Docandersen&#039;s Blog

I got the chance to catch an awesome speaker who was talking about Electronic Health Records and why to stay away from that particular world right now.

It brought me back to the Syncverse. If you are interested you can look back on this blog (figure roughly 14 or 15 months ago) for a series of blog entries on the Syncverse. Or you can go to my Amazon author page above and get the entire series (including some material not on the blog) as a Kindle book.

The concept that intrigued me yesterday because well it is something I wrote about in the Syncverse is the concept of patient centric data. It is a change for the medical profession so it may take time, but the concept is pretty valid.

Like the concept of IT Sprawl but heading in the opposite direction is the reality of a single IT management solution throughout a country. The US finally has a CIO at the top, but the process of creating the overall data stores has slowed to a crawl.

Within IT Sprawl I talked a lot about the fact that some of the overall problem was that software vendors continued to sell new solution after new solution with little regard to what happened. The landscape that IT beheld was much like the barren desert the travelers beheld in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s epic poem “Ozymandias of Egypt” A view of solutions that aren’t":

Connected
Portability
Elastic
COOP aware

Many solutions are – but the reality of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) is not only the pain of consolidating the paper, electronic and multiple systems of today.

The goal of the Syncverse blogs was to lay out a course that would result in a centralized infrastructure that contained information about you (the Myverse) that you controlled. It would support the concept of what is required in cloud identity management rather than the current “send everything.” structure.

It made me realize that my original assertion (that this would cost more up front) was correct. This is not a big data problem or a consolidation or even a structure problem. This is a bad economy problem.

.doc

“Look at my works ye mighty and despair” but as far as the travelers could see there was nothing*.

March 10, 2012March 10, 2012doandersen

A friend of mine reminded me yesterday in my quest to make captive services organizations better than they are today, that I forgot the two problems that caused captive services organizations in the first place.

The automotive industry has captive services organizations (although we could argue that and most likely would win the argument – they tend to work for the dealership and in the 20xx time period there are few in any manufacturer owned dealerships). But there used to be, in the birth of automotive servings many of the dealerships and therefore technicians were in fact working for the car company itself.

You see the true value of a captive services organization is a customer voice in the company with the services group. Captive Services professionals go to the customer every day to solve problems. They can take that information back to the company to make software better. (now do they? Really? Not in a million years. I was once on a conference call with the IT department of a company with a captive services organization. The person from IT said “we know security, we have 5000 viruses entering our network every day.” the customer gasped and said “no way, how is that possible.” and the IT person said “we have consultants who go to customer’s sites and then come back to our network.”)

The reality is that captive services are skin in the game, a necessary evil. They are not welcomed as equal parts in a software development company. In the birth of the automotive industry and in the early days they certainly were critical components. But if you go back a few days to my earlier blog on what they should be doing versus what they do now, and then read the story above you begin to see the problem.

The roots of the need for captive services organizations is in solving customer problems. They specific goal of a captive services org (see Wikipedia for a good definition) is to improve the delivery of solutions based on the company they work for. The minute they try to make $1 over what they cost the company it’s a mistake. Amazon loses $5 on every Kindle Fire they sell, but they sell them because they make a profit on everything else after the purchase. Captive services should be a loss leader across the board, a true cost of goods sold. It would alter the existing bottom line of software companies and may make it tough to report quarterly results the first couple of times, but if you follow the rules I laid out and build the partner community by providing the insight and guidance they need to succeed, in the end you will create new markets for your software.

As a smart man once said in a class I took “do the right things, and the money will follow.”

In the end it just makes me sad.

.doc

* “Osmandius” Percy Blythe Shelly

Up ahead on the left, the road less traveled.

February 21, 2012February 21, 2012doandersen

Waiting for the compelling event. The pocket pc phone was before its time. It in the end failed because it never had its compelling event that drove it forward.

I hung on for 8 years hoping it would get better. It never actually was able to make that final transition. The IPhone and the rapidly growing Android devices saw the disadvantage. 19.99 for a mobile software package was too much. .99 cents was the right price point and that became a compelling event. The sheer number of phones sold, drove more application developers, the cost of the applications meant you could have more applications on your device and not worry because in the end the cost was reasonable.

The compelling event for smart phones however may not have been the applications. It may have been the cachet of the Apple device bursting the “phone” bubble. It became acceptable for those who considered themselves “non-geeks” to have a smart phone.

What is the compelling event for software architecture? Or has it in fact come to rest on its laurels? Enterprise Architecture seems to have taken off recently (although you can argue what and how that has happened and the impact it will eventually have). But the reality of the industry right now remains the separation perceived or real of IT from the Business. If software architects are the visionaries of the IT world, where are they going?

Is there a cachet of and around software architecture? In the end I worry about that. I don’t see anything new in the space and the problems still exist. the old joke (clinical definition of insanity do the same things over and over but expect different results each time) applies.

Robert Frost once wrote “and I took the path less traveled.” The thing that all the various groups don’t understand as they offer “Architecture” certifications and bless “Cloud Architects” and “Mobile Software architects” is that they are all not choosing the road less traveled – they are blazing trails that don’t exist. Which isn’t actually doing something new, if in fact you are simply repeating the failings of the past.

We are bound by and to our failures. The past less traveled is even less traveled now than it was. Overgrown and forgotten software architecture is spinning its wheels. In the end we may dig a rut so deep with our spinning wheels that we can’t get out. Not a wheel on the road and a wheel in the ditch and Neil Young wrote about Alabama. wheels buried to the axels in the mud and muck we generated by spinning our wheels without anything new.

