An example from Mashable

One of the issues around this announcement is about how Apple has taken feature/functions that are currently in 3rd party applications (Camera + from TapTapTap as an example) & put these into the base product.

Nothing like a good idea it seems – the above example is particularly relevant as that app was withdrawn from the iTunes app store for a while because it used the volume button as a shutter button. Apparently Apple is now making this an option.

It will come to pass, and probably caused by European regulators that Apple’s bundling in of capability that is not core to the operating system will come to a stop.

Why is it, dear reader that only Cisco gets to do the base VPN capability for iOS & not others as well ?

We all should remember the unbundling that Microsoft had to do – Internet Explorer – we all now get to state what we want as the default browser – and have the ability to remove IE from the install if we are so inclined.

If Apple is serious about the eco system of apps that surround the iOS platform then it should take a similar approach – that is allow users to replace function that comes with iOS with an alternative

e.g replace the inbuilt camera app, or replace the Safari browser with for example Opera mobile.

That is what IMO I believe Apple can learn from the folks from Microsoft, though it may be a bitter pill to swallow, you need to be willing to free up control, just a little, over the user environment & allow those who have the willingness to do so to choose alternatives that suit.

This will send a clear message to all those app developers that Apple is not going to replace your app with a feature – well not entirely & encourage innovation across the whole eco system.

That, dear reader is the last point I make – small app developers are always going to be far more agile than even Apple (or any big company for that matter) can be – and that will drive innovation that will drive success for everyone.

Thanks for reading

Try not to work on weekends

This may seems to be an unusual thing to say, however by work I mean professional work. I had managed in a vain attempt to get ahead of myself last year developed a habit of sitting down on Sunday afternoon & clearing out my inbox.

This is just taking time away from the things I should be doing as a father & a home owner – you should see, dear reader, what a mess my garden has become over the last couple of years, and I have neglected the upkeep on my house something shocking.

Why ? Why do I do this ? Why is this important? Somewhere along the way working for IBM is not going to be what I do, sometime, eventually, I have to retire from paid work, and if I’m lucky I will have good health, though given that there is no maximum retirement age in Australia (my minimum is 67) I suspect that one of the last things I will want to do is to clear up 25 years of backlog,

But that’s the trivial response.

The real reason is that in the longer term too much work is not good for anyone, not good for me, and not good for my employer. It makes the person one dimensional, some of the best people I know who do the best work, and are great at what they do, are not workaholics, so neither should I be.

The best example I know is John Cohn,, check it out.

Thanks for Reading

This week was the first week that I was back for the whole week from Annual leave – I do try to take a good block of time off over the Summer School holiday period, you know recharge, refresh etc. and get a couple of things done around the place.

As always this time I of year I give myself the challenge of picking 3 things thats will be the basis around which I work through the year, work or otherwise. What I have from 2010 was

• Make sure that I tell the people who are important to me why they are important
• Be fitter at 50 than I was at 30 &
• Ensure that my daughter has a great 16th birthday

And for the first year ever I managed to make every last one of the above.

This year I have only 1 so far, which I have to credit IBM Distinguished Engineer (retired) Clive Harris with the initial advice

No one remembers what you haven’t done for them, so do less but do it better

In the IBM that I work in almost every day is a day of Triage, that is deciding on what is the next most important thing for you to put your attention to, things like

• Clearing you inbox just in case there is something more important’
• submitting your expenses
• Reading trade material or doing research, etc

Can all come well down the list of priorities, yet, as a senior technical professional I am expected to be well on top of these sort of things. The issue is, I know, is that I try to spread myself across too may things and as such I half do a number of tasks & activities that really should have been completed.

That will change in 2011, well as much as I can control it it will & I have 4 major areas that I will focus on

1. Remote Access Transformation
2. Supporting India’s growth & consolidation
3. Work in support of IBM’s technical Community &
4. Continue my work on my Daughters High School’s P&C

(for those for you who are IBMers, the internal version of this post will have a bit more detail)

That’s enough to keep me busy I suspect.

Thanks for reading

Weekly Metrics

I attended 19 meetings & dealt received 245 emails that I needed to do something with.

