Copenhagen

Not the agreement that was hoped for. A weak Accord that was noted only, not accepted. A step in the right direction, I suppose, but the gap between the warnings given by scientists and the action committed to by politicians is a little scary.

And so I ask myself again: what can I do about this? I consistently make excuses along the lines of: I’m a renter, I can’t improve the energy efficiency of my home; I already drive only rarely, cycling to work most days; I have to do something to earn a dollar, so I can’t devote myself to this cause full-time. The list of excuses covers easily every possible avenue of action.

I really think I need to go back to the drawing board on this one.

Movember

This year I’m participating (for the first time) in Movember! This involves growing a hideous moustache to raise awareness for prostate cancer and other men’s health issues. Obligatory photos to follow. Anyone who is willing to support me ’sight unseen’ can go to my donation page. I know that readers of this blog are very generous, and won’t hesitate to dig deep for a great cause!

Update: Day 9 – how time flies! I know I only posted this morning, but still…

Forgive the shocking image quality. A David Niven moustache has been requested. Unless there’s a higher bidder, I think that’s how I’ll have to go!

Oxfam Trailwalker

Anyone want to do the Oxfam Trailwalker? Seems I’ve been somewhat tardy getting a team together… the places available for those willing to commit to raising $1000+ filled up within a day. Which means now, the minimum fund raising to enter is $3000. Anyone game?

Test driven design

I don’t know quite what it is, but something about test-driven development (TDD) appeals to me. Perhaps it strikes a chord with my fundamental belief that machines should do the work so that people have time to think. Or perhaps it’s because TDD appeals to my anal nature. Whatever the case is, I like any opportunity to automate things, and although I’ve never done any, TDD seems to an absolutely brilliant way to spend one’s days.

Only down side is – I’m on an integration project at the moment, and so the opportunity for TDD is limited, right? Well, it might be a wee bit harder, but we shouldn’t let that stand in the way. ThoughWorks have a whitepaper (written by Gregor Hohpe and Wendy Istvanick) that talks about their approach to TDD in enterprise integration projects.

It lays out really clearly all the component pieces needed to overcome the challenges in creating automated tests for enterprise integration solutions, and gives some pretty good advise on designing for testability – which is probably not on our radar at the moment.

Might just drop this on the test analysts desk come Monday.

Walking a long way

I’m not sure what it is, but the idea of walking a really long way appeals to me is some kind of primal way. Cradle Mountain, the Appalachian trail, perhaps something in New Zealand. Cycling a long way, too, has its appeal. I’m not quite sure why this is. Perhaps some sort of naive yearning for a return to a mythical golden age of nomads, when the human species was more in balance with its environment.

Recently though, a friend proposed the ultimate slog. Travelling from Northern Scotland to the southern most tip of South America, entirely by human-powered means. Swimming, walking, cycling, kayaking would all be in. Motorised transport – out.

Am I crazy to be considering this?

Updates

A few quick updates for keen readers: I know I haven’t been posting as regularly as I would like. There are a few things in the pipeline, but nothing brought to fruition as yet.

For those worried about whether or not my business case for multiple monitors was successful or not: it was indeed successful. My PC was swapped out and a second monitor installed on Thursday morning. So far, they are everything I hoped for and more.

I’m sure there is also great interest in how things are progressing with Phoenix, the idea of managing IT systems from cradle to cradle, rather than cradle to grave. Unfortunately, there has not been a great deal of activity on this front, but let me leave you with a qualification, a question, and the promise of more to come.

The qualification: Despite the reference to Cradle to Cradle, Phoenix isn’t about green IT systems – although they are very important. Instead, Phoenix is about how the information imbedded in one system survives the death of that system, and rebirth in another.

The question: if you’re developing new functionality with a system today, the odds are pretty good that XML is involved. Are we at the point where we have standardised building blocks for XML schemas? For example, physical mailing addresses: is there the one true XML schema for address information? Or are there a half a dozen competing standards, plus hundreds of unique implementations imbedded within larger frameworks?

The promise of more to come: there will be more to come.

