Kudos

Unlike other expressions of the human capacity for tool making, computers are, perhaps uniquely, totally versatile in the sense that they can be programmed.

Computer programming is set on simple principles; 0′s and 1′s, on or off. From those humble foundations, springs complexity as layer after layer of abstraction are added, each designed to enhance our ability to utilize the one underneath.

When a programmer works on writing software, she usually does not dwell on the complexity she is creating with each line of code but , like art, no two pieces of software will ever be alike.

Software development is difficult to implement and a managerial challenge if ever there was one. It is a practical tautology that software projects neither finish on time nor on budget, while users are usually dissatisfied with the end product for some reason or other.

This behavior extends to IT. Generally speaking, the more versatile an appliance is (and thus more reliant on software), the more complex and uncertain to implement and maintain it will become.

This is very interesting because there are engineering tasks out there that are no less complex nor less monumental than writing software, yet are easier to manage in terms of risk; building sky scrapers could be one example. That’s because sky scrapers exhibit no emergent behavior.

Many smart people are addressing this challenge by thinking up new ways and creating new tools, to help managers tackle software projects. Probably one of the most interesting of those is Alistair Cockburn, who maintains that software development is most similar to a cooperative game.

I stumbled upon Alistair’s article about software development as a cooperative game (via coding horror), and it was absolutely fascinating. Only rarely do I read an article that leaves me saying “that’s right!” and “I can relate to this” and “damn, so true” so many times in one sitting. So before I go on – Kudos! to Alistair.

Mr. Cockburn’s article is a bit longish, yet packed with good material and is worth some serious discussion.

In future posts I will separately address, and add my own thoughts, on the points that are made in the article – starting with #1, Communication (here is a short excerpt):

“…The first thing to get is that no communication is ever perfect and complete. It just can’t be done. It is not even in the realm of possibility. Your listener, or the receiver of the communication, has to jump across a gap, at some point, and has to do that all on their own. You can’t do it for them. If they are very different from you, then they can’t jump a big gap. You have to explain some basic concepts to them, and then build forward until they build their own bridge of experience so they can finally get what you are saying…”

“The point is, we write these specification and design documents as though we could actually ever explain what we mean. And we can’t. We can never hope to completely specify the requirements or the design. Not even the faintest chance. When we write, we assume that the reader has a certain level of experience. If we can assume more experience, then we can write less. If we have to assume less experience, then we have to write more.“

“All communication is touching into shared experience.”

More on this to come. 

I’ve read an article on Ynet that describes the future of jobs, as resulting of Web 2.0. I have a strong disagreement with parts of that article.

To those of us that don’t read Hebrew, here is a summarized translation of what was written:

In the late 90′s decision makers failed to predict the growth in demand for employees of the new generation; programmers, ERP implementers, knowledge managers and others. As a result, public professional education lagged behind market demand.

Today, Web 2.0 is again causing radical changes to the job landscape. People are talking about Second life marketing experts, PHP ninjas, Interface hackers, open source programmers and others.

Early retirement will befall CSRs (who will be replaced by the users themselves, as creators of support knowledge), brand developers (because the ‘long tail’ enforces a move from brands to tags) and we’ll see demand for Crowdsourcers, You Tube/flicker training experts etc.

Researches beginning in the 80′s show a decline in “traditional” industries, and a switch to advanced industries such as telecom and software. Traditional industries will need to incorporate knowledge workers into their production cycles if they wish to survive.

Globalization dictates that today’s third-world countries (such as India and china) will be the producers and service providers while first-world countries will specialize in high-end R&D, marketing and design. So, as a self proclaimed first-world country we need to invest heavily in the skill sets that will enable our workforce to integrate into the above mentioned first-world niches.

Phew, breathe out.

I don’t have a fundamental argument with the writer or the trends he describes. However, I have a strong disagreement with the totality in which he describes the coming changes. I resent a vocabulary of revolution and advise that we adopt a vocabulary of evolution.

It is quite plausible that viral marketing will be another tool to be used by a marketing manager. But the role of ‘marketing manager’ as we know it today will not vanish.

I agree that wikis and blogs are invaluable tools for customer care, but call centers are far from fading into the night.

It just might be that a company will reach a strategic decision to contribute some of its intellectual property to the open source community, but that does not mean you need an “open source programmer“. What you need is a programmer who can submit and collaborate with the open source community; a skill set that can be acquired within a week.

Current employees need not fear the revolution, but rather need to evolve along with the market and the advances in technology and society. The need to evolve is not new. People who work in high-tech learn new technology all the time. So do doctors. So do marketing people. So does almost everyone, with the rate of learning depending on his line of work.

Do we need to have our public education system adapt? Of course; our teachers are no different from marketing managers. If they don’t adapt they will become non-relevant. That is not to say that others will not fill the gap. It only means that the public system will become irrelevant as it was during the first bubble where we saw a proliferation of private institutes such as John Bryce college and Sivan (incidentally, I taught courses at John Bryce at the time).

