tim berners-lee

This is for Everyone

Peter Cripps comment , , , ,

Twenty years ago today on 30th April 1993 CERN published a brief statement that made World Wide Web technology available on a royalty free basis and changed the world forever. Here’s the innocuous piece of paper that shows this and that truly allowed Tim Berners-Lee, at the fantastic London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony to claim “this is for everyone”. Over the past twenty years the web has become imbedded in all of our lives in ways which most of us could never have dreamed of and has probably given many of us in the software industry quite a secure (and for some, lucrative) living during that time.How fitting then that yesterday, almost 20 years to the day since CERN’s historic announcement, IBM announced a new appliance called IBM MessageSight designed to help organizations manage and communicate with the billions of mobile devices and sensors found in systems such as automobiles, traffic management systems, smart buildings and household appliances, the so called Internet of Things.

I’ve no idea what this announcement means in terms of capabilities, other than what is available in the press release, however it is comforting to note that foundational to IBM MessageSight is its support of MQTT, which was recently proposed to become an OASIS standard, providing a lightweight messaging transport for communication in machine to machine (M2M) and mobile environments. Today more than ever enterprises and governments are demanding compliance with open standards rather than proprietary ones so it is good to see that platforms such as MessageSight will be adhering to such standards.

Its Pretty Interactive, Yeah

Peter Cripps comment

I have said a number of times in this space that I believe Tim Berners-Lee to be one of the greatest software architects of all time. This conversation, as recorded in Wired, not only reiterates this belief but also shows how incredibly humble and self-effacing Berners-Lee is, as well as being the grand master of the understatement.Last week in a place called Tyler, eastern Texas, a scene which could have come straight out of a Woody Allen film was played out. For background on the case see here but, in a nutshell, a company called Eolas, claims it owns patents that entitle it to royalties from anyone whose website uses “interactive” features, like pictures that the visitor can manipulate, or streaming video. The claim, by Eolas’s owner, one Michael Doyle, is that his was the first computer program enabling an “interactive web.” Tim Berners-Lee was called as an expert witness and was being cross-examined by Jennifer Doan, a Texas lawyer representing two of the defendants Yahoo and Amazon. This is how part of the cross-examination went.

“When Berners-Lee invented the web, did he apply for a patent on it,” Doan asked.

“No,” said Berners-Lee.

“Why not?” asked Doan.

“The internet was already around. I was taking hypertext, and it was around a long time too. I was taking stuff we knew how to do…. All I was doing was putting together bits that had been around for years in a particular combination to meet the needs that I have.” [My italics]

Doan: “And who owns the web?”

Berners-Lee: “We do.”

Doan: “The web we all own, is it ‘interactive’?”

“It is pretty interactive, yeah,” said Berners-Lee, smiling.

I just love this. Here’s the guy that has given us one of the most game changing technologies of all time FOR NO PERSONAL GAIN TO HIMSELF, finding himself in a out of the way courtroom explaining one of the fundamental tenets of  software architecture: putting together bits that have been around.

Setting aside the whole thorny question of software patents and whether they are actually evil this is surely one of the greatest and most understated descriptions of what we, as software architects, actually do by the master himself. Thank you Tim.

Happy Birthday WWW

Peter Cripps comment

Today is the 20th anniversary of the world wide web; or at least the anniversary of the first web page. On this day in 1991 Tim Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup:

The World Wide Web (WWW) project aims to allow all links to be made to any information anywhere. […] The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!

He certainly found a lot of collaborators!

As I’ve said before I believe the WWW is one of the greatest feats of software architecture ever performed. Happy Birthday WWW!

Hire an Architect

Peter Cripps architecture ,

Seth Godin has a great definition of what an architect is in his blog here. Here’s the description:

Architects don’t manufacture nails, assemble windows or chop down trees. Instead, they take existing components and assemble them in interesting and important ways.

He goes on to say that:

…intentionally building a structure and a strategy and a position, not focusing your energy on the mechanics, because mechanics alone are insufficient. Just as you can’t build a class A office building with nothing but a skilled carpenter, you can’t build a business for the ages that merely puts widgets into boxes.

I like this because for me this is absolutely the essence of what an architect does, take existing components and put them together in new and interesting ways. That’s exactly what Tim Berners-Lee did when he created the web. The key skill is not to get bogged down in the detail but to maintain the big picture of whatever it is you are doing. It applies equally to IT systems just as much as it does to buildings.

Art, Creativity and the Tyranny of the Timesheet

Peter Cripps comment , , , ,

Apparently lawyers are some of the glummest groups of professionals out there! One of the reasons for this is the very nature of their profession; it’s usually a “zero-sum” game, if somebody wins someone else loses (and in extreme cases loses their life). Another theory, put forward by Dan Pink in his book Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, is that lawyers have to deal with one of the most “autonomy crushing mechanisms imaginable – the billable hour”. Lawyers have to keep careful track of every hour they spend, sometime to the level of granularity of six minute time chunks, so they can bill their time to the correct client. As a result their focus inevitably shifts to from the quality of the work they do (their output) to how they measure that work (its input). Essentially a lawyers reward comes from time, the more hours they bill, the higher their (or their legal practices) income. In today’s world it is hard to think of a worse way to ensure people do high quality and creative work than making them fill in a timesheet detailing everything they do.

