I guess all I have to blog about these days is computer history: The IBM PC is 30 today.
Yesterday I attended the Southwest regional Computer Measurement Group meeting. Barry Merrill started his talk by recounting how he got started in computers as a sophomore at Notre Dame in 1959. One of the things I like about CMG meetings is they make me feel like a youngster.
I don’t mean to turn this into a technology history blog, but the IBM Selectric typewriter will turn 50 on Sunday. I learned how to type on one of those.
I should probably find time to blog more often. Anyway, here’s another look at the history of computing: Microsoft’s MS-DOS is 30 today.
I was busy cleaning up after our Disaster Recovery test yesterday, but I didn’t want to let the 100th anniversary of the incorporation of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (later renamed International Business Machines) pass unnoticed. I owe a lot to IBM: my father worked for them starting when I was about a year old until I was 21, and my job here (and at one previous employer) has always involved lots of IBM hardware and software. On the other hand, it’s hard to ignore the fact that IBM hasn’t always been a force for good or even a force for progress in the IT industry. (I noticed that the page I linked doesn’t mention that Thomas J. Watson was appealing a felony conviction for restraint of trade violations when he started at IBM. He remained a firm believer in monopolies his entire life.)
So it’s been an interesting century. If I had any hope of being around I’d say it will be interesting to see if IBM is still around in another hundred years, and what it will be like if it is.
I’ve thought for a while that the University would do well to have more information about its finances easily available from the home page, so I was encouraged at first when the “Budget 101” link showed up as one of the articles linked in the changing banner section. (And by the way, the longer this distracting element is present, the more annoying it becomes.) But on reading the article, it appears that the University missed an opportunity here.
First of all, Flash? Ugh! When will this abomination disappear from the web? OK, thoughtful, usable things can be done in Flash, but it seems they rarely are. The Flash development culture has always been more about showing off and eye candy than about creating helpful, informative, usable experiences. Also, today most of the things that required Flash can now be done with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, and often done more accessibly, more informatively, and more respectfully towards the end user.
Perhaps it’s because I’m currently rereading Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations, but the cartoonishness of the graphics and the paucity of actual data really seem inappropriate. As an example of the paucity of data, how about instead of pie charts of 2011’s income and expenses, showing line graphs of how those have changed over the past decade or two? Similarly with the bar chart comparing tuition at the University to peer institutions: why not a graph showing how that has changed over time? And why not show the amount expended per student, again over time and compared to our peers?
The videos of Kevin Hegarty were OK, but why not provide transcripts? Where was the captioning?
While this was better than what the University has provided in the past, less effort on glitzy effects and more on seriously communicating information would have made for a more credible message.
Update: There are captions on the videos; I just didn’t see them.
Schmidt is describing an organization that exemplifies many of the most forward-thinking management values: empowerment, trust, engagement, alignment. And very much to his credit, he does it without using any of those buzzwords. (Not that buzzwords are always bad. There’s nothing wrong with talking about, say, transparency, for example.) People are going to do what they do. A company that can actually fill positions with people who actively want to do the things the job requires, who were going to perform those tasks anyway–that company has a tremendous advantage.
Of course, it takes leadership to build that kind of organization.
The Top 7 Stupidest Things Believed by Bad Companies
Yea, I know UT isn’t exactly a “company” in the sense he means, but a lot of this applies.
In other words, a bad company looks just like – sometimes even better – than a good company. And if you buy into that look, you will be as dumb as they are. Because bad companies fail – and when they do, they cost their customers, their employees and their investors dearly. Most of these companies were once good companies in their day, and now leverage long established names built on the backs of innovators of a previous era. They can exist, coasting for years or even decades, but fall far short of their potential.
A former management consultant comes clean: The Management Myth
During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.
The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.” When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration.
After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted to “process” my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?
OK, so I haven’t blogged much lately. Now that we’ve got the new mainframe in production maybe I’ll be able to find more time for it.
I’ve been reading a book I got when they closed down the 13th floor library, The Trouble with Computers by Thomas K. Landauer. It looks pretty good, except it was written in the early 1990’s before most people had heard of the web, so I’m not sure what he might say differently if he were writing today. Anyway, I wanted to quote this:
It is not only the initial design of computer software that is thus so often flawed. The way in which software is produced and deployed makes it almost inevitable that it will miss its mark in providing the right functions for its users. After the initial specification of a product, which may involve executives and managers of the people who will use it, some of whom may have done the job at some time in their past, software is usually developed by a group of programmers with no further contact with customers until the system is complete. The programmers add and subtract features and functions reflecting their own fantasies of what the job is like and under the assumption that the users are people just like them, which is never true. Systems are only rarely tried out on users in their environment before they are sold.
I think this is one of the things we’ve been able to do right in the past. *DACCT (the predecessor of *DEFINE) came about when John Wheat went and sat in departmental accountants’ offices and watched what they were doing. Having programmers working in the departments they support helps too. This is not to say we couldn’t do even better in the future.
With the holidays well over, it’s probably time to blog some again.
I was reading this article about Red Hat at The Register, which linked and quoted from this Forbes article about Salesforce.com, and I’d like to highlight this part:
The theory of enterprise software is that it is cheaper to buy an off-the-shelf solution and configure it to your needs instead of building exactly what you need from scratch. Some companies are great at using off-the-shelf products and others waste a lot of money. But for most companies, the trade-off works. It is cheaper to buy and configure than to build.
What is less widely known is that the range of processes covered by standard software is modest. In his book, Business Process Management: The SAP Roadmap, SAP Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe says, based on research, that standard software covers about 20 percent of the processes in any given business.
I had the sense that moving to PeopleSoft or an equivalent would still leave a need for a lot of local, custom development, but having it meet 20% of the need is much smaller than what I would have guessed.