I realize that the title of this blog post is something that one would probably not associate with a blog that purports to cover technology. Bear with me please and surf over to YouTube (or view below) to look at the video posted by the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission. I think you will agree that the video is very well done. Much like the partnership between Google and the Pennsylvania Tourism Office that I blogged about a couple of months back, this posting to YouTube represents some signs of forward thinking, Web-based focus, and creativity on the part of state government.

 

 

Granted, with tourism and fishing, we are looking at revenue generating sectors of state government. You don’t yet see this sort of thing from Welfare service divisions. How long will it be though until other sectors of state government start looking at public Internet services as an alternate channel for communications with their constituents? The economics of these services surely works in their favor (that is, they’re free). It then becomes a question of what the best channel is to reach one’s constituents.

Face-to-face interaction, snail mail, and government sponsored portals will be around for a while to come, I surmise. But as usage of cell phones, email, inexpensive audio devices and collaborative community-based Internet services like YouTube continue to permeate through the layers of citizenry, state governments will not be able to ignore these viable communication mediums. The one question that remains is whether state governments are prepared to engage in the two way dialog and deal with the power shift that these new communication vehicles will invariably bring.

The innovation engine at Yahoo is heating up, looking to get Yahoo back in the race with the “Big Boys”, rivals Google and Microsoft. In an environment categorized by copycat service offerings and one-upmanship, Yahoo’s offerings are refreshingly unique. I cover three of the most recent services that I’ve been playing around with and that I think will prove entertaining to my readers as well – Pipes, OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, and TagMaps.

• Pipes – No less a luminary than Tim O’Reilly called Pipes “A milestone in the history of the Internet”.  Pipes is a browser-based visual editor that allows you to take input from one source and pipe it (in UNIX parlance) to another source. Along the way, you can apply a series of filters and transformations to manipulate the data. The data sources start and end as common feeds (RSS, RDF, etc). What you do with the data between its input and output is constrained mostly by your imagination.

Yahoo! was certainly not first on the scene with this idea. Dapper and others have preceded them in this regard. What Pipes brings to the party that no one else does is a really cool visual environment that allows you to trace the path of the data through the transformations and filers, interactively debugging along the way based upon the value of the successive outputs. It also has this cool reuse flavor to it, where you can experiment with, tweak, learn from, and potentially improve or fork off new versions of other peoples pipes or just reuse them in a black box sense.

After you’ve read Tim O’Reilly’s introduction, I encourage you to play around with Pipes. Although seeing is believing, you’ll learn best by actually doing.

• OmniFind Yahoo! Edition – Product of a nifty partnership with IBM, the OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is an enterprisey search solution that is the baby brother to IBM’s commercial OmniFind enterprise product. Built on top of the open source Apache Lucene search engine, OmniFind has the solid lineage necessary to be considered worthy of the task.

The product is a very easy install, whether on Windows or Linux, requiring very few steps to get the product up and running. OmniFind returns search results against locally indexed documents and the Internet, with the results being returned in the familiar Yahoo! look and feel. For those interested, the UI can be styled to match a particular site’s look and feel or you can go the direct route and work with the exposed REST APIs.

With the pricetag (free) and support for a couple hundred file types, there’s little not to like about OmniFind. Search performance has proven to be very fast with a few thousand documents. Indications are that the tool scales pretty well although the indexing process can be quite processor intensive and there are a couple of known issues with cleaning up very large temp files that could eat into your available disk space.

• TagMaps – I stumbled onto this product a couple of weeks ago while looking for some information about creating GeoRSS feeds. TagMaps is another way of visualizing data (tags in this case) on maps. I must confess that seeing tags on a map takes a bit of getting used to. I found that the best way to indoctrinate myself was by using Trip Explorer

Trip Explorer is a mashup of TagMaps and Yahoo! Travel users' public Trip Plans. What’s cool about Trip Explorer is that the clustering of tags reveals hidden tour gems that you might not otherwise find on a traditional map mashup. These gems become more evident (and detailed) as you progressively zoom in.

TagMaps is built upon Yahoo’s Flash maps, which are very interesting in their own right and need to be experienced if you haven’t yet had the chance. Aside from using Yahoo’s canned Explorer TagMaps, of which Trip Explorer is one, you can create your own TagMaps mashups. Simply create a GeoRSS feed or select an existing GeoRSS feed that returns a set of weighted tags for a given lat/lon bounded box. Easier said than done, I know. I’ll be writing more about how to do this in a coming blog entry. Until then, give this a look.

