Tag Archives: Value

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 454

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SPaMCAST logo

I’m back for another appearance on Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast.

This week’s episode, number 454, begins with Tom talking about iteration planning. Jeremy Berriault comes next with a segment on QA team leads and I bat cleanup with a Form Follows Function installment based on my post “Trash or Treasure – What’s Your Legacy?”.

Tom and I discuss the concept of legacy systems: what they are, whether they’re trash or treasure (sometimes both), and how they impact an organization.

You can find all the SPaMCast episodes I’m in under the SPaMCast Appearances category on this blog. Enjoy!

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Trash or Treasure – What’s Your Legacy?

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Pirate's burying treasure

The topic of legacy systems is something of a contentious one. In most cases, a legacy is understood to be a good thing. What makes a system “legacy”? Is it a technical or business decision?

A little over a year ago, Greger Wikstrand took a stab at clarifying the term with his post “Legacy systems, a definition”. In the post, he looked at different definitions of what constituted a legacy system, ranging from “any code that is in use” to “outdated technology” to “high technical debt”. The definition he went with, in my opinion, is the most useful:

It should be clear that legacy systems are not about technical considerations. It is about how well the existing system meets and is able to adapt to business needs.

A pair of tweets from Joanna Young that I saw yesterday brought this to mind:

Whether or not a system has crossed the line into legacy territory is not a technical decision but a business one. As Greger and Joanna both noted, it’s about fitness for purpose. Technical considerations absolutely have immense bearing on whether the system is able to meet needs. However, they are not the sole determinant.

The standard narrative is for a system to start out “clean” and then rot via neglect and/or ad hoc enhancement. This is certainly a common scenario, but it overlooks the obvious. While failure to maintain a system and its platform will certainly degrade it, keeping the technology components up to date does not ensure that the system will continue to match the needs of those who depend on it. For that matter, it’s easy enough to build a brand new system using the latest and greatest technology that is a legacy right out the gate due to its failure to meet the needs of its stakeholders.

Age of the platform is not a problem; an inability to get support or find people knowledgeable about the platform is a problem. Technical debt in and of itself is not a problem; being impeded or prevented from maintaining/enhancing the system due to technical debt is a problem. This works for any given technical issue – substitute the tangible, stakeholder-oriented result of that technical issue and the point becomes clearer to those with the ability to address them.

The key is not to focus solely on functional aspects nor quality of service and/or technical aspects, but the system as a whole. This requires the participation of the entire set of social systems involved in the creation, maintenance, and usage of the software system. Communication and collaboration across all elements of those social systems is critical to effectively maintaining the software system and the social systems that it enables.

A critically important part of promoting that communication and collaboration is maintaining the cohesion of the social systems involved in creating and maintaining the software system. Where those social systems are ad hoc and episodic, the potential for forming the relationships necessary for effective situational awareness is minimal. IT won’t know about functional gaps until too late and the stakeholders won’t know what their options are for addressing them nor will they have advance notice of impending technical issues.

Social systems create, maintain, and use software systems. Systems that are designed to work together have a better chance of doing so than those that are just thrown together and wished well.

A Tale of Two Tweets

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Serendipity is a wonderful (and sometimes entertaining) thing.

Monday afternoon, two tweets wound up one after the other in my timeline, one interesting and one “interesting” (I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which is which):

and

My favorite definition for the word “innovation” comes from Scott Berkun:

If you must use the word, here is the best definition: Innovation is significant positive change. It’s a result. It’s an outcome. It’s something you work towards achieving on a project. If you are successful at solving important problems, peers you respect will call your work innovative and you an innovator. Let them choose the word.

If you don’t want to jump to conclusions as to which of the two better fits the definition, you can get more information from the news article linked to in the second tweet, or you could judge by some of the responses to the first tweet:

I’m sure everyone’s just laughing with them.

Defense Against the Dark Art of Disruption

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Woman with Crystal Ball

My first post for 2016 was titled “Is 2016 the Year for Customer-Focused IT?”. The closing line was “If 2016 isn’t the year for customer-focused IT, I wonder just what kind of year it will be for IT?”.

