Pattern Finder

A Reminder of How Bad Things Can Be in IT--And How They're Improving

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On Tuesday, Martha Coakley, the current Massachusetts Attorney General and a college classmate of mine (Williams '75), won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. (For you trivia buffs, here's what she looked like--and I looked like--freshman year in college.) Given Massachusetts' strong Democratic leanings, she'll probably win the election in January, taking Ted Kennedy's place.

Her win reminded me of one of the most depressing conversations about IT I've ever had. I don't see Martha that often--maybe once every couple of years--but back around 2002 she called me up to give her advice on what to do about her IT department. At the time, Martha was Middlesex County DA, and she was trying to figure out what her options were for improving IT support for her office. She sent her car around--nice touch, I thought--and we spent an hour going over her current systems, what she was trying to do, and her budget.

While the specifics escape me now, I remember being horrified at (1) what she needed to do and (2) what she could do, given her budget. She had an IT department of one. He was doing yeoman's duty, but was seriously underpaid. It was just a disaster. I helped her with some terminology and gave her some good questions to ask--Martha would be the first to admit she's not high tech savvy--but I really couldn't help her that much. All the money was going to keep the current systems running, and there was no money left over for improving things. It was the classic case of being on a treadmill and not being able to get off.

If we had the same conversation today I think it would go a bit better. Some of the money that she had to spend for infrastructure could be re-routed to a SaaS service. Given the confidential nature of the work in a District Attorney office, I'm not sure everything could be SaaS-based, but perhaps a few things could be offloaded. Her big issue was helping her attorneys find and track information. Search technology has certainly improved, and the cost of collaboration software has gone down. For example, SharePoint is less expensive than some of the KM systems of the time.

So while we're all still struggling with how to use SaaS effectively and what IT's role should be in today's world--should it continue running the IT engine room or should it become more of a coordinator?--I think things aren't as bleak as they were back then. At the very least, there are more options. And that's a good thing.

John Chambers, Then (1987) and Now (2007)

I got to see John Chambers give a keynote address at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce convention and it brought back memories. I hadn't seen John in person for about 20 years. Back in those dark ages we both worked at Wang Laboratories: John was Senior VP of Sales for Wang's Central Region and I was a product manager of operating systems and utilities. (For those without long enough memories, Wang was a minicomputer company that was a 1980's version of Google, in the sense that it grew as fast as Google and was known for making easy-to-use systems.)

John was a wunderkind even at Wang: his territories consistently outperformed all others and he got results without being a tyrant. I dealt with him from time to time on product questions, but I especially remember an entire day when I was locked up in a room with him and a major customer hashing out a new sales contract. This Chicago-based customer was looking for major product improvements--John was there to make the sale and I was there to make sure we didn't commit to anything developmentally impossible. (Difficult was OK; impossible was not). He started out with, "So tell us what we need to do to make you happy"--and it was a negotiation roller coaster from there. We'd take a break every couple of hours, and I remember saying to him at one point, "Geez, John, you've got us right up to the edge. I was about to cry 'foul' on that supported users demand but you pulled back just at the right moment." John smiled and said in his West Virginia accent, "Don't worry Guy, I'm a lawyer--I know how far I can go." I also remember him telling me, "We don't need to get them to sign today--that will be too far a leap that they may regret later. We just need to get them to the next stage." In short, I knew I was in the presence of a master 20 years ago, and it was a pleasure to watch him work the crowd yesterday.

He came out on stage to great applause, and then began to tell his (and Cisco's vision) of the future: command and control is out--collaboration and communication is in. It was not all 50,000 foot stuff, either. He had concrete examples of how Cisco was using web conferencing to make decisions faster. But the best part was when he went into preacher mode. After about three minutes at the podium, he walked down the steps and into the audience. Given the shaky images on the video monitors, you could tell the camera people were thinking, "What the...?" He then spent the next hour walking back and forth within the audience, making eye contact with individual audience members and making his points forcefully with no script. A bravura performance that attendees were still marveling over hours later. John Chambers was great 20 years ago, and he's even better today.

The Pattern Findings of John Newton of Alfresco

Yesterday was Day One of the AIIM Expo, and I had the good fortune to attend John Newton’s talk on Web 2.0. Having attended several of these, they’re usually a thinly disguised rehash of Tim O’Reilly’s definition. In this case, while John made the obligatory nod to Tim, he had an interesting twist that I’d never heard of or thought of. He said, “Look, it’s simple—Web 2.0 is all right-brain stuff [people, connections, spatial, artistic, future, conceptual]. It’s a viewpoint that differs markedly from the left-brained [objects, analysis, linear, logical, past, factual] programming viewpoint that has reigned for most of ECM’s history.” He noted that one of Documentum’s design goals (John was co-founder of Documentum) was that it should be fun to use. “We were never able to figure out how to do that,” he lamented. 

He attributed one of the drivers of this insight to going to the Davos Conference this year and attending “The Geek Dinner.” [The statesmen and power brokers are invited to the official dinner but the geeks – because their world view is so different and consequently make the movers and shakers uncomfortable – aren’t. In retaliation, the geeks have their own dinner, and as John notes, “It’s now quite an honor to be invited.”

