief and emotional energy. So close to the Synop experience, and with a lot less naivety to hide behind, I didn’t feel ready to jump back in.

Starting Synop straight out of uni, my career has been dominated by the entrepreneurial experience. But, despite doubts about my ability to handle the frustration, my interest in the corporate world has always been strong. This was the perfect time for a complete change and it was only going to get harder to make the switch later.

So far, I’m loving it.

Vlog in a vlog about a vlog

2005-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

This is a vlog that I made while making a tutorial about vlogging.

Video: Vlog in a vlog about a vlog.wmv (1.9MB) Vlog in a vlog about a vlog (small).wmv (0.6MB)

The making of vlog

2005-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

This is a 10 minute video blog and screencast detailing the entire vlog making process from filming to publication. It’s a simple tutorial for beginners requiring only a digital video camera, Windows Movie Maker and Blogger.

The resulting video is in line with my 15 second approach.

Video: The making of vlog (27MB)

The making of vlog (small) (11MB)

Blondie

2005-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

Unfortunately, I forgot to make this video when I made the more obvious transition from natural brown to a life of more fun.

Video: Blondie.wmv (3.6MB)

Blondie (small).wmv (1.5MB)

Doe a deer...

2005-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

Some people have great sights and sounds from their apartment windows, unfortunately I’ve never had the good fortune.

Many years ago, I did live across from a woman who occasionally walked around naked. But that was more a case of “I have to look because you are naked, not because I like what I see”.

The biggest torture I’ve ever experienced was undoubtedly when my home office window was about 2 metres from the kitchen window of an amazing Chinese cook. From about 3pm the intoxicating smells would start drifting through my window making any effective work impossible. I never did work up the courage to ask if I could pay them to cook for me too.

Lately, I’ve often found myself humming Sound of Music tunes. It took me about a week to realise that this wasn’t driven by a subconscious lust for Julie Andrews, but by very faint and consistent piano practice in a nearby apartment block. It reminds me of when my little sister was given a electronic keyboard for Christmas. The next day, on a 7-hour car trip, we discovered to our horror that this machine had no volume control and contained a set of automatically programmed tunes like Camptown Races. Now that’s a fatal combination.

I hate to admit it, but my incessant singing of Weird Al songs probably doesn’t add much joy to the lives of those nearby. It’d be better for everyone if we all just left the music to our local opera singer and her practice sessions.

Frankly, it’s surprising we can hear anything over the dryer noise.

Integrating Microsoft HTML Help search into .NET applications

2005-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

While spending countless hours writing a comprehensive help file is infinitely rewarding for application testing, consistency and design; it counts for a lot more if users can perform quick help searches from inside the application. That little help search box in the top right hand corner of Office 2003 applications is worth its weight in gold.

The HelpProvider in .NET doesn’t provide a method to run help searches from your application. After digging around we found .NET wrapper code to use the unmanaged HTML Help API. While this unmanaged API has an appropriate method, it turns out that HTML Help 1.4 has a bug which ignores the search information struct anyway. So, it will never work. I guess that’s why they didn’t provide a method to do it from inside .NET.

Of course, rather than thinking about fancy APIs etc we can always fall back on the simplest thing that will possibly work:

// Open the help window to the search
paneHelp.ShowHelp(this, Application.StartupPath + Path.DirectorySeparatorChar + "SauceReader.chm", HelpNavigator.Find, "");
// run the search, by sending key strokes to now active help
windowSystem.Windows.Forms.SendKeys.SendWait("{HOME}^+{END}{BACKSPACE}search query{ENTER}");
// select the first result
System.Windows.Forms.SendKeys.Send("{TAB}{TAB}{ENTER}");

Note: Originally posted to my Synop blog on April 2, 2004.

Once you enter, you are an incumbent

2005-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

A nice articulation from Peter Rip of why many entrepreneurs will face the same problems in Web 2.0 that investors faced in Web 1.0:

The root causes are the same:

It is very easy to make the initial commitment (founding or funding).

Underestimation of how many had the same conclusion.

Underestimation of survival requirements for the ‘too many competitors’ case.

…

Reduced barriers to entry always look attractive to the entrants. But once you enter, you are an incumbent.

Two cents worth, a definition

2005-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

After dropping “That’s my $0.02.” into an email for a multi-cultural uni group today, I was asked what it meant. Finding a definition was surprisingly difficult, but I did stumble across a forum with this little gem on the way:

The phrase “2 cents” does often be found in emails and some other situations. What does this phrase mean?

I believe the complete phrase you want is “two cents’ worth,” but often shortened to “two cents,” as in, “Can I put in my two cents here?” Two cents is, in the U.S., two pennies, a very small sum of money. Even in “the old days,” two pennies were considered not worth much. So my opinion, which may not be worth much, is “my two cents’ worth.”

If its “My 2 cents worth” and “A penny for your thoughts”, where does the other penny go?

That’s the penny that dropped.

Entrepreneur v2

2005-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

Watching Dave Winer on NerdTV last night I was struck by one section in particular:

Anyway, well, there’s an awful lot of BOGU¹ in being a successful entrepreneur, and so the second time around you go, “Well, I’m not gonna work really hard. I’m just gonna be smart, ‘cause I know I’m really smart. And I’m gonna have - I’m not gonna have to make do with an inadequate computer, and we’re gonna have a really good PR firm, and they’re gonna take care of the PR issues for us the whole time through. And everything’s gonna be done first-class. We’re just gonna do it the right way this time.” As opposed to, “Well, it didn’t work.”

Fact is that you always got a competitor that’s willing to do all the awful things that you have to do to be successful, and the fact is to achieve that level - any level of success, I think you really do have to burn yourself out. I really do. I don’t think there’s a shortcut. And so that’s the - that seems to be the story that a lot of second time entrepreneurs go through. I think they - that we all end up learning that one.

The mysterious Mr Gutman posted very similar ideas a few months ago, drawing a response from Ev (a Blogger founder):

I firmly believe that the extreme imbalance so pervasively assumed to be a required component of startup life is detrimental to effectiveness in the long run. What I think is much more key is focus.

Another trick to this theory is that it’s harder to demonstrate focus to your people than it is to demonstrate willingness to put in insane hours. And all this is not to say that, endless hours can’t make up for some lack of focus.

All the feelings and sentiments in these posts ring true for me, but I think it all boils down to a feeling of wanting to “do it right” the second time round. Starting a business is more than just a learning curve, it’s getting beat over the head with a learning stick. Through daily decisions and drawing lines of grey you learn about your boundaries, strengths and weaknesses.

I believe it’s about focused energy. Start-ups have very limited capital, time and skills. The tighter your focus, the further you can progress with the limited resources available. Unfortunately, this is incredibly hard to do in the whirlwind of chasing new ideas and customers.

Great start-ups should be like having a baby. No matter how tired you are, or how much attention it requires, the joy and rewards are worth it².

Bend over and grease up - see #19 here.
Or so I’m told by people who actually have children (or canine psuedo-children).

Best first post sequence for a blog

2005-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

The other day I stumbled across Owen Braun’s weblog, which must have the best first post sequence I’ve ever read:

Testing
posted Friday, September 23, 2005 3:37 AM by owenb
Hmmm, first post to my first blog. Dum de dum.

Looking Good
posted Friday, September 23, 2005 3:42 AM by owenb
No flames as yet. Emboldened, in next post, will experiment with actual content.

Hello
posted Friday, September 23, 2005 3:47 AM by owenb
I’m writing this blog to tell you about the next version of OneNote (“OneNote 12”), which is currently under development…

Anyone seen something better?

Bird noises

2005-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

There's nothing better than a nice quiet neighbourhood... Video: Bird noises.wmv (1.3MB) | Bird noises (small).wmv (0.5MB)

Aspiring leaders prepare for opportunity

2005-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

Over the weekend, in a Leadership & Motivation MBA course, we had a number of interesting discussions about what it takes to be a great leader. Many ideas were tossed around including drive, luck, ambition, charisma and much more.

Through discussion, our group boiled it down to this simple model:

Leadership performance = Ability x Motivation x Alignment x Opportunity

In reality, this is just a slight variation of Vroom’s 1964 model for performance at work:

Performance = Ability x Motivation
Performance = (Aptitude x Training x Resources) x (Desire x Commitment)

The fundamental difference being that work normally provides you with a context of tasks or opportunity by default while great leaders normally arise out of new opportunities (thrust upon them, created or sought out). For us, opportunity incorporates luck, timing and preparation.

A guest lecturer, Harry Bergsteiner, likes to expand Vroom’s model to include Values:

Performance = Ability x Motivation x Values

In this context, Values includes ethics, policies, procedures and corporate culture. His argument is that the alignment of someone’s values with those of the organisation is very important to performance. Interestingly, he also points out that the only place where punishment or sanctions of staff make sense is when values are not met. Any ability or motivation issues need to be addressed through feedback, encouragement and training. Personally I think that Values is a little bit too idealistic and universal. For mine, it makes more sense to talk about this as alignment with the values of the organisation.

Performance = Ability x Motivation x Alignment

Part of leadership is choosing, building and communicating appropriate values for an organisation (followers). Here alignment remains a vital element to success, both upwards (personal alignment with larger organisation values) and downwards (bring followers into alignment). So, the performance of a leader boils down to:

Leadership performance = Ability x Motivation x Alignment x Opportunity

According to Winston Churchill, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”. So, if you have the motivation, keep preparing and looking for the opportunity that aligns with your values.

Comment by Joe Primm on March 06, 2006 11:17 AM

I liked the article. Preparation is key to meeting opportunity.

Comments are closed.

Searching for the real nathan wallace

2005-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

A few days ago, my personal home page and blog suddenly lost all of their Google juice. After being the number one result on “nathan wallace” for many years all of a sudden I’m not even in the top 200 results.

The weird thing is that the top 10 results are still pretty much all to do with me, they are just specific articles I wrote, people pointing to my blog or profile pages about me on other websites.

The dropped pages are still in Google’s index and can be found through very specific searches.

