I’ve written before about how I value Twitter’s ability to fine-tune one’s personal information gathering, selecting people to follow who, over time, prove to be the most useful, interesting, and stimulating. I commonly refer to the people I follow as my “personal Algonquin Round Table,” in homage to the well-known literary group of the 1920s.

More simply put, though: I value Twitter because I fundamentally believe in consulting others, picking their brains, observing what they find useful or funny, enjoying their (often differing) perspectives, and learning as much as I can from them.

To my frequent surprise, however, this basic belief in the value of consulting others turns out not to be universally shared. In fact, it can even be scoffed at. That disconnect came glaringly to light recently in the aftermath of the death of Steve Jobs. Basically put, the burgeoning legend of Steve Jobs rests in large part on how, in his path to multiple successes, he fundamentally rejected the value of consulting others.

Particularly in the days immediately following Jobs’ death, an incredible spate of adulatory articles and posts emerged, lauding this legendary refusal to compromise (“Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme” ), his attention to the most minute of design and implementation details, his insistence on molding every aspect of his company’s products and culture.  It was widely quoted how he scoffed at the idea of focus groups and obtaining user feedback:

I had the good fortune last month to be invited to participate as a guest CIO on ITSM Weekly, a great IT-related podcast with the amusing ongoing tagline, “What happens when a CIO, a Service Desk Manager and an industry junkie chat weekly?!”

Amidst the discussion and banter, Chris Dancy of ITSM Weekly gave me a bit of a ribbing about what he perceived as my all-too-common anti-QR-code rants on Twitter. And yes, I have tweeted more than once with outright skepticism about the usefulness and likely impact of QR codes.  Chris’ good-natured needling made me step back and think about why: what exactly makes me so resistant to the notion of QR codes?

And the answer runs deeper than just QR codes per se.  It turns out, as I thought about it, that the story surrounding QR codes represents, for the modern CIO or CTO, kind of a horrible blend: the worst aspects of technology advocacy, combined with the worst aspects of marketing.  This post is an attempt to explain those broader implications.

For those (probably many) of you who don’t really know what QR codes are, look at the upper right of this post to see an example: they’re a two-dimensional barcode of sorts, typically consisting of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background.  QR codes can encode all sorts of information: text, a URL, or other data, and they are typically read/decoded by smartphone applications that are readily and freely available on most mobile platforms.

QR code enthusiasts envision people walking up (for example) to the door of a restaurant, using their smartphone to scan the code displayed in the window, and, well, getting any number of potential outcomes on their screen: a menu, a coupon, a URL, a pointer to a video about the place’s history, etc. In fact, in some countries like Japan, QR codes are everywhere, used for these and many other business situations.

From a technical point of view, it’s indeed really cool that this Rorschach-worthy splotch can be instantly converted to text or other information. Depending on the specific format (yes, there are several divergent standards) and on the nature of the content, as many as 4,296 alphanumeric characters can be contained in one of those splotches. That corresponds to roughly 700 words, or almost three typical pages of ordinary text. That’s a lot of information available at a smartphone glance, so to speak.

So what’s my beef with all that? What’s not to like? Two aspects particularly rankle me as an IT executive:

• It smacks of technology for technology’s sake. Most great CIOs I’ve known have spent a lot of their career pushing back against being typecast as a mere technologist; most of them recognized early on that the way one adds value to a company as a technologist is to get deeply steeped in the business ins and outs, especially customer and financial aspects, and to apply technology appropriately, not just because it’s “cool.”

So sure, QR codes are “really cool” technologically. But are the business use cases really there? Will customers, in numbers, actually go the extra mile of seeing that splotch and feeling motivated enough to pull out their phone and scan it? Personally, I’m an early adopter of and avid experimenter with new technologies (especially when they’re free and widely hyped, as is the case here), but I have scanned fewer than ten QR codes ever. For many advocates, I fear that the coolness (and granted, the potential) of the technology is making them overestimate the probable acceptance of that technology by the masses.

• Excessive hype.  Aside from applying a basic “sniff test” to the breathless, even giddy posts pertaining to QR codes, I’ve noticed that many such posts and even press releases quote surveys and reports on the supposedly major acceleration in QR code penetration here in the US. (Sample purple prose in one such report: “QR barcode use has suddenly gone ballistic.”)

The surveys themselves, and the reports based on data taken from those surveys, are visibly flawed.

If you dig into these posts and reports, it turns out nearly all the data cited stems from a mere handful of companies (ScanLife, JumpScan, and Mobio Technologies, Inc.), all of whom, wait for it, just happen to market QR-code related products! Can you say “conflict of interest”?

Moreover, the surveys themselves, and the reports based on data taken from those surveys, are visibly flawed, chock-full of statistical and methodological red flags:

• the reports almost invariably feature graphs that lack Y axis labels, or that are labeled (for example) as “no scale given; relative measure only.”
• The reports often combine data for all bar code scans (including UPC (conventional) barcodes, which are of course a far more plausible and prevalent use case, due to the abundant comparison-shopping apps that people use in bookstores etc.), and then use that data to infer QR code usage. One survey evidently asked the general question, “Have you ever used a barcode scanning application?” And the data then obtained from the answers to that general question now leads QR code advocates to conclude (erroneously) that “while QR codes aren’t mainstream yet, they’re past the early adopter phase.”
• There’s seldom an attempt made to take into account one key factor in the increase in barcode scanning: the meteoric rise in smartphone penetration overall. A rising tide lifts all boats, and even if we’re seeing an increase in QR code scanning, that needs to be taken in the context of millions more smartphones being sold per month.