Bo Peabody's "Elements of [Entrepreneurial] Style"

I just finished Bo Peabody's book, Lucky or Smart?: Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life, and I highly recommend it. For those not old enough to remember -- or who don't live in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts -- Bo Peabody started Tripod.com, a site for college students that eventually offered Homepage Builder, a precursor to today's wikis. Even though Tripod was based in the non-Silicon Valley location of Williamstown, MA, it had the right karma, and Bo sold the company in 1998 to Lycos for $58 million. The book talks about lessons he learned during his Tripod days, as well as the days since when he's been a VC.

It's not your typical business book -- it's sort of like Strunk and White's Elements of Style for entrepreneurs. The book is short (62 pages, I finished it in half an hour) but full of pithy points. The chapter headings should give you a feel for it. They include:

• Lucky or Smart?
• Entrepreneurs are B-Students. Managers are A-Students.
• Great Is the Enemy of Good
• Start-ups Attract Sociopaths
• The Best Defense is a Gracious Offense
• Don't Believe Your Own Press. In Fact, Don't Read.

Some quotes:

New CEO at Intelligent Results

Intelligent Results, a text mining company, today announced that it had appointed a new CEO, John Moscicki.  Kelly Pennock, a co-founder who had been both CEO and President, will remain as President.

Moscicki previously worked at consulting firms (always good when trying to get Partners at consulting firms to pitch your product) and had been VP of Product Development and Marketing at ADP.  This isn't the only management change at Intelligent Results.  At the end of May, Tom Croswell, VP of Product Engineering, vanished from the Management Team page.  At the time, I sent an e-mail to Trevor Rubel, the VP of Marketing, querying him about the change, but didn't get a reply.

Intelligent Results is one of those companies that's improving the results of data mining by adding text information to the analyzed data.  I'm a fan of the technology (witness my DMReview.com column in September 2004 entitled, "Duo-Mining: Combining Data and Text Mining," but it seems to be taking awhile for companies to adopt it.  I think enterprises just don't know what's possible now -- and the technology is only going to get better.  As (1) more and more companies recognize that e-mail (with customers and partners) is a gold mine of information and (2) voice-to-text translation improves, text mining technology will stop being optional and become standard.

Douglas Adams: A Designer of Systems

The movie The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy opened last week to great fanfare and excellent reviews.  However, the event was a bit bittersweet for me; the author, Douglas Adams, died several years ago, and consequently the IT world lost a wonderful visionary.

I know, because fifteen years ago I worked with a bunch of people intent on bringing the Hitchhiker's Guide to life.  I was working at Wang Laboratories, at the time a $3.3 billion computer company, a pioneer in pen-based systems.  In 1990, a set of developers worked at creating The Guide, a pen-based PC that we would now call a tablet PC.  (For those who think tablet PCs were a relatively recent invention, Wang and NCR both shipped production versions in 1990).

Douglas's book was the inspiration for The Guide, which led to some interesting design decisions.  Most other companies building a tablet PC at the time (NCR, Toshiba) looked at a pen PC as a laptop with a pen-enabled screen.  Consequently, the designs were kind of kludgey.  However, Douglas's spec called for a much more integrated system.  Therefore, besides a PC chip (386), The Guide sported a DSP, a specialized chip that could do many things.  For example, the DSP enabled the modem as well as a voice recorder.  The system also had a chip whose sole purpose was to clean up the digitizer information.  Consequently, The Guide's handwriting recognition was head and shoulders was above competitive systems, since the data from the digitizer was smoother and less noisy.

Because of The Guide, I got to meet Douglas Adams in person.  He'd been speaking at a conference in California; the development manager of the group happened to attend.  He went up to Douglas after his talk and asked, would you like to see The Guide?  We've built it.

Douglas leapt at the chance.  So on the way back to the UK, he stopped off in Boston and came up to Lowell, where we demonstrated the system.  He was quite impressed, given the state of technology at the time.  However, it pained him considerably that it ran on Microsoft Windows; he was an Apple convert through and through.

After signing some books and discussing the system, the 12 of us convened to a Japanese restaurant in Nashua, NH, where Douglas recounted, in hilarious fashion, the origins of some of the stories in the book.  He was tall (probably around 6'5"), funny, loved technology, and was quite a fellow.  But perhaps most importantly, he thought about systems from the outside in -- he thought about what would be nifty to have as a user, rather than starting with the technology and then retrofitting it to the user.  In short, he was a great systems designer, even if the only specs he wrote were novels.

HP's Hurd

HP announced today that Mark Hurd of NCR will be taking over Carly Fiorina's job.  The New York Times take is that it's a good fit; I agree.  I've met Mark and saw him operate at the Teradata division of NCR.  The two companies are culturally quite similar; quality engineering is central to both.  They both have the attitude that superb engineering will win out; marketing, while not ignored, is somewhat secondary.  HP under Carly tried to give more gloss to the marketing, but I think inside the company she was despised for it.

Mark's biggest challenge will probably be getting used to the Silicon Valley ambience.  Trust me, Dayton, Ohio (NCR's headquarters) is not known for its fruit smoothies or veggie wraps.  So hurrah to HP and condolences to NCR, which I know will miss Mark terribly.