Spring Flowers

Yellow taxis and white Toyota Priuses
stir pink flurries
snow blossoms at Microsoft

time falls down
on the ground
beauty falls down
sparks through the air

Agile workplace configuration at Microsoft

Working as a development product manager at Microsoft at the time I had no idea what scrum or agile development was, but this configuration of tables and chairs in the hallway of the 3rd floor of Microsoft's Building 114 just made sense to me.

I found these tables abandoned or stuck in hallways from other floors and dragged them here with my new team members. Then I ordered comfortable chairs from Microsoft's internal portal. We were set and took off and developed like mad.

The person, my friend, in the foreground found our environment to her liking, quiet, convenient yet friendly and joined us; as many travelers or consultants did from time to time. This worked for many reasons and gave MS full-timers the ability to find and interact with us without having to search around much.

Due to the location, our rules were straight forward, low tones, quiet, leave nothing in the room when leaving, push in your chair, and police your area. As you see in this photograph we had one phone for 18 + people. It rarely rang. The person being sought was nearly always there.

Twice in several months there was a slight disagreement about how open or closed the blinds should be but that environment worked very well for the team. We launched our project on time of course.

I absolutely loved working with them.

After I studied and worked with Agile development I came to understand that the techniques I had developed on my own, such as short daily meetings (scrum), worked for others.

The Report: China is a likely winner of the information age supply chain through ecommerce by sticking with its successful strategies

The Report
China is a likely winner of the information age supply chain through ecommerce by sticking with its successful strategy of continued steady growth, coupled with continuing (the appearance of) a transparent society (where currently major decisions are made by top government and business officials behind closed doors) which manipulate and manage economies at large.

In order to be considered a great global leader China should maintain peace and respect for corporate property rights. They need to immediately focus on their serious environmental pollution problems to survive. Politically China needs to resolve the long-standing repression of the Tibetan people; it is too expensive in terms of public relations.

Caption: "The sign that says you're welcome in Shanghai" - Johnny Vulkan http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnyvulkan/1856903750/

The evidence is clear: China has McDonalds restaurants, and with extensive factories they make Dell and other computers. Bill Gates is eagerly pursuing business with China, and the Chinese government has given Microsoft the right to grant post-doctorial fellowships. Key companies invested in technology are willing to go to court to keep the most important Chinese corporate leaders. Kai-Fu Lee, once a vice-president at Microsoft is now Google's manager in China. Mr. Lee was the person at the center of twin lawsuits (suit and countersuit), a battle over which of the two companies would win him to work for them - he may be the ultimate in 'intellectual property.'

Caption ”On the Shanghai subway, rather than advertising computers for sale, Dell promotes job openings.” Danburg Murmur http://www.flickr.com/photos/danburgmurmur/247299162/

What is at issue are personably identifiable information (PII) and intellectual property rights (patents and copyrights) which are legislated and widely respected in the West.

Personal information is the feeder fish at the bottom of the information age food chain. China does not believe people have a right to privacy because of how communism is structured; this is true of members of their society until that person is wealthy and thus powerful enough to opt out of it, and even then the appearance of opting in must be kept.

Even in the West Intellectual property rights are eroding, which is as it should be, as it is not the same as owning a house, and can be damaging to others on a massive scale such as medical patents for aids, cancer, and other life saving drugs.

The Chinese style of governance comes with a 5 thousand year old administrative history of ordering a society consisting of large numbers of people. Because most people in American and the West do not speak their language nor write it, much of China remains a society closed to the English speaking countries. Due to communication barriers the West does not have the very healthy level of respect for China that it should.

The Chinese written language may give China advantages with online screens unknown in the West with their thousands of dense glyphs, pictographs, and phonetic parts. Currently it is estimated more than 1 billion people use some form of Chinese as their native language.

It can be said that he who owns the resources wins; especially true when supply chains are consistent and reliable. This applies to personally identifiable information in the information age as it relates to sales, because personal information is a building block in the information supply chain. Creating mass marketing campaigns targeting not just individuals but large groups of people is based on creating desire, an example is Steve Jobs and the Apple iPod. This is in addition to knowing what people want, not just what they need.

Meeting the needs of all people in the world is still a goal some people are working towards, while many more others try to capture wealth only for themselves and their investors. From the point of view that in the long run we’re all dead, many investors do not view themselves as breaking any moral,ethical, or other rules, just trying to get ahead, or make a profit on their investment, which they want right now. This uninformed short sighted view is killing people, and eroding the middle class of nations. Any country that has a middle class will miss it when it is gone; most countries are trying to build their middle class.