Parenthood, for me did not come & is not easy or natural, it takes a lot of effort on my behalf to remain the calm, whist life is swirling around you. I have attempted to provide a base or anchor point for her life – and I believe that being parent is as much about learning when to take a step backwards & let you son or daughter free to figure things out for themselves, as it is helping them find their own identity & hopefully find a rewarding (for them) place in this world.

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested to Madi that she is doing OK. In response she started telling me everything that was wrong with her life – some serious, some not so. This is the real issue I find with parenting – being supportive whilst being somewhat realistic – my daughter has a real good BS meter.

There is a scene out of the film “Parenthood” where the “Grandma” charter gives Steve Martin’s character a bit of advice – full quote here on IMDB 

“You know, it was just so interesting to me that a ride could make me so frightened, so scared, so sick, so excited, and so thrilled all together! Some didn’t like it. They went on the merry-go-round. That just goes around. Nothing. I like the roller coaster. You get more out of it.”

It been an exhilarating ride so far, I look forward to the next few years as well.

Thanks for reading.

One of the issues that I come across in my work as a senior technical professional is requirements. and more to the point what makes a good requirement vs a bad requirement. This somewhat simple process of understanding the requirements of the solution that you are being asked to implement, design, cost etc. is in my experience the major place where projects de-railed and without a reasonable approach to getting the requirements right & managing the changing of requirements you get yourself all knotted up & tend to have to do a lot more work to make it all right again.

So what makes a “good” requirement – and for this post a reminder that there are 2 types of requirements.

• “Functional” requirements that states what you want the solution to do
• “Non-Functional” requirements that states the constraints on the solution

Wikipedia has 2 great articles on the differences between these.

A good (functional) requirement is one that is stated in the third person and states what the requester wants the solution to do, has a number against it (for tracking purposes) & in my situation (especially for Infrastructure) has a priority, e.g.

in other words make sure everything is black,

From the above I could burn everything in a high temperature incinerator and still satisfy the requirement, so we describe non-functional requirement to ensure we get the outcome that we are really looking for ;-

(and yes I know these are fairly obtuse examples, I don’t want to be publishing via this site my IBM work)

On the contrary a bad requirement is one that states the solution e.g;-

“Install an Acme 1000  widget blackening device”

It may be the eventual solution however when you are deciding which solution you want from the alternatives – be that as an IT architect or as a customer – the well stated requirements will be the basis by which you will find the solution that best matches your needs.

Later I hope to post on how do you use your requirements to do this evaluation.

Thanks for reading.

This morning I went to breakfast as I would normally do in these circumstances. I use breakfast as a means to sort through my head all the tings that I need to do in the day and this is especially true when I am travelling as there is a greater focus on achievement.

In a room of about 25-30 guests there must have been 15-20 staff seeing to the guests needs. Great !, or is that ? It was an almost constant stream of requests if they could be assistance, do you want to read a paper? , would you like an omelette ? Coffee ? etc.

I admire the desire to please me as a guest, and I encourage it.

It occurred to me that you can get too much service, and that applies to many facts in life not just breakfast. Sometimes we spend too much effort to ensure the customer is happy that we miss the point of the interaction all together – we need to ensure that we satisfy, and respond to the needs & wants, we also need to ensure that the transaction does draw to a close.

Thanks for reading

The key idea I have from the week is how important chartsmanship is in making sure you create your own style that reflects the way that you want to present.

Tip #1 The best book I have ever read on the subject is “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds – So good I read it twice in the one trip – on the way to China & on the way back to see how I could have done better with the customer presentations I did whist I was there.

I am a minimalist – I try, as hard as I can to have no more than 1 major thought on the page & no more than 3 major bullets supporting the key thought. I find that this style seems, at times, to run contrary to how my colleagues view this – be it Powerpoint, Symphony, Open Office, or PDF format – the “less is more” vs the “no font size is too small” will always be at some sort of tension.

Where I see the issue arising is that when people create slides they think they need to spend time presenting each slide – but do not want the audience to get bored so if I’m going to spend 2 minutes on the slide I need 2 minutes worth of text on the slide – this is not the case IMO – a great slide should pass the concept to the audience quickly, and if you have some detail you want to go into – bring the audience into the conversation – especially relevant if it is a meeting not a conference.

