Pheonix

Almost everything we come in to contact with is designed to be thrown away. Toasters, couches, computers, buildings, public transport systems – almost everything we use will eventually end up in land fill. When we design things, we normally don’t think about what will happen once it’s served its purpose. If we do, it’s only to plan how we can manage getting rid of it. Often we don’t even do that. Most of us are guilty of hoarding some useless thing or other, simply because we never thought about what we’d do with it once we were done with it.

IT systems are no exception.

A few years ago I read a fascinating book called Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by McDonough and Braungart. The normal approach to design – the one we experience every day – is cradle to grave design. We design a product or service to be created, used, maintained, and then thrown away. McDonough and Braungart opened my eyes to a different type of design. Designing things in a way that allows them to be reborn when they’ve reached the end of their current life.

For physical objects, this means designing things to be either recyclable or biodegradable. There are countless examples of what can be done. Phones that simply pop-apart when heated above a certain temperature, making it economical to recycle their component parts. Square carpet ’tiles’, instead of rolls of carpet, that can be replaced individually when they wear, and again be recycled in to new carpet (your office, if it’s been fitted out recently, probably has these.) The ‘renting out’ and re-capture, rather than sale, of industrial chemicals.

Why do these things? Because we’re running out of land fill and resources, and so ultimately we have no choice. But perhaps more relevantly, because it’s often cheaper. In the long term, it’s cheaper to design products and services that create more resources than they use. To design products and services that will be the foundations that tomorrows products are built upon, and the fertile soil that tomorrows services grow within.

Does this have any lessons for IT management? We habitually manage our systems and services on a cradle to grave basis. Indeed, IT management frameworks such as ITIL build in the assumption that systems will be decommissioned-thrown in the bin. We make decisions on the basis that, at some point, the system is going to be replaced. We take shortcuts when developing new processes or capabilities, because we know we won’t have to support them forever. Often, we avoid making necessary changes because a new system is perpetually just around the corner.

Would we make different decisions if we were managing IT cradle to cradle? What would this mean in practice? Stay tuned.

World food production

I’ve just read Feeding the World, a special report by Joel K Bourne Jr published in June’s National Geographic – I’m just catching up on the issues that came while I was away. The report discusses the fact that world food production is failing to keep pace with world food consumption. It also discusses the Millennium Villages, championed by The Earth Institute and Jeffrey Sachs, whose book I recently read. It’s hard to fault Sachs’ book, which argues compellingly that we can end poverty, but Feeding the World reminded me of an aspect of the book with which I am not wholly satisfied.

Sachs argues, amongst other things, that the Green Revolution of the 1960s should be brought to Africa as part of a program to end extreme poverty. The Green Revolution brought high-yield grain varieties, intensive irrigation and synthetic pesticides and fertilisers to Asia, enabling global production to double in the second half of last century. The Millennium Villages are in part intended as a demonstration that this can also be achieved in Africa.

In this argument Sachs’ takes the West’s proven technologies and rigourously plans and calculates how they can be applied in the third world. This is an eminently reasonable approach, and due to its conservative nature, no doubt the approach that has the best chance of receiving mainstream political support. However, one wonders if saddling the third world with technologies that increasingly seem outmoded is the best approach.

Intensive industrial agriculture has enabled us to feed a growing global population, but it has also depleted soils and aquifers, and in many cases degraded those resources to the point where they can no longer be used. It seems that there may be hard limits to how much further industrial agriculture can carry us, and it seems that we might have come right up against those limits.

There is, however, an alternative to industrial agriculture, one that has a great deal of promise. Sustainable farming seems to be a real alternative- choosing crops that suit the local conditions, rather than those crops for which there is the greatest demand; combining different crops that compliment each other and rotating through crops that fix nitrogen or protect soils, rather than raising vast areas of a single crop; managing farms as entire and complex ecosystems, from soil biology up, rather than as an equation of nitrogen plus water in equals gross tonnage out.

Despite its great promise, sustainable farming is handicapped by it’s apparent idealism, by the ease with which it is dismissed as naivety, and by the real complexity of achieving ecological management at a global scale. The simplicity of chemical agriculture for the end user is an enormous advantage. It remains to be seen whether sustainable farming will gain any real support, or the outcome if it doesn’t. For my part though, I’d rather struggle with the complex answer, then risk backing the simple response – as appealing as it might be – to the exclusion of all else.

A lot of spam

I’m currently getting a lot of spam, and the default WordPress configuration doesn’t do much about it. Thankfully, the Akismet plugin is available – it’s just not enabled by default. Now that I’ve enabled Akismet, the bots seem to have stopped attacking me – or perhaps I’ve inadvertantly broken the comment functionality. Time for some regression testing! I’ll be right back…

Regression testing complete! No, the fact that there have been no comments since enabling Akismet is yet another proof (if one were needed) that correlation does not imply causality.