Finally, in a particularly delicious example that Darrell Huff would be amused by, ScanLife shows a graph comparing 1D (conventional) barcode scans with 2D (QR code) scans, favorably to QR codes, of course. Well, read the fine print under that graph: “Note: 2D traffic includes 3rd party apps while 1D traffic is only sourced from the ScanLife app”. Apples are being compared to oranges here, in other words. Vested interest. When data is presented in so obviously skewed a fashion, by people with a clear commercial agenda, one has to wonder whether it’s really all part of a sales job.

And the reports also don’t even begin to address a potential major factor when examining such data at this stage: what percentage of people scanning QR codes are doing so right now simply out of the sheer novelty of it all? As Steve Smith observed, “we are still in the gee-whiz stage of 2D codes”. Will this phenomenon have legs, so to speak?

So let me recap my main concerns about the QR bandwagon:

• Even relatively widespread adoption (which QR codes have yet to see, of course) of a great new technology by technophiles doesn’t guarantee eventual deep penetration to the mass market. That should be obvious to anyone who isn’t running a Linux box for their desktop.
• Will a critical mass of non-technical people (say, those who couldn’t manage to set the time on their VCRs back in the 80s and 90s) really tend to whip out their smartphone and scan QR codes in profusion? Maybe, but right now it’s just a matter of opinion.
• Will there ever be enough “bang for the buck” with QR codes (i.e., investment of time/money versus benefit obtained from using them)? Even as an early adopter, I’ve scanned fewer than 10 QR codes ever, because there was never sufficient payback for my effort. And for the retailer or marketer: will QR codes really pull more people in the door, or is it just another gimmick? Where’s the data? (the real data, that is). Even in museums (one plausible use case mentioned for QR codes), I can envision only the highly motivated museum-goer as likely to indulge in QR code scanning.  It’s technology for a very narrow slice of the audience. It may be worth doing for that slice, sure, but let’s not go overboard in our excitement or our investment.

Back in the late 90s, several companies invested millions of dollars promoting what amounts to an earlier version of this scheme: specialized barcodes published in magazine ads, designed to be read by a “CueCat” scanner which they distributed broadly, for free, to people like Radio Shack customers and Wired magazine subscribers.  It failed miserably. In December 2009, the popular gadget blog Gizmodo even voted the CueCat the #1 worst invention of the “2000s” decade.  Yes, now we have smartphones and don’t need to obtain special equipment, so that gives QR codes an advantage that CueCat didn’t have. But still, it gives me pause that QR codes are being promoted with much the same zeal, and perhaps with similar blinders as to the true practicality of the technology. It’s déjà vu all over again: endless hype, plus technology pursued without solid practical reasons to do so: these are, and deserve to be, twin bugaboos for any technology executive.

And that’s why I express skepticism about QR codes on Twitter.

Lagniappe:

Opinion:

• Hamilton Chan, “Why QR codes will go mainstream”
• Oliver Williams, “Why isn’t everyone using QR codes?”
• Heidi Cohen, “QR Codes Are Here to Stay [Data]”
• Dan Frommer, “Death To The QR Code”
• Steve Smith, “Down the QR Code rabbit hole”
• Dan Neumann, “RIP: Why We Don’t Need QR Code Campaigns”
• Dan Neumann, “2D Barcodes: You’re Doing it Wrong”

“Data”:

• Veselin Nedeff, “QR Codes Usage Stats for the First Half of 2011”
• Veselin Nedeff, “Global Growth in Mobile Barcode Usage – Q1/2011”
• Veselin Nedeff, “QR Code Scanning Now Mainstream in US Retail”
• Mobio Technologies, Inc., “The Naked Facts: QR Barcode Scanning in 2H-2010”
• Mobio Technologies, Inc., “The Naked Facts: Whiplash Edition. QR Barcode Scanning in Q1-2011”
• Wayne Sutton, “The QR Code Statistics you have been looking for – infographic”
• Heidi Cohen, “QR Codes: 26 MUST-HAVE Facts [Data & Charts]”

Novels are harder than most technology-oriented people typically realize. The backbone of a good novel is character development, meaning that the character learns and grows — which makes it easy for especially amateur novelists to start off with a character who is, frankly, little more than a one-dimensional dolt. This is an even more dangerous pitfall when it’s a “novel of IT”: the temptation is almost unavoidable for the author to create as protagonist a stereotypical technology leader, clueless as to what is really important or how to be effective, who is then gradually enlightened by wiser individuals as the novel progresses.

There are three IT-related novels I’m aware of, all relatively recent, that fall essentially along those lines.

• fruITion: Creating the Ultimate Corporate Strategy for Information Technology, by Chris D. Potts
• Adventures of an IT Leader, by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, and Shannon O’Donnell
• Haunting the CEO, by John Hughes

All of them are worth reading, but I had majorly different reactions to each. While I’d intended to cover all three in one blog post, the complexities involved in discussing the first, very problematic example have led me to divide this discussion into more than one post.