The only explanations I can come up with are:

I’m using 301 permanent redirects from the old URLs like http://www.e-gineer.com/nathan/index.phtml to http://www.e-gineer.com/nathan/. This is part of changing my site to purely static content.
This blog is published to the e-gineer site using FTP from Blogger. You can tell since the pages contain metadata saying it is blogger generated. Perhaps the splog problem is being targetted even harder by Google.
I’ve actively started updating the e-gineer site and the pigeons really don’t like the direction my content is taking…

I love Google and rely on their services for email, blogging and my daily searching. No complaints here. But, I am searching for reasons as to why I’m suddenly being cast off into the index wilderness. Google, why don’t you like me anymore?

Update (Oct 14, 2005): My blog has jumped back up to result #3.

Update (Oct 15, 2005): My blog is now #2 and the Nathan page #3.

Update (Dec 3, 2005): I was lost, but now I’m found. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have the Nathan page #1 and my blog #2.

Update (Jan 2, 2006): Google has completely shunned me again.

Update (Feb 4, 2006): I’m back at #1 & #2 again.

Comment by Victor on October 10, 2005 11:49 AM

Now that you mentioned it. Victor Hadianto also didn't return my homepage or blog. Destination used to be the #1 hit for victor hadianto search for a while. Strange ...

Comments are closed.

Becoming tough guy macho

2005-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Deal and Kennedy’s cultural model groups organisations into one of four categories. I often reflect on this model when evaluating new ideas or projects.

I like to aim for “tough guy macho”. It allows me to think big, learn fast and make lots of non-fatal mistakes.

Watching through the windows

2005-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

Apparently, some analysts believe “the music business is evolving into a natural home for windows”. By windows they mean the gradual release of content, for example movies are available in theatres, DVD and then TV. In Australia we have the added disadvantage of a geographical window, further delaying releases in each form.

Let’s consider the “windows” for The West Wing (a current addiction for me):

Shown on NBC in the US.
Released to DVD in the US.
Released to DVD in Australia.
Available as overnight DVD hire.
Available as 3 day DVD hire.
Available as weekly DVD hire.
TV broadcast in random order at variable, late night times (standard for sophisticated show on Australian free to air TV).

While this seems like a nice theoretical pecking order, there are some overlooked steps:

Shown on NBC in the US.
TV scrape available for free download via Bit Torrent (or other P2P technology).
Released to DVD in the US.
DVD rip available for free download via Bit Torrent (or other P2P technology).
Released to DVD in Australia.
Available as overnight DVD hire.
Available as 3 day DVD hire.
Available as weekly DVD hire.
TV broadcast in random order at variable, late night times (standard for sophisticated show on Australian free to air TV).

Currently, the only way to watch season 6 or 7 in Australia is by P2P download. It is not yet available in video stores. Given a single hire contains about 8 episodes, even for season 5 (overnight hire), download or hire and rip to personal hard disk is the only practical way to watch.

Long term, the only way I can see “windows” working is if it is released in digital form first. I’m happy to pay, but I’m not happy to wait.

A digital release can be done sooner and at lower cost. There is no artwork or packaging to create. Demand can be gauged and built before the release of collectable physical versions. Fans will buy in digital form first (timely access) and then in physical form later (experience access).

Making digital copies the initial release adds to their value and discourages sharing. Asking a friend if I can rip an electronic copy from their physical copy costs them nothing, they still own the higher quality and more exclusive object. But, if the only copies available are in paid digital form, then asking for a copy reduces its exclusivity. Unfortunately the main concern here is normally the perception of a friend about their copy, not the rights of the artist or publisher.

So, if you are going to use windows, the most effective order would be:

Hard to copy live performances.
High quality digital release.
Released in collectable, physical form.

Free copying of electronic content cannot be stopped. We have to assume that every DRM scheme will get broken, or scraping techniques so powerful that the content isn’t really protected.

So, the only way to monetise electronic content is by changing focus to the value of the content to the license holder rather than the artist or publisher. You need to make me less willing to give away my stuff. Here are my recommendations:

Make digital versions the first release version.
Lower the cost of digital versions reflect their production and distribution. No artwork, no packaging, less marketing, less transport.
Brand digital copies as something else.

I was struck the other day by just how viable the digital alternatives have become. My $40/month internet connection can download from Australian sites at about 800kB/sec. A reasonable quality DVD rip is generally 800MB or less. Theoretically, I could download a DVD in just over 15 minutes (1000 secs). That’s less time than it takes me to get to the video store, let alone make a return the next day.

Using windows to release in different formats I can live with. Just don’t make me wait.

Comment by James Robertson on October 05, 2005 5:33 PM

Not forgetting that we can often purchase the DVD directly from the US before it's released to TV in Australia...

(The wonders of DVD players that are "chipped" by the store to work with any DVD region.)

Comments are closed.

The need for speed

2005-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Mark Fletcher (the bloglines guru) explains the effect of speed on a web site / application:

The speed of your service directly affects its usage. We quickly discovered this with ONElist. When the web site was slow, people used it less, resulting in fewer page views. When it was fast, we saw an increase in usage … we thought that web site usage was very task oriented. Once they finished their task, they’d leave. The speed of the service wouldn’t affect the number of pages they viewed, just the time it took to complete their task. But we were wrong.

A slow site leads to an exponential increase in load on the service. … This is because people are impatient. If Joe Surfer has to wait more than a few seconds for a web page to load, he generally hits the Stop button in his browser and tries to load the page again.

This definitely reflects our general experiences with Sytadel, but I have seen another more powerful way to create exponential load. During the boom I was the technical lead for a very high volume dot com. 4am one morning (Australian time) I get a dreaded “server down” call (9am their time). Restarting Apache and watching the httpd process list grow to

100 in the first few seconds is very disconcerting. The server had been performing well for weeks and investigations later that day revealed the problem. The home page was constructed by using a number of include() statements to pull in various PHP code pieces. A technician for the site had added some new PHP code pieces but was getting the content piece via an fopen() on the full URL rather than using an include(). So, every home page view spawned 4 extra page views on the same server to construct the home page HTML itself.

The fact that I now use Google for all mathematical operations is also testament to this. While drilling down for the Windows calculator a couple of months ago I saw that Google toolbar input field sitting there just waiting for an equation. I had the answer faster than it would normally take to find the calcuator from the Windows Start menu.

Note: Originally posted to my Synop blog on 24 March, 2004.

Glimpses of big change in Office 12

2005-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

About 2am last night I was about to crash when I stumbled upon this video demo of the Office 12 UI. Wow! I’m really impressed with the guts to make changes on this scale and think the results look great. IMO, the screenshots don’t do the changes justice at all.

Watching people struggle with various Office programs through an MBA, the more adept users normally just sigh and take control of document creation or clean up. So any changes that make the capabilities easier to access or explain is a good thing.

It was also great to hear how much useful information Microsoft gathers from their customer experience program. For example, around 70-90% of clicks in Word are on the standard toolbar.

It’s interesting to see that Review has been raised in importance to having it’s own top level Tab in the Ribbon UI. This gels with the apparent focus on team authoring in Office 12, building on the success of Sharepoint which was strongly integrated in Office 2003. For Office 11, the Sharepoint team was moved into the Office team. For Office 12, the Content Management Server team was moved into the Office team as well. On top of that, Groove has been added to Microsoft over the previous year.

With Office 2003, Sharepoint was added to the mix. Over the last 3 years it’s grown massively in popularity for Intranet solutions. Office 12 will take a while to filter through, but I’m expecting dramatic changes to the enterprise content and workflow landscape.

RSS is sticky traffic

2005-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

In the old web days, a spike of new traffic to your website was normally just that, a spike. After the initial interest had died down the general traffic averages would return pretty much to normal.

An interesting characteristic of RSS is that the traffic is sticky. Once someone discovers your site is interesting and subscribes to your feed, they effectively never leave. This results in a constant upward trend for your traffic statistics.

I wonder what interesting statistics or views we could get of RSS data from the web server? For example, average number of requests / IP address / day; % of requests that returned 304 Not Modified; graph of the length of time it takes for a feed update to reach a majority or readers; subscribers gained in the last month; subscribers lost in the last month; etc.

Note: Originally posted to my Synop blog on July 22, 2004 and picked up by Scoble.

GPL3 to close a loophole

2005-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Many years ago I was a keen user of the Arsdigita Community System. Coming out of MIT, it was licensed under the GPL. This worried me a little:

As I understand it, the GPL states that any work derived from the GPL’ed work also comes under the terms of the GPL. Doesn’t that mean that any customized ACS web site must be available publically? I have also noticed with interest that comparable open source projects seem to be releasing under the LGPL (Library GPL).

The response was a very direct “don’t worry about it”, sensibly trying to shut down any concerns or worries of users and their customers. But, his answer also showed a misunderstanding of the GPL and the general loose care factor at the time about using it:

I’m not a lawyer. I just have an office down the hall from Richard Stallman’s so I used his license… I’m too busy programming the next release to worry too much about legal stuff…

But, under the changes proposed to the GPL3 to “close a loophole” I suspect we’ll have no choice but to worry.

Developers and website administrators have to be very careful about the software licenses they don’t read. The “I’m not a lawyer” argument just won’t hold up in court.

Dryer drama

2005-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Working long hours, it was common for us to do washing of a weeknight and put on the dryer while going to sleep. But our downstairs neighbour seems to be an insomniac and likes to blame our dryer (among other things).

The most memorable disagreement was the first night that she buzzed us to complain about 10:50pm. I argued back and refused to turn it off until the clothes were dry.

This may seem unreasonable, but we’ve never heard any noise from any other apartment in 2 years. Also, we’d kindly let her in late one other night a few months earlier to search for a noise that was keeping her awake (not in our apartment).

Anyway, about 20 minutes later I felt guilty and the clothes were pretty much dry so I turned off the dryer.

Then at about 12:30am our apartment buzzer rang again, waking me up. Still annoyed, I answered the apartment buzzer with “What?!?”. “Ah, sir, it’s the police. Would you mind coming down?”. So, I was woken up by a noise complaint follow up from the police. To be honest, I’m not sure either the cops or I knew how to handle it.

I’d love to do a full noise level analysis to check that we’re definitely within the NSW noise guidelines, especially since dryers aren’t even listed as a potential problem source. But unfortunately, I don’t have access to a noise level meter.

