Reshape IT Via New Models Like Software-as-a-Service

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

IT should embrace SaaS enthusiastically, as it can save a whole lot of headaches building prototypes that users reject.

Anyone who’s been in IT for more than a few years knows the dirty little secret of the profession: many IT projects (in fact, most of them, in my experience) fail. That’s been the story as long as I can remember. Why, after so many years, are we still so frustrated by failure?

There are three main reasons I’ve observed:

  • In too many companies, IT is an island that is organizationally and even physically removed from the business it serves.
  • Too many users suffer from throw-it-over-the-wall syndrome, which leads to projects that fail to match the needs that exist at delivery.
  • Turnover and organizational change undermine too many projects, making them irrelevant by the time they’re delivered.

Let’s look at how you can approach each problem.

IT is an island – IT people themselves are often too willing to accept a balkanized structure that isolates them from the business. There is a bad idea for so many reasons, but the insular, often introverted nature of technical professionals lets them rationalize this situation. They don’t communicate well with the business side, so they settle for separation.

You can’t change people’s personalities, and you can’t force people to work in situations that make them uncomfortable. But you can make sure that IT project leaders have the capacity to work productively with business end-users. That means not talking down or clamming up, but rather showing tolerance, acceptance, and humor. Your project managers are ambassadors. You need to select people with strong diplomatic skills.

With the right ambassadors in place, you can afford to set the rest of your IT organization apart to some degree. The project leaders should serve as both diplomat and translator, buffering the relationship with the business side while speaking both languages fluently.

Customer accountability – The throw-it-over-the-wall problem begins with the user sponsor, and is perpetuated by gullible IT organizations. Often, the perpetrator is a senior business-side executive, a “big idea” type who conceives of a grand vision and then hands off half-baked requirements to an IT group that often doesn’t fully understand what it’s supposed to deliver. Six months later, IT comes back with a prototype, by which time either the requirements have changed, the user has moved on, or he or she has forgotten about the whole thing.

Let’s face it: no one likes creating spec documents or sitting through progress report meetings. They’re tedious and boring. But they are absolutely essential if a project is to remain on track. The CIO needs to be the bad guy here. He or she must insist upon project management discipline and review meetings at least once a quarter to make sure the project is still relevant. The CIO needs the backing of a top company executive in taking this approach. Otherwise, IT will be buffeted by constant changes in the business environment. Which leads to the final problem.

Organizational change – How many managers can you name in your organization who have been in the same job for more than two years? In many companies today, half the leadership has taken on a new assignment in that time. So why do we still start IT projects that have deliverables scheduled a year or more down the road?

The business environment is too changeable these days to permit that kind of scheduling. Projects must be componentized, with deliverables scheduled every few months. If you can’t decompose a project like that these days, it probably isn’t a very good idea in the first place.

Technology may be riding to the rescue. The rise of the so-called “software as a service” (SaaS) business – epitomized by Salesforce.com –– is enabling users to try applications before they commit to them. SaaS delivers applications over the Internet, and users can often achieve results in a matter of days. In some cases, users may find that a SaaS solution is all they need. But even if they don’t, SaaS is a heckuva way to prototype different approaches and solutions. A lot of IT organizations are approaching SaaS warily, worried that they will lose control. Instead, they should be embracing the model enthusiastically. It can save them a whole lot of headaches building prototypes that users reject.


Donald Gillin, 1930-2005

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Donald GillinMy father, Donald G. Gillin, died a year ago tonight. His death from Alzheimer’s Disease at 75 was tragic for one so intellectually vibrant, but Alzheimer’s is an unforgiving disease. He had taken great care of his body for many years, but he was unable to escape the clutches of an illness that robbed him of his mind.

I’m posting this entry because I recently became aware that news of his death apparently did not disseminate through the standard communications channels. My dad was a terrible record keeper. He had no Rolodex and whatever contact information he had consisted of phone numbers scrawled on slips of paper that he kept in his wallet. When he died, I had no way to contact the people who might want to know the news. I submitted obituaries to his alma mater and to the leading professional journal in his field of Asian studies, but apparently neither ever published anything. I learned this by contacting a colleague and friend of his recently, who was unaware of my dad’s passing.

