« July 12, 2004 | Main | July 14, 2004 »
July 13, 2004
How to Start a Blog
I'm sure there's a million of these on the net, but I get asked occasionally by friends how to start a blog, so here's a collection of tips that I wrote to a friend recently. Now they're written down somewhere...
08:35 PM | Recommend This | Print This
VisaProcess, Meta-Mail, and Virtual Networks of Demand
On a note related to the article on Alan Kaye I just posted, I just was reading Esther Dyson's abstract for this month's Release 1.0 on what the spreadsheet did for data, freeing users from models built on the mainframe and why we don't have a similar tool for processes. She says:
First story: My inbox is overflowing. I have 3158 messages in it, dating back to the last general cleanup, January 2004. I also have a folder called Memorial Day, which contains 1825 messages dating back to spring of 2002 and before: These are all the messages I was planning to handle over the 2002 Memorial Day weekend, but never got around to. I know that I can find them, even with Eudora's relatively slow search. But I want to know more: Which ones of the 3158 new ones should I be paying attention to and looking for?
Second story: A couple of weeks ago, analysts following Omnicom Group noted that the company plans to spend an extra $50 to 60 million in audit fees and internal costs (mostly IT, we assume) to comply with the new Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. Presumably it has all the data, but now it needs to make the processes explicit: Who's in the chain of command? Who made the decision to pay the bill? It wasn't made by the programmer who wrote the code.
Two stories, one theme: Getting control of business processes, not business data.
Indeed, data is relatively easy, and we have good tools for it: the calculator, the spreadsheet, and the giant financial number-crunching application. The spreadsheet gave users a tool not just to calculate, but to build complex models and, in fact, to do many things that previously could be done only by IT high priests. Better yet, the spreadsheet allowed them to build models that were intelligible to normal people. So-called power users could build the models, while other users could reuse or modify them, plugging in their own data and coefficients. Complementary graphing and other tools made the data more visible and meaningful to ordinary people who could not pick trends out of a sea of numbers. We also have the database, which acts as a back-end to those corporate applications and to the spreadsheets, allowing for easier sharing of data across applications and even among enterprises.
The first successful spreadsheet was called VisiCalc; where is VisiProcess?From Business Intelligence & Market Research with Technology Analysis- Release 1.0 Publication
Referenced Tue Jul 13 2004 11:47:52 GMT-0600
Esther also uses the term "meta-mail" to describe this. I've used a different term for a similar idea in the past: virtual networks of demand, a term I first heard from Duy Beck. Here's the idea:
Anytime you get an organization of more than a few people, you start hiring people with particular functional specialties to perform specific tasks. Therefore, getting anything accomplished, requires that you have a workflow (formal or informal) for getting things from one person to another in the right order, at the right time, etc.
Another way to think of this is as every person representing a little bit of production capacity with their own supply chain and demand chain. All of these internal supply and demand chains represent a "virtual network of demand." The goal of an organization is to find ways to efficiently and effectively service this network and keep it flowing.
From an IT perspective, when we install CRM systems, ERP systems, employee portals, workflow systems, personal computers, office suites, and the like, we're trying to service and automate this demand network. The problem is that we can't, yet, approach it from the standpoint of viewing each employee as a custom unit that has specific needs because of their role, their style of work, the way they learn, the way that they're most comfortable communicating, etc. We more or less give everyone a standard set of tools and require them to do their own customization. We just build a machine and expect people to be cogs in it, instead of viewing them as a big distributed P2P network. I think we'll see a trend in the future toward more and more fine grained approaches to this problem.From Phil Windley | Virtual Networks of Demand
Referenced Tue Jul 13 2004 11:49:43 GMT-0600
Do things like BPEL get us closer to this? I'm not sure. Its not that BPEL isn't a good thing, but that its just one piece and incremental at that. What made the spreadsheet so revolutionary is that it let non-programmers build sophisticated models by putting programming into a rigid enough box (no pun intended) that many of the gotchas we experience in programming were no longer relevant. I'm not sure BPEL (or other process oriented languages), even with a great visual programming front-end, represent this same kind of fundamental leap forward.
11:59 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Alan Kaye and Modeling
Fortune has an article on Alan Kaye. Alan decries the current uses of computing and says:
"We're running on fumes technologically today," he says. "The sad truth is that 20 years or so of commercialization have almost completely missed the point of what personal computing is about."From Fortune.com - Fast Forward - A PC Pioneer Decries the State of Computing
Referenced Tue Jul 13 2004 11:28:46 GMT-0600
His chief complaint with regard to business use of computing is that its more or less simply used as a replacement for pen and paper. What he'd like to see more of is modeling and simulating. He doesn't mention spreadsheets, so I'm not sure if he sees them in the same light or just the way their commonly used. Whenever I contemplate a new business one of the things I do is create a free cash flow model of the business and run lots of scenarios. I don't think I'm alone in that and that's certainly modeling.
I am, however, shocked by how difficult it is to show those models to other people. When I do this, most people want a static snapshot printed out and stuck in a book. That hardly captures the dynamic nature of the model.
Alan's latest project is Squeak. Alan demonstrated Squeak at ETCon 2003. Here's what I said at the time:
The keynote for this morning is Alan Kay and is entitled "Daddy, are we there yet?" Alan is the inventor of SmallTalk, among other things and he has Utah ties, getting his PhD from the Univ. of Utah in 1969. His primary complaint is that the last 20 years have been pretty darn boring because we're spending our time making better buggy whips in the form of better spreadsheets, better ways to write memos, etc. Alan quotes from a paper written in 1963 called "Man-Computer Symbiosis:" In not too many years, human being and computing machined will be coupled together very tightly and the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought before. he claims that this hasn't happened in large part yet, although I'd argue that networked computing has allowed some of us have made some progress in that direction.
To prove his point, Alan is going through four or five examples (all with live demos and video which is pretty cool) of really neat, revolutionary computer science breakthrough including Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad and McCarthy's LISP 1.5 implementation for the PDP-1. He is now showing what is likely the first collaborative software system: Engelbart's NLS. Built in 1968, it had live full motion video conferencing and concurrent document editing with shared cursors.
Alan shows something called "end user computer literacy" which is a graphical LOGO-like environment where users draw things like cars and steering wheels and then connect them together using scripts they build from property panels. It doesn't sound dearly as impressive as it was to see. The goal is to get kids building programs and using it to do experiments. One of the examples is using the system to explore the notion of a gravitational acceleration constant.
The base system is called Squeak. Squeak is the programming language and the OS. Its a grand total of 2.8M of binaries. One interesting thing he showed was that his presentation was actually a sequence of desktops so that each slide was a fully functional view. This made for some pretty cool demos.From Phil Windley | Done at ETCon
Referenced Tue Jul 13 2004 11:38:33 GMT-0600