However, once comments (legitimate and otherwise) start to trickle in once more, I’m not sure Akismet will have solved my problem or not. I’ve enabled spam filtering because I don’t want to have to do it myself. However, spam filtering is imperfect, and Akismet can’t guarantee that there won’t be false positives. To guard against this, one presumes that some sort of manual process is in order. Net gain: zero. Alternatively, I can embrace the risk that I may miss out on considered, thought-provoking feedback whose only fault is a higher-than-average use of trademarked names for erectile disfunction medicine.

Review: Jeff Sachs’ The End of Poverty

As I write this, I’m in Abu Dhabi International Airport. The last time I was here, I grabbed a copy of Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. It’s a very readable book, and one that has opened my eyes to a whole different way of looking at the world. I very highly recommend that you read the book, as this review will not do it justice, but I would like to briefly summarise some key concepts that have stuck with me.

The key message of the book is that it is within our power, for the first time, to end extreme poverty. That is, over the next 15 years or so, we can build a world where no-one is without the basic necessities: food, clean water, shelter, education, health services, and the opportunity to work to better their lives.

To do this, we need to be guided by what Sachs refers to as clinical economics. Clinical economics means practicing economics as a doctor practices medicine, rather than as an exercise in promoting ideology. Rather than simplistic assessments of economic woes, it calls for a detailed differential diagnosis of the problem. Rather than one-size-fits-all solutions, clinical economics calls for an evidence based approach: choosing those courses of action that we have good empirical reasons to believe will work, and then rigorously assessing our progress against clearly defined goals.

While there are some parts of the work that I don’t completely agree with, for the most part The End of Poverty is excellent. Once again, I very highly recommend reading it. I found it to be thought-provoking and it has inspired me to find ways to engage with problems of this scale within my own domain. I have longed believed in the power of IT , and though my thoughts are yet to coalesce, I’m sure that IT has a large role to play in the end of poverty.

Two stories

Staying positive is hard. Just ask Kevin Rudd, who was recently overheard dismissing hopes of achieving a global agreement on climate change in Coperhagen. I believe Rudd was elected in large part because he gave the impression that he would act decisively on climate change. Together with the simple need for change, that was central to my decision to vote Labor. Naturally, he was careful not to give any specific promises, and we have since seen Rudd decisively avoid taking any action to mitigate climate change. I’m therefore not surprised to learn that he has no faith in the current talks, and is privately undermining them. Not behaviour one would want in a nation’s leader.

More inspiring are paralympian Kurt Fearnley’s plans to crawl the 96 kilometers of the Kakoda Trail. His positive outlook and refusal to take the easy way out by living within stereotypical limits really give pause for thought. Too often we accept limitations prescribed by habit or history, and accept defeat before we try. Those who can see other ways are truly rare role models.

In Bath

While we were in Bath last week, we were surveyed by a council member about a car park that we had used. He seemed very interested in what we had to say – particularly as we were from out-of-town. They were collecting information on where people had come from, asking for post codes. We must have been the first people to give a post code from the continent, and he was very excited by that. One of the best things about Europe is that it’s so quick and easy to get around. One of the best things about Britain outside of London is that people are surprised when you do.

Back from the UK

Just back from the UK! Talk about a whirlwind tour! Took the Eurostar from Brussels, which was brilliant. We really need proper trains in Melbourne. Brussels to London in less time then it would take to get from Belgrave to Sandringham by train. Got in to St Pancras International at 9am or thereabouts, and continued on to Heathrow where we were picking up a rental car.

Bad call. Firstly, there was the 40 minute wait for the shuttle bus to take us the 2.5 miles to the Thrifty outlet. Secondly, there was the hour long queue and very highly mediocre service. Classic case of running out of IT spend and deciding that the best course of action was to implement a “business process” workaround. Not the best introduction to Britain. Whilst in line we were treated to an excellent show of British whinging – apparently you can’t find good service in Britain any more. Thankfully this wasn’t our experience generally.

Still, once we were on the road, driving around the English countryside was perfect. Over the course of Saturday and Sunday, we took in Bath, Glastonbury, Salisbury, Avebury and Stonehenge.

We stayed near Salisbury, in a perfect little B&B called The Poplars and had dinner at The Black Horse Inn just around the corner. I wouldn’t have been sorry to have spent the whole trip there, the area was so idyllic.

Then to London, which was (I understand) uncharacteristically hot. Temperatures topping 30 degrees! Nothing much for us hardy Australians, but I suppose if the infrastructure isn’t built for it (which the Tube and our accommodation most definitely weren’t) then it will have a disproportionate effect (c.f. rail failures in Melbourne with temperatures over ~40 degrees.)

In London, we visited the Natural History and British museums, which were brilliant but really needed a week each. The museumic highlight for me was the Clockmaker’s Museum, run by The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers of London. The intense interest in clock making, as well as automatons and clockwork oreries etc, particularly during the 17th and 18th centuries is very intriguing. Having read books like Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver I can’t help but being interested in the history that in part underpins those novels.

One last thing – the sales in London! Brilliant! Those who know me will get some measure of how compelling these sales are when I say that I laid down a significant amount of plastic in my final hours in London.