I don’t like to do book reviews back-to-back but Founders at Work has kept me pretty busy reading (and not writing) over the last couple of weeks. The book definitely deserves a five star rating and at $13 for the e-book version, it really is a great deal. My review follows…

This is an absolute must read if you’re job, your passion, or both (if you’re lucky) has anything to do with creating technical innovation. “Founders at Work” is a wonderfully meander through the stories of successful company founders – across several decades. Far from focusing on just those who made it big during the first dot-com boom or those who are profiting from Web 2.0, Jessica also includes some of the true pioneers in the field. She recognizes that, not only do these industry veterans have valuable stories to convey but, since many of them are helping to steer companies and venture capital funds to this day, their advice is quite topical and current.

From the great introduction right through the final interview, this book is packed with great anecdotes, advice, information and inspiration. Makes you wonder as to what the story is behind the story - how did Jessica get unfettered access to such a broad array of the founding fathers?

I’ve included some illustrative quotes from the book below. Give them a read and then go pick up this book. The printed copy is a bargain and the e-book version is a steal. It may turn out to be one of the best investments you ever make.

• “You guys are nuts. Throw out your business plan. Your customers—or potential customers - are telling you what your business should be. The business plan was only used to get you the money. Why don’t you rewrite a business plan that is focused just on providing what your customers want?” - Q.T. Wiles advice to Charles Geschke (Cofounder, Adobe) on the real purpose of a business plan
• “There were some warning signs. Consider McKinsey, which holds itself out as one of the world’s leading repositories of knowledge on how to manage a business. They say they’ll never grow their company by more than 25 percent per year, because otherwise it’s just too hard to transmit the corporate culture. So if you’re growing faster than 25 percent a year, you have to ask yourself, ‘What do I know about management that McKinsey doesn’t know?’” – Philip Greenspun (Cofounder, ArsDigita) on scaling corporate culture
• "That [not improving core product quality] was probably the biggest mistake we made. And that’s the advice I give everybody. All those little coupon schemes, this is what General Motors does. They figure out new rebate schemes because they forgot all about how to design cars people want to buy. But when you still remember how to make software people want, great, just improve it." – Joel Spolsky (Cofounder, Fog Creek Software)
• “I think some people slept; I know I didn’t sleep at all.” - Max Levchin (Cofounder, PayPal)
• “There were times when we were really broke before we had our angel investment, when only one guy who had children was getting paid.” – Caterina Fake (Cofounder, Flickr)

With nearly 21 of the 32 interviewees having the term “Cofounder” in their titles, Joel Spolsky’s advice seems perhaps to reflect best on what was critical to the success of these companies. “But because they never really take the leap and quit their job, they can give up their dream at any time. And 99.9 percent of them will actually give up their dream. If they take the leap, quit their job, go do it full-time—no matter how much it sucks—and convince one other person to do the same thing with them, they’re going to have a much, much higher chance of actually getting somewhere.”

Windows Power Tools is a collection of brief tutorials and overviews of freeware and open source .NET development tools. What kind of rating you might give this book depends largely upon what type of background that you’re coming from. If you’re the kind who has stuck religiously to the Microsoft Press series of books and acknowledge only the old testament, than this book will be either an epiphany (5 stars) or outright blasphemy (1 star). If continuous integration, test-driven development, and object relational mapping (new testament type stuff) are terms that you are fairly conversant with, then this book will probably land somewhere in the 2-4 star range.

Since I put myself in the 2-4 star group, I’ll start by mentioning that there are great online tomes of knowledge that contain most of the tools listed in this book and a bunch others not listed here. One of the most respected and well linked lists belongs to the author of this book’s forward, Scott Hanselman. His Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows has been dutifully updated on an annual basis. Despite the fact that there are free, decent resources out there that fill some of the same purposes as this book, I enjoyed thumbing through the book and picking out tools I hadn’t heard of to fill in some knowledge gaps.

