Tag: innovation

IT Consumerization

“consumerization” was obvious years ago when you would use your private IT resources to get shit done because the lumbering IT department could not.

Few people would disagree that traditional enterprise IT is complicated. And expensive. And unnecessarily complex. Sure, it tries to solve complex problems. But is that always the most effective thing to do? Maybe it would be more rational to first solve the simpler problems in a more cost-effective and user-friendly way. Of course, IT professionals are perfectionists. But they tend to optimize the wrong dimensions. Consumers behave differently, because they are willing to forgo functional perfection in exchange for simplicity and cost-effectiveness.

Medicine is Primitive

The practice of modern medicine is surprisingly primitive. My doctor only recently started to provide printed prescriptions instead of the usual scrawl. Incorrectly filled prescriptions can be serious and computer printed prescriptions are an obvious response yet even today only 25% of physicians use some form of electronic health records and only 10% really use electronic records to follow a patient’s entire history. My credit card company knows far more about my shopping history than my physician knows about my medical history.

the last area of artisanal production needs standardization, measurement

Analog tax

spending time with my parents affords me an opportunity to see what they use their computer for, and some of it is not pretty: take this whole world of “mail merge”, no matter whether in microsoft office or it’s retarded cousin openoffice, is a world of pain. the user interface is unspeakably bad, quite in tune with a process that is about as fun as a visit to the dentist in the first place. bringing this bloated world onto the web with the recent craze of ajax word processors is fundamentally misguided: why deal with label printing when there is email? similarly, when you are faced with the task to protect 2.5B in revenues per quarter, why screw around with new toolbars when your products don’t help squat to solve the real problem: outdated assumptions about a paper-based world.

Post-sourceforge world

People have asked the question “What if SourceForge disappeared?? for years now, but I have to wonder if we should be asking this question again. Now, SourceForge has its warts, but it’s ultimately a beneficial service. And, even if they did disappear, it’s highly unlikely that the open source movement would be handicapped for any real length of time. But here’s why I ask the question:

phil goes into some more detail, wondering whether GOOG or YHOO might be prepared to take over. Maybe the woes of sourceforge can bring some long-needed fresh air though:

I think that the problem with SourceForge is that they are providing 1999-era functionality based on a business model that really is not much more than an afterthought after the collapse of their hardware business. Consequently, the core functionality in the SourceForge project hasn’t changed all that much in the past 6 years. All the projects on SourceForge are effectively partitioned… we don’t see any tools for figuring out code reuse possibilities or anything particularly innovative.

3 years ago, i researched the state of the art of open source production, and developed a matrix to map activities, actors and tools. To say that there are many areas of improvement in the way open source software is produced is an understatement. The obvious observation that there are a power laws in effect with regards to quality and popularity of a project makes me wonder what can be done to improve life for the countless small projects out there that have neither their act together code-wise, nor any audience. A recent study found that 81% of sourceforge projects are inactive, and only about 0.05% innovative.

A considerable subset of these projects deserves to do better on both fronts with the right tooling. Done correctly, a post-sourceforge integrated site could act as a large-scale lab for novel collaboration and software engineering techniques. Tool vendors might be willing to integrate their technology in return for widespread usage and name recognition, and the rest of us might finally break free of the anachronisms of mailing lists and other 1980s-era solutions.

Furthermore, the site could be made to emit statistical data for open source research. Most academic papers in the field already look at sourceforge anyway, if they had a way to get better data, they might actually arrive at some useful conclusions, including reuse patterns, social network analysis, and many more. Such a site could therefore be a down payment on discovering the finer points of peer production, slated to become ever more important in the larger economy.

you and your work

i was quite impressed by this talk transcript by richard hamming. his observations over 40 years as to why so few with the potential for greatness deliver ring very true. some of the takeaways:

  • pick your battles. don’t fight ‘the system’ when you should be pursuing your goals instead: The appearance of conforming gets you a long way
  • knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity.
  • Plant the acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow, which could be redefined as don’t get trapped by your success
  • Pick an important problem where you have a reasonable attack
  • Communicate the relevance of your work to a wide audience outside your field

thanks, lambda