Not everyone is a fan of fiction, though: why read any of these novels? In my view, the veneer of fiction, of semi-realistic dialog and interaction among the typical players in business-IT situations, promises a degree of engagement and entertainment, as well as the chance to obtain a deeper understanding of how and why the involved parties interact they way they do. Ultimately, I’d want such a book to provide me with insight, in a “show not tell” kind of way, into what motivates the typical players in these business scenarios, and to depict a healthy growth of character and role that lets me understand my own situation and how better to foster collaboration, synergy, and business effectiveness. Beyond the superficial, the events of a novel and the utterances and interactions of its characters can eloquently illustrate various approaches and philosophies, often more forcefully and meaningfully than would a straightforward treatise.

As a CIO, I’d want to be able to hand the novel to my CEO or CFO.

In fact, a fundamental purpose of quality fiction is to enable the reader to live and understand another perspective. So primarily, I would want such a “novel of IT” to help all factions (inside and outside IT) come to see the other side’s perspective and arrive at deeper understandings of common problems and disagreements. Otherwise, it’s sheer polemics. As a CIO, I’d want to be able to hand the novel to my CEO or CFO and have everyone’s reading of it help us find common ground in how we approach our goals.

(One small aside: before I begin, I should note that none of the novels I’m going to cover can compete, as artful fiction per se, with what I consider to be the best IT-related novel: Ellen Ullman’s The Bug. Unlike the three novels I will cover fully, The Bug is intended primarily as art, not as a fictionalized essay designed to make points about how to run IT. Highly recommended.)

Let’s start with FruITion, by Chris D. Potts.

This book, which has been generally praised, depicts itself as essentially contrarian, as describing “what happens when corporate strategists decide to ignore all the IT strategy orthodoxies.” It’s meant to reveal “indispensable messages about the next generation of strategies for information technology,” as one of the blurbs on the back has it. The key distinguishing feature of the book, arguably even underscored by the implications of the photo on the cover, is that it’s intended to turn the conventional view of IT on end.

Well, I’m going to be a contrarian to the contrarian. Simply put, I think the fundamental thrust of the book is wrong-headed, divisive, lofty, unnecessarily diminishing of the importance of the role that IT plays in a business, and ultimately not helping disagreeing factions find common ground, or showing useful ways that IT can truly provide value to business.

As Twain famously said, history may not repeat itself all the time, but it sure does rhyme a lot. Or, as Yogi Berra said, “you can observe a lot just by watching”. Or, in Potts’ own words, “the language you use is taken as evidence of your mindset.” And, just by carefully watching the interactions and language in FruITion, my unavoidable observation is that Potts’ mindset is particularly, astonishingly, and blatantly ill-disposed towards IT.

Ian, the protagonist and first-person narrator and CIO, is a straw-man-stereotype kind of IT person. He’s tentative, focused on technology, set in his ways, reactive, defensive, a bit paranoid. Conversely, the novel presents the non-IT executives (the CEO and her delegates) as wise, fast-thinking, and a bit mysterious in their uncanny insights into what’s not working. They’re a little inscrutable, and more than a little threatening: Ian is constantly fretting about whether he’s about to be sacked, and the strategists are constantly making subtle and not-so-subtle references as to whether or not he’s “getting it” and whether he’ll even be around for the next go-round.

It’s “us vs. them,” in other words, in spades. Ironically, one character, presented as particularly insightful, is introduced positively as being “fed up with the ‘us and them” and ‘we know best’ attitudes of some IT people towards the rest of the company.”

Yet IT is presented mainly in the negative (indeed, with disdain) at every turn.

Yet IT is presented mainly in the negative (indeed, with disdain) at every turn, characterized repeatedly and triumphantly as “delivering no value on its own”, and it’s emphasized that “no one values what IT does.” Everyone else in the novel sees things clearly except for the IT people, who “execute their strategies at arms length from everyone else rather than by collaborating.” In one characteristically heavy-handed moment in the novel, Ian’s “IT Strategy Manager” views with excitement the chance to participate in a key software vendor’s new beta release: “It could change our whole strategy,” he enthuses, not realizing how narrow that statement shows his notion of strategy to be.

Face it, we’ve all known people in IT that exhibit those small-picture tendencies. But I don’t believe that it’s useful or accurate, in this day and age, to trot out such stereotypes and thereby blast the entire discipline. One “strategic” character in the book even tells Ian, “we want you to break loose, join the gang, help us turn the tables on those bastards in IT.” In the end, Ian escapes (ascends?) into this strategic realm, away from IT, but all the future pesky technical decisions are then relegated to a Technical Services Manager whom they elevate to “CTO,” and whose stated job it is “to get the IT we wanted to use delivered reliably well, economically, at an acceptable level of risk, and with economies of scale and synergies. Nothing else.” Simple, eh? (Note the amusing similarity of this new “CTO” role to what the role of the CIO was also thought to be, way back when. As the old joke has it: from here, it’s “turtles all the way down”).

In essence, it’s “technology bad, strategy good”: this novel presents an overly simplified, frankly offensive, and ultimately detrimental dichotomy. The book seems, quite intentionally, to consider current-day IT as a mere exercise in procurement: “All in all, our people now know enough about IT and how to use it not to need an executive to make those decisions for us. All we really need is someone who can source the IT services we want to use.” Really? We know what we want; IT just needs to get it for us. Order takers. How many years/decades ago did we all collectively figure out that that’s a counterproductive approach?

In short, if there’s any book that actually fosters the “us vs. them” rift that’s too often characteristic of how IT fits into a company, this would be it. It’s simplistic, dismissive, lofty, and ivory-towerish; in the end, despite its contrarian nature, it delivers next to no new practical insights. And one sad aspect of its dismissive nature: those who point out its failings will almost certainly be accused by its proponents of “not getting it.” (Witness this review of Chris Potts’ interview with Claudia Imhoff). I think I “get it” quite clearly, though, and I simply reject it as misguided, naive, and ultimately counterproductive to the needs of a modern organization.

