Software

Super Doodle Dandy (Software) — Decorator Crabs and Wirth’s Law

decorator-crab[1]

The song (absent the “software” part) in the title is borrowed from the soundtrack of the movie, The Incredible Mr. Limpet.  Made in the day before Pixar and other recent animation technologies, it remains a largely unappreciated classic; combining photography and animation in a time of more limited tools, but with Don Knotts creating another unforgettable character beyond Barney Fife.  Somewhat related to what I am about to write, Mr. Limpet taught the creatures of the sea new ways of doing things, helping them overcome their mistaken assumptions about the world.

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Let’s Get Physical — Pondering the Physics of Big Data

As a primer a useful commentary on the ethical uses of Big Data was published today at Salon.com in an excerpt from Jacob Silverman’s book, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection.  Silverman takes a different approach from the one that I outline in my article, but he tackles the economics of new media that were identified years ago by Brad DeLong and A. Michael Froomkin back in the late 1990s and first decade of the 21st century.  This article on First Monday from 2000 regarding speculative microeconomics emerging from new media nicely summarizes their thesis.  Silverman rejects reforming the system in economic terms, entering the same ethical terrain on personal data collection that was explored by Rebecca Skloot on the medical profession’s genetic collection and use of tissue during biopsies in the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

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Forget Domani — The Inevitability of Software Transitioning and How to Facilitate the Transition

The old Perry Como* chestnut refers to the Italian word “tomorrow” and is the Italian way of repeating–in a more romantic manner–Keyne’s dictum that in the “long run we’ll all be dead.”  Whenever I hear polemicists talk about the long run or invoke the interests of their grandchildren trumping immediate concerns and decisions I always brace myself for the Paleolithic nonsense that is to follow.  While giving such opinions a gloss of plausibility, at worst, they are simply fabrications to hide self-interest, a form of tribalism, or ideology, at best, they are based on fallacious reasoning, fear, or the effects of cognitive dissonance.

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Brother Can You (Para)digm? — Four of the Latest Trends in Project Management

At the beginning of the year we are greeted with the annual list of hottest “project management trends” prognostications.  We are now three months into the year and I think it worthwhile to note the latest developments that have come up in project management meetings, conferences, and in the field.  Some of these are in alignment with what you may have seen in some earlier articles, but these are four that I find to be most significant thus far, and there may be a couple of surprises for you here.

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The Big (D) — Ways of Looking at Big Data

Recently I have been involved in several efforts regarding what is often referred to as Big Data, but of a particular kind.  Oftentimes the term, which was first defined by Doug Laney now at Gartner, is seen as utilizing data in order to monetize consumer information that is being collected to allow business to focus advertising, marketing, and product development.  More generally, however, big data (as defined by Laney) distinguishes itself from normal relational database management by its volume, variety, velocity, variability, and complexity.  The Wikipedia definition is slightly different with the additional attribute of veracity.

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Doctor My Eyes — Excel is Not a Project Management Tool (and neither is PowerPoint)

This is not to disparage the utility of a good spreadsheet to take care of those transient requirements to take a bit of data from the reporting systems and to run some custom algorithms or trends to perform what-if or other one-off analysis.  Probably most of us do this occasionally.

What I am referring to is the condition in many organizations in which data that consists of information essential to business operations is kept and analyzed using spreadsheets or other flat delimited storage or text methods.  The issue here is the optimum use of information, which the use of Excel and PowerPoint does not achieve.  Before anyone thinks that this is a contrarian’s post that is critical of Microsoft products, one need only read the technical advantages of true relational database management systems that are managed by specialized language like MS SQL.  Each of these applications and products has their proper place.

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My Generation — Baby Boom Economics, Demographics, and Technological Stagnation

“You promised me Mars colonies, instead I got Facebook.” — MIT Technology Review cover over photo of Buzz Aldrin

“As a boy I was promised flying cars, instead I got 140 characters.”  — attributed to Marc Maron and others

I have been in a series of meetings over the last couple of weeks with colleagues describing the state of the technology industry and the markets it serves.  What seems to be a generally held view is that both the industry and the markets for software and technology are experiencing a hardening of the arteries and a resistance to change not seen since the first waves of digitization in the 1980s.

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