‘Interface hacker’, or ‘PHP ninja’ are just goofy ways to carry a message across as to the skills and attitude required of the candidate. There is nothing “new” about those jobs. A good programmer is a good programmer. If she doesn’t know everything required for a specific task, she’ll sit and read a book, get some guidance – and do her job.

First and foremost, Web 2.0 is an emergent system. Emergent systems are by definition impossible to predict. Not a single soul managed to predict where Web 2.0 was going, and not a single soul will be able to predict where it will head. All we can say on Web 2.0 is that within it are created new systems that are better as more people use them.

It is the revolutionary (bon) tone that unleashes the demon of hype. Hype begets loss of rationality and loss of rationality begets a bubble. We really don’t need another bubble.

I call to the stop of the dreamy eyed prophets; they are scaring all the sheep.

I have a friend who’s in charge of marketing and business development at a local services company. He reviews various start-up companies looking for business opportunities. Yesterday, someone sent him a “Web 2.0 toolbar” for his review and he accidentally forwarded it to me (instead of information regarding a different company he wanted to talk to me about).

The first impression I got looking at that email was that people are not fully aware that Web 2.0 is not a technology. It is an idea.

Yes, technological tools are used to implement the concepts behind W2.0, but they are not its substance. The substance of W2.0 is in what leading technology and academy gurus call emergent, freeform networking effects.

I won’t go into the formal definitions of these concepts, but I’d like to write about emergence, because I think it’s a very interesting idea. Basically, emergence can happen when a system has the ability to use a few simple rules to build structures. These rules will define what kind of structures are built, and what their level of complexity is.

I always think about evolution in this regard. Life, too, is built out of a relatively simple set of building blocks with rules that allow those blocks to be combined into structures. These structures are then combined into larger structures, more complex with each new cycle.

You have amino acids that make proteins. These make sub cellular structures that go on to create cells, organs and blood vessels, until you get an animal, which is a very complex organism.

Evolution has a tendency to give us unexpected solutions to natural obstacles. This is because of the unpredictable factor of mutations and their impact on the organism. Web2.0 follows these guidelines as well, and a true W2.0 application shows signs of emergence because of it’s very own unpredictable factor – the way human beings decide to use and link the information on the web to other bits of information.

Because of this, no one is ever really able to predict which W2.0 application will be successful. We cannot predict if and when a blog will have many readers, nor can we know which wikis will attract enough people to become successful. Sometimes a W2.0 application reaches critical mass, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Similar to the natural world, in W2.0 we see unexpected results to natural problems. Emergence dictates that the organism will adapt and mutate, sometimes in a counter-intuitive manner, to overcome obstacles. I was amazed once I read this blog post by Don Dodge. It describes search efforts after database guru Jim Gray who went missing while sailing his yacht. Here is a quote found in the post:

A number of folks on the distribution list have discussed the possibility of acquiring satellite data…The Microsoft Virtual Earth Team is working with GeoEye and Digital Globe to acquire imagery on the next pass…NASA is working on getting there vis/ir camera on an ER-2. All of our satellite friends are concerned about fog and clouds; and/or ability to find a little red-hulled / white deck boat in a sea of gray pixels. Still, all of us with any bit of satellite experience are willing to take a shot regardless of the low probability of success.

and this as well

Please visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk site to help review satellite images. You will be asked to look at 5 images and determine if they should be examined more closely by the search team.

Jim’s friends have accessed satellite information which is usually used by Google Earth and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth along with a bunch of other data and created a blog site on amazon which gives web users the ability to help locate a missing person at sea. I am fairly certain this has never been done before.

The information was mostly already there, and no new technology was used here. But, a bunch of new connections were made between existing bits of data and the word was put out to thousands of people on the web.

To me, this is a good example of a set of existing structures being linked into a newer, more complex structure. Emergence.

Here is what some people from the coast guard said about it:

Coast Guard officials said they had never before seen such a concerted, technically creative effort carried out by friends and family of a missing sailor. “This is the largest strictly civilian, privately sponsored search effort I have ever seen,” said Capt. David Swatland, deputy commander of the Coast Guard sector in San Francisco, who has spent most of his 23-year career in search and rescue

Of course, Jim has a few powerful friends (Amazon CTO and Google CEO among them) but I think this example is valid since it shows the evolving complexity of Web2.0. Other examples may not be as extravagant, but the principle is the same.

So, next time you talk about user generated content, wikis, blogs or (god forbid) Ajax, XMLHTTP and other techno-geek-talk, remember that underlying all of that is a basic concept that has been discussed and researched since the time of Aristotle.

Objects and patterns can arise from simple interactions in ways that are surprising and counter-intuitive.

(Emergence, Mitchel Resnick and Brian Silverman, MIT Media Laboratory)

Jim was never found. After exhausting all possible leads, the coast guard and his friends called the search off.

For a good visual example of emergence, go here.