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: remove technology from purview of CIO

“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.”

• 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:

1. so that the follower’s count will increase
2. so that the follower’s messages will then have broader distribution/marketing power
3. 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:

1. Atherton Bartelby, “FOLLOW FAIL: The Top 10 Reasons I Will Not Follow You in Return on Twitter”

2. Skellie, “How to Follow Everyone Back on Twitter Without Ruining Your Experience”

3. Roger Hjulstrom, “Don’t let anyone tell you how to act on Twitter”

4. Twitter, “Turning Up The Heat On Spam”

5. “How spammers use Twitter”

6. 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“