Video: Dryer drama.wmv (2.1MB)

Dryer drama (small).wmv (0.6MB)

Composing multicore CPU symphonies

2005-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Borrowing from the infinitely more eloquent writing and ideas of Eric and Joel, music provides a richer basis for the multicore CPU metaphor I tried to build yesterday.

Programming for single core CPUs is like composing a powerful solo piece.

Programming for multicore CPUs is like composing for a band, choir or symphony.

Rewriting the software development playbook

2005-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

Over the last few days I’ve been reading up on hardware architecture for the PS3 and XBox 360. With multi-core processors seemingly the way of the future for all the major manufacturers, game developers will continue to be software pioneers over the next few years facing incredibly complex multi-threading and software design problems. From Arstechnica:

But like I said above, that free ride is over, and now it’s time to face the multithreaded, multicore music. In the new world, a world of which both the Xenon and the Cell are a part, programmers have a whole lot more work to do, in terms of both splitting their applications up into threads and of optimizing those individual threads. The fact that they haven’t yet been able to figure out how to make applications that they learned how to write on the old hardware work on the new hardware is completely unsurprising. The old hardware had a theoretical performance peak and lots of hardware aimed at helping applications reach that peak; the new hardware has a higher theoretical performance peak, and little to no hardware aimed at helping applications reach that peak. So developers have a longer distance to go, and they have less help in getting there. It certainly makes for a vexing combination, but it’s way too early to say that it’s the end of the world.

Anandtech has a number of great articles for getting up to speed on this hardware architecture and the implications for software:

While there will be many challenges in rearchitecting existing software for optimal execution under this new architecture, I’ll be more interested to see what new applications and solutions become possible as a result of the new architectures. Software that has many things going on simultaneously, software that seems to be moving around you rather than just waiting for your next piece of input.

Software developers are used to coaching a single player (think tennis), who got faster and stronger each year. Now, we’re being asked to coach a team (think football) where each player gets only slightly better but the number of players available increases each year.

It’s time to start rewriting the playbook…

Simple isn't easy

2005-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

In thinking about starting a new business, a big part of the question is what type of business to aim for. I see a few basic types: build yourself a job, build yourself a cushy job, build something bigger than yourself.

When building Google, did they foresee a company that will touch the life of every Internet user? Were the dreams that bold? Or, did they just see a company that could be big? Is the creation of a multi-billion dollar benometh intentional and planned?

I suspect not.

What these founders see, I suspect, is a new simple model. They see potential. They see a new way of doing business that they feel a large number of people will like. Whether that builds into $10M’s, $100M’s or $1B’s can only be discovered with time and is usually irrelevant to the model they’ve adopted (profits are sound at any of those levels).

Great businesses aren’t complex, they’re usually incredibly simple. That’s why they make sense to customers and can grow so fast. The problem with simple is that it appears easy, but making something simple is the hardest thing to do.

Exploring beneath the fold

2005-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been thinking for a while that I don’t do enough to encourage exploration of my weblog content, making it hard to discover older content. Of course, most people probably only see it in an RSS reader and thus couldn’t care less about my design or branding decisions anyway.

In Embrace your bottom! Derek Powazek might have the idea to kick start some improvements:

Your engaged users - the ones who really like you, yaknow, more than a friend - are sticking with that main content. Everything in the sidebar just makes it harder to focus on your content. Then, when they get to the end, when they’re ready for something else to do, when they’re ready for that end of the date smooch … that’s the moment it’s all been leading up to. That’s when users are most open to suggestions of where else to go, maybe do a search, maybe even click on an ad.

Harry Potter

2005-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

While stuck in bed over the last couple of weeks, I’ve re-read all the Harry Potter books. They really are engaging and a delight to read. I’m amazed at the depth and consistency of the earlier books, it’s clear that the entire series was envisaged from the start.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (#4) remains my favourite as it has the joy and innocence of the earlier books along with some of the darkness prevalent in the later books.

16 curly roots

2005-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

The last two weeks haven’t been the best of conditions for some relaxing time off: 5 days sick with a terrible case of food poisoning, 2 MBA exams and then my wisdom teeth out the very next day.

Video: 16 curly roots.wmv (7.5MB)

16 curly roots (small).wmv (2.1MB)

Comment by Tim Haines on September 29, 2005 2:26 PM

Damn, I was hoping to see the curly roots.

Comment by Nathan @ e-gineer on September 29, 2005 2:34 PM

I actually asked the same thing, but unfortunately they put them straight into medical waste disposal...

Comments are closed.

Built to last

2005-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

A story of unjustified, but appreciated, faith in my building capabilities.

Video: Built to last.wmv (2.3MB)

Built to last (small).wmv (0.9MB)

Making powerful decisions from the edge

2005-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

Power to the Edge is a fascinating manifesto from the US Department of Defence on how the structure of their organisation needs to change in the coming years to better meet the challenges of a dynamic, politically loaded and loosely coupled world.

Power to the edge is about changing the way individuals, organizations, and systems relate to one another and work. Power to the edge involves the empowerment of individuals at the edge of an organization (where the organization interacts with its operating environment to have an impact or effect on that environment) or, in the case of systems, edge devices. Empowerment involves expanding access to information and the elimination of unnecessary constraints. For example, empowerment involves providing access to available information and expertise and the elimination of procedural constraints previously needed to deconflict elements of the force in the absence of quality information.

Empowering people at the edge to make decisions is great, but (as they explain) the boundaries on appropriate decision making need to be set. These boundaries are social and self-inflicted rather than technically or structurally constrained. The organisation structure may have checks & balances on decision making, but it is usually too late when these take effect.

During my Organisational Behaviour MBA course I found that Vroom and Jago have done some interesting work to help managers decide how a particular decision should be made within their organisation. Changing their flowchart language slightly yields a useful starting point for decision boundaries at the edge of the high performance teams.

Note: Originally posted to my Synop blog on March 23, 2004.

Technology paralysis

2005-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

I first craved a DVD player in 1999 after my flatmate moved out with his. From memory, back then a decent one was $1,200AU. This seemed just a bit too expensive, so I waited and made do with videos and a new flatmate’s good Sony 68cm TV.

Then, in late 2002 the flatmate & TV moved out again. Bianca and I just ended up using her little old 34cm TV with videos.

By early 2004 it was getting harder to hire videos so we decided to spend $60 on a cheap DVD player. Unfortunately her TV was so old that it didn’t support the input cables and it would cost another $75 in adapters to make it work (since Macrovision prevented us routing the signal through the video).

Of course, at this point a new TV was justified, but we just couldn’t help wanting a flat panel, which were way too expensive. So, just like the DVD player decision above, we waited.

Suddenly it’s 2005, and I can’t believe that we still don’t have a DVD player!

This was a classic case of technology paralysis. I decided the only cure was to jump the DVD cycle completely and starting building a HTPC.

Comment by Matt Sheppard on September 05, 2005 1:27 PM

Don't remember if I even mentioned it, but I've been quite happy with my DVD player from Dick Smith. I've actually got it running though my video because it...ahem...doesn't do all that macrovision rubbish (and it's also multi region).

Comment by Nathan @ e-gineer on September 06, 2005 11:35 AM

Interesting ... it was in trying to buy a cheap one from Dick Smith that I learnt about all the Macrovision problems (from their staff). Might have done better to try it anyway!

Comments are closed.

False alarm

2005-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

It was incredibly eerie with our massive apartment fire alarm ringing out through the darkness of West Chatswood. As is typical of these “emergency” situations, after I was unable to get back to sleep through the noise I finally went out to investigate.

This video reflects my sleepy state during filming at 1:30am. I knew it was dark but thought you’d at least be able to see reflections of the flashing fire engine lights.

Video: False alarm.wmv (0.4MB)

False alarm (small).wmv (0.3MB)

Information overload: Replacing noise with signal is not a solution

2005-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

Before feed subscriptions, our world was filled with time-intensive manual monitoring and pull based operations (e.g. web browsing). Push based operations were normally based on giving up access to attention management tools like email, making them risky and outside our control.

Feed subscriptions give us a pull mechanism for having information pushed to us. This is a sublime combination of push convenience using the safety and control of a pull mechanism.

But, it’s important to realize that feed subscriptions do not solve the information overload problem (contrary to popular opinion). In fact, for many people they will make the problem worse.

Feed subscriptions dramatically increase our control, signal to noise ratio and ability to stay in the loop. They also remind us daily of the continuous information flow, forward march of ideas and compel us to stay connected.

Using RSS and feed subscriptions we can fine tune our reading to the weblogs and sources that best match our interests. Compared to the previous time-saving method of checking key hub / aggregator sites only, this results in a much higher average level of interest in the items discovered.

We are better informed, but far more overloaded with information that we feel compelled to consume for integration into our mental map.

RSS provides time advantages for consuming individual items of interest. This is through reduction of discovery overhead, removed lookup and download time, a consistent interface and reduction of the need to troll through large amounts of irrelevant information.

The problem arises because feed subscriptions are so effective at helping us to find relevant information. Interesting information and sources obviously take longer to consume that irrelevant ones (which don’t need to be read in detail). So, subscriptions increase relevance which also increases processing time. Thus, if we discover the same number of items each day as before using subscriptions the process will take us much longer (since those items are generally more interesting to us).

Without feed subscriptions	With feed subscriptions
Monitoring is expensive	Monitoring is cheap
Overloaded with noise	Overloaded with signal
Information is hard to find	Information is hard to prioritise

The next major challenge we face is developing tools, techniques and acceptable behaviours to help us deal with this growing amount of high-value information. I suspect that the solutions will grow increasingly less technically driven and more socially driven.

As information consumers we need to learn to balance the cost of not knowing (lost opportunities, etc) with the cost of knowing (time).

Note: Originally posted to my Synop blog on March 20, 2004.

DVD run

2005-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t have a car, so walking to the video store twice (pickup & return) takes about 50 mins total. With a high throughput server and my 8Mbs internet connection I could download a 1GB DVD rip in about 20 mins. The time for video on demand is now.

Video: DVD run.wmv (4.4MB)

DVD run (small).wmv (1.2MB)

MBA snippets: Marketing Management

2005-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

In a moment of stupidity during late 2003 I signed up to do a part-time MBA. I’ve just completed the exam for Marketing Management, my first subject. Below are the tidbits, comments, theories and anecdotes I found particularly interesting or thought provoking. Many of these are distilled from Marketing Management by Philip Kotler, a valuable text that I’m sure will be referred to often.

