Maxwell’s Demon: Planning for Technology Obsolescence in Acquisition Strategy

Imagine a chamber divided into two parts by a removable partition. On one side is a hot sample of gas and on the other side a cold sample of the same gas. The chamber is a closed system with a certain amount of order, because the statistically faster moving molecules of the hot gas on one side of the partition are segregated from statistically slower moving molecules of the cold gas on the other side. Maxwell’s demon guards a trap door in the partition, which is still assumed not to conduct heat. It spots molecules coming from either side and judges their speeds…The perverse demon manipulates the trap door so as to allow passage only to the very slowest molecules of the hot gas and the very fastest molecules of the cold gas. Thus the cold gas receives extremely slow molecules, cooling it further, and the hot gas receives extremely fast molecules, making it even hotter. In apparent defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, the demon has caused heat to flow from the cold gas to the hot one. What is going on?

Because the law applies only to a closed system, we must include the demon in our calculations. Its increase of entropy must be at least as great as the decrease of entropy in the gas-filled halves of the chamber. What is it like for the demon to increase its entropy? –Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1994, pp. 222-223

“Entropy is a figure of speech, then,” sighed Nefastis, “a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.” –Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, J.B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1965

Technology Acquisition: The Basics

I’ve recently been involved in discussions regarding software development and acquisition that cut across several disciplines that should be of interest to anyone engaged in project management in general, but IT project management and acquisition in particular.

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The Medium Controls the Present: Is it Too Late to Stop a Digital Dark Age?

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984

A few short pre-Covid years ago, Google Vice President Vint Cerf turned some heads at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, warning the attending scientists that the digitization of the artifacts of civilization may create a digital dark age. “If we’re thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create?” Cerf’s concerns are that today’s technology will become obsolete at some future time, with the information of our own times locked in a technological prison.

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Red Queen Race: Project Management and Running Against Time

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast, as that!” —Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Chapter 2, Lewis Carroll

There have been a number of high profile examples over the last several years concerning project management failure and success. For example, in the former case, the initial rollout of the Affordable Care Act marketplace web portal was one of these, and the causes for its faults took a while to understand, absent political bias. The reasons, as the linked article show, are prosaic and basic to the discipline of project management.

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Big Data and the Repository of Babel

In 1941, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) published a short story entitled “The Library of Babel.” In the story Borges imagines a universe, known as the Library, which is described by the story’s narrator as made up of adjacent hexagonal rooms.

Each of the rooms of the library is poorly lit, with one side acting as the entrance and exit, and four of the five remaining walls of the rooms containing bookshelves whose books are placed in a completely uniform style, though the books’ contents are completely random.

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The Need for an Integrated Digital Environment (IDE) Strategy in Project Management*

Putting the Pieces Together

To be an effective project manager, one must possess a number of skills in order to successfully guide the project to completion. This includes having a working knowledge of the information coming from multiple sources and the ability to make sense of that information in a cohesive manner. This is so that, when brought together, it provides an accurate picture of where the project has been, where it is in its present state, and what actions must be taken to keep it (or bring it back) on track.

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Shake it Out – Embracing the Future of Program Management – Part Two: Private Industry Program and Project Management in Aerospace, Space, and Defense

In my previous post, I focused on Program and Project Management in the Public Interest, and the characteristics of its environment, especially from the perspective of the government program and acquisition disciplines. The purpose of this exploration is to lay the groundwork for understanding the future of program management—and the resulting technological and organizational challenges that are required to support that change.

The next part of this exploration is to define the motivations, characteristics, and disciplines of private industry equivalencies. Here there are commonalities, but also significant differences, that relate to the relationship and interplay between public investment, policy and acquisition, and private business interests.

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Shake it Out – Embracing the Future in Program Management – Part One: Program and Project Management in the Public Interest

I heard the song from which I derived the title to this post sung by Florence and the Machine and was inspired to sit down and write about what I see as the future in program management.

Thus, my blogging radio silence has ended as I begin to process and share my observations and essential achievements over the last couple of years.

My company—the conduit that provides the insights I share here—is SNA Software LLC. We are a small, veteran-owned company and we specialize in data capture, transformation, contextualization and visualization. We do it in a way that removes significant effort in these processes, ensures reliability and trust, to incorporate off-the-shelf functionality that provides insight, and empowers the user by leveraging the power of open systems, especially in program and project management.

Program and Project Management in the Public Interest

There are two aspects to the business world that we inhabit: commercial and government; both, however, usually relate to some aspect of the public interest, which is our forte.

There are also two concepts about this subject to unpack.

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Innervisions: The Connection Between Data and Organizational Vision

During my day job I provide a number of fairly large customers with support to determine their needs for software that meets the criteria from my last post. That is, I provide software that takes an open data systems approach to data transformation and integration. My team and I deliver this capability with an open user interface based on Windows and .NET components augmented by time-phased and data management functionality that puts SMEs back in the driver’s seat of what they need in terms of analysis and data visualization. In virtually all cases our technology obviates the need for the extensive, time consuming, and costly services of a data scientist or software developer.

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Potato, Potahto, Tomato, Tomahto: Data Normalization vs. Standardization, Why the Difference Matters

In my vocation I run a technology company devoted to program management solutions that is primarily concerned with taking data and converting it into information to establish a knowledge-based environment. Similarly, in my avocation I deal with the meaning of information and how to turn it into insight and knowledge. This latter activity concerns the subject areas of history, sociology, and science.

In my travels just prior to and since the New Year, I have come upon a number of experts and fellow enthusiasts in these respective fields. The overwhelming numbers of these encounters have been productive, educational, and cordial. We respectfully disagree in some cases about the significance of a particular approach, governance when it comes to project and program management policy, but generally there is a great deal of agreement, particularly on basic facts and terminology. But some areas of disagreement–particularly those that come from left field–tend to be the most interesting because they create an opportunity to clarify a larger issue.

In a recent venue I encountered this last example where the issue was the use of the phrase data normalization. The issue at hand was that the use of “data normalization” suggested some statistical methodology in reconciling data into a standard schema. Instead, it was suggested, the term “data standardization” was more appropriate.

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Ring Out the Old, Ring in the New: Data Transformation Podcasting

Robin Williams at Innovate IPM interviewed me a few weeks ago and has a new podcast up to cap off the year. The main thrust of our discussion, as it turned out, which began as a wide-ranging one, settled on digital transformation and the changes and developments that I’ve seen in this area over the last three decades.

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