SteveJ-restore-test

Jonathon Schwartz of SUN Microsystems posted an article on SUN and Intel Alliance . SUN may be coming back from the brink - with the 'opening' of Solaris, they could have realised again they're a hardware company (and do great servers). There was a line that gave me pause: To be clear, this isn't about displacing one another's competitors , it's about getting as big a piece of the future as possible. The market's not shrinking, after all. I was struck by The market's not shrinking, after all. In 2000, the personal-use PC's were 'desktops' - now laptop sales are at least equal or higher... The world is changing - the I.T. market is very close to maturation - near 'topping out' perhaps. Take for instance the Gartner predictions for desktop/laptop sales in next 12 months (can't remember the link). They forecast a 10.6% growth in sales volume (to 255+M units) but only 4.x% increase in sales dollars . SUN have announced their "D...

Here are Questions, not Answers... Things that I'd like to explore and have better answers on. Most of these questions probably don't have permanent 'answers' - each generation, each culture, each industry has to define and redefine them for their mix of technology, political structure and workplace organisation I suspect. Management Why do we 'manage'? What is 'management'? A definition of the role/tasks. Taxonomy. Why is 'management' so hard? Exactly in what ways is 'management' hard? How is 'management' different from 'project management'? What parts of 'management' can be modelled? What cannot be? What is a 'good manager', 'poor manager' and 'bad manager'? Can 'management performance' be measured? Are all 'manager' behaviours productive or acceptable - bullying, rule-by-fear, ... Where do 'Qualtiy', 'Errors', 'Performance' and 'Humanness' f...

Objectives (The What) That "I.T. is done for a Business Benefit" seems axiomatic. But where's the evidence after 50-60 years of computing? It's not coming out our ears - just the reverse. Businesses understand the importance of hard data and it's through analysis for marketing, but don't apply the same techniques or management principles to their I.T. Operations. I'd like to model and quantify the Business Benefits of I.T. Operations across multiple organisations to provide baselines, benchmarks and trend analysis. The impact of all aspects of I.T. is beyond the scope of a single researcher project. Approach (The How) Data is fundamental input for analyses. Leveraging what's available means the outputs can be commercially reproduced and aer within the project budget (zero cost). Three separate data streams will be mined: Historic "ITSM" tool data from multiple organisations. Detailed I.T. accounting information from selected organisations. Pr...

The industrial revolution was about using Tools as Physical Amplifiers. Prior to the steam engine, the oxen/bullock/horse/donkey/elephant was the dominat non-human power-source. Humans can work at about 125-250W continuously (1/8 to 1/4 of a kilowatt, or 1/6 to 1/3 Horsepower). Elite athletes can produce 500W or more for short periods. All biological systems have a short and medium term "duty-cycle" - our muscles get tired, non-linearly, and need short-term recovery and longer-term rest and recuperation. Sleep and recreation are about the nervous system/mind/brain. From chapters of Taylor's book Scientific Management here's proof you get more out of people by making them rest! He improved average output from 12 tons/day to 47 tons/day through careful (psychological) selection and enforcing rest periods. Counter-intuitive, but well-researched. For example, when pig iron is being handled (each pig weighing 92 pounds), a first-class workman can only be under load 43...

My last post took me most of a day to produce. Not a great words/minute rate. I'd expected to spend no more than an hour - it's work that I first did around 2000, so I'm familiar with it. A friend jibed that "You should've used your I.T. project management methodology". I do have stong views on managing I.T. projects, especially large one, and they are backed up by the solid research data from Standish Group. They do apply to exactly this task of writing. Unfortunately they offer no useful guidance. All new programs are research projects If you haven't got working code, you don't know how long it can take. If it's a complex task, then beforehand you cannot know where the 'beartraps' are. At any point in a project, you can only see in detail a couple of weeks ahead. 'Scale' is everthing [Alan Kay's argument]. Don't take on any project more than 30% larger than one you've completed successfully. Everyone is an efficient,...

Background There's a report around at the moment that says spending on I.T. is 3-4 times more effective than anything else. [Link to come] In the first couple of decades of commercial computing, all the "low hanging fruit" - the best returns - for I.T. were exploited. That's when 'the books', financial information and large internal databases (assets, employees, stockholders, vendors, customers, ...) were computerised. 1991 - the first IT recession - marked the end of this era. For the first time, IT staff were laid off in an economic downturn. Previously other staff could be displaced by automating their jobs with I.T. The 2000 I.T. recession - which we are only just starting to recover from - was industry backlash (and rightfully so) to "Y2K" and the "Dotcom Bust"). The general I.T. justification before then was: "We need this, trust us". After 2000, business needed to be convinced... The Triple Whammy The Triple Whammy of was...

The Standish Group has researched and released the CHAOS report since 1994. What's special about Yet Another Expensive Industry Report? The fact that nobody else does it, they have 50,000 detailed case studies of I.T. projects, and their results are consistent year to year (but they would make it that way, wouldn't they?). Do we believe their claims the US spends $250Bn/year on IT applications development? That $81Bn of that is on cancelled projects and anothe $59Bn on over-runs? Or that only 16.2% of projects finish on time and within 130% of budget? That "For every 100 projects that start, there are 94 restarts"? To scale that back to Australia, about one fifteenth the size, there'd be A$21Bn/year on just applications development. Which doesn't gel with estimates from the ABS that the I.T. sector here is about A$20Bn in total. (The ABS only reports accurately the ICT sector - grossly inflated by 'Communications' i.e. phone et al.) If the Australian...

The people who worked with the computer pioneer John von Neuman all practiced and valued 'code reviews'. This definitely was passed on - Jerry Weinberg, the Software Qualtiy supremo, is proof. In the 1970's, as an academic, he even proved reviews and a focus on 'quality' were the cheapest, most effective way to produce good programs, quickly. There must be hundreds of other Good Practices that have fallen by the way, that were once 'standard practice' somewhere and exceedingly useful. So why aren't all or some of the Good Practices taught routinely - both at University and in the work place? After all, we're talking about things that work , that address the software fundaments: cheaper, better, faster, more , that push up the tradeoff point for "pick two of 'fast, good, cheap'", make the production of software more reliable and predictable - and ultimately cheaper . Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) a British doctor and psychi...