Posts Tagged systems
don’t forget to add the ‘fun’
image by Tony M...., flickr artist
i was just at the grocery store picking up supplies for the week.
when i got home, i took out the bottle of vitamin water i had purchased as part of those supplies and cracked the top. the flavor was called “spark” and was one that i hadn’t tried before, so — being new to me — i held up the bottle to read the label.
to my amusement, the text was upside-down. i turned the bottle to read it and, the label — the text i was reading — talked about the action which i had just performed (turning the bottle upside-down). it closed with a clever joke, and it was at that point that i realized what just happened.
i was having fun!
fun from a plastic vitamin water bottle? yes. (well, more specifically it was the label itself.) so i started to ask myself a very simple question: why, when we create products, do we always leave out the fun factor? when did we all become mr. soggy pants?
a challenge to all those in enterprise security
i’m tired.
i mean it. i’m really fed up.
i can make bank transfers, and pay bills, and shop online from my cell phone. why then can’t i access a file stored on a sharepoint installation from that same device? why can’t i access the latest updates from members of my team on our project from an enterprise 2.0 solution? why can’t i do it all pain free — just as i do my online banking (or my shopping at express)? don’t tell me there are security concerns about accessing proprietary information outside of the corporate firewall. i don’t want to hear it; it’s just an excuse.
i need knowledge when i need it — not where or when you want to allow me access to it. i’m interfacing with clients all the time — hardly ever at my office — and i need to have the right information available to me so that i can help them make informed decisions. i can’t be bothered to jump through hoops just to get that information.
i walk around with an iphone in my pocket all day, and i can hardly use it for more than pulling up a lightsaber, finding waldo, and making fart noises. it’s unacceptable.
if you work in enterprise security, i’m holding you personally accountable. for far too long you have lagged behind the curve when it comes to the rest of the technology world.
it’s time that you finally catch up.
this old house
my parents just bought a new house, and by new i mean old. in philadelphia, every house is old — many of which have not been renovated since the 60s. so the weekend before thanksgiving, i went up to philly to take care of some errands and, while there, to check out the house and paint the upstairs bedrooms for my parents.
not bad, right? wrong.
the new house has popcorn ceilings with … sparkles? in it. and both the downstairs as well as the back room upstairs have floor to ceiling mirrors which one can only assume is to ‘make the room look larger’. to me, it all makes the room look ‘horrible’. but such was the style back in the day (…i suppose).
there’s a slight problem, however: namely the fact that it’s now the future and such designs are way outdated, look bad, and worse yet are hard to change. painting the ceilings was not fun. first, the popcorn soaks up all the paint so you end up using far more than you would have used on a normal, flat surface. second, it falls apart on you. i know this too well. my brother and myself both had paint covered pieces of the ceiling fall off and into our mouths. (yes, it would have made sense to have a mask on, but we didn’t exactly have an OSHA approved setup.) the mirrors? they’re still up there. it would have cost too much money to have them removed, and then you have to worry about what’s behind those mirrors once you do take them down. beyond the cost to remove them, you may incur even more costs in fixing whatever is behind the mirrors. it’s not an agile design for the interior of a house.
much like designing a house, you may want to be careful when you are making design choices for your organization. you will be tempted to put a lot of processes in place and begin to adopt “industry best practices” from competitors in your marketplace. i say to exercise caution because the more processes you have, by definition, the less agile your organization is. processes reduce your ability to make changes, and therefore your ability to innovate.
don’t get me wrong – some processes are important. you do still need a ceiling, and you certainly need walls. before you go making choices, however, think about the future. are you making the same choices based on what everyone else sees as the newest fad, or trend? are you making decisions that are restricting your organization’s ability to adapt to changes? are you going to be stuck with popcorn on the ceiling that’s hard to change and mirrors on the walls that are expensive to get rid of?
don’t let “this old house” turn into “this old organization.” always plan for the future.
to get where you’re going…
image by elvez40, flickr artist
… they say you have to know where you’ve been.
i say, to get where you’re going — you have to know where you’re going.
stupid, right? or is it?
whenever you start some sort of new venture, you have to know what the end state is. you have to set some sort of goal. otherwise, when do you know that you’ve gotten to where you want to be? when do you call it quits and move on to the next challenge?
build a microwave oven but create a nuclear device
i’ve mentioned in a previous post how it’s important to create systems based on standards. i even went so far as to say they really ought to be based on open standards (php, xml, etc.) and i really mean that.
now to go along with that, a current trend that i honestly feel you’ll see much more of is a move towards more and more open-source projects and systems in the workplace. i love the open source community — i really do! they’ve given me my instant messenger clients for the last 6 years, my WordPress that i use to create this blog, my web-based collaborative software that i use to track my work and milestones when on the job, and a lot more!
the point is no single developer is as great as a community of developers.
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