Next up: two more novels of IT that I believe show a (much) more even-handed, useful, and insightful approach.

Lagniappe:

• Colin Beveridge. Book review: Fruition. http://www.colin-beveridge.com/index.php/book-review-fruition/.
• John Gøtze. FruITion. http://gotze.eu/2008/08/29/fruitio/.

It’s time for me to speak up.  Not that I haven’t before, here and here. But sometimes I just have to shake my head. I read certain IT-related articles on the web, or tweets by some colleagues, and they’re so out of sync with IT reality that I feel like it’s Opposite Day.

Here’s what I mean.  Let’s look closely at the latest item of this ilk that has spurred my head to swivel: this rather stunning recent Forbes interview with Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research at Gartner Executive Programs. At core, McDonald is touting and praising, and with much reasonable-sounding eloquence and assurance, an abandonment of common long-standing lessons in IT.  In fact, such an abandonment is being presented as the only path to goodness, success, and truth; traditional areas of focus for IT are deprecated as being either of lesser importance, or even as the veritable hallmark of a clearly backward CIO who just doesn’t get the new order.

This isn’t to pick on Gartner alone. As I said, similar views can be found every day. Sometimes this view is couched as IT needing to take a “journey” through different “generations” — where the stated ultimate goal is to actually to eliminate the need for an IT strategy altogether. In the Gartner interview, the terminology used, however murkily, is that of CIOs being “rich” or “poor”.  Underlying this deprecating and generally anti-IT attitude is the belief (explicitly stated by Gartner) that business people are superior to technologists: “It’s always easier to teach a business person technology than a technology person business.” So to Gartner, not only is the very educability of the technology person at question, but these hapless tunnel-visioned technologists are even going about it all the wrong way: for example, by misguidedly focusing on properly managing IT resources:  “The poor IT organizations believe they create value by properly managing IT resources.” If they emphasize enabling the business, that’s wrong too: “If you define your IT organization as enabling the business, that’s an indication you’re headed in the poorer direction.” And, it turns out, the real secret to success is to throw over the IT people altogether when it comes to management: “the real determinant [of a “rich” CIO] is that many of [the “rich” CIOs] come straight out of business.” And again, it’s not just Gartner; elsewhere on the web, we can find similar statements, such as “many [IT] projects disappoint because they’re “too focused on timescale and budget”.

If you step back from being sucked in by this golden shimmer of an IT-less future, devoid of drudgery and tedium and all the traditional IT messiness, these haughty, ludicrous statements pretty much rebut themselves.  As one Twitter contact of mine put it in reaction, “It’s only hubris which allows one functional area (IT incl) to think the other’s domain is simple.”

And hubris is the right word here. Yes, much about the underlying recommendations sounds reasonable on the surface: we should emphasize business value above all, and we need to focus on enhancing the revenue, profits, and value of the company.  Those specific points are inarguable, to be sure. But it’s quite revealing, the way that the discussion is typically framed: it’s both enormously judgmental and dismissive, using words like “rich” vs. “poor”, or it makes grandiose claims that “with innovative and enterprising CIO leadership, a company’s strategy for investing in change will come to fruition and not apparently be about IT at all!” Or the statement that “running IT is not a valuable use of [the next generation of CIOs’] time, talents and energy”.

The obvious implication there, of course, is that if one still believes in the critical (indeed, strategic) importance of a well-managed IT function, even amidst a necessary focus on business value, then one clearly isn’t “the next generation” of CIO. This isn’t simply arrogant; it’s flat-out wrongheaded and dangerous. It leaves hard-learned practical lessons behind while presenting a fine-sounding, lofty, but ultimately fuzzy theory that promises to lift the CIO (and by extension the company) above the standard oh-so-trivial concerns of delivery and technology. It redefines basic words in order to depict a kind of transcendence of the mundane and dreary.  Dismissing the importance of basic IT facets such as proper management of resources, or adherence to time and budget, or technology itself, is akin to pitches that promise weight loss without dieting, or language learning without memorization; such pitches feed on the fears of the already discouraged.  Let me be utterly blunt: it’s snake oil; I don’t buy it, and neither should you.

Recommended take-aways for the CEO and other senior management:

• Don’t leave the valuable lessons of the past behind in your desire to evolve to some kind of higher plane in IT. The lessons still matter; in fact, they matter more than ever.
• Rather than striving to leave technology behind as a lesser concern, look for ways to integrate it and leverage it in everything the company does, centralizing and standardizing those things that matter as you go.
• Recognize and extend what technologists bring to the table, rather than pushing them back into their own ghetto and belittling their contributions and concerns.
• Don’t reject the need to carefully manage IT resources at a senior level. Despite what you may be told by masters of theory, those resources really don’t just manage themselves, and the risks involved in their mismanagement have become greater, not lesser.  Does anyone really need to debate this?
• Continue to insist that IT spend wisely (and continue to focus) on both new work and ongoing operations. The potential for financial mismanagement, if covered by a blanket excuse of “oh, we’re focusing on value now” is simply huge; it’s unwise and unnecessary to shrug that risk off as passé, or to relegate its oversight completely to junior managers.

