Articles by barry

Last week, I was reading the paper and I saw the most insane comment I have read in a paper for years.
It in relation to taxation changes in the Resources sector. “Most of the Venture Capitalists I talk to say their biggest issue is access to capital”.

If you are a Venture Capitalist without Capital you are simply a Venturist. These people are not capitalists, they are parasites, they add no real value and take huge fees, I hope they all go broke and quickly.

These clowns seem to have completely ignored the evidence that says their economic models (rational economics, etc), the financial engineering, and new management religion don’t work. You’ve had 20 years and it failed.

I want to hear from a new voice, one that understands logic, history and evidence.

Can we now get back to considering productive capacity as value and not the money that describes that value please?

A quick note on something that happened this morning. Occasionally our company undertakes random acts of community action. I got a call from a representative of one of the applaudable organisations in regard to some upcoming opportunities to be involved. I explained that now was not a good time, but later in the year might be better. She said, “If you like, I can send over the paperwork and then its ready for later in the year”. “OK” says I.

20 minutes later I got an email marked as ‘Urgent” from the lady. I deleted it without opening.

I was amazed that anyone could possibly think that this was a good idea.

I mean for me, not the world, so let’s not get excited.
The thought came to me today when a fellow I am talking to about business and other things asked for a resume oriented to web projects.

It occurred to me that I have not worked on any other kind of IT development since 1999 or before. Then I got to thinking about CSIRO and the things we did there.

I reckon I can claim my first ‘internet’, not “web”, project to 1988/9 or there about’s. I was building a mappnig database for a demo of our relational GIS system. I had a lot of layers, DCDB, Water, electricity and water. I ran into an issue though when I filled up my Oracle server.

I called a friend in the local ANU Department and he gave me permission to setup a tablespace on one of his servers and access it with Oracle’s SQL*Net as it was then (I think).

It all went swimimingly, except for the fact that in those wonderful days we had big endian and little endian modes of computers, because noone could see the sense in agreeing on these small matters.

Locally I had a Sun Workstation, connected to a sun server (maybe Motorola, maybe Sparc - long time gone bye) and the other Oracle (5.1.22) was on a Digitial Electric Corporation Vax of some description, but importantly of different ends.

The result was that my ‘links’ of water pipe cam back horizontally flipped, so that the pipes did not connect. (DOH!!)  See 5 P’s of fishing: its appropriate here and ,any other places.

I got 11/10 believe it or not when I explained why the water network looked like shite.    The chaps that were watching were stunned that we had set up the equivalent of  a distributed, federated database on the fly.  And if only because I ran out out of space.

Anyway, that’s the thought for today.

This is the first in what will probably be an irregular series of dispatches on the lessons of 28 years of software development, sales and marketing and small business ownership.

Firstly I need to say that I have a very big fan of the Object Management Group for a very long time and believe that the concepts that make the Model Driven Architecture approach to systems analysis, design, implementation and maintenance/enhancement should drive all systems development.  Of course, in practise they don’t.   The reasons that the approach come in many forms, mostly there is little or no commitment to trying to understand business modelling (UML 2, etc) rather than a financial model (Excel).

After at least 15 years working for, driving and generally trying to actively promote the idea of a single set of terms, tags and nomenclature generally within the stakeholder community.  But again, the daily stresses and to be blunt the vested interests of stakeholders can easily run the endeavour off the rails.  these interests can be of a budgetary nature (vendors, sub-contractors), or more personal, less tangible matters.

We (hpfm) have been working with a national, geographically extremely diverse organisation as they have migrated their daily activities (membership management, education, patrol rosters) from a combination of disparate databases, paper and informal arrangements to  a uniform, national information framework that support some 300+ organisations, over 300,000 individuals that allows each agent the degree of flexibility required to ‘get things done’.

The user population is regularly surveyed by an independent party and for the past 3 years has gained 85 % acceptance rates by the largely volunteer group.

So, why is that so different to corporate experiences?