Customer satisfaction

The challenge, according to Jeffrey Gitomer, is not to produce satisfied customers; several competitors can do this. The challenge is to produce delighted and loyal customers.
96% of dissatisfied customers don’t complain, they just stop buying.
Of the customers who register a complaint, between 54 and 70% will do business again with the organisation if their complaint is resolved. The figure goes up to a staggering 95% if the customer feels that the complaint was resolved quickly. Customers who have complained to an organisation and had their complaints satisfactorily resolved tell an average of five people about the good treatment they received.
According to Jeff Bezos, if you make a customer unhappy he will tell five friends; if you disappoint a customer on the Internet, he is capable of telling 5,000 or 50,000 people.
What is a customer?
- A customer is the most important person ever in this office … in person or by mail.
- A customer is not dependent on us … we are dependent on him.
- A customer is not an interruption of our work … he is the purpose of it. We are not doing a favour by serving him … he is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to do so.
- A customer is not someone to argue or match wits with. Nobody ever won an argument with a customer.
- A customer is a person who brings us his wants. It is our job to handle the profitably to him and to ourselves.
Herzberg’s theory distinguishes dissatisfiers (factors that cause dissatisfaction) and satisfiers (factors that cause satisfaction). The absensce of dissatisfiers is not enough, satisfiers must be actively present to motivate a purchase.
Product layers:
1. Core benefit: the basic benefit that meets a customer need or want.
2. Basic product: realisation of the core benefit.
3. Expected product: normal customer expectation.
4. Augmented product: exceeds customer expectations and includes all facets like delivery.
5. Potential product: all potential product augmentations.
Tony O’Reilly, former CEO of H.J.Heinz, proposed this test of brand loyalty: “My acid test … is whether a housewife, intending to buy Heinz tomato ketchup in a store, finding it to be out of stock, will walk out of the store to buy it elsewhere.”

Strategy

Peter Drucker’s classic questions:
- What is our business?
- Who is the customer?
- What is of value to the customer?
- What will our business be?
- What should our business be?
Most companies believe they can win by performing the same activities more effectively than their competitors, but competitors can quickly copy the operationally effective company using benchmarking and other tools, thus diminishing the advantage of operational effectiveness. Porter defines strategy as “the creation of a unique and valuable position involving a different set of activities.” A company can claim that it has a strategy when it “performs different activities from rivals or performs similar activities in different ways”. Porter’s generic strategies:
- Overall cost leadership: The business works hard to achieve the lowest production and distribution costs so that it can price lower than its competitors and win a large market share.
- Differentiation: The business concentrates on achieving superior performance in an important customer benefit area valued by a large part of the market.
- Focus: The business focuses on one or more narrow market segments.
Value disciplines states that within its industry, a firm can aspire to be (Treacy/Wiersema):
1. The product leader;
2. The operationally excellent firm; or
3. The customer intimate firm.
Four rules for success:
1. Become best at one of the three value disciplines.
2. Achieve an adequate performance level in the other two disciplines.
3. Keep improving one’s superior position in the chosen discipline so as not to lose out to a competitor.
4. Keep becoming more adequate in the other two disciplines, because competitors keep raising customers’ expectations.
Tomina Edmark, inventor of the plastic hairstyling piece called Topsy-Tail, grew her company’s sales to $80 million in 1993 with only two employees. Instead of hiring 50 or more employees, Edmark and her two employees set up a network of 20 vendors who chandled everything from product manufacturing to serving the retail accounts. Yet Edmark has been careful to follow the first rule of effective outsourcing: She keeps control of new product development and marketing strategy, the core competencies that make up the heart of her company.
As Jim Kelly, CEO of UPS, which has a number of global alliances puts it “The old adage ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’” is being replaced by “Join ‘em and you can’t be beat’”.

Marketing

SWOT:
- Strengths (internal)
- Weaknesses (internal)
- Opportunities (external): An area of buyer need or potential interest in which a company can perform profitably.
- Threats (external): a challenge posed by an unfavourable trend or development that would lead, in the absence of defensive marketing action, to deterioration in sales or profit.
Positioning statement: To (target group and need) our (Brand) is (concept) that (point of difference).
Taco Bell estimates its customer lifetime value at up to $11,000.
At Volvo, engineers think safety in every design decision (matching their desired market position). When they decided to add a GPS to the dashboard of a recent model, they wanted to be sure that the screen would be easy to read and close to the driver’s viewing point so it would not act as a distraction; and when some customers asked volvo to make a convertible car, the company decided against it because “convertible cars aren’t safe”.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (people try to move up from 1 to 6):
1. Physiological needs: food, water, shelter.
2. Safety needs: security, protection.
3. Social need: sense of belonging, love.
4. Esteem needs: self-esteem, recognition, status.
5. Self-actualisation needs: self-development, realisation.

Miscillaneous

Viagra works for 80% of people, but for 25% of those it’s a placebo.

Note: Originally posted to my Synop blog on March 16, 2004.

Killboy Powerhead

2005-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

Just a quick glimpse at some of the impressive infrastructure work going on around Chatswood station at the moment.

Confession: While I don’t plan to make it a habit, this video has two camera shots and is about 1 second longer than normal.

Video: Killboy Powerhead.wmv (5.2MB)

Killboy Powerhead (small).wmv (1.2MB)

Holy spam, it's propaganda

2005-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

Yesterday (March 9, 2004) I received around 160 spam messages. SpamBayes does a great job, catching about 140 of them, and flagging about 20 as suspect. It only missed one or two “spam” that are content newsletters highly related to my field which I was subscribed to without permission or no longer read.

I now trust SpamBayes decision that a message is definitely spam and completely ignore those. I skim the suspects everyday and use those for training.

Trends in spamming techniques are very clear when you receive this much junk. While I consider these interesting (e.g. mixing up word letters, adding junk words to fool the filters) a couple of recent messages have annoyed me more than most.

Last week I received my first piece of spam art / poetry. A simple poem that the author felt compelled to send to millions of readers. I could appreciate the idea when done through Google Ads, but was not so excited about having it thrust into my Inbox.

Today, I received my first religious spam encouraging me to find Jesus. This felt even lower…

It raises the interesting idea however that spam is a very effective propaganda technique. If you have a cause and want to get the message out to as many people as possible as quickly as possible, why not use spam? This could be used for both constructive (Go Wildcats!) or destructive (XXX is guilty - here’s proof) ideas. It’s like a modern day equivalent of dropping leaflets only cheaper, faster and bigger.

Imagine if someone decided to start a SPAM onslaught threatening a terrorist attack? Hard to track, quick to spread and must be taken seriously.

Note: Originally posted to my Synop blog on March 10, 2004.

Update August 20, 2005: While I peaked around 400 spam per day, by moving to Gmail and removing the catch all for Synop email addresses I’ve cut back to about 39 with only 1 or 2 actually reaching my inbox each day.

"this is copyrighted by me so u cant copy it!"

2005-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

Until last night, I had no idea how widely read my PHP: Hackers Paradise articles had spread. Turns out, you can read copies of the article in full (or close to full) on these sites:

http://www.devnewz dot com/2001/0809.html (particularly clever innuendo that Peter Thiruselvam is the author while actually stating that I am).
http://www.biblioteca dot co dot cr/html/php-hackers-paradise-php.shtml or in PDF http://www.biblioteca dot co dot cr/pdf/PHP_Hackers_paradise_ebook.pdf
http://triviasecurity dot net/library.php?F=619

But, on this sites you have to pay to get access to a full copy of the article:

http://www.aneas dot net/ebookstore/inventory3.asp ($5 to download, but seems to have been removed, via google cache)
http://www.learnessays dot com/show_essay/138954.html ($9.99 / month)
http://www.radigan dot net/page.php?page=books (special client area)

This guy (http://www.joshuaz dot com/community/Downloads/48.aspx) added the RTF file to his site, but then suspected it may contain a virus (it doesn’t). I’m even in his most popular downloads list!

There are RTF and PDF versions floating around in lots of places, but it was amusing to see that I’d made it onto Astalavista (http://www.astalavista dot com/?section=directory&cmd=detail&id=1905) and the eDonkey network (http://www.poptopic dot net/file.php?hash1=98B77F35FDC1E338&hash2=133840719A7A5D4A&size=135895).

All the above is pretty low, but there is one guy who takes the cake. Greg Tampa decided to simply change the author name and post it to this site (www.hackercity dot com/read.html?postid=3438&replies=2&page=1). Classy.

Skimming through to the bottom of that page I noticed that Greg had decided to add a comment on his own post: “note this is copyrighted by me so u cant copy it!”.

Comment by Peter Thiruselvam on October 07, 2008 1:47 PM

Nathan Wallace,

My name is Peter Thiruselvam and about 8 years ago I worked for Richard Ord of iEntry.com. I see that you have used my name saying that using "clever inneuendo" I tried to take credit for your article. I did not. I was the editor for several newsletters for Richard Ord and his policy was to use articles for his newsletters and give the author credit for it. Several hundred articles were published and each one had the original author's credit, unless I wrote the article myself. You are mistaken if you think I wanted credit for your article. I don't even remember it and devnewz is not on the net anymore. Actually, many authors were very pleased to have the article published so that they received wide publicity from the several hundred readers. If you thought that I was trying to get credit for your article, then I apologize. However, this was not my intent and the bottom of the article did give you credit as the author and me as the editor(which was in fact my position). Therefore, please remove my name from your BLOG as soon as possible.

Thank You,

Peter

Comment by Anonymous on October 29, 2008 3:28 PM

Hey Nathan,

You are full of shit. Pete has published several of my articles and always gave me credit. I have a copy of that article saved and it clearly gives you the credit as the author. Stop thinking your more than you are. I'm sending a copy to all my friends with a copy of the email so they too can write their own comments on your "blog"

Fuck You,

M. Tipton

Comments are closed.

Sampling the CC licenses

2005-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

I think the Creative Commons system of licenses is great. They are simple, clear and direct. Unfortunately, I’ve struggled to find a license that I feel is suitable for the e-gineer site.