In this day and age, the health, revenue, and growth of your company quite likely depend on the degree to which it can successfully leverage technology, both in a day-to-day sense and for strategic initiatives. Effective strategy is critical, but excellence in operational execution can often be a key differentiator. Above all, and for either, it’s not the time to step away from thinking that technology matters.

Fred Brooks wrote a seminal essay in 1986, “No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering“, a model of clear and cogent thinking that I consider to be required regular reading for anyone involved in information technology.  Despite the essay’s brilliance, and despite its wide promulgation and deserved fame, the phenomenon it describes seems to have only broadened in the last twenty-three years.  Brooks argues as follows (with bolding added):

“The familiar software project, at least as seen by the nontechnical manager, has something of this character; it is usually innocent and straightforward, but is capable of becoming a monster of missed schedules, blown budgets, and flawed products. So we hear desperate cries for a silver bullet—something to make software costs drop as rapidly as computer hardware costs do.

…

“There is no single development, in either technology or in management technique, that by itself promises even one order of- magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.”

So this basic tenet has been convincingly articulated by a leading IT thinker for almost a quarter century. Yet, the trend continues: new technologies pop up every couple of years and the hype cycle begins. Evidently, hope springs eternal.

IT and an inclination towards zealotry have always tended to have a high correlation, but one thing I find interesting about the incessant quest for a “silver bullet” solution is that the impetus for that quest often stems from non-IT senior management. They long for something, anything, which will take this risky, recalcitrant technology beast and tame it into predictability.  As a result, we see notable IT thinkers respond to that pressure, often by championing one or more specific practices, methodologies, approaches, or technologies as “the answer.”  Many sorts of silver bullets have come and gone in the decades since Brooks’ essay. The one constant seems to be that there are always a few memes out there being touted as cure-alls. Why haven’t we learned?

Let me gingerly pose the empirical evidence of this “quest for the cure-all” meme that is provided by my Twitter stream every day.  I see a number of IT tweeters who have doggedly taken up the flag of a particular movement or approach; in some extreme cases, virtually every tweet and comment from those people views all conceivable issues through that one lens.

Let’s list some recent candidates for the ongoing “silver bullet glomming” that I see, with some sample quoted hype for each one.  My Lagniappe section at the end of this post, for your amusement, will provide additional links to sites decrying the hype in each case.

Examples:

• Agile software development

“Agile Development Can Lead to Better Results and Technology-Business Alignment”

• Cloud computing

“Cloud computing heralds an evolution of business that is no less influential than e-business, according to Gartner Inc.”

• Project Portfolio Management

“Multiplying ROI at Warp Speed”

• IT Governance

“Firms with superior IT governance have more than 25% higher profits than firms with poor governance given the same strategic objectives.”

• Business alignment above all

“There are no IT projects”

“Only once we stop having IT projects and start having business projects will we see the full value of project management.”

“What if we took technology away from the CIO and focused him uniquely on Business Leadership?”

• Eliminate complexity: a simpler architecture is the key

“The proliferation of IT failures is caused by increasing IT complexity. And this is good news, because complexity is a solvable problem.”

• Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

“From small organizations to multinational enterprises and anything in between, this best practice framework has helped many improve efficiencies and bottom line figures, putting IT back in business!”

• Ruby on Rails (or, .NET, or J2EE, or Smalltalk, etc.)

“Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming. Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days.”

• Design Thinking

“It’s a technique that designers and executives alike hope may help to provide a solution to some of the world’s serious challenges.”

• Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

“SOA provides benefits in four basic categories: reducing integration expense, increasing asset reuse, increasing business agility, and reduction of business risk.”

• Web Services

“Experts and visionaries believe that the benefits of XML Web services will be instrumental in propelling explosive business growth over the next few years.”

It’s important that I note here that none of these theories, approaches, or technologies is necessarily a bad idea (although I think that each does tend to land at quite different points on the spectrum of goodness). There are some, in fact, for which I myself have major enthusiasm, because I think they promise to relieve at least portions of the IT delivery crisis.

The key takeaway, I’d argue along with Brooks, is that there’s no one technique, approach, methodology, philosophy, or magic that will wondrously make systems work easy and reliable.  No matter what the tools and techniques used, it’s hard work. It’s rife with opportunity for failure. It requires leadership, detail-oriented personnel, skillful practitioners.  Brooks took pains to say,

“Skepticism is not pessimism, however. Although we see no startling breakthroughs–and indeed, I believe such to be inconsistent with the nature of software–many encouraging innovations are under way. A disciplined, consistent effort to develop, propagate, and exploit these innovations should indeed yield an order-of-magnitude improvement. There is no royal road, but there is a road.”

So, we all have our silver bullet, I suppose: mine, along with Brooks’, consists of maintaining balance, practicality, and a broad embracing of multiple approaches, rather than one panacea.

Lagniappe:

• Peter Merholz, “Why Design Thinking Won’t Save You”
• Jerry Iacouzzi , “Debunking the myth of SOA”
• Matthew Huntbach, “What’s Wrong With Ruby?”
• Rob England, “The Emperor has no clothes. Where is the evidence for ITIL?”
• Colin Beveridge, “Biggest IT Myth of all time?”
• Steve Yegge, “Good Agile, Bad Agile”
• Cath Everett, “Five cloud computing myths exploded”

Consider these statements:

• Baseball is a game where the pitcher throws to the catcher.
• An iPhone is a device that lets you call anywhere in the world.
• The Grand Canyon is a tourist attraction in Arizona

You’ll have noticed that these statements aren’t wrong, per se. But they still take you aback, don’t they? They miss the point, miss the magic, neglect the important differentiators. By explaining too little, defining the subject too narrowly, they explain nothing that’s really useful.

