Category Archives: rants

Sometimes You Just Have to Shoot the Sacred Cow

With apologies to our Hindu and Zoroastrian friends, sometimes the sacred cow needs to be put down. If it’s old, weak, limping, and in pain, it’s not slaughter, it’s mercy.

So how do you know when it’s time to shoot the sacred cow? How do you know when it’s beyond it’s prime and on a rapid decline? Simple. You monitor it’s health and give every cow an annual checkup. When it’s overall health level starts to drop dramatically, you know it’s time.

This goes for every cow in your organization — the performance cow, the promotion cow, and the payments cow in addition to the marketing, legal, and advisory cows. This is very important because performance that was good enough yesterday might not be good enough today, different skill sets will be needed by the managers of tomorrow, and if it takes 57 days to process a payment, that’s a problem, even if it is within your 60 day limit.

So, just like this recent HBR article on “tackling the obvious” points out, if you want to stay alive, you have to continually ask what is good performance, whom do you promote, and are you focussed on change … because your supply chain can’t stand still and survive.

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A Purdue Philosophy Degree — Literally Not Worth The Printed Paper

I found this recent article on Daily Finance on how “eBay halts indebted Purdue Grad’s diploma auction” very amusing. While I feel sorry for the alumnus, it strengthens my belief that a degree in the philosawfical isn’t worth the printed paper you hand over for the printed parchment in return. As per the article, the graduate said that his philosophy degree has not given him the means to earn enough income to cover his $470 per month obligations to Sallie Mae.

A degree is only an investment if it increases your income — and since most liberal arts degrees don’t lead to a job, these degrees are just expenses. So if you can’t afford them, i.e. if you can’t afford to flush the 30K, 50K, or 100K down the toilet that some institutions will charge you for the privilege of obtaining the degree, don’t borrow. It’ll only end in tears, as it did for this poor soul who racked up 97K in debt getting degrees in religious and women’s studies.

This Is Gonna End Well … NOT!

As pointed out by Dick Locke in his post from earlier this week on More Headlines You Hate To See, this is an actual headline from DailyTech:

Foxconn Makes Employees Promise Not to Kill Themselves

FoxConn is asking all of its “colleagues” to sign a “health and wellness” letter that includes, in one of the numbered clauses, a statement that

I will not harm myself or others

in response to Apple’s demands to do something about the “suicide problem” in a factory that has seen almost fifteen suicides in recent months. (KokuGamer.com) I think the nets that Foxconn chairman Terry Gou plans to build around the dormitories are going to be more effecitive. (source)

After all, how are you going to reprimand a dead employee? Flail him? He’s already dead, moron.

Hopefully Apple and Dell can figure out what failed and force Foxconn to fix the problem. (source)

More Reasons the Cloud is Not a Fluffy Magic Box

Soon after I told you that the cloud is not a fluffy magic box, I found this great post over on an Information Week blog on “3 things that could kill the cloud” which points out some more sobering realities of the cloud, which is just really an abstraction of the multi-tenant SaaS model where one provider provides the software and another provides the infrastructure the software runs on. The article has some good points that should be taken into account before you decide that the cloud is the answer. (Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.)

  1. Scalability is not UnlimitedFirst of all, at any point in time, the infrastructure provider has a limited amount of hardware and bandwith available. When that is reached, you’re out of scalability until the provider ramps up. Furthermore, even if the provider ramps up, there’s still a practical limit dictated by the software. Most databases start to fail miserably when you get to the Terrabyte range. Most analytics applications fail miserably when you ask them to process millions of records in real time. Etc.
  2. Security is not AbsoluteThe cloud does not inherently provide more security as some vendors would have you believe. In fact, it might even provide less. In reality, the security of any platform comes down to the knowledge and vigilance of the provider’s people and how well they are at identifying potential holes, locking them down, and keeping up with patches. If the software vendor assumes a certain port will be locked down and the infrastructure provider leaves it open or if the hardware vendors assumes the software vendor will patch core applications and vice versa, security is weakened.
  3. Prices can be HigherWhile up front prices are quite cheap as you’re primarily paying for energy costs (to run and cool the CPUs) and bandwidth, and while the Cloud will be cheaper for small-scale applications, the reality is that for large scale, high-bandwidth, applications, the total costs can be more expensive than running your own data centre as most providers don’t yet have the scale and expertise to beat in-house costs. You have to do the analysis.
  4. Your application can disappear in a puff of smoke.Thanks to the Patriot act, if a drug dealer happens to be using the same multi-tenant provider, in the US the FBI can sweep in and seize *every* server in the data centre, regardless of what else is on the servers, shutting down the entire operation of the infrastructure provider for an unspecified time — like they did to Core IP Networks in April.