In the past 14 years, I have worked as a senior consultant to some of the largest organisations in Oz.  I have seen at least 5 “Enterprise” IT initiatives, each budgeted well over $100 million.  Each managed to spend several million IT dollars, achieving nothing and finally dying an inglorious death.  WHY?

Well, mostly its because they are realiy poorly thought out.

And I think it stems from the popular name or industry has: IT.  We don’t often stop to remember that this means Information AND Technology.

Information is a very long term volatile asset.   Technology as Moore’s Law informs changes on a very rapid cycle.

I know of very few projects, including all of those above, that proved to be either terribly technically risky or infeasible.  I saw a $5 million (AUS) project management tool become a time sheeting system.  Not because it couldn’t be integrated, but because the budget was cut after the technical work was done.  For the sake of less than $2 million dollars, that organisation has condemned a project to ridicule, paid millions of dollars for a time sheet tool.  But most distressingly it would already have missed out on 10’s if not 100’s of millions of savings on major projects.  Let alone the opportunity cost in not having the in detail practical data available for decision making.  I met one poor chap managing a $450 million dollar equipment roll-out with a 5,000+ line Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.  I don’t care who you are that task is impossible.

This is a failure to understand that the information to be managed in the ’system’ is far more valuable than the piece of technology that is lives in.

I have used the example of the Roman Colosseum, the technology used is ancient but available in huge supply.  After all there are more humans on the planet that can lay bricks that ever before.  Of course we’d need the plans, blueprint, the information that tells us what to build. Otherwise its just a pile of bricks.

The other ingredient in systems are people.  Those pesky social animals we need to get things done.  Ignoring the requirements, likes, dislikes and communication mechanism of these folks is the singularly largest mistake we can make.  Falling into the trap so many managers/execs do of thinking they know how everyone will use the new system is common and fatal.  The extreme negative (and realistically common) response to the imposition of system change from above was, at least in my presence, first coined by Dr Dave Abel as “malicious compliance”.  We’ll fill in the forms bur no more.  My time sheet example above died this way.

The past few years have  been an ongoing learning experience, we have developed our own methodology for working with organisations to work at two very distinct levels and on two independently assessed set of criteria.  These are determination of the business objectives, rules and constraints, the other is to work with the community of those affected to build consensus.

In short (and I’ll expand on this process in the series), we need to work with the business owner to identify both root causes and immediate opportunity to improve.  This is a structured process that is directed to a strategic assessment of the business requirements for information.  This takes the form of a very concise set of framework principles that govern the assessment, design and implementation of systems change.  This then defines the language used to describe the proposal and has been fully socialised with stakeholders.

In a parallel stream, a range of techniques is used to the above we work with the business to identify immediate action to build the community buy in to adopt the new system.  At this stage we focus on the people most affected by the proposed modifications.  In these sessions we find out what makes sense in terms of delivering the benefits  available.  Through experience we have come to understand the concept of “desire-lines” , and how they affect a systems adoption in the target social network (employees, customers, vendors, the state).  That is people will find there own way to get the job done, after all you employed them because they have skills.  Our method says, if we know that this is going to happen, why not help that process and get a better result all round.

The worst question you can ever ask is what brand system is best for [CRM,ERP,B2B,Web,etc]?

Until you really understand both what you are doing and why, the next thing is to develop a shared concept.  Normally you need to work on a 5-10 year cycle to deeply embed strategic, high value, flexible, robust and scalable system change.  Every $1.00 you fail to spend on truly understanding and sharing that system vision, is billed back to you at $100 when the technology is delivered and reduces the value of your endeavours.

If you get this bit right, the technology become a true enabler, not a cost centre.

Next: Turning it into SDLC

Call us slow or stupid, but Phil and I have only just realised that we are part of an extremely small percentage of chaps that work in an IT company with equal male and female staff and potentially to become female dominated.

Small but lucky percentage that is, wouldn’t have it any other way.

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/earth_overshoot_day/

Seems we are now using next year’s resources. What happens when we become environmentally bankrupt?

We have just had a sensationalised discussion about economic debt, or if you like about using too much of an artificial estimation of value.