Here’s another:

• Cloud computing is where you have a lot of intelligence in the network and it’s available from wherever you need to get to it

A distressing portion of mainstream media covering cloud computing has decided that the best way to explain the phenomenon is first to make hand-waving general statements such as the above example from BusinessWeek, and then cite a few consumer-understandable examples such as in this piece from NPR: “Do you have a Yahoo e-mail account? Maybe a Gmail account? Do you put up pictures on Flickr? Perhaps you’ve started keeping your schedule online. If so, then you are using cloud computing — that’s what tech companies call it when people work and store information on the Internet.”

Flickr, Gmail, and Facebook are great services, but declaring that they represent the burgeoning trend of cloud computing is as incomplete and unsatisfying as explaining the Grand Canyon as just a tourist attraction in Arizona.

The problem here, and the reason that so many of these mainstream articles get it so wrong, is they’re trying to explain cloud computing as a consumer-oriented phenomenon, and it’s basically not. Not the exciting or “new” part, anyway. Even technology vendors drift into this as they try to tout their cloud offerings: witness a recent TV commercial from IBM entitled “My Cloud: Virtual Servers on the Horizon”, a commercial which would work just as well if it were titled “the incredible power of the Internet”, or even, “aren’t computers cool?” Similarly, that cloud computing “definition” from BusinessWeek is, quite frankly, nonsensical in its broadness: it not only completely misses the point of what makes cloud computing relevant and compelling as a game-changer, it even fails to distinguish it from the last 15+ years of the Internet in general.

Mainstream media drifts into this oversimplification in part because they’re leery of delving into technical arcania (virtualization, scalable architectures, APIs) that many of their readers can’t relate to. Yet, there’s actually no need, when you try to explain its real impact, to make cloud computing sound geeky and complicated; it’s not, at least at core. I’m going to trot out some analogies here; like most analogies, they’ll necessarily gloss over some important complexities, and will only go so far before they break down. Nonetheless, they should give you a better idea of what’s different about this trend, in a way that talking about storing your photos on Flickr won’t.

Cloud computing is simply a way for a company to use someone else’s computing resources (servers, software, etc.), on demand, to fill its need, rather than buy and manage and maintain those resources itself. Instead of bulking up its own data center, the company uses as little or as much of someone else’s as its immediate needs dictate, on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Does that still sound complicated? Okay, think ZIPcar. Rather than own your own car, (purchase it, license it, insure it, maintain it, fuel it, pay to park it, etc.), you can choose to use a ZIPcar that’s parked near where you live. You reserve it, walk up to it, and drive it away as if it were your own. You pay an hourly or daily fee, to be sure, but perhaps you don’t need “fulltime, anytime” access to a car, and it works out to be both easier and cheaper to get one when you need it, and not worry about all the ancillary details. Are there downsides? Sure, and these will vary depending on your situation. This solution may be great and cost-effective for you, but not work at all well for your neighbor, who has different needs.

In the not-too-distant past, ZIPcar wasn’t available to you as an option. Neither was cloud computing. If you started a company that provided an online product or needed internal systems, you bought servers. And electricity and cooling. And storage. And software. And you hired people to set that all up for you, and keep it all operating smoothly. And you tried to anticipate your demand, and to make sure you had just the right amount of capacity (not too much, not too little) for your customers or users. Almost always, that meant you bought ahead of the curve, and you sat on (and paid for) your excess capacity while the demand increased.

Enter the cloud. Now, depending on your company’s situation and needs, you don’t need to sink in resources and funds (and risk) up front. Reserve your server, and (metaphorically) walk up to it and drive it away as if it’s yours. Let it go when you’re done, and poof, it’s effectively gone; no more overhead. Think about the sheer power that possibility represents. Think of the reduction in logistics and interdependencies. Think about how much less risk the company has incurred, if your plans happen to change. The potential independence, enablement, and empowerment that the cloud brings, particularly for new and small businesses, is as close as anything I’ve witnessed to the way the industry was shaken and shaped by the advent of the PC, starting in the early 80s. And that “disruptive technology” nature of the cloud, astonishingly, is what’s being missed by the kinds of articles in BusinessWeek and NPR that I’ve cited, not to mention by the myriad old-timers who like to sneer loftily that nothing here is new.

Lest I be accused of being starry-eyed about the cloud (to mix some firmamental metaphors), let me make sure I acknowledge here how early this technology is, how key aspects are still being worked out, and that it’s not a panacea. And, like ZIPcar, it’s not for any and every situation. But none of those caveats detracts from the cloud’s potential and the ground-shaking nature of the phenomenon.

It’s all about cost, flexibility, time to market, and risk mitigation, basically, for businesses. Just a couple of quick examples: eHarmony recently did a project where they took a monthly expense of $5K down to $1.5K with cloud computing. And here’s another study of a startup using cloud approaches and reaping a lot of benefits. As a CTO/CIO, I can personally attest to how much time and heartache goes into planning capital investments and attempting to right-size infrastructure; anything that can simplify and streamline that thorniness is welcome indeed.

Remember, everyone wants IT to be less costly and more flexible, to focus on business needs more than on technical minutiae, and to be able to turn on a dime to meet new needs. Cloud computing will be key to fulfilling those desires. In fact, I believe it will be revolutionary to the industry over the coming years.