I encourage people to link to this site. I encourage people to build on my ideas and work. But, I don’t want people distributing complete copies of my work on e-gineer, commercial or otherwise.

I’m surprised that Creative Commons haven’t created a license format to represent the standard / implicit copyright case. I understand it’s implied and may even be against the spirit of CC, but surely it would make sense to provide it with all the machine and human readable capabilities they’ve managed to bring to the more sharing friendly licenses? If anything, it would encourage the use and awareness of the CC license format and ability software tools to use it more widely?

Anyway, as best I can tell, the Sampling license is the most appropriate for my needs.

My understanding of clause 6a in the license is that once used on a work that work can be used subject to those terms perpetually, regardless of whether you change the license. I’m certainly not expecting a flood of users, but I guess that means it’s important to choose carefully before using a license. So, for now, everything here remains under the implicit (no need to even © it) copyright license.

eBay, myths and the bottom-up economy

2005-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

eBay’s origins as a site built by Pierre Omidyar so his fiance could trade Pez dispensers is well known. It’s old news, but I learned last night that this is actually a brilliant PR myth created by Mary Lou Song.

Myths, stories and legends are vital for company culture and to create a mystic that attracts outsiders. The eBay myth is an inspiring example of how a good story (true or false) can connect a company with its customers in a very real way.

eBay is an expert at understanding the importance of customer relationships on their business, they embody the bottom-up economy:

In the bottom-up economy, presuming you know what the customer wants is the ultimate error. Prahalad and Ramaswamy instead call for “co-creation of value”: The successful products and services from now on will be those developed jointly – company and customer working hand in hand.

To Pierre Omidyar all that sounds very familiar. As the founder of eBay, he is the Adam Smith of the Bottom-Up Economy. From the beginning, eBay set out to level the playing field between big and small.

Says he: “At eBay the managers don’t control the brand or the customer experience – our customers themselves do.”

Scary. But then, eBay’s $42 billion market cap suggests that the benefits of working bottom-up make it worth the risks.

Note: Originally published to my Synop blog on March 8, 2004.

Wal-Mart & productivity

2005-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

A fascinating article about Wal-Mart from FastCompany:

There is no question that Wal-Mart’s relentless drive to squeeze out costs has benefited consumers. The giant retailer is at least partly responsible for the low rate of U.S. inflation, and a McKinsey & Co. study concluded that about 12% of the economy’s productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s could be traced to Wal-Mart alone.

via Dave Pollard.

Note: Originally posted to my Synop blog on January 30, 2004.

Creating a favicon

2005-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

While there is plenty of information around on creating a favicon for your website, unfortunately most of it is fairly incomplete. Here’s my summary:

While newer browsers support a gif or png image, IE still needs an ico file. There are a few online tools for creating these, but personally I use Microangelo.
I was surprised that IE only uses a favicon (any context) after the site has been bookmarked. Firefox uses it all the time.
Icon files can contain multiple images. I included 16x16, 32x32 and 48x48 pixel images in Windows XP colour (24-bit with 8-bit alpha). At the very least, you need one 16x16 pixel image. There are many more formats you can provide depending on your desired level of support. I wanted it to look good in the browser or in Windows as a shortcut.
There are a few ways to inform the browser about a favicon:
- Horrible way: Save a favicon.ico file in your web server root directory.
- Standards compatible way: <link href=”/my/icon.ico” type=”image/ico” rel=”icon”/>
- Tradeoff for IE & standards (my choice): <link href=”/my/icon.ico” type=”image/ico” rel=”shortcut icon”/>
The favicon validator is a great little online service.

Rich vs King

2005-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

It’s relatively well known that founder CEO’s will probably be replaced, but this HBS article covers the issue well:

My research shows that in small companies, it’s still true that when founder-CEOs do badly, they are replaced. But the interesting paradox is that when founder-CEOs do really well, that also increases the chances that they’re going to be replaced.

For me, the main factor would be the skills of the replacement. I’d want what’s best for the company. Financials are important, but the main driver for me would be to see my baby fulfill its potential.

Are you ready to be replaced? Can you pass the “Rich vs King” test?

Unofficial history of Synop

2005-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

I started Synop in September 1998 as a uni student working from my bedroom with about $8,000 to my name. Luckily, starting a business didn’t seem like a big deal because I could always get a job and I didn’t really even think of it as starting a business, let alone understand what that meant.

Initially, Synop traded as a NSW business called Synop Software.

Caught up in the Internet gold rush, I wanted to build an online version of Quicken so I could enter my expenses remotely. Typical of Synop, this turned into a full fledged electronic organiser with sophisticated item sharing between members. elec.org was the working name and the site was built using AOLServer, TCL and the Solid database server. Having no experience with Internet sites or databases, Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing was my bible at this time.

In March 1999, Dave Thomas became involved as a mentor and guide on my business building journey. His probing questions led me to understand more about the business realities of running a large scale web site funded by advertising, particularly since disk space was relatively expensive. Around this time sites like When.com launched the first online electronic organisers.

During 1999, Dave found me various small paid consulting projects for his network. Only later did I realise that this was a gentle form of testing, funding and keeping me afloat while I learnt the basics of a business (i.e. one needs customers).

Around this time I shifted from AOLServer to using a PHP in a LAMP stack (although it wasn’t called that yet). The primary driver was that I could host a public web site with scripting and a database for $25US / month. Demonstrating elec.org was horrendously difficult and expensive as AOLserver was not commonly used and required a dedicated server.

Inspired by software that ArsDigita was building, I built a PHP equivalent called Synphony. This powered e-gineer.com, to which I was adding many articles and instruction sets and which hosted the PHP Knowledge Base (later FAQTs).

In August 1999 I made my first visit to the US. Reading extensively online, I kept hearing about the internet revolution and how the web was everywhere. In Australia, the occaisional URL was making its way onto the bottom of TV advertisements and I thought “Yeah, it’s happening”. Then I arrived in San Francisco. Every billboard I saw during my visit was for an Internet company. I could literally overhear people talking about new business ideas across cafes. I learnt two things: the significant divide between Australia and the US, despite the Internet; and just how huge the Internet was becoming.

I did a number of job interviews in the US on this trip, and decided to turn down jobs with ArsDigita, CNet and others. It’s at this point that Synop really became more than a hobby.

Towards the end of that trip (October), I ended up in Sarasota, Florida upgrading WorldFinanceNet.com from FrontPage and static HTML to run the first version of Synphony. This top 1000 web site with massive morning traffic spikes was Synop’s first real customer and user of Synphony.

WFN was a classic Internet boom company. Two decisions stand out in particular. The first was deciding not to spend $5,000 US to get the wfn.com domain name for their top 1000 web site (apparently, WorldFinanceNet.com really isn’t that long or confusing). The second was when senior management came in and told me with much excitement that we need to add another advertisement to the home page. It was a barter deal in exchange for cheap access to their own private jet for getting to meetings…

At this point, the realities of web server support became very real to me with many late night calls. Being woken up to cries of “the server’s down!” is not conducive to a good nights sleep. One night, I logged in and saw 300+ httpd processes thrashing on the server. Restarting Apache, I couldn’t believe my eyes as the traffic built up to 200+ again within a minute. Turns out that a hacker at WFN had changed numerous includes on the home page to pull in smaller pieces on the site using URLs rather than PHP file includes. The result, was a morning traffic spike with every home page visit spawning 5 PHP script requests to Apache.

Unfortunately, the WFN relationship didn’t end happily (Apr 2000). Business lessons: bill customers early and often; it’s hard to be persistent and insistent by phone; and the US legal system is too expensive to bother pursuing $50k US ($100k AU) in unpaid bills.

There was one alternative I didn’t pursue however. On a US domestic flight I ended up next to a crazy old duck from NY. Turns out she was a bookmaker in her spare time and was more than happy to give me the number of some guys who could be quite persuasive when retrieving funds.

During the summer of 99/00, Jad and I built FAQTs.com and really took Synphony to the next level. The highlight was probably teaching Jad how to kick a football in my living room over many intense design discussions. At this point Synop had it’s own room in our apartment for an office.

Apachecon 2000 was held in Orlando during March, at the absolute peak of the bubble. Everyone was running around offering everyone else a job. This was the first of a number of conferences where I was lucky enough to present.

July 2000 was a dark time for Synop, with its survival limited to my credit cards after the WFN payment default. Through Randy Best, a great friend to Synop, we entered a contract with First Light Communications in New York to build and maintain a content management system that they would resell. “Feast or famine” was an email subject from Randy at the time, and certainly securing this contract took Synop back into the fast lane.

Synop Software incorporated to become Synop Pty Ltd at this time. Luckily another company with the name Synop had dropped it between 1998 and 2000, so we could get the originally preferred name.

Over the coming months I built and delivered Synphony v2 products to First Light. The real crunch was just prior to the Sydney olympics when I did three 20-hour days in a row, shipping the first product on the day of the opening ceremony. I remember working to 3am and getting up at 6:30am for a chance to watch the torch run by on the Pacific Hwy. Synphony obtained role based security, membership models, affiliate tracking and an incredible raft of features at this time.

In October 2000, my good friend Matt joined as Synop’s first employee. He quickly established our Artarmon office, which we used until closing and generally built all of Synop’s administration facilities and systems that I’d completely ignored since starting. John and Dean joined Synop quickly afterwards, ramping up our scale to support Synphony and continue development.

Hopes and expectations for the future of Synop were high, unrealistically high on my part, around this time. In anticipation of a bright future, the Synphony products were rebranded to Sytadel and a suite of E-gineers (communication, community, construction, content, knowledge, surveillance, sytadel).

These hopes came crashing back to earth when we held a booth at ApacheCon 2001. This was a different world to just a year before, with few attendees and everyone there looking for a job rather than offering them. The bubble had truly burst.

Over the coming months all of Synop’s significant clients went out of business, and Synop was forced to shrink back down to me working alone. At this stage I was experimenting with tools to help with Agile project management (code name Agilation), including an add-in for Microsoft project that provided a card playing UI for task allocation.

Peter Bailey had joined as a part time consultant in May 2001 and agreed to join permanently after helping to win our first government contract (the IP Access portal) in Oct 2001. Thus began the next phase in Synop’s life, and a great journey for us together.