I think its fascinating that we face a real deficit, of tangible things and our best and brightest can simply ignore it. How do we pay back an environmental debt?

Anyone?

We start next year at minus three months of resources and an accelerating rate  of withdrawal.

It simply must be time to wake up soon.

I am almost uncontrollably pissed off today. I heard about this:  http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/10/2512341.htm

Apparently this happened over a year ago, but we are only hearing about it now.

I want to see the Directors, Management and direct workers held reponsible for killing a man who’s crime seemed to be that he was aboriginal.

I am not happy.

Today marks the start of the new episode. For several years now, I have a very is painful neck, so much so that it has prevented me from writing in detail of the sort I’d like to, on a whole range of topics.

Given that I’m a well-known mumbler and prevaricator.  I imagine that trying to read these posts, initially at least could be very difficult.

It should be fun to find out.  It Today is also remarkable for the fact that I have finally divorced myself from an addiction or at the least a dependence upon Apple’s, iTunes.  

I got sick of a range of issues that I was suffering from with iTunes and so I have replaced it with Mozilla is Songbird. http://getsongbird.com/

The issues that I had was when I asked by iTunes to copy my files from the standard format to an MP3 format.  Rather than replace the file the existing songs with their MP3 versions, iTunes simply made another copy of the same files.

Having done this a few times, I add it up with multiple copies of nearly every song in my music collection.  I went through all of the subfolders and directories of music and removed all duplicates leaving only the MP3 files.  

iTunes, of course, didn’t update its playlist, so I would be fortunate if one in three files listed in the playlist were actually able to play. Rather than work through the whole, iTunes environment to try and figure out what the hell was going was going on how to fix it I decided to replace iTunes altogether

I now have a new music player, which looks fantastic sounds great, and seemed to have all my music on.

What more could you ask willo, having purchased Dragon NaturallySpeaking, of decided that all my posts from now will be done using speech recognition, stay well

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Today saw the current federal government cave into Australia’s filthiest companies and consigned the Barrier Reed, Kakadu and probably the Murray Darling System to history.

Given the chance to show that we truly understand how important the condidtion of the worlds atmosphere is, our representatives bubkled at the knees and gave i because it seems too hard.

They even decided to reward the most digusting forms of environmental vanadlism with an extra $4billion AUD.  This is equivalent to giving Rothmans money to fight lung cancer!!!

I thought the Rudd government was serious about this, but it seems oiling squeaky wheels is more effective if you want to stay in power.

This effort gets 3/10 simply because they announced a target - paltry and pathetic as that may be.

I guess its still slightly better than the other lot.

But either our kids, kids lose, severely.

I guess we become the titleholders of ‘most selfish lifeform ever’

I was looking at the Rocky Mountains Institute web page directed to transport, which follows watching The Daily Show last night in which I heard for the first time someone saying that the smart way ahead is to plan for the termination of our dependence on fossil fuels.  The RMI is planning for the end of oil, Australia I would propose needs to plan to eliminate coal mining by 2050 as well.

Why kill the goose that laid the golden egg?  Because someone is going to work out how to produce power without pollution.  That person, company, group or country will have a mortgage on the future.  The market economist must admit that with the climate situation as it is, there is definitely demand there.

In the Daily Show interview the ‘bubble’ nature of economics was discussed.  That is we had the first wave of internet players, this created a hyper infalted bubble that crashed and cost a lot of people lots of money. When the dust cleared we had this amazing resource called the World Wide Web which is now core to most of world trade.
We can look at Coal in the same way.  We currently have a hyperinflated buble of coal generated power networks.  Once this bubble bursts, there will be huge costs and business failures etc, BUT we will be left with highly valuable power networks that the new generators can leverage.

But how do we get there?