Health and organic food in Cuba

There’s a lot of lessons we could learn from Cuba. That’s right, Cuba. Poor, communist nation, currently the subject of US embargoes. Admittedly, I don’t fully understand the political situation there, but here’s what I do understand: in 2003 Cuba is ranked even 7th (behind 30 other countries) in terms of Healthy Average Life Expectancy (HALE – figures taken from WHOSIS).

The HALE in Cuba is 68. Japan’s HALE is 75. Japan spent $2018 (average of spending from 1995-2006) to achieve this. The USA (the least effective spender on health) spent $4949 to achieve a HALE of just 69. On average, the 30 top ranked countries spend $2475 per capita. Cuba spent just $211. The nearest rival in terms of health spending effectiveness was Singapore (HALE 70, per capita spending $941) which spent $13 per year of healthy average life, versus $3 per year in Cuba. The top five performers are Cuba, Singapore, Malta, Spain and Japan.

There are of course lessons to be learnt from all of these countries. Here are a few that we can learn from Cuba: focus on prevention. Train doctors, and imbed them in communities, rather than hospitals alone. Fund research. Use vaccines and eliminate diseases. Measles was eliminated in Cuba in the early or mid 1990’s. Grow and eat healthy food.

Cuba has been assisted greatly by the US embargoes on this front – it had no choice, other than starving. Cuban’s grow food without petrochemicals such as fertilisers and pesticides. They don’t depend on oil to plow the earth or ship produce great distances. Instead, farms are interspersed within communities, including within cities. They use natural substances to deter pests, and use complementary crop techniques, instead of monocultures that require substantial chemical intervention. The result is cheap, healthy food – and it shows in healthy average life expectancy.

Multiple monitors

Anyone who has used dual monitors (or a very large monitor) will know that the extra screen real estate makes work more productive and less difficult. However, it can be difficult to convince your boss – who works exclusively on their laptop’s 11 inch screen – that it’s worth the cost.

So I put together a business case.

First step: is there a benefit? From my own experience, yes there is. Any time I’m doing any sort of serious work at home, be it research, coding, or writing a blog post, I set my laptop up at my desk with a second monitor. It’s a much faster, more pleasant way of working with multiple windows. I might have reference material open in one window, and my be writing a post in another, for example. A quick google reinforces that there is ample anecdotal evidence that multiple monitors are a smarter way to work. I needed something more than that, though. I needed an empirical study.

Enter Productivity and multi-screen displays. According to this NEC-Mitsubishi study, “Respondents got on task quicker, did the work faster, and got more of the work done with fewer errors in multi-screen configurations than with a single screen. They were 6 percent quicker to task, 7 percent faster on task, generated 10 percent more production, were 16 percent faster in production, had 33 percent fewer errors, and were 18 percent faster in errorless production. Multi-screens were seen as 29 percent more effective for tasks, 24 percent more comfortable to use in tasks, 17 percent easier to learn, 32 per cent faster to productive work, 19 percent easier for recovery from mistakes, 45 percent easier for task tracking, 28 percent easier in task focus, and 38 percent easier to move around sources of information.” Admittedly, one study is not sufficient cause for certainty, but one study combined with strong anecdotal evidence and a logical theory to explain the results is very compelling.

For my business case, I’m most interested in the 10% gain in productivity. Where I work, it’s reasonable to assume that at least half of these productivity gains will come in the form of chargeable work. This is because I’m currently less than 100% chargeable (a large percentage of my work is ‘business as usual’), and we’ve got a large amount of chargeable work on the horizon that we just don’t have the resources to take on. This makes it really easy to demonstrate that getting multiple monitors will generate more benefits than it costs. For others, who might already be at 100% chargeability- or who don’t do any chargeable work- this argument won’t apply. In those cases, it will be more difficult- but not impossible- to demonstrate that multiple monitors generates value.

So, finally, to the figures (download the Excel spreadsheet). Assuming a 10% productivity gain, I’ll have time to do an extra 24 days work per year. If half of that is chargeable, that’s an additional 12 days work. At my chargeout rate, that equates to $AUD6,600 per year in additional revenue. The cost of dual monitors is $AUD250 for a dual-monitor video card, and $240 per year to lease the monitor. Over three years, the total benefit per employee with dual-monitors works out to be $AUD18,830.

That’s pretty clear cut.

Update: (13 Sep 2009) The business case was accepted and I now have two monitors on my desk.

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.