Dominic Sayers

The company hierarchy - is it necessary?

One of the most consistent routes for people to find this blog is through the search term "company hierarchy". At present, this just leads them to a rather trite cartoon by Hugh MacLeod that I continue to find amusing only because I work in just the sort of organisation it depicts. I do, however, have some personal opinions about organisations and how they are managed. And since passers-by drop in occasionally I don't see why I shouldn't inflict those opinions on my visitors... Previous posts:

1. Real-time communication makes traditional hierarchies unnecessary
2. What we call a "boss" is simply a collection of roles in a set of business processes

We can manage people's roles in business processes the same way we manage, say, access to network resources; through people being members of groups. People can be a member of an arbitrary number of groups, groups can have an arbitrary number of members. Managing the membership of these groups is simply a business process that a particular group is permissioned to do. Let's call that group the Board of Directors. When it comes to giving me a pay rise, the traditional organisation will leave that to my boss. But in a "matrix" organisation it will be a collaborative decision between my functional line manager and my regional line manager (or whatever the dimensions of the matrix are in your company). Managing the matrix is where the complexity arises in larger organisations - whatever dimensions you choose (function, asset class, region, grade etc.) are likely to be wrong for many situations. And you can't have different dimensionality for different people without it all getting very confusing. Contrast this with the simple idea that the people who give me a pay rise are members of a group. A group with the permission in the pay rise process to award me a pay rise. Of course, my pay rise cannot be chosen in isolation. It must be done in the context of next year's budget and other people's awards. So the group of people who award pay rises to individuals needs to be aggregated into a larger group that norms the awards across the population. This can be done by simply making my pay rise group a member of another larger group, a group that has access to real-time conversational tools to achieve a global consensus about pay awards. I'm not talking about a hippy nirvana. Certain roles in certain processes would clearly be very powerful. What I'm saying is that rather than aspiring to be higher up the hierarchy, you could aspire to have more important roles in critical processes. In effect this is what we do anyway - job descriptions are altered to fit people's aspirations and negotiated terms of reference. Today's CIO might have far less power and independence than his predecessors even though the job title remains the same. What we need to do is lose the antiquated framework we currently use to describe people's jobs.

Managing my reading lists

Steve Patrick, who clearly has my education as a personal mission, has recommended another couple of books (for which I thank him). I've added them to the lists. By the way, the idea of storing del.icio.us tags in del.icio.us itself is a fabulous one which I can see all sorts of uses for. I am very pleased with my list of lists. Now, Steve's comment raises a couple of points of order. Firstly, one of the books is a work of fiction. You (o erudite reader) might think that some of the other books on my lists are works of fiction too but I haven't read them so I can't say that yet. This has led me to open a new category, fiction I should read. Hopefully it won't get too long too soon. Secondly, Sean Park suggested that one of the books on my list wasn't very good so I gave it a "deprecated" category - not removing it from the list altogether but perhaps putting it to the end of the queue. Steve Patrick disagrees with this assessment and thinks it should be restored to its rightful place. How do I deal with this? I've decided to use the Charmed principle. Steve cannot remove a spell that somebody else has cast on him. Sean either has to remove it himself or another witch needs to cast a reverse spell. Them's the rules. If you want Traders, Guns and Money restored to its place on the list then let me know. Footnote: I don't think I could manage my reading lists this well using LibraryThing, Google Books or Facebook's Visual Bookshelf. Using del.icio.us is really quick and easy and does everything I need. The book-specific tools want me to do things in a particular way but del.icio.us is general and universal.

Listening to last.fm recommendations

If you have a last.fm account, one thing you can do is listen to tracks that it recommends for you based on your listening habits. Last time I tried this it gave me a farrago of lowest-common denominator stuff that meant nothing to me. Today I tried it again and I'm loving what it is piping into my ears. This is what it recommends for me. What has happened to change this into something useful? There are a number of possibilities: 1. last.fm has more information about me I've now got my favourite tracks in a playlist and I've been playing them a lot. That's a couple of hundred eclectic tunes that represent what I like hearing. last.fm learns from this. 2. last.fm has more information The number of users of last.fm is growing and it has information about a wider selection of tracks and artists, and more information about which tracks people play a lot. 3. The matching algorithm has improved Not necessarily, but certainly possible. The improvement in the service could be explained by the first two factors alone, but I'm sure they tweek the algorithm too. My listening tastes vary from the popular to the quite obscure (like everybody else's probably), but I've been impressed with the variety of tunes last.fm has chosen for me. Artists I would not have considered because I thought I knew I didn't like them (Moody Blues for example), artists I had never even heard of (Sun Electric anybody?), tracks I had never heard (a remix of Tubular Bells with an extended drunken 3am monologue from Vivian Stanshall). Some of the selections cause me to press the Ban button straight away but presumably this contributes information to the algorithm to improve the service for me and everybody else. Try it.

Books I should read

Oh dear. If my list of Books I Should Have Read wasn't long enough, here is the list of books people have suggested I read as well:-

1. Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives: Books: Satyajit Das (Steve Patrick)

2. China Shakes The World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation: Books: James Kynge (Steve Patrick)

3. Who Runs This Place?: The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century: Books: Anthony Sampson (Steve Patrick)

4. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software: Books: Charles Petzold (Chris Hind)

5. Tricks of the Mind: Books: Derren Brown (Malcolm Dick)

6. The God Delusion: Books: Richard Dawkins (Steve Patrick)

7. Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe: Books: William Rosen (newspaper review)

Another plea then: how do people read so much? My journey to work is short so I can just about read The Economist in a week. At work I do work. At home I attend to my family. I don't watch television or have a hobby or do anything that could be displaced in favour of reading.

How do you manage it?