I’m posting this in hopes that someone searching for news about my dad will come by this blog entry. Below is the obituary that ran in the local newspaper. Please contact me if you’d like to know more.

SHREWSBURY, MA. – Donald Gillin, Ph. D., a noted China scholar and former head of the Asian Studies program at Vassar College, died on Aug. 28 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 75.

Dr. Gillin taught at Vassar from 1968 until his retirement in 1992. He was previously a faculty member at Duke University. A fluent Mandarin-Chinese speaker, he was noted for his talents as a lecturer and storyteller. His innovative “Hollywood on Asia” course at Vassar at one point drew enrollment of almost 15% of the Vassar student body. An accompanying slide set on images of China in popular media sold more than 700 copies when produced by The Asia Society.

Dr. Gillin served as a visiting member of the faculty at the Universities of Michigan and North Carolina, Stanford University, San Francisco State College, Arizona State University and Sir George Williams University in Montreal. He delivered scores of papers and lectures at conferences and symposia around the world, including many meetings of the Association for Asian Studies.

His books included Warlord: Yen Hsi-shan in Shansi Province 1911-1949 (Princeton University Press, 1967) and East Asia: A Bibliography for Undergraduate Libraries (BroDard Publishing Company, 1970). Warlord is still in use as a college textbook nearly 40 years after it was published. He co-authored Last Chance in Manchuria (Hoover Press, 1989) and Prescriptions for Saving China: Selected Writings of Sun Yat-sen (Hoover Institution Press, 1994). His monograph, Falsifying China’s History: The Case of Sterling Seagrave’s The Soong Dynasty ( Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 1986) caused a small sensation in Asian studies circles for its impassioned refutation of the bestselling Soong Dynasty.

Dr. Gillin also published dozens of articles in scholarly journals, including The Journal of Asian Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, Encyclopedia Britannica, Journal of Modern History, and American Historical Review. Born in San Francisco, Dr. Gillin earned B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. A recipient of Ford Foundation and Stanford grants, he studied Chinese language in Taiwan and Hong Kong before joining the Duke faculty in 1959. He joined the Vassar faculty in 1968.

Dr. Gillin’s wife, Rose Marie, died in 2000. He leaves two children: Paul Gillin of Westboro, Mass. and Presto Rubel of Brimfield, Mass. He also leaves two grandchildren. A cremation is planned. Donations may be made to the Alzheimer’s Association. Communications may be sent to Paul Gillin, 1 Garfield Dr., Westborough, MA 01581.

Addendum, July 2014

My dad was never very good at playing with others, so his death was ignored by the Journal of Asian Studies and even by Vassar College, where he taught for 25 years. My blog post appears to be the only record of his passing, judging by the many e-mails and comments it has received. I’m glad I could build some small memorial to him since he was such a brilliant and memorable character. I’ll use this space to jot down some memories from time to time.

My dad was a brilliant but quirky man. In addition to modern Chinese military history, he was an expert on the Civil War and very proficient in the history of both world wars. He spoke Chinese so fluently that he sometimes fooled native Chinese speakers on phone calls.

Donald and Paul Gillin circa 1961

Donald and Paul Gillin circa 1961

He had an unbelievable mind for facts and trivia. As a kid, I liked to watch the game show Jeopardy! My dad hated game shows, so whenever he caught me watching one he’d scold me for wasting my time with such rubbish. Then he’d start answering the questions, often running the board before leaving in disgust. I used to tell him that if he could get over his aversion to game shows he could have won us $100,000 on Jeopardy.

As brilliant as he was, he struggled to distinguish between right and left until his dying day. He once lost his wallet at the Poughkeepsie train station because he took it out of his pocket to look up his own phone number and left it in the phone booth. When he died I went through his wallet, a grotesque blob of leather stuffed with hundreds of pieces of paper, nearly all of them phone numbers. I found my own number at least a dozen times, covering three houses and more than 15 years. His own number was in there several times as well. My dad couldn’t be bothered with keeping detailed records. His mind contained most of what he needed to get through life.

