Finger stylus

I've been watching my kids using their DS consoles. One of the main things that I notice is the styluses constantly being left lying around, getting lost, chewed or otherwise broken.
It is certainly much easier to use a finger; with the added benefit that, in general, people are more accurate in using their built-in equipment rather than external tools. The trouble is, of course, that fingers are usually much too big for the resolution required by modern touch devices.
Essentially a stylus is a miniature finger, except that they tend to be wielded in a manner more like a pencil. The implement lies along the finger and extends past the tip to provide a finer contact point than possible with a finger. This has restrictions for the necessary length and thickness of the tool to make it possible to hold comfortably. For instance, nearly all styluses I have seen are too short and thin to be easily handled - a restriction applied by the form factor of the device being used and how easily the tool can be stored.
The thought occurs that the more natural movement would be using the finger itself. The issue then becomes the wide area of a finger tip. Filing a long finger-nail into a point would be one solution but is something that would inconvenient when not in use.
An artificial fingernail then, that can be slipped on and off. A 'thimble' with a soft point on the tip. This form factor would provide a more natural mechanism for using smaller touch screens.

Now I realise that this would be a gimmick only. There are obvious issues with how to store on or in the device for easy access. Also the variation in finger size and the complications imposed by multi-touch. Still a flexible, elastic fingertip with a small point on the end would be an interesting variation on a theme.
This post is just vague rambling. If anyone is reading this and finds the idea intriguing, feel free to use it. I can't imagine that I would bother doing so my self.

Operating System Personalities

My mother-in-law is looking for a new computer. Her ancient machine - with CRT and running WinXP (no service pack) is finally going to be retired.
I find it interesting the advice she has been given from the rest of the family and what it says about the source.
Her daughter has recommended an Apple, preferably an Air or even an iPad. That says something about her.
Her son has recommended getting a shop to put something together from parts and make sure you install Linux. That says something about him.

To introduce an analogy - Apple are the cool kids in the school-yard. Everyone admires them and wants to be part of the group. They are where the party is AT. To be accepted you have to do things the acceptable way - which means the Apple way. You should sneer at everyone else. Also you need to update your entire wardrobe every six months to stay in fashion. Apple products ARE cool and desirable - but they are not designed to last.
And yes, my sister-in-law is very stylish and popular.

Linux is the nerdy kids and the outcasts. It is very robust and built to all the best specs. It is technically the best. It is eminently Extensible, Flexible and so forth. It is *very* robust and can be adapted to be exactly right for any purpose. There are multiple versions with fine distinctions that only the geeks really care about - but which you have to know in order to set it up properly. Basically there is a whole lot of context that you need to be aware of before you can join.
And yes, my brother-in-law is a geek.

To continue the analogy, Windows is the mainstream. They are inclusive and let anybody join. By default you are part of this group whatever your inclination. They go out of their way to make sure that they are open to all comers. Of course, this is also the downside. They are also open to all the undesirables (whatever that may mean to you). The bad kids (malware) and the clueless (useless applications) are there as well and you have to share the playground with them.

To answer the obvious question - my mother-in-law eventually bought an iMac. Not stylish anymore but it suits her use and, more than anything else, it just works. Which is fine by me since I know nothing about Macs and so I won't have to try to fix it for her :-)

Corporate Goals

I was recently reading a blog post (an interesting read, if somewhat long and technically focussed).
The point that stuck was in the first few paragraphs where it talks about the ideal state in a corporation. Where everything is aligned with the company strategy. Where the approach taken at each branch of the corporate tree contributes to the goals of the level above.
It occurred to me that I have no idea what my organisation's goals *are* at the company, unit or account level - nor what the strategies are in place to achieve them. This makes it quite difficult for me to tell if what I am doing is aligned or not; whether I am helping or hindering the strategies.

