Click on the image to go to the gallery
February 28, 2008
February 24, 2008
Exposition Boulevard – Photo Gallery
On this gallery Elizabeth contributed with pictures of gems.
Click on the image to go to the gallery
February 17, 2008
Ducks, Rows, Lines And Business Processes
Image courtesy of rengawman.wordpress.com
I like my ducks in a row. Oh yes .. I do indeed. Every time my ducks get out of alignment I react, to some extent, poorly. This is particularly true as I help build companies through technology. Technology is just a business tool and even though it may take center stage as the enabler of a business, it is not the business itself. But that is no excuse to bypass technology best practices.
A word on best practices:
Most people take best practices as a recipe; as a cookbook; as a road to follow. To me best practices is a set of tools that I can use to accomplish particular tasks. There is no particular guide to the practices but the practices themselves as I adapt them to my needs. The same goes for development and project management methodologies. I only adhere to my own. Each problem is different and requires adaptations. It is ridiculous to think that one size can fit all; especially when each task is in the context of varied corporate cultures, projects and business needs.
Back to my ducks …
The whole thing starts with picking the first duck and placing it at the beginning. Then I pick another duck and I scurry to some supposed end and place the “last” duck there. This duck represents where the company may be in a distant future. Call it 5 to 10 years out. It is 100% my conjecture and based on my personal vision of where the business will be in “a period of time”. I based this vision on discussions I have with other stake holders. Will it go there? Who knows. I just like to think of the possibilities and have something to aim at. Does it matter if it does or not? Not at all. The company will experience changes based on the market. The business will go where the market takes it.
Third, I once again scurry around looking for another duck – the right one too – and I place it following the first duck. I turn around, look at the “last” duck and line the first with the second with the last.
It is time for another duck. I rush to find yet another duck, rush to the front and place it, all neatly lined up with the first, second and “last” duck. I go find another duck and I go back to the fourth position. I look back to the “last” duck, I look at the row in front; I look back just to make sure … and … the “last” duck is gone. I mean, nowhere to be found. This is not a real duck; it is my duck. How can it have flown away? Or walked?
I drop the duck in my hand somewhere in position and run back to find the last duck. I look around … I look around … I look around and I finally find it. There it is. But it is not where it is supposed to be. I pick it up and try to figure out where it really belongs. Undoubtably, since it moved, it does not go back to its original place. I figure out its new placement, most likely based on changed assumptions and market forces. And, I have to go to the front and quickly rearrange all the other ducks and align them with the “last” duck. This process happens again and again.
It does not bother me that the “last” duck moved – as a matter of fact I assumed from the beginning that it WILL move; what truly bothers me is that nobody told me before it got moved and then I am expected to auto-magically aligned the other ducks. If the duck had gone “quack quack”, then by just listening I could have quickly rearrange the other ducks on the fly. But these ducks are quiet. They do not make a peep, especially as they are being moved. Or maybe they are being forced to move pointed by a gun under the threat of death if they “quack” ? 
I see building companies very much as a process of putting ducks in a row. True, they do not need to be in a perfect line, but the row should have no gaps. The gaps are potential black holes that can drag the whole business into oblivion. Let’s be clear: gaps does not mean not having answers to all the questions. Many of the business or technology questions are answered as we lay down the ducks. Gaps means skipping the full understanding of basic elements in the business. In manufacturing it can mean skipping quality in the automation. In software development, not respecting a project plan. In business development, not having an out in a business relationship. In business in general, not having a solid strategy and not continually contesting it, revising it and analyzing potential risks factors.
Often I am asked “how can you know where the business will be?” As I stated above, I do not know. But I do imagine what the possibilities can be. It is not that hard to look up and try to take a leap of imagination and visualize where the business can be in 3, 5 or even 10 year. It is a dream. It is pure imagination. It is not real. It is a VISION. It is also a goal to aim for and a way to reverse engineer a road-map. Will the business end up there? Most likely not. Most likely it will take detours, it will change and morph, it will reinvent itself. It will struggle to survive (not necessarily in financial terms.) The market dictates where a business goes. And my ducks are witnesses to the detours and changes.
Regardless of the market, the vision needs to be there at the beginning. And the vision needs to adapt to the market. A business starts with imagining an idea. It continues with the fantasy of success. And follows the excitement of victory. In other words: THE VISION. Not vision as in a corporate statement – The Vision and Mission, those are important and necessary because they are internal call to arms and good external communications tools. But the vision as a quest to conquer some uncharted land or defeat some mortal enemy. Will the vision change? Absolutely. The change is what keeps things interesting.
