Complexity is Simple

I was taken with this cartoon and the comments put up by Hugh Macleod last week over at his gapingvoid.com blog so I hope he doesn’t mind me reproducing it here.

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Avoiding the Legacy of the Future

Kerrie Holley is a software architect and IBM Fellow. The title of IBM Fellow is not won easily. They are a group that includes a Kyoto Prize winner and five Nobel Prize winners, they have fostered some of the IBM company’s most stunning technical breakthroughs―from the Fortran computing language to the systems that helped put the first man on the moon to the Scanning Tunneling Microscope, the first instrument to image atoms. These are people that are big thinkers and don’t shy away from tackling some of the worlds wicked problems.

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The Wicked Problems of Government

The dichotomy of our age is surely that as our machines become more and more intelligent the problems that we need them to solve are becoming ever more difficult and intractable. They are indeed truly wicked problems, no more so than in our offices of power where the addition of political and social ‘agendas’ would seem to make some of the problems we face even more difficult to address.

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"I'll Send You the Deck"

Warning, this is a rant!

I’m sure we’ve all been here. You’re in a meeting or on a conference call or just having a conversation with a colleague discussing some interesting idea or proposal which he or she has previous experience of and at some point they issue the immortal words “I’ll send you the deck”.

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Architect Salary Survey

The first ever architecture specific salary survey has just been published in the UK by FMC Technology. In total over 1000 architects responded to the survey. The report looks at architect roles in six main areas:

• Architecture Management
• Enterprise Architecture
• Business Architecture
• Information Architecture
• Application Architecture
• Technology Architecture

It also looks at pay rises (in 2013), regional and industry differences as well as motivational factors
The results can be viewed here.

Also on my Wordpress blog here.

How to Deal with the TED Effect

Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design and author of the books Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences and slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations has written a great blog post about what she refers to as the TED effect. The TED effect refers to the impact that the TED conferences have had on all of us who need to present as part of our daily lives.
Nancy’s basic assertion is that “in public speaking it’s no longer okay to be boring”. In the years BT (before TED) it was okay to deliver boring presentations because actually no one knew if you were being boring or not because most people’s bar for what constituted a good presentation was pretty low anyway. In the dark years of BT we would all just sit stoically through those presentations that bored us to death and missed the point completely because bad presentations were just an occupational hazard we all had to learn to deal with. If nothing else it gave us time to catch up on our email or quietly chatter away to a colleague in the back row.
Now though everything has changed! For anyone that has seen more than half a dozen TED talks we know that if we are not engaged within the first 30 seconds we are ready to walk. Not only that if we felt you were wasting our time we go onto Twitter or Facebook and tell the rest of the world how boring you were. If however you did engage us and managed to get across your idea in 18 minutes or under (the maximum time of a TED talk) then we will reward you by spreading your ideas and help you get them adopted and funded.
As technical people software architects often struggle with presentations simply because they are communicating technology so, by definition, that must be complicated and take loads of time with lots of slides containing densely populated text or diagrams that cannot be read unless you are sitting less than a metre from the screen. But, as Nancy Duarte has explained countless times in her books and her blog, it needn’t be like that, even for a die-hard techno-geek.
Here’s my take on on how to deal with the TED effect:

1. Just because you are given an hour to present, don’t think you have to actually spend that amount of time talking. Use the TED 18 minute rule and try and condense your key points into that time. Use the rest of the time for discussion and exchange of ideas.
2. Use handouts for providing more detail. Handouts don’t just have to be documents given out during the presentation. Consider writing up the detail in a blog post or similar and provide a link to this at the end of your talk.
3. Never, ever present slides someone else has created. If a presentation is worth doing then it’s worth investing the time to make it your presentation.
4. Remember the audience is there to see you speak and hear your ideas. Slides are an aid to get those ideas across and are not an end in their own right. If you’re just reading what’s on the presentation then so can the audience so you may as well not be there.
5. The best talks are laid out like a book or a movie. They have a beginning, a middle and an end. It often helps to think of the end first (what is the basic idea or point you want to get across) and work backwards from there. As Steven Pressfield says in the book Do the Work, “figure out where you want to go; then work backwards from there”.
6. Finally, watch as many TED talks as you can to see to see how they engage with the audience and get their ideas across. One of the key attributes you will see all the great speakers have is they are passionate about their subject and this really shines through in their talk. Maybe, just maybe, if you are not really passionate about what your subject you should not be talking about it in the first place?

Also posted in my Wordpress blog here.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

So sang Bob Dylan in The Times They Are a-Changin' from his third album of the same name released in early 1964 which makes it 50 years old this year.

These are certainly epochal changing times as we all try to understand the combined forces that social, mobile, analytic and cloud computing are going to have on the world and how we as software architects react to them.

You may have noticed a lack of posts in this blog recently. This is partly due to my own general busyness but also due to the fact that I have been trying to understand and assimilate myself what impact these changes are likely to have on this profession of ours. Is it more of the same, just that the underlying technology is changing (again) or is it really a fundamental change in the way the world is going to work from now on? Whichever it is these are some of the themes I will be covering in upcoming posts in this (hopefully) reinvigorated blog.

As of this posting I plan to move my blog over to Wordpress which I have decided I prefer as a blogging platform. For a while I will maintain both until I build up readers on the new platform. At some point a will begin to just put links on here to my Wordpress blog and eventually stop updating this one altogether, just leaving it as an archive. Please join me therefore over at the other Software Architecture Zen.