software technology

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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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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Back in the Saddle Again — Putting the SME into the UI Which Equals UX

“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”  — Statement by Henry Ford in “My Life and Work”, by Henry Ford, in collaboration with Samuel Crowther, 1922, page 72

The Henry Ford quote, which he made half-jokingly to his sales staff in 1909, is relevant to this discussion because the information sector has developed along the lines of the auto and many other industries.  The statement was only half-joking because Ford’s cars could be had in three colors.  But in 1909 Henry Ford had found a massive market niche that would allow him to sell inexpensive cars to the masses.  His competition wasn’t so much as other auto manufacturers, many of whom catered to the whims of the rich and more affluent members of society, but against the main means of individualized transportation at the time–the horse and buggy.  The color was not so much important to this market as was the need for simplicity and utility.

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New York Times Says Research and Development Is Hard…but maybe not

At least that is what a reader is led to believe by reading this article that appeared over the weekend.  For those of you who didn’t catch it, Alphabet, which formerly had an R&D shop under the old Google moniker known as Google X, does pure R&D.  According to the reporter, one Conor Doughtery, the problem, you see, is that R&D doesn’t always translate into a direct short-term profit.  He then makes this absurd statement:  “Building a research division is an old and often unsuccessful concept.”  He knows this because some professor at Arizona State University–that world-leading hotbed of innovation and high tech–told him so.  (Yes, there is sarcasm in that sentence).

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Rise of the Machines — Drivers of Change in Business and Project Management

Last week I found myself in business development mode, as I often am, in explaining to a prospective client our future plans in terms of software development.  The point that I was making was that it was not our goal to simply reproduce the functionality that every other software solution provider offered, but to improve how the industry does business by making the drive for change through the application of appropriate technology so compelling through efficiencies, elimination of redundancy, and improved productivity, that not making the change would be deemed foolish.  In sum, we are out to take a process and improve on it through the application of disruptive technology.  I highlighted my point by stating:  “It is not our goal to simply reproduce functionality so we can party like it’s 1998, it’s been eight software generations since that time and technology has provided us smarter and better ways of doing things.”

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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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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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Family Affair — Part III — Private Monopsony, Monopoly, and the Disaccumulation of Capital

It’s always good to be ahead of the power curve.  I see that the eminent Paul Krugman had an editorial in the New York Times about the very issues that I’ve dealt with in this blog, his example in this case being Amazon.  This is just one of many articles that have been raised about the monopsony power as a result of the Hatchette controversy.  In The New Republic Franklin Foer also addresses this issue at length in the article “Amazon Must Be Stopped.”  In my last post on this topic I discussed public monopsony, an area in which I have a great deal of expertise.  But those of us in the information world that are not Microsoft, Oracle, Google, or one of the other giants also live in the world of private monopsony.

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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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