2 ways:

• Wait - then pay the price and conintue as a third rate economy, desperately trying to catch up.
• Take the pain in lumps

• Stop all subsidies to fossil fuel immediately

• E.g remove trade incentives
• Tax emissions
• Make them pay for the water they use
• Cancel all exploration permits immediately

• Free, non-poluting universal public transport
• Free, non polutting  personal  public transport
• Disuade private fossil fuel use

• in cars, lawnmowers etc

Of course we cant see thus happening for a while because of the outrageious lobbying power that these organisations have.

Coal Miners, Oil companies etc may well employ a lot of people, but the damage they are doing to us is now measurable and must be acknowledged.

Protecting these dinosaurs serves noone, we must see them off the premises for our own good, regardless of how good they make us feel.

I was waiting for a take away coffee and I saw today’s Sydney Morning Herald.  While I love it when the Markeeters and Fund Cowboy’s start crying fowl because the circumstances others have had to face that lead to fat commissions are now at play on them, I was more struck by a question.  Why would anyone care what the likes of Access Economics thinks about the current financial crisis.  We are in the direct consequences of their advice for the past 10 years.  They have, apparently been so wrong that the only measurable output from their advice right now is the largest financial crisis since the great depression.

When will we start to hear from credible analysts that have a different world view?

As Albert Einstein said “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” (Ref Quote )

While we have an incredibly severe financial crisis on our hands, it is dwarfed in both size and immediacy by the changes in the planets climate.

Planetary Change is bigger than all of the economies in the world, if only because to totally encloses them.

We must have more and very different ideas to provide us with an alternative to the vision that is able to ignore the single largest threat to civilisation ever encountered.  This is bigger than the last Ice Age, at the level of the organism the change is on a par with the extinction event that saw off the dinosaurs.

And we engineered this one.

To quote a very smart man “”We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” - Albert Einstein

A chap I know from the Greens called me last week to ask if, as a rep of one of the groups I belong to, I would endorse a proposal to have the Warringah Council write to both State and Federal Govt’s to protest over a proposal to explore for Coal off the Sydney coastline.

Just how many things are wrong with this idea? Who is the fool that thinks this is sensible?

We want to decrease the amount of coal we burn not use more.

And given the amount of coal we have on the mainland, why would gassification, offshore with the all the attendant environmental issue be entertained at all?

I am amazed that we still have people that want to expand the most toxic industry the earth has seen. The first steps SHOULD be to immediately cancel all fossil fuel exploration licences, remove all government subsidies on mining (of all kinds) and look to seek damages from these companies for the damage they have wrought on the world.

But is that likely to happen? Of course not, we will these dirty, polluting industries rewarded for driving the Earth toward the 7th major extinction event.

Went boogey boarding for about an hour. Soreness pronounced but so far not too nasty.

Still not ready for surf, damn!!

For that past few years, I’ve spent most of my time trying to attract senior and executive leaders to the need for simple, strategic and long term thinking about the lifecycle of their organisations. The advances in information management technologies, well ordered information exchange and systems of identifying, locating and storing everything that organisation provides an opportunity of accelerating value over the long term.

So why is that a strategic view of the activities of the business, intolerance of empire building and good governance falls of deaf ears?

Why?

From time to time, I hope to return to this theme.  I suspect it is to do with a shift in value from the means of production to the means of manipulation.

I’m going the long way ruond to get the US.

 From Sydney (home btw), I headed up to Tokyo, where I am in the Dayroom area after a few hours kip, waiting for the connection to Minneapolis and then onto Duluth where the holiday starts in earnest.

 We were help on the tarmac in Sydney for abuot an hour because a Typhoon was due to hit Tokyo about the same time as we were due to land.  Now, having seen and been through a number of cyclones in Queensland, an hour didn’t seem long.

 Flight uneventful, which is exactly the way they should be.

More later, go to go my Yens have dried up

We here in Oz have been subjected to one of the most dishonest polictical debates I can remember lately, over how we should respond to Global Climate change.

Out Government continually states that we cannot take decisive action on climate change that might hurt the economy. This is then taken as the base of the argument, that is any response will hurt the economy.