The main reason that I landed on a 3 star rating instead of a 4 star rating is that the brief tutorial format that worked so well for James when describing Visual Studio functionality is his previous book, Visual Studio Hacks, just doesn’t do justice to tools that represent significant pieces of an application or support infrastructure. I would have preferred to see less tools and deeper coverage in certain areas. Understandably, since not everyone would want to see the same tools as me; a broader, shallower approach trades off depth and detail for marketability. I’ve included my complete list of pros and cons below so that you can see how I came to my rating:

Pros

• Great reference book with enough of an introduction to get you started with a broad array of tools
• If you’re an O’Reilly Safari subscriber, this book is included in your subscription
• The authors aspire to keep materials current on the book’s companion Web site. At the time of this review, the site is little more than a list of tools in the book

Cons

• Lots of this material is available for free on the Web, if you have the time and inclination to find it
• Introductions to tools are not sufficiently in depth to communicate any more than the most rudimentary of use cases

Technologists who spend their time working on line of business projects are typically exposed to subtle and not-so-subtle messages about business ethics. Most recently, the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has touched most of our lives in some way, shape, or form. At a bare minimum, it has heightened our awareness of how terribly wrong things can go when the trust afforded certain practices (accounting and reporting, in the case of SOX) proves to be misplaced.

As strong as the reaction to Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom debacles was; it surprises me again and again to see just how willing the corporate community is to shrug off major IT project failures. This is especially true when you compare the strict regulations, codes of conduct, and ethical guidelines in place for the public accounting community and the almost complete lack of anything resembling these structures in the professional software engineering community. Enron and Tyco may be examples of otherwise ample process controls gone awry. In the software engineering community, we don’t even have a process.

The recent IT conversations Podcast on the utter failure of the project to stand up the FBI Virtual Case File system reinforced this point for me. For those of you who want to get the down and dirty on the FBI Virtual Case File story, the IEEE has a pretty good article containing what appears to be a fairly objective history of the project. “So what does this have to do with ethics?”, you ask.

I think most laypeople, let alone professional software engineers, perceive about halfway through the IEEE article that this project was a train wreck in the making. So why was this not apparent to the 200 plus contractors and countless FBI staff involved in the project? Have we, as a profession, been conditioned into silence or is virtually every software project so fraught with journeys into uncharted waters that we have become ethically ambivalent to the dangers?

The real “story within the story” here is the tale of Matthew Patton, a security contractor who, despondent about lack of management concern, posted his concerns about the project to a Web-based bulletin board. The Web post, which has been archived online, lead to an FBI investigation, denial of his clearance, and a situation in which Mr.Patton had little choice but to resign. Perhaps it’s just me but I find it a bit ironic that Mr.Patton was forced out of the FBI project in the same year that an FBI employee made it onto Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” cover along with whistleblowers from Enron and WorldCom.

There have been movements in our profession (if I can refer to it as such) to institute a code of ethics and similar measures. Both IEEE and the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) support a unified software engineering code of ethics. With membership in these organizations representing just a fraction of the population engaged in software engineering, this code has nowhere near the professional impact of similar measures released by organizations such as the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). Where does this leave us as software engineers?

• We need more people like Matthew Patton amongst our ranks because there are certainly more train wrecks like the FBI Virtual Case File system just waiting to happen.

• We have to start taking software engineering as a profession seriously. The fact that late and over-budget projects have come to represent the norm needs to change.

• We need to think long and hard about how to police ourselves as a profession. Accounting and auditing tried, failed, and then Congress stepped in and told them how to run the show as part of Sarbanes-Oxley. If we don’t figure out how to do this ourselves, someone will tell us how we have to run our show.

We as software engineers are bound by the same laws that we created. There are no silver bullets for the issue of ethics in software engineering. There is only the fact that a lot of software projects are delivered late, over-budget, or both. It is our ethical obligation to speak up or support those who do speak up and call out the doomed death-march projects before they’ve done too much harm – to us, to our organizations, and to our profession.

The Technology and Venture Capitalism Podcast on IT Conversations featured some interesting guests who brought a lot of good ideas to the table. Phil Windley, the moderator, got the guests to kick around the concept of patterns for applications that are good prospective candidates for funding in the VC world. The discussion started with the simple advertising-only model (a’la Google) and the group then moved onto the Apple iTunes / iPod model.