I am so sorry for jinxing so many things for so many people. 🙂

So far, the year has brought us great moments in customer experience like:

  • Google Mic Drop – an automated kiss-off for email (“you meant to hit that button, right?”)
  • Google/Nest and the Resolv home automation hub – retiring a product by bricking it (“it’s just not working; it’s not you, it’s us”)
  • Apple Music – cloud access to your music and freed-up disk space (“nice little music collection you have here, it’d be a shame if you quit paying for access to it”)
  • Evernote’s downsizing – because when the free plan is good enough for too many people, taking away features is the way to get them to pay, right?

Apple, of course, probably won the prize with their “courageous” iPhone 7 rollout:

Using “courage” in such a way was basically a lethal combination of a giant middle finger mixed with a swift kick in the nuts, all wrapped in a seemingly tone-deaf soundbite. This is the kind of stuff critics dream about.

Because Schiller said exactly what he said, he left the company open to not only mockery, but also bolstered a common line of criticism that often gets leveled upon Apple: that they think they know best, and everyone else can hit the road. You can argue that this is a good mentality to have in some cases — the whole “faster horse” thing — but it’s not a savvy move for a company to say this so directly in such a manner.

Apple then continued it’s tradition of “courage” with the new MacBook Pro models.

So, is there a point to all this?

Beyond the obvious, “it’s my site and I’ll snark if I want to”, there’s a very important point. Matt Ballantine captured it perfectly in his post, “Ripe for Disruption”: “You’re less likely to be disrupted if you are in sync with your customers’ view of your value proposition.” His definitive example:

I think that most of the classic cases of organisational extinction through disruption can be framed in this way: Kodak thought their value was in film and cameras. Their customers wanted to capture memories. Kodak missed digital (even though they kind of invented it).

The quote bears repeating with emphasis: “You’re less likely to be disrupted if you are in sync with your customers’ view of your value proposition.” What you think your value proposition is means a whole lot less than your customer’s perception of the value of what you’re delivering. This is a really good way to poison that perception:

Disappointment, betrayal (perception is reality here) are not conducive to a positive customer experience. Customer acquisition is important, but retention is far more important to gaining market share (h/t to Matt Collins). The key to retention is to relate to your customers; understand what they need, then provide that. Having them pay for what’s in your best interest, rather than theirs (hello Kodak), is a much harder sell.

Building a Legacy

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Greek Trireme image from Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany

 

Over the last few weeks, I’ve run across a flurry of articles dealing with the issue of legacy systems used by the U.S. government.

An Associated Press story on the findings from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued in May reported that roughly three-fourths of the $80 billion IT budget was used to maintain legacy systems, some more than fifty years old and without an end of life date in sight. An article on CIO.com about the same GAO report detailed seven of the oldest systems. Two were over 56 years old, two 53, one 51, one 35, and one 31. Four of the seven have plans to be replaced, but the two oldest have no replacement yet planned.

Cost was not the only issue, reliability is a problem as well. An article on Timeline.com noted:

Then there’s the fact that, up until 2010, the Secret Service’s computer systems were only operational about 60% of the time, thanks to a highly outdated 1980s mainframe. When Senator Joe Lieberman spoke out on the issue back in 2010, he claimed that, in comparison, “industry and government standards are around 98 percent generally.” It’s alright though, protecting the president and vice president is a job that’s really only important about 60 percent of the time, right?

It would be easy to write this off as just another example of public-sector inefficiency, but you can find these same issues in the private sector as well. Inertia can, and does, affect systems belonging to government agencies and business alike. Even a perfectly designed implemented system (we’ve all got those, right?) is subject to platform rot if ignored. Ironically, our organizations seem designed to do just that by being project-centric.

In philosophy, there’s a paradox called the Ship of Theseus, that explores the question of identity. The question arises, if we maintain something by replacing its constituent parts, does it remain the same thing? While many hours could be spent debating this, to those whose opinion should matter most, those who use the system, the answer is yes. To them, the identity of the system is bound up in what they do with it, such that it ceases to be the same thing, not when we maintain it but when its function is degraded through neglect.

Common practice, however, separates ownership and interest. Those with the greatest interest in the system typically will not own the budget for work on it. Those owning the budget, will typically be biased towards projects which add value, not maintenance work that represents cost.