Footnote: these lists are now on del.icio.us - Books I should have read and books to read. In the spirit of JP's NewTailBlog meme, perhaps other people could use the same tag for their lists and see what happens when we aggregate the lists.

The economics of abundance

Plenty of noise going on about the economics of abundance - the notion that Keynesian laws of supply and demand don't work very well in the limiting case where supply is effectively infinite. I'm not sure anybody has the answer yet, but I'm assuming there is an Einstein out there who can challenge the Newtonian weltanschauung we are all suffering from. I came up with the phrase "quantum economics" to describe this shift in thinking. Then I thought I bet somebody has thought of that before. Indeed, here is the definitive text on Quantum Economics. So, here is my reading list at the moment: Chris Anderson The Economics of Abundance More on the economics of abundance John Walker The New Technological Corporation This was written in 1988 by the man who wrote AutoCAD but it seems to be incredibly prescient. He also uses the phrase "quantum economics". TechDirt Economics Of Abundance Getting Some Well Deserved Attention The Importance Of Zero In Destroying The Scarcity Myth Of Economics The Economics Of Abundance Is Not A Moral Issue Ross Mayfield Abundance, and Five Years of Blogging Dave Hornik Chris Anderson Strikes Again: The Economy of Abundance Confused of Calcutta Four Pillars: Because Of rather than With: A very provisional post More posts on Because Of Rather Than With A lot to read and take in, but maybe there is the beginning of an idea in there?

An anecdote

My father-in-law has run a number of businesses in his life, both large and small. His current business is based on selling tractor parts to dealerships in Latin America. That he makes a successful living in this trade is down to all the obvious factors like hard work, product knowledge and market knowledge, but this alone probably wouldn't make a viable business. His competitors are Massey Ferguson, John Deere and Ford. His is a small business. How does he compete? Firstly, he has an excellent relationship with his customers - he can bring all the business background and skills of a major account manager to a relationship that Massey Ferguson assigns to a junior sales rep. No contest. Not only does he talk their language in business terms, but he has also invested a considerable amount of time (at age 60 plus) in learning Spanish and trying to get a deeper cultural understanding of his customers. So I kind of believe him when he says that these dealerships are not about to start buying their tractor parts over the internet any time soon. He knows them and their shops better than I do. There are people that would have us believe we are on the verge of a global transition to a web-based economy, and that "high-touch" sales and marketing techniques for low-value accounts will be made obsolete by automation. Don't believe everything you read. It's not a recipe for getting massively wealthy in 18 months but it is sustainable for the time being. And I believe there will always be a place for human relationships in business, even for low-value transactions.

Open source maturity models

In Bill Hilf's latest post from his somewhat counter-intuitive position as head of Microsoft's open source laboratory, he mentions a Carnegie Mellon West initiative called OpenBRR. This is an attempt to assess the business-readiness of open source software. In other words, if you want to adopt a particular piece of open source software in your enterprise, how ready is it for a production system?

To quote from the introduction:

There is no widely used model for evaluation. This complicates open source adoption, as companies assessing open source software can rarely learn from each other’s experiences.

A fair point, but is a formal standard the answer to this problem? It seems like there is already a lot of formality about open source development because you are replacing a closely-knit development team with a looser congregation of individuals and the only way to manage this is by having high-quality source code management processes. So in that sense, some formality from the user side fits nicely with the supply side disciplines.

On the other hand, open source development is supposed to be a new paradigm for a new era. Is it right to hamper it with old-school technology evaluation methods? The OpenBRR proposal builds on two existing maturity models, Navica's Open Source Maturity Model and Cap Gemini's equivalent. The target audience for these processes seems to be decision-makers who would be more comfortable buying big iron from IBM.

The OpenBRR specification is not bad in itself. In my organisation we used a very similar proces for evaluating BPM software not so long ago. We faced the same challenges: (1) reducing a large number of potential vendors down to a manageable shortlist and (2) making sure our efforts were shared and available to other technology teams to prevent them having to go through the same expensive and time-consuming exercise themselves.

In this respect the process was no different between open source and traditional vendors. An open approach to sharing these results is a great idea, but I'm not sure it needs anything other than a public wiki to do so.

Part of growing up

Just edited my first wikipedia page. Seminal experience, even though I was only correcting a spelling mistake. See my edit here (14:06, 26 July 2005): http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jabberwocky&action=history

Anti-establishment orthodoxy

If the establishment is sufficiently unpopular, a significant number of people will oppose it. They may oppose it for fundamentally different reasons but there is a tendency for the antis to gather together under the same flag. Perhaps this explains the prevalence of two-party systems in mature democracies, but it equally applies to the Apple-can-do-no-wrong school of anti-Microsoftism. The Mac OS X user interface is flawed. Apple's corporate policies are increasingly tarnished. But for many opponents of the Microsoft monopoly, it is enough that they are different. Is it possible for us to oppose what is wrong without compromising what we say we believe is right? Don't we lose power if we fight separately instead of together? Maybe not. We can all voice our opinions with global reach now. Anybody can read this. I don't have to use anybody else's platform to have my say. The herd instinct (maybe that should be troupe instinct since we are primates) means that there will always be an anti-establishment orthodoxy. But that's no different to goths or other adolescents who know they want to stand against something but don't want the sense of vulnerability that goes along with being truly individual.

Collaborative Tube Resource part 96

I forgot a hugely important resource for information about particular tube stations (and everything else as well of course: wikipedia. The excellent entry for my example station Embankment is here. Not every station is covered, but many are. I would hope that http://www.mytube.org would be less like a reference book and more like a Rough Guide to the station and the area round it. Wikipedia and MyTube can coexist happily because they serve different purposes. What wikipedia really needs, though, is the clickable tube map I am working on. That would give it a focal point for tube information that isn't beholden to TfL copyright restrictions.