The tiniest mechanical tasks could send him into a rage. He had absolutely no mechanical skills – couldn’t even operate a screwdriver. It wasn’t for lack of motor skills, though. He played a mean game of tennis, despite having never had a lesson. His tennis form was terrible; he was all wrist and he served with an odd scooping motion. He was surprisingly devastating, though. He played with manic intensity, often staying on the court for two hours in the brutal North Carolina summer heat. Then he might stroll to class. As one former student recently wrote me, “He would come in the early afternoon class fresh from the tennis court, his racket in his hand, and would tell us about Chinese peasants, or Yen Shi-shan, whose biography he was writing then.”

He was a brilliant lecturer and storyteller, but he hated meetings and largely avoided faculty get-togethers, preferring the company of a few close friends. He was basically a loner who nevertheless thrived in front of groups. He loved to tell stories but hated small talk.

Late in my dad’s career, he figured out a way to combine his love of Hollywood films with his passion for China. Understand that his love of movies was far more than just a pastime. I believe he had seen just about every major motion picture that had come out of Hollywood between 1945 and 1960, and he filed them away in his prodigious memory. As a teenager, I used to play a game with him by picking movie titles at random from TV Guide. He would respond with the year the film was made, the names of the lead actors, the director and a summary of the plot. As I recall, his accuracy rate was between 80% and 90%. It was awesome.

In the late 1970s, he hatched the idea of an undergraduate course called “Hollywood on Asia.” Each class consisted of a full-length popular film – usually a B&W Classic like “The Mask of Fu Manchu,” followed by a lecture. The course became a modest sensation at Vassar, where it enrolled as many as 250 students in one semester. That’s 15% of the student population. Many students no doubt thought it would be a gut course, but my dad took the topic seriously and he graded hard. I don’t remember specifics, but he said he gave out a lot of Cs and Ds on the term paper.

The course was controversial. While the students loved it, some of the faculty criticized my dad for dumbing down scholarship. He thought they were jealous, and they probably were. It didn’t help that he took things a bit too far with his next venture, which was a slide presentation on Chinese sexual imagery in popular culture. The images he used weren’t obscene, but some of them were pretty racy, and the reaction from his colleagues was largely negative. That presentation was probably one of the main reasons the Vassar administration forced him into early retirement at age 63. That coincided with the beginning of my mother’s long downward spiral from diabetes and Lupus, which ended in her death in May 2000. My dad’s Alzheimer’s symptoms became apparent about a year later.

Disruptive Technologies to Watch Over the Next 12 Months

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

Keep an eye on these four technologies in the short term, as they’ll have profound implications for the long term.

This week I get to talk about one of my favorite subjects: disruptive technologies. These are the innovations that get into the cracks and crevices of our daily lives and break things apart, often causing massive changes to institutions and procedures years down the road. Those changes are rarely evident at the outset.

Here are four technologies that I think are potentially disruptive:

Digitized voice – We’ve been recording voice digitally for years, of course, but the arrival of voice-over-IP services like Skype are forcing the cost of voice communications toward zero. Also, technologies embodied in services like Podscope are making it possible to index and search audio almost as effectively as we search text today. What will the world look like when our voice interactions can be stored and searched? How will this development change the way we research a topic or access content that helps a customer? What are the privacy and accountability implications?

Virtualization – So many of the headaches in IT today are caused by scarcity of resources. Software slows down, crashes, or is rendered unavailable because of hardware problems. Virtualization is a big step forward. First storage was virtualized. Then servers. Now you can also virtualize applications, running each in its own protected and secured envelope. Combine that with AJAX technology, which permits applications to be downloaded from a server and run as needed on a client, and you have the elements of a radical restructuring of computing fundamentals.