Sytadel v3 was built and shipped as part of the IP Access project. This saw version control, workflow and many other advanced features come to Sytadel. At this point, Sytadel owners could use the Construction E-gineer to develop new content types that were automatically version controlled, subject to workflow, had complete editing and viewing screens. All the generated code was completely documented and extensively commented for ease of editing.

I completed the final stages of this project working from Internet cafes while chasing Bianca around Central America. Actually, the fastest Internet connection I’ve ever used was in Guatemala.

In April 2002, Synop organised Agile Australia 2002, the first series of talks on Agile Methods in Oz. I also presented two Synop papers at XP 2002 in Italy. To reflect this change and our project development methods, Synop’s tagline became “take the agile approach”.

Mid-2002 saw Synop win the ACCC Internet and Intranet portal redevelopment project in partnership with SecureNet. This was a huge project with more than 750 pages in the project specification. Many project problems, including massive scope creep, performance bottlenecks and my decision to rewrite Sytadel from scratch into v4 based on XML saw this project blow out into 2004. As a fixed price concern, this project became a huge millstone around Synop’s neck.

Although I did have my car written off while parked outside the ACCC late one night, the darkest days of this project were spent working for a week at the James Court Serviced Apartments in Canberra. After months of furious code development and sleepless nights, we felt Sytadel had reached a turning point in solidity and features. This week was going to put on the final touches and really begin roll out of the myriad of ACCC customisations. But, PHP and Sablotron had other plans for us. At this point, the system literally imploded and everything just stopped working. Days of installs, work arounds, bug fixes and rollbacks could not get things working again. Sytadel is an incredibly complex piece of engineering that pushes PHP, MySQL and XML libraries to their limit. Or beyond it, as we found out that week. After returning to Sydney (broken shadows of our former selves), we did some C hacking to replace the XSLT engine and Sytadel magically restored to working order. I still get shivers every time I pass the James Court, but only Richard who joined Synop and toiled with me through every inch of the Sytadel v4 rewrite would probably understand that.

Buried in the ACCC debacle, Synop struggled through early 2003 to deliver on a range of new customer projects (e.g. UNJLC, MDBC) we’d won with the promise of Sytadel v4 features and hard business development work throughout 2002. Working on site at the ACCC and in Peter’s Canberra home office, Matt Sheppard joined us in late 2002 to help.

Through 2003, Synop succesfully added hosting, support and consulting revenue streams to smooth out our traditionally lumpy revenue.

Contemplating life after this project onslaught, in April 2003 we started thinking about an AusIndustry R&D START grant application for what eventually became the Sauce project. Work on Sauce began in September 2003, at which point Victor Hadianto also joined Synop.

The Sauce project had 3 components: an aggregation server (TrustedSauce.com), aggregation client (Sauce Reader) and a content server (Sauce Studio). We built the aggregation server using .NET in late 2003 but it was never made public due to lack of resources to support a large search infrastructure and compete with now well-funded players like Technorati. TrustedSauce contained unique features for FOAF discovery, tracing weblog conversations and more.

Sauce Reader was released as a free for personal use product, to support RSS reading and weblog posting. Many 1.x versions were released through 2004, using the .NET platform. To address significant performance concerns, and for better integration with Sauce Studio, Sauce Reader 2.x was built using Delphi and released in May 2005. While technically advanced, Sauce Reader struggled as the RSS reader market exploded through 2004 with hundreds of competitors, free open source versions and increasing integration into web browsers.

Sauce Studio was built to concept stage in house and provided a file system based, XML content management system. It was a lightweight, flexible solution that could be combined with third party security, version control and other tools. Although we had strong belief in this technology, unfortunately we could not identify an appropriate market niche to commercialise the product.

While this aggressive R&D took place we continued growing the Sytadel and consulting aspects to Synop’s business. We opened our Canberra office in January, and by late 2004, Synop had grown into a company that could estimate and deliver increasingly complex projects reliably and profitably (e.g. METeOR, AER). During this busy time, Synop doubled in size to 10 people, adding more developers and our first full time business development manager. We finally had a good mix of experience and skill-sets.

Come 2005, Synop was faced with a difficult situation. Despite growing our business development resources and stringing together successful projects, our pipeline of new Sytadel business was running out. Our projects were typically the more high risk and complex customisation jobs requiring a flexible CMS. But, hypercompetition was driving prices lower and making jobs increasingly difficult for Synop to win.

After recognising the inherent conflict of being a small company building large enterprise CMS systems back in 2003, the Sauce project was intended to provide the next phase of Synop’s product line and consulting services. However, delays due to hangover projects in 2004 and a failure to identify an immediate and profitable market niche made rapid growth of revenue from this project highly unlikely.

With Synop in a financially healthy, but strategically weak situation we considered a range of alternatives for the future of the business. The only financially viable option appeared to be movement towards a pure consulting services model, building on third party products. Unfortunately, Synop’s passion had always been developing new products. So, the sad and difficult decision was made to divest assets and close the business as appropriate.

Comment by Rod on August 17, 2005 7:27 AM

Bugger! Sauce Reader is my favorite RSS reader.
Have you thought about charging for it?

Comment by Chris Johnson on August 18, 2005 2:41 PM

What a shame you are giving up Sauce Reader! It really is THE BEST reader out there ... just not enough people know about it! I have tried all the rest and they suck. Your software is clean, designed well, does not try to re-invent how applications look and feel ... and is easy to use! It will probably be years before someone comes up with something as good as your V2. Ah well .. will have to keep using that for a while yet then! :)

Comment by Anonymous on August 25, 2006 8:48 PM

Hi!
Thank you very much for that perfect news aggregator. I like it very much. I use Liferea under Linux and yours under Windows.
Please keep on going to develope it!

Comment by RadhaKrishna on January 09, 2007 5:45 PM

Saucereader is THE BEST...I cant tell you how many aggregators I have used before using this..I instantly fell in love with it..Seriously you must consider charging it..I am sure once it develops traction, a lot of people will not think twice before paying

Comment by Luiz on March 22, 2007 10:56 PM

Congrats on the reader! It's the best one I tried.
Since you cannot mantain it anymore, how about transfering it to an open source initiative? :)
You keep your legacy and make a lot of happy users! :D

Comment by Anonymous on April 02, 2007 3:28 AM

Saucereader is the best, no other like it. I abandoned it just today after months of struggling beacause it's not more capable to read my blogs. Really thanks anyway.

Comment by Mr. Hobbs. on February 18, 2010 3:09 PM

I look forward to reading Volume II, whenever that eventuates.

Comments are closed.

Personal IT: Website & weblog

2005-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Having decided that I should have grown out of server administration by now, I needed to come up with a simple solution for running a personal web site. For me, the criteria are:

Quick and easy to update, which in 2005 means a weblog.
Minimal effort to maintain and improve.
A site that can grow with my many ventures and changing circumstances.
Minimal cost.
Easy to backup.
URLs and content that can last a lifetime.

All of the above is easy, once you decide that the site will be completely static. Static files:

Never break.
Can be easily copied or moved.
Don’t need to be upgraded or maintained. Just because you like weblogs in 2005 doesn’t mean you’ll want to be maintaining some crazy weblog CMS written in the coolest language of today in 5 years time.
Are incredibly cheap and fast for website hosting (e.g. Jodohost or PowWeb).
Can be maintained or edited using your favourite tool of the time (e.g. FrontPage).

The only remaining problem is easy updates to a weblog. Enter another free Google service, Blogger, with a customised template and publishing via FTP to my preferred location. We can publish as many weblogs to the site as desired, while the infrastructure is maintained and improved for free.

So, the entire infrastructure for e-gineer is now the cheapest possible web hosting and a Blogger account. I’m haven’t looked back once.

Options are expensive

2005-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Every time you add an option to your application, take some advice from Greg Hudson and Joel Spolsky:

“Options are expensive”, they “increase the required testing load of a program, they increase complexity, they decrease the consistency of the program’s behavior, and they intimidate and confuse users.”
“Pull up the Tools Options dialog box and you will see a history of arguments that the software designers had about the design of the product.”
“Every time you provide an option, you’re asking the user to make a decision.”
“It has been said that design is the art of making choices. … When you are designing, and you try to abdicate your responsibility by forcing the user to decide something, you’re probably not doing your job. Someone else will make an easier program that accomplishes the same task with less intrusions, and most users will love it.”
“The trouble with customizing your environment is that it just doesn’t propagate, so it’s not even worth the trouble.”

Note: Originally posted to my Synop blog on December 18, 2003.

The font thing

2005-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

Trawling through thousands of fonts is an important process when creating logos. The right font can make all the difference. I’m still very happy with the Synop logo after all these years, I believe it was timeless.

Found this great, free, Australian utility yesterday for looking through fonts that are in a directory, but not installed. Go get the font thing.

The beauty of everyday things

2005-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

I was blown away late last night by the beauty of the macro images in this June Marie Sobrito gallery.

If only I could take photos like this…

30th birthday

2005-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

Drinks, pool and a Peking Duck feast. What more could a man want?

Video: 30th birthday.wmv (1.8MB)

30th birthday (small).wmv (0.8MB)

Unexpected uplifts...

2005-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

Yesterday was my 30th birthday. Having embraced a mini-crisis a few months back, I was well prepared for the big day and things were drifting along in a fairly normal way.

But it turns out that Bianca had arranged a surprise dinner for me with my parents and close friends. Talk about transforming my birthday into a memorable event! I was shocked, touched and amazed at their ability to lie through my normally fairly inquisitive questions.

The night took another massive lift when I received the O₂ Xda II mini PDA phone that I’ve been coveting for a couple of months. I have a habit of wanting the latest, most expensive gadgetry but permanently delaying the high price purchase decision. It’s for this reason that I’ve been living off hand-me-down mobile phones since 2001 and still don’t own a DVD player (although I’m currently building a HTPC). I think the joy for me of owning a new gadget was clear to everyone. It’s a truly beautiful device that will take me months of tinkering to optimise.