Business to Business (B2B) resource supply chains control wealth. Only the wealthy have a reason to protect privacy of information, because the poor and the very poor have much more immediate concerns. Hopefully the Chinese will learn as other countries like Malaysia did, that including diverse ethnic types is not just a ethical ideal, it is a strategy for long term success.

This lesson continues to be a painful and costly lesson to the US, which in many ways is exclusionary. Viewing the poor as beggars while subsidizing production with huge remedies is one of the inadequacies that may be overturned as international growth is managed at a global level because it can not be justified as anything other than corrupt practices. By all accounts I read, generosity in international relationships is mythical and with the digital age has only grown worse . Does it matter what you wear while you ask for money or how well educated you are? Apparently it does.

One size fits all privacy will never suit everyone because it has a biological basis and the need increases with education, and its cousin, wealth. Increasingly to have the opt out choice in terms of privacy you need wealth. That too will change subtly because as ecommerce becomes pervasive, some system or sets of systems will always knows that someone is there in some detectable way.

The patent and copyright systems can be damaging to others on a global scale by shutting down creativity, and unfairly favoring their protection even against life, due to medical patents for aids, cancer, and other life saving drugs being so expensive to produce or purchase that people are allowed to die as a result. Calls to action for multinational drug companies to reduce these costs, have changed little or nothing in the developing world. This has been featured so well in the headlines and news stories lately that it can hardly be a surprise to anyone that it is a problem – youth know because Digital Rights Management (DRM) is dead.

Ecommerce is a tool and can be used in many ways. Trading is already a cold transaction and to remove it from human context makes it even more so. In accounting they discuss "arms length transactions" - with ecommerce those arms get pretty long.

So we can expect that the human repercussions of global ecommerce, driven by the integration of B2B procurement systems, could stabilize and destabilize entire populations unless the planning is very good. That means everyone must hold the keys in some way, and be open to transparency at some level which runs counter to special interest groups . Transparency in action does exactly what it need to do, but which, for example, is not a match for the existing Chinese culture.

Real transparency in global governance with a goal to meet the basic needs of all people living sounds like a science fiction plot, but that is what makes it exciting. Transparent governance may only become possible due to radically unexpected causes, like education, religious idealism, or a shared social solution of the young through organizations such as http://www.one.org/. Oddly enough one of the religions which may benefit China is Tibetan Buddhism.

Ecommerce will not cause peace in the world, educated people working with strong idealism in transparent cultures will. Still my conclusion remains that China is a likely winner of the information age supply chain through ecommerce. We should invest in China.

Readings:
Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas Friedman

The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Friedman

The World Is Flat?: A Critical Analysis of New York Times Bestseller by Thomas Friedman by Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo

Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Alernative to Paper Prototyping - Case Study

Thought you might be interested in reading this case study about an application, iRise, which claims to reduce the cost and time to develope software substantially. It's termed "Application Definition Software" (This article was suggested by Bill Marriott to the MSIM2008 cohort as additional reading.)

See iRise's Citibank case study for increasing the competency for capturing user requirements for user interfaces along with functionality requirements:

http://www.cio.com/archive/020107/fea_tec.html?CID=28501

That article was written in Feb 2007, the iRise software, established 1996, is growing, see the site at:

http://www.irise.com/

Also see the 2005 Computerworld Honors Case study:

http://www.cwheroes.org/laureates/Business/20055302.pdf

Eventually a companies, such as Microsoft, will need to find ways to flatten the organization and cut costs and time to market. This is one of those ways -- knowing about and offering this kind of advise either to lease or build may help information managers shine in productivity and reduce the need for several levels of management governance.

Microsoft is building it's own ERP application to compete with Oracle and SAP. Assuming that Microsoft understands their small to medium business market in the ERP space still makes planning, designing, and building a new ERP solution a huge undertaking. iRise is the kind of software which could make that process easier and faster.

iRise's application could plug into Microsoft's ERP solution nicely while maintaining the kind of traceability SOX requires, especially as more Western firms leverage outsourcing to India.

This kind of application, an enhancement over tools such as VISIO could help program management shave time off of planning, and increase relevance and adaptability in what each IT unit does. As I understand it, even in considering what difficult business styles and classes of IT units need what kinds of direction and storage of related enterprise level information.