In the future, software will be less and less “machine-aware,” meaning that programs will draw on hardware resources as needed, whether locally or across a network. This could make a rich suite of applications available to users wherever they are in the world without concerns about hardware availability or capacity. The possibilities for innovation are almost endless.

The $100 laptop – A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the One Laptop per Child project, whose goal is to build a $100 networked portable PC. When you think through the implications of this achievement, the potential is stunning. Here we have the possibility of putting computers in the hands of billions of people who can’t now afford them. What will be the implications of this development be on global business? How will it change the way we organize workgroups, outsource applications and manage dispersed organizations? How will communities of people who are unfettered by a legacy of costly, complex computers organize new enterprises around this cheap, simplified technology? How will it change our expectations of computers as appliances? The implications of this project are very long term, but very exciting.

Video iPod – If this choice looks incongruous, hear me out. The next wave of the Internet will be the multimedia Web , and portable video will be the killer application. Once we can stream and download video to a lightweight, handheld device, it will change nearly every aspect of our lives. I’m not talking about watching reruns of American Idol. I’m talking about being able to communicate with our colleagues, access real-time news, view training materials and documentation, access archival information and check in with our loved ones with all the benefits of full-motion video. The ultimate vision is to carry around a window on the world, but coming up with functional players is the first step. Whether the leader is Apple or someone else, the term “iPod” connotes a user experience that we all relate to.


Crunch time

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I’ve been quiet these last two weeks because the deadline for delivering The New Influencers to the publisher is suddenly very real, and I’ve got three chapters and a profile still to go. The good news is that Chapters 5 & 6 are available for you to review at the drafts page. There’s a lot I want to write about, but most of that energy is going into what you find there.

If you’re a student of computer history and appreciate great writing, be sure to check out Charlie Babcock’s excellent feature called What’s the Greatest Software Ever Written? over at Informationweek. If you’re expecting to find a comparison of Quicken vs. MS Money, forget it. Charlie went way back in computing history and also looked at embedded, scientific and medical applications. Some of the choices will surprise you.

The Power of Goals

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

One characteristic that’s almost universally shared by innovative organizations is a commitment to goals. I’m not talking about fuzzy goals like “improve the customer experience,” but rock-hard, quantitative, measurable and achievable goals, stuff like “cut invoice processing times by 50% within 12 months.” Those are the goals that get results.

There’s a remarkable example of such goal-oriented innovation going on right now in Cambridge, Mass. There, a team led by computing visionary Nicholas Negroponte is building the $100 laptop. Their project has gotten a lot of press and a lot of skepticism. I have to admit that the first time I heard the idea 18 months ago, I thought it was crazy. Everyone knows laptops have to cost north of $500.

But the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) association, a nonprofit group led by Negroponte, is on its way to achieving that impossible goals. Although early production units are expected to cost about $135 when they ship in early 2007, the $100 price tag is within reach and certainly will be achieved within a year. It is a stunning example of the power of big, hairy audacious goals (“Beehags,” for short).

The OLPC team came up with a long list of innovations to achieve this milestone. It used open-source software (naturally, since the Windows license would put the machines over the $100 threshold out of the box) and an innovative dual-mode screen based on display technology used in portable DVD players. The screen can display color but can also be switched to black-and-white mode at three times the resolution.

The units have only 128Mbytes of memory and 500Mbytes of flash ROM. That’s not very much by business standards but, as Negroponte explains it, “Today’s laptops have become obese. Two-thirds of their software is used to manage the other third, which mostly does the same functions nine different ways.” In other words, the project will focus on doing a few basic things well rather than attempting to be all things to all people.

Broadband wireless networking will be built in, as will mesh networking, a technology being advanced by the MIT Media Lab that enables nearby computers to create a peer-to-peer network that inexpensively expands the power of each computer.

Finally, each unit will have a hand crank on the AC adapter that can deliver about 10 minutes of power. Designed for rural areas where power is scarce, the innovation strikes me as something that could be handy for business travelers on long plane flights with dying batteries. It’s flat-out brilliant.