This dinner was the second unexpected uplift for me in the last week. After speaking at Open Publish last Thursday, I got a call from Peter who was stuck in Sydney waiting for a delayed flight. After an afternoon at the pub I had a strong sense of closure on Synop, which I’d been unable to achieve through the series of farewells and goodbyes we’d had for other staff. There was something poetic about Synop finishing the way it’s current (and longest) phase had started, with Peter and I dreaming up ideas over beers…

Caring for lithium ion batteries

2005-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

Lithium ion batteries should be recharged early and often. Running them down to nothing actually decreases their life. For me, this means simply putting my phone on the charger every night.

This is in contrast to the older NiCd batteries, which suffered from the memory effect.

Opportunity or overwhelming odds?

2005-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Last week was my last official week of Synop employment. After 7 years of blood, sweat and tears it’s a significant milestone for me personally. As part of the windup, we’ve had a set of farewell lunches and parties that were helpful for everyone else but for some reason had never given me a personal sense of closure.

Then, last Thursday, Peter was delayed in Sydney while flying out to Bhutan. Turns out that an impromptu afternoon in the pub together both reminiscing and contemplating the future was exactly what I needed.

As a mental state of mind, shutting down Synop has been weird. We had to actively avoid opportunities and ignore the internal cries to continue doing everything possible to survive. Every past decision is called into question and mumurings of what if are mixed with constant self-reassurance that this was the right decision.

Gradually, I’m getting excited about new ideas again. My creative, ambitious side is waking up and things are starting to look like opportunities rather than overwhelming odds.

Smelly weekend

2005-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

The hot water system in our apartment building broke, leaking water down through the lift shaft. With no shower and extra sweat created coming up the stairs, this was a double blow.

I love the unlimited hot water in our apartment block and was amazed at how small the broken tank actually was (yes - it’s in the crane shown in the video).

Video: Smelly weekend.wmv (3.8MB)

Smelly weekend (small).wmv (1.1MB)

DVD burning for backups on Windows XP

2005-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

I had to recreate Synop’s DVD backup burning capabilities today. After some searching and digging around I’m using:

cdrtools: Using mkisofs.exe we can create DVD ISO images greater than 2GB from the command line. This seems to be a project that stalled and has been carried on by others. In the end I found good information on the CDR Tools Front End site, which points to the latest unofficial versions on a German site.
Windows Resource Tools: From Microsoft, these tools include dvdburn.exe for burning the actual disks.

Here’s a quick sample backup script that we use:

del "E:\backup\burning\FridayA.iso"
del "E:\backup\burning\FridayB.iso"
"C:\Program Files\cdrtools\mkisofs.exe" -v -J -R E:\backup\burning\FridayA\ > E:\backup\burning\FridayA.iso
"C:\Program Files\cdrtools\mkisofs.exe" -v -J -R E:\Backup\burning\FridayB\ > E:\backup\burning\FridayB.iso
"C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\dvdburn.exe" D: e:\backup\burning\FridayA.iso
"C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\dvdburn.exe" H: e:\backup\burning\FridayB.iso
"C:\Program Files\cdrtools\open_cd.exe" d
"C:\Program Files\cdrtools\open_cd.exe" h

Quiet & experienced modem beats newer, whining model

2005-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

Since changing to iiNet for faster ADSL speed, I’ve been having connection problems with our modem. It seems to keep getting disconnected. Moving it into the kitchen, plugged into our apartments first phone socket seemed to help with stability, but not aesthetics. On top of this, it has been making a high pitched whine noise while connected. Not unusable, but definitely annoying.

Tonight I tried moving it back into the study, but got the same connection problems immediately. Upon moving it back to the kitchen they continued. In frustration, I tried plugging in the old Synop modem we got in late 2000. They are both Alcatel SpeedTouch, but we only got the whining modem in late 2003.

Suddenly our internet connection came to life! All this time I’d been assuming that our apartment building had a crappy phone line path to the exchange, although we live very close.

With the whining, newer modem our synch speed was about 2.5Mbps down and about 830k up.

With the quiet, old modem I’m getting 7.5Mbps down. Unfortunately, I’m unable to determine the upstream speed using the more primitive interfaces and tools. I only took the time to work this out when I was staggered at how much faster it actually felt to use. Yum!

Some tips for people who are playing with Alcatel SpeedTouch modems in an Australian ISP environment:

The Oz Broadband Speed Test site is really helpful to get a sense of your speed. I found that Optus gave the fastest results.
I used these instructions to upgrade my Alcatel SpeedTouch home modem to the Pro model. To be honest, I probably didn’t need to bother since I’m not using the PPP features anyway at this stage.
I used these instructions to upgrade the modem firmware. My modem only had obscure model numbers, so I was unable to work out exactly what type it is. I looked at the existing firmware version to try and guess the most suitable upgrade version. For me, it was an upgrade from KHDSAA.133 to KHDSAA3.264. You can download a lot of different firmware versions here.
Alcatool was really helpful for getting line stats information from this older model modem which has an incredibly crappy web interface. Click the System button and then the Line Stats button to see your info. A good summary of the line stat terms is available here.

Now, if only there was a way to make US sites as blindingly fast as the Australian ones. I often still only get 30kB/sec to the US.

The mess

2005-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

When shutting down offices, all the stuff has to end up somewhere. Unfortunately, that somewhere is currently my living room.

Video: The mess.wmv (1.8MB)

The mess (small).wmv (0.7MB)

Can we have an Australian Bill Gates?

2005-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Steve Balmer was the speaker at a Microsoft breakfast I attended on Tuesday. An audience member asked if the next Bill Gates could come out of India or China, particularly given their culture of copying.

Personally, I felt this question reflected the usual lack of comprehension for the sheer amount of talent and skill coming out of these countries. Each year they are the world’s leading producers of Bachelor degree trained people. Steve Balmer also pointed this out.

But, what he went on to say was more interesting. He believes that an Indian or Chinese person may well be the next Bill Gates, but that they will do it from inside the US. His three reasons were:

IP protection
The legal system
Access to the world’s largest domestic market

Unfortunately, this provides further evidence for my growing scepticism that Australia will not produce the next Bill Gates or Google. While we have the IP protection, legal system and talent our domestic market is just too small to support a sizable pool of early adopting customers and rapid growth. Our inherently conservative investment and customer market further decreases the presence of early stage customers.

As a result, Australian companies must start exporting before they are ready. Their products are still weak and the processes incomplete, which is brutal when you add distance into the equation. A local customer can be courted, worked on and built as a partnership to iron out the early adoption kinks.

While sceptical, I haven’t yet descended into complete pessimism. But the odds are certainly stacked against an Australian Bill Gates or Google.

Synop Sydney office tour

2005-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

A quick tour of the Synop Sydney office in Artarmon, where we worked from November 2000 to July 2005. The background music reflects both our attitude and the fact that we’d have loud singalong tracks playing in the development lab much of the time.

The “horrible smoking accountant” would sit in the office next door sucking on cigarettes. Unfortunately, the smoke would filter over through the roof and into the office, making the air fairly stale some days.

Video: Synop Sydney office tour.wmv (2.5MB)

Synop Sydney office tour (small).wmv (1MB)

Shower caps and sausages

2005-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

Apparently it’s a video blogger right of passage to make a cooking video. Here’s mine.

Video: Shower caps and sausages.wmv (1.6MB)

Shower caps and sausages (small).wmv (0.5MB)

Red coathangers are evil

2005-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

White shirt + Red coathanger = Pink stripes.

Video: Red coathangers are evil.wmv (1.4MB)

Red coathangers are evil (small).wmv (0.5MB)

15s of fame

2005-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

Inspired by Richard, I’ve decided to try my hand at videoblogging. I can’t be bothered doing huge editing and only have an old digital camera for shooting videos, so they will be 15 seconds or less, single scene and largely unedited. Remember, one of the great things about short films is that even if it is crap, you know it will be over quickly.

Video: 15s of fame.wmv (1.6MB)

15s of fame (small).wmv (0.5MB)

Organising and storing tax receipts

2005-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tax receipts must be kept, but the chances of ever needing to access them again are very low. This suggests a storage system that prioritises the speed of adding receipts over the speed of finding them. It should be simple and reliable in the long term tax receipt time frame. We currently track all expenditure in Quicken, so it will mostly be a process of cross-checking for the physical paper record when required.

When keeping tax receipts be sure to discard any non-tax receipts. One of the rules I was taught by NSW State Records was to keep only important information, otherwise it gets lost in the sea of unneeded archive data.

I’ve decided to use an expandable folder and place all receipts in there by date. Each slot will be for about 6 months worth of receipts, with one folder holding about 10 years. After that time, they are no longer required for tax purposes and we can remove older receipts and cycle through the folder slots again. The folder is quick to reference, easy to store receipts in, and the enclosed nature means it’s very unlikely to spill receipts out.

At Synop, we used a lever arch folder with a section for each person. Expense receipts were stuck onto loose leaf pages in your section. Stored in a public place, this made expenditure transparent and was a simple system for both staff and our book keeper. This system is a little slower for adding receipts, but that’s justified by the book keeper reading and the transparency benefits.

I’m undecided at this stage as to whether Bianca and I should have different yearly slots. We are already dividing the expenditure by person in Quicken, so it wouldn’t add new information to the system but might make access faster. I’m going to combine them for now, but will separate if we seem to be keeping a lot of receipts.

Cone of silence

2005-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

When out with friends, we often refer to being in a “cone of silence”. The implication is that you seem to have found a noisy spot at the table which means you cannot hear a word of the conversation going on around you.

Turns out that the term originates from the Get Smart TV series, here are some pictures.

PS: Made my first contribution to Wikipedia today, adding a link to images from the Cone of Silence entry.

Personal IT: Email

2005-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Email is the most important aspect of my personal IT infrastructure. It’s also particularly hard to achieve since I’ve been spoilt with the Exchange, Outlook 2003 and Outlook Web Access setup at Synop. Here are my personal requirements for email:

Email address that can last a lifetime. It must be suitable for many different ventures and circumstances.
Top rate spam filtering.
Web based email for access from anywhere.
Minimal effort to maintain and improve.
Minimal cost.
Large level of storage. A lifetime of email creates a lot of data.
Personal copy of data for offline work and backups.
Virus checking. Standard requirement, but hasn’t been a problem for me so far.