To me this ignores 2 important things:

1. Our current activities (buring fossil fuels) are hurting us to the tune of Trillions of dolars a year in opportunity costs for the future.
2. Many countries are already reducing carbon emmissions and their economies are growing just fine

And then I heard one to top it all, the head of our national generation body has had the gall to suggest that if we are to enforce limits on emmission they would expect to be ‘compensated’. I would have thought that we the nation, should expect to be compensated for the damage these folk are inflicting on us.

At the very least, all subsidies to coal, ga and petroleum companies must be cancelled immediately and reinvested into non-polluting technologies. And we should be making them pay the same price for water that everyone esle has to pay. That way at least we get an idea of what the real cost to the economy is of our current practises, rather than this insane distortion that makes coal, etc seem relatively cheap.

Of course I would then add an environmental tax on the carbon and other impurities these filthy industries inflict on the community.

We need to have a real discussion on Climate change and to do that we need to dispel the myth that coal is cheap.

I have been planning a new business service for some time now and we are about to bring it to market.

We believe that our approach provides a unique capacity to significantly reduce a small to medium size business’s tele-communications costs, while radically increasing their ability to know and resapond to their customers needs and wishes.  Our service provides end-to-end secure business IT support with radically increased information quality, reduced searching time, eliminate IT Brain Freeze while costing less than many of small businesses pay for their phones now.

We call it Business In a Box - and I will expand on it and add links as I go.

Over the past 10 years or so, we (Australia) have seen a steady decrease in personal liberties in the name of protecting individual freedom.

This is to me is a little like fighting for peace, ( I would have used the other analogy, but I do need to keep this clean).

The one single issue that has amazed me is that of David Hicks and his internment for 5 years without charge with the complicity of the Australian Government. In the end he will server a few more months and be released.

At no stage in the process did we ever know exactly what he was supposed to have done - other than glib comments about him being a “terrorist” - a catch-all to shut up anyone that has the audacity to question the current administration.

To me the treatment of David Hicks means that no one can actually rely on the accepted notion of innocent until proven guilty, something most of us assumed was our unaliable right as Asutralian citizens. My understandning is that it is this one principal that defines our ‘freedom’. By stripping this from Hicks the current Austrlian Government has set a precident that severly impacts anyone’s freedom to disagree with the authorities. There is no guarantee that you or I won’t be treated in the same disgusting way.
We afford legal process to mass killers (Martin Bryant, Ivan Milat, the Snow Town crowd), who have commited crimes that dwarf the Hicks invovlement in ethnic struggle, but add the word ‘terrorist’ and its OK to treat someone any way you please. We didn’t even insist on application of the Geneva convention.

I wholeheartedly support moves to charge and try anyone that seeks to break the laws of the land, particularly if that includes violence. If Hicks broke the law, he shoud be punished, in accordance with the law. But that did not happen. He was punished first with a detailed and coordinated media assault on his character, but no charges for 5 YEARS!!! When,finally, our Government was embarrassed into ‘managing the situation’ (not through due process), we get the spectacle of a forced confession and a custodial sentence, politically determined to minimise the adverse impact on the government’s polling results.

This government, and particularly the PM and Attorney General should hang their heads in shame, as far as I know they are first to subvert justice in the name of trying to defend it.

As an elector and citizen of Austrlia, I demand a full explanation of why this was allowed to happen, and further :

• What crimes are so bad that a citizen of Australia can expect to forego due process because someone from another country thinks so?
• What third party countries are able to kidnap our citizens, hold and torture them without providing legal representation?
• What is the difference between what the Australian and US Administrations have done to Habib, Hicks and others and the Hezbollah, PLO, Iran have done when they kidnap innocent (remember under our laws, Hick and co were innocent until the court case ended, if they got one) people, hold and torture them? From my reading these folk make the same claims of right that the US and Austrlian Governments did.

I guess the old guy I met when I was young was right when he said “There are no good guys in this“.

Well after only 5 years, I have the company blog running. I have only recently decided that we can start to tell out companies story and see what we can do to grow our networks.

It is quite late here so, I will head off to bed now, but I am looking forward to making my notes here.

Back soon…