The premise of the Apple discussion was that the combination of offering digital media services (iTunes Store), a rich user management interface (iTunes), and a non-traditional computing device offered a model that might be increasingly followed in the future. The group referred to Tim O’Reilly’s O’Reilly Radar presentation, in which Tim cited hardware hacks as an important trend to watch in the future. They also chatted a bit about the Chumby, a much-hyped hardware hack that is available is being circulated in prototype mode to über-Alpha-geeks.

All of this talk got me thinking and putting together a mental model. It brought me back to a McKinsey interview I had in the late dot-com era where the interviewer asked me to draw out a value map for several emerging digital media technologies. Granted, there were no iPods or Chumbies back then but the value map visual seems to work just as well for these newer technologies too. I’ve included a simple map of some representative technologies (circa 2006-2007) below.

In the diagram, the dollar signs [$$$] represent where the primary value derivation occurs in the chain. If you buy into the Value == Services + Device equation, TiVo and Apple are set to come out on top since they control both services and devices. Brings to mind all types of questions around potential commoditization of the services and devices as well as to what strategic leverage (aside from high switching costs) these companies enjoy. Audible and MySpace own only the services, having to rely upon complimentary products (MP3 players and the browser, respectively) to deliver their services. The Chumby is in an interestingly unique position, controlling only the device but not the services. This makes me wonder what the long term value potential is for this product. It would seem that, without very strong branding and product loyalty, the Chumby would be exposed to all sorts of knock-offs. I guess time will tell.

All of this makes devices like the iPhone very interesting in the future. With the combination of very strong branding and the ability to integrate content from all of the major media channels, it would seem that the iPhone is a market killer in an increasingly mobile society. With all of that power in one place, you might want to keep an extra one or two handy, just in case…

Try this on for size – the EPAct2005 is the Y2K of Y2K’07.  No, this is not an anagram. No sooner is 2006 behind us and folks are already worried about “the next Y2K”, the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Between January 1^st and January 3^rd, I’ve received no fewer than 8 emails on this topic. These emails include everything from details about software and hardware that will require some form of remediation to EPAct2005-related business opportunities.

 

 

What is the Energy Policy Act of 2005 exactly, you ask. If you read the Wikipedia entry on EPA2005, you will get a face-full of legislative overload. What’s important to look at, at least if you’re in the IT industry, is the one section titled Change to daylight savings time:

 

“The bill amends the Uniform Time Act of 1966 by changing the start and end dates of daylight saving time starting in 2007. Clocks will be set ahead one hour on the second Sunday of March instead of the current first Sunday of April. Clocks will be set back one hour on the first Sunday in November, rather than the last Sunday of October. This will make electronic clocks that had pre-programmed dates for adjusting to daylight saving time obsolete and will require updates to computer operating systems. The date for the end of daylight saving time has the effect of increasing evening light on Halloween (October 31).”

 

“Will require updates to computer operating systems”. Ugh, that sounds both nebulous and uggy. The links below lead to the vendor specific remediation instructions.

 

• Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/timezone/dst2007.mspx
• Sun - http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/USDST/
• IBM - http://www.ibm.com/support/alerts/daylightsavingstimealert.html
• Red Hat - http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_80_7909.shtm

From the links it doesn’t really look like things are so bad. What makes this a bit less containable than it appears at first glance is the pervasive nature of embedded devices, occasionally connected devices, and computing systems other than the ones with keyboards and monitors on them. Y2K turned out not to be so bad because it was a bit easier to quarantine the old iron running the offending code. With EPAct2005, getting to the desktops and big machines is only part of the battle. There are just so many other devices out there running on computers of some form that much is bound to slip through the cracks. Then again, your DVR and your kids’ robotic dog aren’t exactly air traffic control systems.

Over the holidays, I had the chance to catch up with some back reading and Podcasts and there was one, in particular, that caught my attention. The book / Podcast combo on transforming state governments by Deloitte & Touche provided some really interesting, innovative, no-holds-barred analysis of the problems that state governments are facing in the early 21^st century. Recorded the day after the 2006 elections, Deloitte’s Bob Campbell and Bill Eggers collaborate with Deloitte advisor, former governor of Pennsylvania and first secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge to produce an excellent Podcast. The Podcast serves as a solid introduction to the more extensive analysis in their book, States of Transition: Tackling government’s toughest policy and management challenges.