I am a technologist and see technology as a business process, not as an esoteric pursuit of technicality. Indeed, the better the technical solution I come up with, the better I feel and I always strive to produce great technology including novel work when possible; however, as a function of creating value for the company and not for technology sake. I very strongly believe that in the end, if the technology does not answer the business need, for as good and revolutionary it may be, it is worthless.
My ducks, in the end, are just steps in a process to lead an important part of the business to success. Technology is an equal partner to all of the business units. It is normally considered a cost center, but it really is a revenue generator and through automation and operational efficiencies, a direct profit center.
February 10, 2008
The End Of Progress
NOTE: In order to make the best read of this post – but you do not have to – you can read The Last Question, by Asimov (at https://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm) and one of my previous posts called Downtime (at http://www.fabianschonholz.com/2008/01/06/downtime)
—
A few weeks ago surfing the web I discovered a short story by Asimov I really liked called The Last Question. I have read many of Asimov’s works, but not this one. More or less at the same time I read the story, I was having a conversation with – let’s call him Bob – regarding God, science, technology, mathematics, physics, etc. The whole idea revolved around the fact that mathematics is the language of nature. Bob shared with me a NY Times article that touched on the subject. My reply to the article was The Last Question. And his reply to me was: Can humanity come together and decide to stop progress? My answer is a categorical NO.
Around the same time there was a TechCrunch blog post regarding services downtime events during 2007 and how certain business were affected. I placed a comment to the blog post and later wrote a blog post myself that took a consumer centric approach to the post. I focused on the dependency we have on technology as a society and how our daily lives are affected by technology and any downtime. In my opinion our lives are, to a large extent, the product of technological progress. From medicine, food preparation and the web, to cars, airplanes, cellular telephones, etc. Humanity as it stands today is very much the product of technological progress.
Why is it that humanity can not come together to stop progress?
Humanity has never and will never come together. Our history, starting with prehistory, is all about control and dominance. Hardly a “coming together” bunch. As tribes were developing and humanoid life evolved, confrontations have been the common theme. Most of these confrontations were about territory. Early humans were not hypocritical; If they wanted a piece of land they fought for it. There was no guise or pretext to why they conquered by the sword: land, power, wealth and procreation, the preservation and expansion of the tribe. When hordes of barbarians moved from one place to another they left behind most of what they had – they traveled light. And each new conquered place was an opportunity for expansion in more than just territory. For as crude as it sounds, the image of the sailor with a girl in every port comes to mind.
As early humans progress took place, “progress” being the operating word and concept, new dynamics developed. Battles and entire wars were fought in the name of a God, or a series of gods. Religion and the religious establishment became a controlling political influence and factor in such progress. Culture, just another form of “technology”, was regulated by the political, but mostly, by the religious establishment. The motivation for war remained the same, territorial and financial expansion, basic economics. The spinning of these motivations is what changed. Humans became hypocritical.
Fast forwarding to the last few hundred years, the spinning has gotten worse. New players joined the party and old players have grown more powerful or have created splinters, adding even more to the confusion and “not coming together”. There is no unifying banner for humanity to gather under. There is no common ground for people to come together because people have become cattle. And the different herds are guided in opposite directions. How can humanity come together when a few people are waiting for the Messiah, while others are waiting for the Messiah to come again. How can humanity come together when a few people deny the Messiah and rather believe in prophets. How can humanity come together when we will kill because of skin color. How can humanity come together when our differences, as minute as they can be, are used to drive a wedge between brothers. The world keeps getting smaller and we keep getting further apart. The political, religious and economic establishment profits from it. While this may sound as though I am placing the responsibility solely on religion, I am not. However, religion does have a great influence on people thus, bad religion or bad religious leaders rather share a good part of the responsibility in not coming together. Also, religion is a tool of control, and as such, it is often used to manipulate public opinion.
The fact that by nature we can not come together as a general people is not small, but only a part of my answer. It can be argued however, if you agree with my assessment above, that the question is already answered. Indeed, it is. If we can not come together how can we agree on anything let alone something as monumentally big as “stopping progress”.