I have had several useful discussions at the account level which clarified how specific projects fit within the (implied) strategies. But I did not learn what those strategies were - only how my manager thought they applied to the immediate situation.
There are exceptions; the CEO of our local branch recently shared her intent to drive the company toward a more socially responsible role - and was asking for suggested strategies to achieve that. The CEO of our parent company has mentioned, as an aside in a corporate-wide message, that he sees the global company heading toward a more product-centric future. Both of these *appear* to be aligned with the published corporate vision, but it is very difficult to tell since it will be critically dependent on how the goals are implemented. And that will depend on the strategies adopted.
Obviously not all strategies can be advertised widely for business reasons, and certainly they will adapt over time to changing circumstances. But it should also be true that there are directions that the corporation would like to head, and decisions made about the means to achieve this, which can be shared with all employees.
The majority of these intents may not be directly relevant to my day to day work, it helps me put context on what we are doing. And it provides an approach to take when talking to clients or other team members. Apart from anything else, understanding the reasoning behind decisions made by the governing team, at each level in the organisation, provides more relevance to the work and therefore a greater sense of engagement.

So, given the advantages, how does it come about that we know nothing about the direction the company is intending to go? The trouble is that there are very many managers who like to play things very close to their chests. Letting people know what you are doing leaves the door open for them to comment on how you do it; or, even worse, discover that you are NOT aligned and are working on your own behalf, not the company's.
I have had one account manager (i.e. a sales person) ask us to put together a web-site where his team could enter in the current prospects, how much they were worth, the likelihood of conversion etc. One of the requirements was that it NOT be able directly upload to the corporate dashboard. He wanted to make sure he had the chance to 'adjust' the figures before they became visible to his bosses.
In addition, I have found our company to be almost paranoid about what "leaks" out to the media and how they might spin the information. I am not sure whether this is a consequence of the size of the company, the culture (internally or externally) or the pre-delictions of the governance team. I do find it is very difficult to get any information about the reasons behind are policies and what they are intended to achieve.

Corporate Governance

There are a large number of people in my company who are called 'managers'. There are project managers and portfolio managers and engagement managers and account managers and delivery managers and, and, and...
The question arises - why is it necessary to have so much management? I think a large part of it is just terminology.
A minor part is because the company is basically Indian. Despite having sites around the world the internal culture is very much sub-continental. As an non-Indian, one of the things that is clear is that everyone wants to be a manager. I have been told that this is cultural. Status arises from the number of people/activities that you influence rather than the work you do yourself (as it is in my home culture).
However, there are a number of roles in any company which are referred to as 'manager' but which I would suggest are more governal (is that a real word?). These are the "senior management" roles. The CxO level jobs are not trully management, or they shouldn't be. These are governance roles in the same way that national government is not the same as management. The Bureacracy is in charge of management. The ministers and congressmen and corporate leaders are in charge of setting direction and creating policy.
To have policy set by junior staff in the IT department means that the overall goals of the business can be short-circuited by someone with no view outside their office. (Of course the junior staff member in IT may have a wider vision than the CIO but we are talking about abstract roles and responsibilities here, not real people).
Hence the 'senior management' would be better referred to as 'corporate governors'. The change in title would hopefully give a different focus to the roles.
Of course, a good policy maker takes into account all the consequences of the policy and will canvas feedback and suggestions from all stakeholders. (Again we are back to ministerial roles rather than management.) Just as it is the duty of every member of the organisation to bring details (and ideas) to the attention of the governance team. Implementation of the ideas and management of the process is not however, the responsibility of the governance team.

This has drifted far from what I wanted to say - about the nature of government in most organisations - but I think it is a necessary prelude to define the approach.

What do I talk about?

It is interesting to find how difficult it is to articulate an idea enough to write it down in a coherent form. One of my intents with creating this blog was to get used to writing things down. Instead of ideas whirling around in my head as I re-tread old ground over and over again, if it is put on "paper" then, in theory, I should be able to view it from a different angle.
The trouble with this theory is that it is often very hard to formulate the various aspects of an idea in a linear form that makes any sort of sense. The gestalt of an idea contains so many side tracks and associated concepts that it is very difficult to follow just one. It is particularly annoying when I drift off into another path and never get back to the point I was trying to make!
More to the point for writing it down is where to start when showing only one side of an idea seems purile and pointless. Things that seem deep and meaningful in my head, with many interesting connotations and facets, get flattened into something that is simply not particularly insightful and which seems to have been said multiple times before.
Still, since this blog is not being read by anyone (according to the stats), it is just for me to say whatever and it really doesn't matter. So be it.
Perhaps I can broaden the scope somewhat. I was keeping this mostly impersonal and non-technical. But it started writing down some concepts related to heavy-weight vs light-weight applications and it occurred to me that this is probably a good place to go over what I want to say while I try to find the common thread that I am looking for.