 

 

 

The Podcast is available via iTunes or as a download on Deloitte’s Web site. You can also download a decent sized book excerpt here. I have also mirrored the book excerpt as well for the sake of speed and continuity. I’ve highlighted some of the interesting points of the Podcast and book below. I encourage you to listen to the Podcast and pick up the book. My experience with state government leads me to believe that Deloitte’s analysis is spot on. Many of the truths analyzed in the book / Podcast are the veritable elephants in the room of state government. As important as these insights are for public policy and administrative specialists; they are equally important to technologists. As I have told several clients, the business architecture issues of state government such as workforce, political, and organizational constraints must be offset by tradeoffs that will ultimately affect the application and technical architecture solutions that we as technologists are asked to provide. If you are a technologist providing solutions to state governments, it behooves you to understand these business architecture constraints.

 

Before I go into the highlights of the book / Podcast, I’ll start with a bit of ethically obligatory disclosure. I am a Deloitte employee. That said, I am not writing this blog entry to tout or profit from my employer’s intellectual capital in any way. The materials I am blogging about are, obviously, all publicly available. Furthermore, I am writing about them because I feel that they would be of interest to the majority of this blog’s readers. Enough of the fine print; highlights as well as a matrix excerpted from the book can be found below:

 

• Bob Campbell hits the nail on the head but citing federal entitlement programs as the drivers of siloed state government operations. Makes you wonder if things like the Federal Funding Accounting and Transparency Act are eventually going to have trickle down effects on the states.
• Focus on states as the “laboratories of democracy” and drivers of innovation. This is especially important since states have the potential to be much more agile than the federal government in addressing policy issues and providing innovative solutions.
• Coverage of the tough choices needed to fix an ailing Medicaid system. Innovations such as the Vermont Medicaid waiver system are included in the discussion. One fact that I found both interesting and scary (though not surprising) is that, were state Medicaid budgets the basis of independent operating entities, nearly half of the states’ Medicaid programs would be Fortune 500 companies.
• Detailed analysis of state government workforce issues. There is a lot of information about unfunded liabilities on state retirement and healthcare plans. Governor Ridge went as far as to compare state government with the steel and automotive industries; a comparison I contemplated a lot on my recent trip to Detroit.
• Critical look at an infrastructure deficits and discussion of the need to increase focus on this area. There are some interesting examples of the public-private partnership model at work. One in particular that came up during the Podcast was the purchase and execution of warranties on roads by New Mexico. For those with further interest in this area, I’d encourage you to listen to the IT Conversations Podcast about transportation networks.

Trying to remain fair and unbiased, there are also several things for which I would have liked to have seen analysis and opinions. It’s understandable these issues didn’t make the cut for a text that is already tackling a lot of huge issues. However, I’d be interested to know where folks stand on these issues:

 

• Detailed analysis of the real cost of a state worker (per hour). When you factor in the number of hours worked and the liberal pension and healthcare benefits, what is the actual cost of your hypothetical state worker? I’d be interested to know.
• Focus on the citizen-centric viewpoint of government. That is, with my cable company, whether I go online, call on the phone, or walk into one of their storefronts, they can ask me a question or two to establish my identity and then pull up all of the information they need to help me without asking me to provide it again. Government, on the other hand, comes across as having a serious case of amnesia when trying to pull off the same act. “Need to file taxes? Tell me your name, your address, your dependants…”, “Need Welfare? Your name, your address, your dependants…”, “Need a license...”
• Discussion about digital and energy infrastructure as well as physical infrastructure. Not to diminish the value of physical infrastructure, but last time I checked, we didn’t rank too well globally in terms of the pervasiveness of high-speed network connectivity. We also have a serious addiction to dead dinosaur juice. While energy policy tends to be largely a federal thing, states like California are well versed trend setters in this area. If states really are to be the drivers of innovation, what could they do in this area? Check out my post on the Destiny USA project. Seems like New York has mixed emotions about being too much of a trend setter.
• Realistic view of drawing the best and the brightest to state government work. I’d be interested to know how many states offer tuition reimbursement as part of their employment package. Anyone, anyone?? Also, with the private sector increasing chunking work into projects and matrixing staff across projects, I’d be interested to hear ideas about if and how a hierarchical organization such as state government can be contorted to follow this precedence.