Its time for a little sand for traction and then veer off the beaten path to the road less traveled.

.doc

There is nothing new in software architecture but I think I know why…

February 20, 2012February 20, 2012doandersen

There is nothing new in software architecture. I talked briefly yesterday about seeking what something new in software architecture and realizing like the tourists seeing the statue of Osmandius for the first time, there is nothing there.

Sure there are great concepts in the world of software architecture. Visio and UML are tools that have come from the need to have software architectures documented. There are many other tools, too many to name so we will go with the language (UML) and my personal favorite (Visio).

Devices have changed radically. The cloud has introduced the concept of decentralized centralized computing (figure that one out).But if Richard the III of England needed something new upon the field of battle to turn the tide as he needed a horse, he would as in the end fail as much for something new in software architecture as he did in his quest for a horse.

There is nothing new.

Sure there are a lot of certifications out there now. I talked about that in my certification-merry-go-round (and round and round and round). But in the end it doesn’t matter what pretty horse you ride (or don’t ride, instead stand next to your child who does ride and you of course are the moron standing on the merry-go-round without wanting to be there).

Each of the certifications (and I know of more than 10 now) certifies architects. None of them value the other certifications enough to just say “sure, you have that – we will grant you ours.” It is a fractured market right now.

My argument is that it is fractured as much from lack of “new” as anything. In Medicine and other “professions” you don’t see new certifications. Sure doctor’s chase specializations but that is because they have a specific interest or desire. You don’t have 5 different organizations certifying doctors, or pilots or teachers. (well ok teachers you have 51, but they follow the same core concepts for each of the state licensing processes).

There is a corollary to Murphy’s law (O’Toole’s corollary is my person favorite, and applies to everything “Murphy was an optimist”) I don’t know who the attribution is but the statement is quite simple “work on something long enough to improve it and it will break.”

My question to the world today – have we worked on software certification so long now that we’ve broken software architecture? There is nothing new coming forth in a profession that remains ever changing. The only new things now are variants of certifications rather than new ideas and concepts.

Yea though I walk through the valley of architecture

I will fear no certification

because mine is better.

Or at least mine is newer.

Ok mine has a cooler certificate.

Who cares.

If the goal is certifications – congratulations you win.

if the goal is a profession than let’s kick certifications to the curb for now. The merry-go-round is making me dizzy.

Its time for a standards body. So software architects can get back to creating new things. Instead of chasing a merry-go-round we will never catch (its currently set at 120 KPH).

-Scott

Oh the change she is a coming…

November 6, 2011doandersen

http://chuckandersen.wordpress.com/

If you think about cloud too much you will go blind. Its something that used to be a joke when I was a kid (doing x activity enough and you will go blind). It happened in most cases X was the activity an adult didn’t want you to continue.

The reality is you don’t go blind. The cloud however does offer us a great opportunity to stop doing things they way they always have been done and to move forward. It is not that people are lazy or evil. Its sometimes very hard to disengage from the way things are to do them differently.

Cloud computing lets us walk away from a number of bad habits as we move forward. The concept of development environments in the cloud is a great opportunity. Having an agnostic environment is even better but those are going to be hard to find overall. Most organizations have a “pre-disposition” to a specific vendor or type of development. I suspect the future of development clouds will fall to the SI’s rather than the tools vendors, which is a huge change from migration tools and other things like that in the past.

But cloud computing is all about the opportunity to do things differently. Not just do things better or easier, but in fact make significant process and technology changes that will in the end benefit everyone.

.doc

A case study in bad communication…

April 3, 2011April 3, 2011doandersen

What is the impact of a single person?

So yesterday or the day before (I don’t recall) I rambled on about communication and in particular the concept of “The Smartest Man in the Room.” I experienced another iteration of that yesterday receiving a smartest man on the email thread. It was a form I hadn’t seen before with veiled illusions and “concern.”

The concern was so blatantly false that it actually made me stop for a moment and realize that the person was thinking only of what they needed rather than what everyone in the situation needed.

I realized that the smartest man in the room problem is the underbelly of arrogance. People are arrogant for one of two reasons:

I am not good enough
I have no empathy for the other people in the situation

I can deal with the first one. As a second grade teacher I ran into that from both children and parents. You simply have to create a safe environment for that person to express what they need to say. Sometimes that means you have to listen to them rant for a bit (or express their emotional pain) and then you can rationally discuss how things could work going forward.

But the second one truly scares me. I fear that it has a more negative connotation than I am willing to assign it at this point. For now, lets just say it is a sad thing when someone thinks they are the only person who is working towards solving a problem. A team effort requires that you drop the I of arrogance and work with the team to solve the problem. If you enter the room with no empathy for others, you cannot be successful and unless they shun you, neither can they.

I suspect I will have more on this topic.

.doc

Dazed and confused

April 1, 2011doandersen

To find, my way.

Lately at times I have stopped feeling as lost as I did previously. I have more to do which always helps me focus more (when I have less than 50 hours of work in a week I tend to drift a little where as with more work, I focus on getting that done).

So with more work to do I can focus on getting things done rather than wondering what my next project is.

Why is that?

Why can’t I take a normal approach and get done what I have to do regardless of how much there is?

Next thought…

Why do USB and Network cables break?

I just don’t get why USB and network cables (Cat-5) almost seem to decay at a rate that is much faster than the rate I would expect. Maybe it is me. Maybe I am hard on cables. I don’t know, but it is frustrating.

.doc

Da Boys are 13!!!

March 30, 2011doandersen 2 Comments