Lagniappe:

• Maria Spinola, “An Essential Guide to Possibilities and Risks of Cloud Computing — A Pragmatic, Effective and Hype-Free Approach For Strategic Enterprise Decision Making“
• Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
• Lori MacVittie, “Cloud Computing: The Last Definition You’ll Ever Need“
• Cath Everett, “Five cloud computing myths exploded“
• Jeffrey Burt, “Gartner Predicts Rise of ‘Cloud Service Brokerages’”, July 9, 2009.
• Brenda Michelson, “Cloud Computing Picks for Business Analysts“

Are you among those who believe that if you don’t follow someone back on Twitter, you’re being snobby and arrogant?  Then this post is meant for you. My purpose here, quite candidly, is to persuade you that reflexively following someone back is not only a habit which encourages spam, but is in fact a major contributor to making Twitter a thriving spam platform.

For those who reflexively follow, in other words, I ask you to consider the ramifications of your behavior to the greater community, especially when multiplied by the thousands or millions of Twitterers who may behave likewise. Basically, you’re helping the spammers win.

First, let’s think about this: why does anyone follow anyone else on Twitter?  Three main reasons come to mind:

1. The follower believes that the person he’s following has interesting things to say, and wants to read those interesting things;
2. The follower is hoping that the person he’s following will follow him back, for one or more of the following reasons:

• so that the follower’s count will increase
• so that the follower’s messages will then have broader distribution/marketing power
• so that the follower can send Direct Messages (DMs) to that person for even greater exposure and attention.

3. The follower is reciprocating being followed, out of politeness, sense of obligation, or idealism. Often, there’s a belief that following back will “strengthen the relationship.” You can “transform them into a fan with your valuable tweets“! Or so goes the claim.

I’m arguing here that the first of these behaviors is useful, the second describes spammers and marketers above all, and the third is a well-intended but unfortunate fulfillment of the spammer’s hope, one which encourages their continued activity.

Reciprocal following by rote in many cases does little to further a relationship.  Remember that they call Twitter “asymmetrical”.  Let’s use myself as an example.  I tweet about a fairly narrow range of topics, basically: IT management, cloud computing, and sometimes interesting or amusing industry or sociological matters.  I happen to have a broad list of other interests that I myself don’t typically tweet about but helps me pick whom I follow: literature, languages, music, politics, travel, theater, to name a few. I follow people solely for the first of my reasons listed above: because I want to read what they have to say. Again, it’s asymmetric: my reading interests are not the same as what I tweet about. Anyone who follows me simply because I followed them (i.e., behavior #3) may be taken aback by how uninteresting my tweets are to them.

Let’s look more closely at what happens when I’m followed by people who are unlikely to be interested in the content of my tweets.  If you watch closely, you’ll notice that you are often followed by entities (read: marketers and spammers) because of a keyword contained in something you’ve tweeted.

Just to give some examples: recently, I’ve been followed by:

• @HerbiesHeadshop, because I happened to use the phrase “down in the weeds” in a tweet;
• @BuilderPal, because I wrote and tweeted about what I call “roof projects” in the context of information technology;
• @proxyserver, because I happened to use the term “proxy server” in a tweet.

I’m not interested in any of the services these people provide, so I have no reason to follow them back. But more important: I’d argue that none of the above entities is remotely interested in my tweets. As a matter of fact, I am fairly certain that none of the above entities, or actually anyone who follows people as a result of keywords harvested from the Twitstream, is even reading my tweets, let alone anybody else’s. They just want to be followed back, so that I will then be more likely to read their tweets. They are using Twitter as a means to one end: marketing their services. Advertising. Exposure. Page views. And so they target (however clumsily) people they believe are interested in the products they provide. It’s kind of a new (and cheap) way of generating a targeted email address list.

Let me say it again: people who follow you using behavior #2 usually have NO interest in your tweets and in most cases aren’t reading anyone’s tweets at all. You are just a means to an end.  It’s not about you, it’s about them. If you’re laboring under the illusion that following someone who follows you is a way of strengthening the relationship, you should recognize that that strength is quite often going to be one-way only.

I could, of course, simply ignore any of these follows; most of them will eventually unfollow me anyway, not because of the content of my tweets (remember, they’re not even looking at these), but simply because I didn’t bite: I didn’t follow them back. I didn’t help them meet the sole objective they had in following me in the first place.

How do the spammers win? Spammers really only have an audience on Twitter if people follow them. More followers mean higher positions in search results for their pages and products. Most notably, following a spammer gives them the ability to Direct Message you, which increases the likelihood you’ll see and read their message and click on their links. And let’s be clear: the only reason people follow spammers is this strange perceived obligation that’s arisen on Twitter: follow everyone back who follows you; “it’s only polite,” after all, or it’s “snobby and arrogant” not to. When you succumb to that perceived obligation, the spammers win. If no one followed back, the spammers would go away.

It’s easy to turn behavior #3 (reflexive following) into behavior #1 (following because you’re interested in the person’s tweets): before you follow someone back, simply review the last 10 tweets the person has sent, which turn out to be astonishingly predictive of whether they’re a spammer.

You’re obviously welcome to use Twitter as you please and follow people for any or no reason. But consider the points I’ve made, in terms of the impact on the Twitter community of your actions.  And if you follow reflexively, don’t ever complain about getting spam DMs, because it’s your behavior that got you into that position.