I looked at a number of alternatives for providing this, including Gmail, paid email hosting and running my own server. All of them had limitations against the above criteria. In the end I’ve adopted a hybrid model that more than meets all the above criteria:

Create an email address associated with a domain, you@yourdomain.com.
A Gmail account acts as the primary email server, store and web access interface for you@yourdomain.com.
Outlook (or your preferred client) provides POP access to Gmail for a local store and email program.

This setup is straight forward, except for the problem of having sent messages appear to come from you@yourdomain.com while still being automatically archived in Gmail. Mail sent through the Gmail SMTP server is automatically archived, but appears in the From header to have come from your Gmail account. Mail sent through your ISP SMTP server is not added to the Gmail sent mail archive. To resolve this problem, I decided to send email through the ISP SMTP server while configuring Outlook to automatically BCC all messages to my Gmail account. In both Gmail and Outlook I then setup a filter to label these received messages as sent items and archive them automatically. Now, all sent messages appear to come from you@yourdomain.com while a copy is permanently archived on the Gmail servers for later access.

For those that are interested, here is the basic setup:

Domain settings
- Forward all received email to the appropriate Gmail account(s).
Gmail
- Enable POP access.
- Set POP to archive messages when they are downloaded.
- Setup a filter labelling BCC’ed email from you@yourdomain.com as “Sent Items”.
- Set the reply address to you@yourdomain.com.
Outlook
- Setup for POP access to the Gmail account.
- Send messages using the SMTP server of your ISP.
- Automatically BCC all sent messages to your Gmail account using HiddenBCC or similar.

Jerry Springer and lose-lose outcomes

2005-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Reading my negotiation textbook, I couldn’t help but think of the guests on Jerry Springer:

Often, it is the mere presence of an audience that can make “saving face” of paramount importance for the negotiator. When a person’s face is threatened in a negotiation, it can tip the balance of his or her behaviour away from cooperation toward competition, resulting in impasses and lose-lose outcomes.

Still, with episodes like “Daddy, will you marry me?” I guess lose-lose is inevitable.

Personal IT: Password management

2005-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

Managing the myriad of passwords for systems is a huge headache for everyone. Personally I use the KeePass software to keep a complete list of all passwords.

It’s good to get in the habit of making passwords around 8 letters long that use a combination of lower case, upper case and numerics. This seems to be the sweet spot for getting through the various “security enforcing” password systems. Of course, with each one subtlely different it’s a nightmare trying to do anything consistent. I like to use simple word / number combinations (e.g. song title & length in secs) or words with some letters substituted for numbers (e.g. t00thbru5h).

I have employed a system for many years of having a secret number which is combined with a sensible keyword on each site (e.g. blogger5147, gmail5147, etc). Unfortunately this means that should the number become compromised you have to change all your passwords. Some protection to this can be offered by having different numbers for different levels of security, but the site owners may still store the raw password and be able to compromise you in other places.

At Synop, we’ve employed both the above systems to good effect even as the company and number of passwords quickly grew.

ADSL in the fast lane

2005-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

After weeks of pain in the bad old days of dial up, our new ADSL connection finally went live yesterday. It’s amazing how a few weeks of dial up completely changed our habits: buying the paper for a TV guide, not checking email at night, wireless laptop never leaving the study.

Using iiNet broadband starter we have up to 1Mb/8Mb speeds with 4GB of data download a month for $39.95. Our apartment connection seems to be line synching at about 0.8Mb/2.3Mb which is a little disappointing, but not unexpected.

So far the speed seems to be highly variable, but is absolutely flying throughout the day. Even late last night things were particularly slow. I’ll give it a few days to settle in. For real numbers, the Oz Broadband Speed Test is helpful. We get about 200kB/sec real usage speed. When it works, it’s great!

Of course, in Australia the extra speed isn’t always noticable as it seems that most connections to US websites don’t run much faster anyway. I don’t know where the bottleneck is for these, but I guess that’s the beauty of the seamless connectivity / complexity of the Internet. Everyone can blame someone else.

PS: Using our Alcatel Speedtouch modem I could get the line synch speed through a lot of fiddling around to access the web interface (http://10.0.0.138).

Personal IT: Automated backup for the home office

2005-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

Two things are important when it comes to backups:

Backup copies for protection against short-term loss (e.g. hard disk fail).
Archived copies for protection against long-term loss (e.g. deletion, catastrophy).

I run the following backup procedure to protect the home office:

Everyday: Copy all important files to a separate physical hard disk used purely for backups. For protection against complete machine failure, preferably this is in a separate machine to those storing most of the data that gets backed up.
1st Mon of month: Burn all data to a permanent DVD+R archive that is stored off site.
2nd Mon of month: Reburn all data to the Mon2 DVD+RW.
3rd Mon of month: Reburn all data to the Mon3 DVD+RW.
4th Mon of month: Reburn all data to the Mon4 DVD+RW.
5th Mon of month: Reburn all data to the Mon5 DVD+RW.
Every Wed: Reburn all data to the Wed DVD+RW.
Every Fri: Reburn all data to the Fri DVD+RW.

This system requires a hard disk, 6 DVD+RW’s and one DVD+R each month. It provides the following levels of protection:

Daily copy of all files to separate hard disk.
3 snapshot points during the latest 7 days.
One snapshot point per week for the last month.
One snapshot point per month indefinitely.

The maximum possible loss scenarios are:

If you lose a single data hard disk then you should lose no more than one day’s work.
If you lose the backup hard disk and a data hard disk simultaneously, there will be no more than 2 days work lost.
If you lose the entire office, there will be no more than 1 months work lost. As the office size grows, you can protect your data more rigorously by increasing the frequency of the archival points. For example, reburn data DVD’s on Tue and Thu as well while making an archive copy every Monday rather than every 1st Monday. Similarly if your data set grows beyond a single DVD (4.7GB), simply add a second DVD burner and effectively double your capacity by using A & B disks on each day.

Tit for tat: Good guys can come first

2005-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

During a negotiation theory course for my MBA, I recently learnt about the tit for tat solution to the prisoner’s dilemma.

While growing up, I would always prefer to avoid conflict and retaliation. Internally, I justified this to myself as taking the high ground. Unfortunately, to the observer, I was just getting trampled on.

Unhappy with this, I learned how to deal with conflict and no longer accept being trampled.

Tit for tat provides a balanced approach that is optimistic, proactive and forgiving without being weak in its responses. It is proven, logical and sound as a strategy. Most of all, it’s the type of person I try to be.

Rediscovering e-gineer through blogging

2005-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

Like most things in my life, e-gineer morphed to become part of Synop as it formed. Then, like many other things, it was heavily neglected as Synop grew and changed.

With Synop coming to a close, this is an ideal time to reclaim e-gineer and use it as a basis for rebuilding my personal IT infrastructure and sense of self. (It’s an indication of my high level of nerdiness that my sense of self is intertwined with a web site and email address). Having spent 7 years designing and building CMS software, it’s only natural that I decided to come up with a framework for e-gineer that should help it survive a lifetime of personal change, neglect and rediscovery. I’ll be describing this in more detail through a series of posts about Personal IT.

It’s traditional for a first blog post to make promises, build anticipation and represent a burst of enthusiasm. Since most blogs start with no readers, I guess it doesn’t really matter. Anyway, here is what to expect from this blog:

Posts made in infrequent bursts. The great thing about RSS is that it costs readers nothing to continually check for new content from irregular authors.
A wide ranging set of topics. Focus is nice, but this is a personal weblog that I’m taking on my journey into entrepreneurship. Who knows where we’ll end up?
Honesty and openness, to a point. I prefer conversations with substance to smalltalk, and seem to quickly end up in deep discussions with new aquaintances. But, this is the web and everything I say can be stored, archived and referenced for all time. So, I’ll hopefully say enough to be interesting without going too far.

Of course, the only important outcome for any blogger is to find your voice.

e-gineer

Revving up the Google App(s) Engine

Corporate Alumni - Pretend they never leave

Arguing against a fear of open collaboration inside an enterprise

A soft boiled MBA

Two worlds colliding: Small and nimble versus Big and efficient

Two worlds colliding

A natural change for small companies

Cultural shift in big companies

Conclusion

UI Design for Non-Designers - From Models to Hypothesis to Metrics

Agree on a model

The design hypothesis

Optimisation with metrics

The world isn't flat: Use enterprise context to enhance, not control

Context and control

Revolution and Enterprise 2.0

Embrace and extend

Conclusion

Lachlan ... And then there were 4!

E2EF 2009 - Janssen-Cilag Case Study

Removing one way screws from window locks

Juice: A user-centric approach to IT equipment and new starters

Introduction

Before Juice

Managing equipment as kits

The financial model

Approvals and workflow

Onboarding & Offboarding

Order fulfilment, stock management & asset tracking

Business impact

Integration & next steps

Conclusion

Jitter: Experimenting with microblogging in the enterprise

Introduction

People Search with Jitter

Adoption and business impact

Lessons Learned

Conclusion

Clarify. Simplify. Implement.

Tough love adds value

Design reviews: Brutal refinement and pixel-perfect goodness

Zero training

Staying simple

Clear, simple solutions challenge traditional project economics

Take the time to write short letters

Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum - Janssen-Cilag Case Study Presentation

Continuous Application Release Cycle

Introduction

The Continuous Application Release Cycle

The CARC in practice

Building Enterprise 2.0 on Culture 1.0

Introduction

Technical and Cultural Maturity

What does success look like?

The Enterprise Collaboration Maturity Model

The two cultural barriers to collaboration

Reducing additional work

Reducing the personal risk of sharing knowledge

Own the flow and the stocks will come

Manifesto for Collaboration Tools

Next steps for Janssen-Cilag

Conclusion

Metaphors for interface design

Our Intranet, the Wiki: Case Study of a Wiki changing an Enterprise

Introduction

History of Janssen-Cilag’s Intranet

Intranet requirements gathering

Pitching a Wiki to the business

Implementing a Wiki for your Enterprise Intranet

Launch & user training

Adoption, statistics & business impact

Content ownership model

Keeping momentum & next steps

Conclusion

Getting your Blogger blog listed in search results

Cost allocation model for shared services

Introduction

Infrastructure costs

People costs