Fragmentation and Consolidation

Recently I attended a talk about the National Broadband Network (NBN) being rolled out in Australia. In part it considered possible impacts of higher bandwidth and faster internet connections.
I am amazed at how poorly this is understood by some sectors - especially many politicians. It may only be rhetoric when they refer to 'being about to download movies faster' but really - is that all they see the internet as being? The world wide web *can* (and does) provide content faster and better than any other mechanism, but it is hardly just another broadcast medium. There are very many, very intelligent people who have been talking for years - starting, I think, with the Cluetrain Manifesto - about all the other capabilities which will be made available with good connectivity.
One good example given in the talk was the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Built at a time when there were very few cars on the road and almost no-one driving, the bridge was designed with four road lanes in each direction and two rail lanes. Way more than anyone at the time could possibly forsee being used. As we now know, the Bridge is now supplemented with another deck for trains and the Harbour Tunnel - and both are only barely supporting the demand. That it is anywhere close is argument enough for building for the future - most other roads in the country are full almost as soon as they are finished.

But that was not the original point that I was going to make. Another point that was brought up in the talk was the possibility of dynamic selection by consumers of utility provider. Most utilities in the country are supplied by one company - as wholesaler - and billed through another - as retailer. I am sure that there is some good business reason for this but I can only see the extra middle-man as being an extra cost on the consumer.
Be that as it may, it leaves the door open for households to change provider, for example for electricity, if some other retailer drops the price. (The providers of course counter this by only offering term contracts). By switching is a lengthy process and not something done yearly let alone daily.
Good internet access and online price lists mean that, in theory, users could switch two or three times a day to take advantage of the minute by minute benefit in prices. The best off-peak price from this retailer and the best on-peak price from that, etc.
Now I really don't think this sort of thing will ever happen. To start with the retailers are too canny to allow their customers to move about that easily. As with phone providers, the utilities are already starting to introduce a 'confusopoly' (Scott Adams term) so that prices simply can't be compared in the first place.
However, the concept introduces the idea of fragmentation of supply. If you were to get your power (or any other service) from multiple providers, would you necessarily recieve a bill from each? This could be very inconvenient, even if setting up direct debits (which tie you closely to your bank - hard to move 20 direct debits to another institution).
So the fragmentation in supply opens an opportunity for consolidation in another area. If all your bills were sent to one service, which provided you with a single invoice - all of which is managed electronically, that would make it enormously simpler for the average consumer. Indeed, it seems that almost all bills in Australia are created and sent from about half a dozen providers which have arrangements with any company large enough to send regular bills. This could be a value-add for them or for any other group that would like to insert themselves as consumer agent. Brokerage groups - who allow you to navigate the confusopolies now - would be another prime candidate for this service.

Thinking back over the above, I think it is only one aspect of a much larger conceptual framework of fragmentation and consolidation discussion. The internet allows consumers to have more control over where they source things - hence fragmentation. But at the same time, they need some method of consolidating those fragments to provide a managable point of view - hopefully more focused on their own requirements rather than the needs of the provider.
Perhaps the discussion above is simply a single concrete example of how this might work in practice?

Data, Information and Knowledge.

Many years ago I was working at one unit of CSIRO (Australia's major research organisation) and there were regular brown-bag sessions covering aspects of related areas.
There were a number of good talks, sometimes internal, sometime from visitors from other units, other countries etc. There is one that I particularly remember which was about the difference between 'Data', 'Information' and 'Knowledge'.