Unfortunately the concept of the billable hour is now firmly embedded into other professions, including the one I work in, IT consulting. As IT companies have moved from selling hardware to software that runs on that hardware and then to providing consulting services to build systems made up of hardware and software they have had to look for different ways of charging for what they do. Unfortunately they have taken the easy option of the billable hour, something that the company accountants can easily measure and penalise people for if they don’t achieve their billable hours every week, month or year.

The problem with this of course is that innovation and creativity does not come in six minute chunks. Imagine if the inventors of some of the most innovative software architecture (Tim Berners-Lee’s world-wide web or Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook) had to bill their time. When such people wake up in the middle of the night with a great idea that would solve their clients business problem what’s the first thing they reach for: a notebook to record the idea before its gone or a spreadsheet to record their time so they can bill it to the client!

As Dan Pink says, the billable hour is, or should be, a relic of the old economy where routine tasks (putting doors on cars, sewing designer jeans or putting widgets into boxes) had tight coupling between how much effort goes in and the work that comes out. In the old economy where a days work equaled a days pay and you were a day laborer you essentially sold out to the highest bidder. Isn’t what we do worth more than that? As Seth Godin points out “the moment you are willing to sell your time for money is the moment you cease to be the artist you’re capable of being”.

But what’s the alternative? Clearly IT consulting firms need to be able to charge clients for their work; they’re not charities after all. Here are my thoughts on alternatives to the tyranny of the timesheet which enable the art and creativity in building IT systems to flourish.

  1. Start with the assumption that most people want to do good work and incentivise them on the work products they create rather than the work inputs (time recorded).
  2. Recognise that creativity does not fit nicely into a 9 – 5 day. It can happen at any time. Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) has his most creative time between 5am and 9am so is just finishing his work when the rest of us are starting. Creative people need to be allowed to work when they are at their most creative, not when company accountants say they should.
  3. When charging clients for work agree on what will be delivered by when and then build the right team to deliver (a team of shippers not time keepers). Of course this gives company lawyers a nightmare because they get involved in endless tangles with clients about what constitutes a deliverable and when it is complete (or not). Maybe giving lawyers a creative problem to solve will cheer them up though.
  4. Give people time-out to do their own thing and just see what happens. Google famously give their employees 20% time where they are allowed to spend a day working on their own projects. A number of google applications (including gmail) were invented by people doing their own thing.
  5. Allow people to spend time having interactions outside their immediate work groups (and preferably outside their company). Innovative ideas come from many sources and people should be allowed to discover as many new sources as possible. If someone wants to spend half-a-day walking round an art gallery rather than sitting at their desk, why not? Frank Gehry allegedly got his idea for the shape of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao from Picasso’s cubist paintings.

In the new economy, the conceptual age where creativity and versatilism is the order of the day the timesheet should be firmly assigned to the shredder and people should be treated as innovaters not just cogs in the big corporate machine.

How Not to Create Artitecture

Peter Cripps architecture ,

Following on from my previous post what should we do if we just want to create a SOA (same old architecture) rather than a TOA (totally outrageous artitecture)? Here are five things you should do if you want average rather than exceptional architectures (anti-patterns for ineffective architecture if you like):

  1. Focus on what your employer wants you to do (your job) rather than what your client wants you to do (your work). How much time is the project team spending excessively networking obsessing over recording data that is not project related and of dubious use anyway or attending endless meetings which don’t have a clear agenda or any useful outcome.
  2. Start committees instead of taking action. Like most things in life the best architectures don’t come from committees but come from the focussed efforts of a small team of architects. Sometime that small team can be just one person (consider Tim Berners-Lee’s world-wide web or Ray Ozzie’s Lotus Notes). Committees (we call them Design Authorities in technical circles) may have their place when multiple stakeholders need to be bought together but don’t confuse governance (i.e. controlling the steady-state) with design (i.e. initiating a change of state). Unfortunately there is safety in committees where there is no single person responsible for decisions and no one individual can be blamed when something goes wrong.
  3. Create a culture of blame and negative criticism where everyone has to watch their back. Many people on projects interact with others as though they are better than their peers or want to teach them a lesson. Others assign motivations and plots where there are none. Still others criticise anyone who is doing something differently from the norm. Mistakes happen and are usually the result of a series of unfortunate events rather than deliberate negligence or dishonesty. Learn from mistake and move on.
  4. Stop people from learning. Not allowing or fostering a learning culture is probably one of the gravest crimes that can be committed in the conceptual age. Learning does not just have to come from attending classroom based courses (or the dreaded “online training”) but should come from everything we do. Treat every type of interaction with a person (talking to them, reading their blog or whatever) as an opportunity to learn something new.
  5. Produce overly complex and outlandish work products. The problem with many delivery processes is that they can demand large numbers of work products that, when taken literally, will pull the team down into a never ending spiral of “document production” where every deliverable has to be signed off before progress can be made. Delivery processes and the work products they produce should be highly customised to the projects needs not the needs of stakeholders that demand huge volumes of written material which no one needs let alone reads.

Not having any/all of these is not a cast-iron guarantee you will succeed in building great systems based on innovative architectures but having them will certainly ensure you have architectures not artitectures.