To do this I know I’m fairly boring – I put a picture, graph, illustration, etc.  on the right hand side & the text on the left – I think it engages more than just the listening part of the brain and as such you can get better engagement of the audience – it also allows the picture/word association kick in some folks..

So this brings me to Tip #2 which I got from Presentation Zen – buy clip art – I use “istockphoto” and yes they can cosy $5 each for the smaller ones, however spending $50 to make a set of slides look great may be the difference between success & failure with the consequent re-working you are going to have to do, etc. – to me it’s an easy investment – one I acknowledge that not everyone can make.

Thanks for reading

“By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.”

Which of course got me to thinking about the consequences for this on the way in which IT is delivered as we get to this critical point of inflection in the industry. This is one of those game changers and the way an Enterprise reacts to this will be important for their Internet business channel as well as how they deliver their own internal IT capabilities to their employees (where that is actually allowed).

So why do I think it will change things ?

1) The real estate is different – and no matter how good a resolution that Apple or the others put on the device the limiting factor will always be what the human eye can see, comfortably – and yes this gets into the usability of what is presented, however I would suggest that there is a significant amount of work that will ne needed to bring most web sites, email systems etc. down to be reasonably useable on these devices.

The term I have seen used is “snacking” – on smartphones with the 4 inch screens what you will be doing is (mainly) viewing bit size chunks of information.

2) The connectivity to the device is (or can be) different. – The main modes of connectivity to these devices is via 3G, which in lots of places may barely get above the 512/128k of basic ADSL, and in the growing markets like India, China etc. even more so. As such you also need to ensure that you try not to put too much “stuff” down as part of your page as this is only going to delay the response time & annoy the users.

3) There are no standards for the devices at this time – we probably have all seen the push & shove between Apple & Adobe about Flash on iOS, Google, the developer of Android, sees no issue with, say java, then you add in the Symbian from Nokia & WebOS from (now) HP they all have a different view & perspective – if you take a look at the AdMob monthly statistics (May 2010 is the latest available since Google acquired the company) you can see that there are significant differences dependant on the market – as an example the predominance of Symbian in the India as compared to the mixed environment in the US where Symbian is very much a minor player.

So how does this play into the way an Enterprise delivers it’s internal IT ?

The key one that I will share with you is that for some sectors of your employees you will be asked (if you havn’t already) to deliver functions such as email, IM, & most of the common business tools on these devices. Any thought that you could control the types of devices your employees use is just going to create an organisational dystopia.

So what I would suggest is to have a structured approach to allowing devices to connect & be used. Be very clear on what are the minimum capabilities necessary before you will allow connectivity (you did the same for PC’s right ?), including the ability to verify their state (jail broken etc). Start with the most popular devices amongst your users & work through the issues systematically.

Whilst you are doing that you will need to get your applications ready to be usable on these devices. You may want to start with the basics – email/calendar/IM – as Blackberry did in this space 10 years ago. Use this to generate the use cases & business scenario’s that will help you to be able to figure out some way in which you can get all this change funded.

Thanks for Reading, and good luck.

This blog is about how I feel and I suppose it goes to how I view myself & why.

I never realised how senior a position I had in IBM, well let me be clear – I knew, intellectually that I had a senior position, however I was very unaware of how others in Australia & New Zealand viewed me and that I have managed, somehow, to get to & pass my own expectations of myself, good news I suppose.

Well that’s not totally true either I have very high standards for myself, and the level of self criticism in my head can at time vary from the dull noise to a very loud roar, however because of those standards I actually have fairly low expectations & that dear reader is where the confusion in me lies, the dissonance that I generate between where I think I am from the inside & where I actually am on the outside.

Now I can see it I can work on it,

Now I can see it I can understand where it comes from

Now I can see it I can see how this limits the person I can be

Thanks for reading

No so it seems – barely 3 words into the sentence he was overtaking me telling me his point of view, and despite some factual errors on his behalf, which he declined to concede, he continued on his way to explain the fallacy of my thinking. Which I hasten to mention he never actually heard so how would he know ?

After taking some time to compose myself I thought through this a bit and it made me realise & re-double my efforts to give my daughter as balanced a perspective, but more importantly listen.

Listening is the best thing I think that any parent can do – listen to what they have to say, and be measured in your response. That’s not the easiest thing in the world to do . . .

Thanks for reading