Use Twitter for education, conversation, and interaction. It’s really the only thing it’s there for (other than providing rife subject matter for TechCrunch articles). Unless, of course, you’re a spammer.

Lagniappe:

• Atherton Bartelby, “FOLLOW FAIL: The Top 10 Reasons I Will Not Follow You in Return on Twitter”
• Skellie, “How to Follow Everyone Back on Twitter Without Ruining Your Experience”
• Roger Hjulstrom, “Don’t let anyone tell you how to act on Twitter”
• Twitter, “Turning Up The Heat On Spam”
• “How spammers use Twitter”
• Stop Twitter Spam blog

I don’t want this to be just another post about Twitter, the current hot trend of the Internet.  Rather, I’d like to relate this new Twitter fad to a long-planned important topic here.

Specifically, what can we in technology do to keep current and stay up-to-speed on our various areas of interest and expertise? There’s more out there than any of us can learn, and new technologies come along all the time.  Truly staying current, at a reasonable depth level, would be a more-than-full-time job.

Here’s how I’ve come to grips with that basic reality. These remarks are most relevant to the executive level, but to some extent they apply across the spectrum of roles in IT.

• If you don’t work at the nuts-and-bolts level with a given technology for 8 or 10 or 12 hours a day, you’re really just a dabbler anyway. Don’t delude yourself that you know a technology at the detailed level just because you have read a few articles or a book on it.
• Embrace that certain unavoidable level of dilettantism. Work on understanding what a technology can accomplish, how it relates to the bigger picture of architectures and business value, and how it differentiates itself from other players in that game.
• Recognize that the skill you really need most of all is “just in time” learning. I took a headhunter call a few months back from a company that was looking for a seasoned senior technology executive, but they were adamant that the person have coded and deployed Ruby on Rails applications for three or more years.  And sure, wouldn’t that be great: but there are high-quality executives out there who understand technology at a deeper, bigger-picture level, and can pick up the Ruby nuances in a matter of a few weeks.  And, judging from the other professed needs and gaps of that company, they should have been deemphasizing the specific technologies and searching much more for that big-picture guy or gal.
• As an executive, don’t worry about learning a technology at other than the conceptual level unless and until it becomes relevant to your business needs and goals. That said, you do need to stay current, at a conceptual level, with ever-shifting technologies.

So, there’s a lot out there, and it can be overwhelming. If you want to stay in the game at this level, you can’t just throw up your hands and not keep learning.  So how do you amass that concept-level understanding, then?  My pre-Twitter ways of drinking from the technology firehose involved spending a great deal of time doing the following:

• Subscribe to email newsletters.  Read, follow links.
• Find relevant web sites with content targeted to my interests. Read, follow links.
• Read white papers and technical journals
• Read blogs, follow links
• Use RSS to target my interest areas. Read, follow links.
• Experiment with various technologies (at a light level) on my own

I’m not stopping any of those activities, particularly the all-important last one.  However, I’ve come to realize that there aren’t any really good sherpas out there for this ongoing battle, no effective way of whittling down the massive input stream into just what I need.  So even though there’s nothing wrong with any or all of these above activities, the trouble was that the whole day can go by while I do that.  In other words, those approaches are just not sustainable for a busy executive.

Enter Twitter. Once you get past the common knee-jerk reaction (e.g., why do I care to hear what people had for breakfast?), and actually use it for a few weeks, you realize that it has some unexpected advantages:

• Probably 90% of Twitter users produce little more than drivel. But, you don’t need to follow any of those 90%.
• Messages, by virtue of the 140-character limit, are pithier, hence more scannable. Brevity is the soul of twit. (I can’t be the first person to say that).
• Topic areas are more findable, prunable, and groupable, leading to an incredible and still-growing abundance of Twitter utilities and after-market products to help people divide, search, conquer.
• Twitter, used properly, is much less subject to the incursion of advertising (or pure inanity) that plagues nearly everything else on the net: you can (and should) customize the people you follow for maximum utility. It’s so much easier to simply unfollow someone who turns out to be a spammer or a fool than it is to, say, unsubscribe from a typical email blast stream. It’s your action that does the unfollowing, not theirs.

“Mindcasting” is the term that I find most applicable to Twitter. Through Twitter, I get to tap into the minds of people I find useful, people who are willing to share, via this new medium, their perspective and interests. Those whose tweets prove interesting and useful, I keep following. Those who don’t, get dropped, and that’s OK. Via Twitter, I get to establish and hone the membership of my own private Algonquin Round Table, as it were, of fascinating interlocutors.  It’s more granular than relying on RSS, in my view, in that it’s more targeted and more bite-sized. I can trust the people I follow to give me quality links to read. I can see whom those people are following, and extend my circle to include those folks as well.  As a result of this daily honing and pruning, I get a much higher “signal to noise” ratio in my reading, thanks to my Twitter stream.  And lo and behold, very little of that stream ever relates to people’s breakfasts.

I’ll avoid going into detail about the frailty of Twitter’s offering, operationally (see links below about the infamous “fail whale“, other than to gently point out what should be obvious: that they need a different level of IT management if they are to continue to scale.

You’re all welcome to follow me, if you so choose, on Twitter here.

Lagniappe:
Useful articles on the Twitter phenomenon:

• “Twitter sucks, so change your friends,”
• “Forget the Fail Whale: Twitter Jumps the Shark“
• “On Twitter, mindcasting is the new lifecasting”
• “OMG! Shut up about Twitter already“
• “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy“
• “Twitter Explained In 267 Seconds“