As I remember the definitions used were something like:
Data = a record, or a set of related values which tell you something about the world.
Information = a document. I remember the presenter spending sometime justifying this point but don't remember the details. It came down to the fact that information was a concrete entity which could be written down and persisted. Thinking about this now I don't think that a physical document should be required. Just that the information should be abstractly external and therefore documentable.
Knowledge = what is in someone's head. He was clear on the fact that knowledge always required someone to know it. Knowledge is not passed on to someone else, but rather created within their own minds as a partial copy of the original. The point being, of course, that no-one can be sure that what they know about a topic is the same as some-one else's view. If nothing else the mental models and contextual links will be quite different.

Several years later I tried to see if any of this had ever been published or was available somewhere within the organistion. I was unable to define exactly when I had heard it, who had presented or even what unit they were from. Naturally I was unsuccessful.
I have found other definitions of Data, Information & Knowledge* but none seem to match the approach I remember.
In other words - I am not sure if what I have written above matches in any way the actual presentation. Still, it provides a basis for further thought.

The approach has significant consequences for things such as knowledge bases or knowledge transfer sessions etc. An organisation, if treated as an organism, has knowledge of its environment and its internal processes. This knowledge is a conglomeration of the knowledge of the constituents, the individual members, of the organisation and is subject to contexual links between them. (I suspect the same applies to knowledge within individuals). Communication patterns - how information is processed and propagated - within any group of people will have a significant impact on the operational knowledge the group uses to perform its function - and on the sensory knowledge it derives to examine its environment.
To maintain knowledge within an organisation requires that it be sufficiently dispersed amongst the members of the group so that the removal of any specific element has no significant impact. Dispersal of the knowledge requires that sufficient communication paths exist to distribute information amongst the people most involved in it. Since knowledge tends to be stratified within an organisation (i.e. each level in the hierarchy has its own priorities; despite "Undercover Boss" you would not expect the CEO to know how to work on the shop floor - their priorities are different) the most important communication paths are between peers. A good manager should understand this and encourage it; while still understanding enough of his people to be able to cover the inevitable gaps.
There is a whole discipline there about the creation of knowledge in new members of a group. Depending on the maturity and size of an organisation and the clarity of the knowledge, there are very many different mechanisms for achieving this. Teaching, Training, Mentoring, Coaching, Leading, or just chatting between the old hands and the newbies. Each has its own advantages and drawbacks and areas of effectiveness. All are related to re-creating knowledge held by one person in the mind of another.
Converting knowledge to documents allows it to be propagated and stored. But storage of information in a repository can only be useful as a back-up mechanism and with full understanding of the limitations. 'Knowledge bases' are only useful if used as temporary storage and constantly updated. Nailing down knowledge as information makes it static and isolated. It removes context and the documentation is locked in place where it quickly goes stale. If picked up in time, by someone who has some mental framework in which to place it, the information can be brought back to life as knowledge. But over time, the signal to noise ratio decreases and it becomes more and more difficult to identify what is relevant.
In other words, unless carefully organised and maintained - and with regular turn-over - any 'knowledge store' collects so much outdated information that it becomes a major effort to find the uesful tidbits. This is the whole point of librarians. They specialise in the organisation, maintenance and search for meaningful information that may be used to re-create knowledge.

but one point that I think I may return to is that one view of the Internet is as a vast information repository. Most of it is turned over very regularly and hence is relatively useful - depending on the relevance it has to the knowledge you already have in your head**. While not particularly well organised (and, I think, all the more powerful because of it), the information can be reached easily which mitigates somewhat. However current search mechanisms could easily become a problem. 4M responses to a simple query is not targetted and it is very difficult to find anything when the relevant keywords are too generic (try finding about a problem where IE8 freezes occassionally - what other search terms can I think of?). Extracting the signal from the noise becomes more and more difficult as the total volume of information increases.

I am not sure where I am going with this and in re-reading the post seems to ramble about a bit. But it touches on a number of points that I think I will explore in more detail later and I don't want to leave them out. Besides - since no-one is reading this anyway, who cares :-)

* For instance: Information and Knowledge as the first and second derivatives respectively of Data with respect to Intelligence. A cute definition but not particularly useful - even mathematically :-)
** Useful is a very relative term. It has a critical dependence on the inclinations of the person acquiring the knowledge and how closely it can be linked to existing knowledge.