On the other hand, let’s assume that we could come together and agree on something. Stopping progress will probably be the last thing we would come to agree on. If anything I can only see us agreeing on “regulating” progress. Why then progress can not be stopped. For one, as I expressed earlier, we are the product of progress. Secondly progress is part of the philosophical system we natively subscribe to: Capitalism.
Capitalism as a philosophical system.
Humans are definitely capitalistic in nature. Capitalism as an economic system is just but a product of a larger system that encompasses who and what we are. The failure of socialists and communist systems is normally attributed to external and internal factors with the emphasis on the external ones. Isolation policies and economic blockades are more often than not cited as the driving factors on the collapse of the so called leftist regimes. However, my personal opinion is that communism, in particular, failed purely for internal reasons – the external influences only solidified and to a minor extent fueled the internal struggle. What then are these internal reasons? People and power. We as individuals want power and the struggle to get power fuels capitalism. So, how can you drive a communal based system when your internal participants inadvertently desire power and control? You can not.
In history we look at individual events and try to find the causes for them. In big blocks we find the dependencies of past and present events. But there is no granularity. There is no visibility at the individual levels. For example, we know that the “Boston Tea Party” kicked off the American revolution. We know a great deal about the mood at the time not only in America but in Europe (the French Revolution). And we know about some of the political undercurrents supported primarily by the Free Masons. But we do not know how it all really started. We do not know about a couple of guys drinking wine one night and being dissatisfied with their situation; we do not know about the conversation that ensued and their complaints expressed in terms of taxation, but in reality, probably about the discrepancy between their economic prowess and the power of their voice.
A few years ago two friends of mine and I went Baja California, Mexico, on a fishing trip. One night we got very drunk. Not that the other nights we did not get drunk, but this night in particular was different. We started with Tequila. After we were two bottles into it we got hungry, so I prepare some sashimi. Of course, beer and sake became part of the meal. Once we finished dinner we moved back to Tequila and that is when our “brilliant” idea started. In our drunken imagination we concocted a plan to unify California and Baja California as an independent sovereign country – California (being the 5th largest economy in the world) has the economic might to pull it off.
The point of the anecdote is not about the particular ramblings of three drunks, but … how many a revolutions started just this way? How many a movement? How many people died because of two, three, four drunks came up with an idea? Moreover, our ramblings were neither idealist or romantic, but focused on economic gains. In other words, three guys somewhere in the middle of the totem pole and doing very well trying to get to the top of the pole. Basically, a typical middle class dissatisfaction.
I guarantee you, if we had visibility into all levels of history, we will find that most of the big historical events started as the discontented ramblings of three drunks. No matter how well we are doing, we want more. We want more of everything – in particular more power. We want our voices heard. We want our legacy to last. We want, and in this want communal based systems are defeated. Utopia, for as fantastic as it seems is unattainable because it is not in our nature. Our nature, as a species, is to move forward, to “progress”. With Capitalism comes efficiency and efficiency is one of the key drivers of progress.
Progress is always expressed in terms of technological advances. Even “thinking progress” indirectly is expressed and explained by advances in technology. With efficiencies not only comes more productivity but also more time. With more time, inclined and “illuminated” people could educate themselves and “study”. And with the pursuit of intellectuality “thinking progress” takes place.
We are the product of Progress.
When I think of progress and Homo-Sapiens-Sapiens I think of them as one. I can not separate from the other. The closest species to us humans are the Chimpanzees. We share 98% of our genetic makeup, yet we have surpassed them in every possible area. This is not to qualify our actions as good or bad, but factually, we have indeed surpassed them. And while Chimpanzees use tools just like we do, we have taken the same tools and have made machines with them that have taken us to the moon. So, apparently 2% difference in a genetic map is an important difference. And in that difference dwells our desire to progress.
I can imagine early humanoid life in this planet. This includes all the primates at the time. All competing for the same resources and the would be humans not always winning in the struggle. The power for abstract thought drove us to understand our limitations better and to find ways to overcome them. Technological progress became the differentiator, the edge that allowed us not only to survive but to flourish. While other species progressed much slower or disappeared altogether, our ability for abstract thought enabled is to adapt the same tools every body used into machines that conquered space.
—
I finally understood “The Time Machine”, by H.G. Wells. The story warns us of our desire for progress, while “The Last Question” gives us a possible answer to the beginning … and End Of Progress.
—
And to conclude, a follow up question should be: “How dependent is progress on not coming together?”