The One Laptop per Child project is a shining example of the power of beehags. The group started with a simple, if seemingly impossible goal, and methodically knocked down barriers until it reached its objective. The toughest problem to solve was the display, but there the team looked to apply technology that was already on the market to a new use. Building on an established product is a form of innovation.

Give credit to Negroponte for never wavering from the mission. At any point, he could have revised the goal to a $200 laptop, but that would have been too easy. It was up to the team to innovate the last $100 out of the cost. And now that they’re nearly there, you can see $50 laptops on the horizon.

Give credit, also, to OLPC for changing the rules. If it had focused on simply stripping cost out of today’s low-end laptops, it would have invented an under-powered business machine. Instead, the group looked at the needs of the core audience – the roughly 80% of school children in the world who have never touched a computer – and designed a machine from the ground up just for them.

If the initiative succeeds – and there’s no guarantee it will – it could revolutionize the computer industry in unforeseen ways. Laptop computers were designed from the outset to duplicate the power of the desktop as closely as possible. But who says we need to compute that way? Could you be happy traveling with a machine that only did word processing, spreadsheet, e-mail and web browsing, but got eight hours of battery life and weighed about three pounds? We’ve been conditioned to believe that such portability should cost hundreds of dollars more than the price of a conventional laptop. OLPC is turning that on its head, making a lightweight portable machine the cheapest option.

The project could also be a breakthrough for open-source software. U.S. business users are hooked on Windows because that’s all they’ve known for 15 years. The OLPC project works from the assumption that users shouldn’t care about their operating system. Under those conditions, Linux works just fine.

The One Laptop per Child initiative is innovation personified and a tribute to the power of simple goals. What beehags have made a difference in your life? If you were the boss, what big goals would you assign your team to meet? Let me know in the comments ection below.

Voices of BlogHer

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BlogHer was the best conference I’ve attended in some time. The participants were thoughtful and reflective and there was none of the chest-beating and posturing that you see at most conferences (is that a surprise?). Consider adding this conference to your schedule for next year. You won’t be sorry.

Instead of blathering myself, I thought I’d let the attendees do the talking this time. Here are some quick audio interviews with BlogHer participants chosen more or less at random.

Leah Jones

Accidentally Jewish

A recent convert talks about life in a new community.

Millie Garfield

My Mom’s Blog

80 years old w/attitude. Check out “I can’t open it!” Hilarious!

Erica

The Alternative

This intensely personal blog by a eating disorder sufferer helps others cope with similar problems.

Kristen Chase

CoolMomPicks.com

Displaced New Jerseyite relates slightly snarky tales of motherhood in the Mississippi delta. “It’s who I am.”

Tiffany Brown

TiffanyBBrown.com

Blogging has helped her programming career.

Corey Dennis

NotShocking

She’s a music marketer and serial blogger who thinks social media will change the world of marketing.


Whitney Brandt

The Ugly Green Chair

You’ll have to listen to the end to find out how this blog got its name.

My morning with Doug Kaye

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The best thing about being a writer is that you get to sit at the feet of people who are doing incredible things. Yesterday was one of those opportunities, as I had the pleasure of interviewing Doug Kaye, the brain behind the Conversations Network, at his home in Marin Country.

Journalists are supposed to be impartial, but I have to admit my unabashed adoration for Doug and what he’s contributed to the Internet community. I have attended at least a half dozen conferences in the last year thanks to his work, and I never set foot at one of them. The work he is doing will forever change our expectations about access to information from great thinkers. That’s why I’m devoting a chapter of my book to him. Please read the draft. I’d appreciate your comments.

Headline news

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I read Media Post pretty relgiously because it does a good job of documenting changes across the industry. You didn’t have to do much more than read this morning’s headlines to see what’s going on. Check out this selection.

(Consumer-Generated Media)

Teen People Folds In Print, Remains Online

Forecast: Networking Sites’ Ad Revenue To Reach $1.86 Billion In 2010

Kelsey: Newspapers Should Bolster Online Alliances