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The Seven Deadly Software Sins

Regular readers will notice that I regularly rally against a number of different software products and platforms. It’s not necessarily that I think they’re (intentionally) evil (well, at least not in most cases), but that they commit one or more of the seven deadly software sins and perpetuate myths over reality, which helps no one. So what are the software sins? And why are they dangerous? Let’s answer these questions once and for all.

  1. “Shrinkwrap” This is the notion that software can be “packaged”, sold, and never touched again. No software is bug free, no software can be configured for every possible platform, no integration works issue free out of the box, and every piece of software ever written has a shelf life, which gets shorter by the year. Thinking you can sell a piece of software, install it, and be done with it for however long finance says your customers can “amortize” the license cost is delusional. That’s why I like SaaS, and, more specifically, the pay-as-you-go software model. Especially in business, we have to start treating information technology as a utility, because that’s what it has to become to be truly useful.
  2. “The Cloud” This is the notion that the cloud is a fluffy magic box that will solve all our problems, which it’s not. It’s simply another delivery model, where the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider outsources its infrastructure to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IAAS) provider who specializes in green data center management, leaving the SaaS provider to focus on its software strength.
  3. “Dashboards” They don’t call them idiot lights for fun! They call them that because dangerous and dysfunctional dashboards give you a false sense of security that the ship isn’t sinking when in fact it’s going down faster than Maury the Management Moron’s fraudulently expensed Thai “Masseuse” for his “stiff joint” because the idiot who configured the dangerous and dysfunctional dashboard thought that “pump performance” would be a better gauge than “water on board”.
  4. “Spreadsheets as BI” Business Intelligence is the deep insight that can only be derived through a thorough and detailed multi-dimensional analysis of all relevant data through a true data analysis tool, not a wimpy two dimensional spreadsheet that only allows for a small number of statistical calculations and bland graphs. That’s why Excel is not a supply chain solution. It was designed to be a simple accounting tool, and that’s all it is. Trying to use it for more is just asking for disaster, as demonstrated by the fact that 90% of spreadsheets have non-trivial errors in them. Get a real e-Sourcing, e-Procurement, or Trade Data Management tool.
  5. “Sizzle over Substance” It’s what the tool does, not how it looks. Just because the company in question hired a few Flash monkeys and integrated some animated charts and graphs doesn’t mean the tool does anything. In fact, if the capability is being promoted as a strong selling feature, I’d argue that the tool probably doesn’t do anything at all. Some of the best analysis tools in the space still use simple 8-bit Windows Interfaces built in Visual C and Visual Basic. They’re the best tools because, instead of wasting the last ten years redesigning the UI every year to look flashier, the developers spent the last ten years adding more analysis power, speed, and flexibility. If it sizzles, there’s no beef in that double cheese burger, just bacon. And you’ll be left hungry. Similarly, if the PowerPoint Rangers spent too much time on that presentation, ask yourself what the provider is trying to hide. If the solution is really great, the sales person won’t be able to get to the demo fast enough (because truly great software sells itself).
  6. “Social Networking” This is where you build your offering around, or attempt to integrate with, social networking where it makes absolutely no sense to do so. Business is business, not fun. Plus, let’s look at the definition of social. Seeking or enjoying the companionship of other people. People! Not computers. And definitely not bots. You say you can tell the difference? Are you sure? Some of the chat bots are so good that it’s pretty hard to tell the difference between them and a r34l g4m3r that’ll p4wn ur @ss. In fact, if you administered the Turing Test, you’d probably choose the chat bot. Secondly, where’s the “networking”? How are you “networking” by farming someone’s virtual fields in cyberspace? Or poking them? Or by reading time-lagged status updates? You’re not. Thirdly, and most importantly, as it stands now, “social” networks are nothing more than a useless time suck. And, as a bonus, if you’re on Facebook, all your privacies are belong to us“. (Pop Culture Reference) See SI’s previous posts on Facebook for details. The reality is that, where networking and companionship is involved, you’re better off playing a MMORPG and joining The Guild. In fact, you’ll even learn collaboration skills, cultural sensitivity, project management, time management, and economics whereas most social networks won’t teach you a damn thing.
  7. “Alert Communication” This is the asynchronous “communication” that Twitter purports to offer … but comments are not conversations! Furthermore, Twitter will make a twit out of you, literally, as a study has found that potheads are smarter than Twitterers. This also means that “sound bites” and pointless press releases add no value to your software.

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