Speaking of cost, is 75% of the budget an unreasonable amount for maintenance? How well are the systems meeting the needs of their users? Is quality increasing, decreasing, or holding steady? Was more money spent because of deferred maintenance than would have been spent with earlier intervention? How much business risk is involved? Without this context, it’s extremely difficult to say. It’s understandable that someone outside an organization might lack this information, but even within it, would a centralized IT group have access to it all? Is the context as meaningful at a higher, central level as it is “at the pointy end of the spear”?

Maintaining systems bit by bit, replacing them gradually over time, is likely to be more successful and less expensive, than letting them rot and then having a big-bang re-write. In my opinion, having an effective architecture for the enterprise’s IT systems is dependent on having an effective architecture for the enterprise itself. If the various systems (social and software) are not operating in conjunction, drift and inertia will take care of building your legacy (system).

[Greek Trireme image from Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany via Wikimedia Commons]

Dealing with Technical Debt Like We Mean it

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What’s the biggest problem with technical debt?

In my opinion, the biggest problem is that it works. Just like the electrical outlet pictured above, systems with technical debt get the job done, even when there’s a hidden surprise or two waiting to make life interesting for us at some later date. If it flat-out failed, getting it fixed would be far easier. Making the argument to spend time (money) changing something that “works” can be difficult.

Failing to make the argument, however, is not the answer:

Brenda Michelson‘s observation is half the battle. The argument for paying down technical debt needs to be made in business-relevant terms (cost, risk, customer impact, etc.). We need more focus on the “debt” part and remember “technical” is just a qualifier:

The other half of the battle is communicating, in the same business-relevant manner, the costs and/or risks involved when taking on technical debt is considered:

Tracking what technical debt exists and managing the payoff (or write off, removing failed experiments is a reduction technique) is important. Likewise, managing the assumption of technical debt is critical to avoid being swamped by it.

Of course, one could take the approach that the only acceptable level of technical debt is zero. This is equivalent to saying “if we can’t have a perfect product, we won’t have a product”. That might be a difficult position to sell to those writing the checks.

Even if you could get an agreement for that position, reality will conspire to frustrate you. Entropy emerges. Even if the code is perfected and then left unchanged, the system can rot as its platform ages and the needs of the business change. When a system is actively maintained over time without an eye to maintaining a coherent, intentional architecture, then the situation becomes worse. In his post “Enterprise Modernization – The Next Big Thing!”, David Sprott noted:

The problem with modernization is that it is widely perceived as slow, very expensive and high risk because the core business legacy systems are hugely complex as a result of decades of tactical change projects that inevitably compromise any original architecture. But modernization activity must not be limited to the old, core systems; I observe all enterprises old and new, traditional and internet based delivering what I call “instant legacy” [Note 1] generally as outcomes of Agile projects that prioritize speed of delivery over compliance with a well-defined reference architecture that enables ongoing agility and continuous modernization.

Kellan Elliot-McCrea, in “Towards an understanding of technical debt”, captured the problem:

All code is technical debt. All code is, to varying degrees, an incorrect bet on what the future will look like.

This means that assessing and managing technical debt should be an ongoing activity with a responsible owner rather than a one-off event that “somebody” will take care of. The alternative is a bit like using a credit card at every opportunity and ignoring the statements until the repo-man is at the door.

What’s Innovation Worth?

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Animated GIF of Sherman Tank Variants

What does an old World War II tank have to do with innovation?

I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating – one of benefits of having a blog is the ability to interact with and learn from people all over the world. For example, Greger Wikstrand and I have been trading blog posts on innovation for six months now. His latest post, “Switcher’s curse and legacy decisions”,is the 18th installment in the series. In this post, Greger discusses switcher’s curse, “a trap in which a decision maker systematically switches too often”.

Just as the sunk cost fallacy can keep you holding on to a legacy system long past its expiration date, switcher’s curse can cause you to waste money on too-frequent changes. As Greger points out in his post, the net benefit of the new system must outweigh both the net benefit of the old, plus the cost of switching (with a significant safety margin to account for estimation errors in assessing the costs and benefits). Newer isn’t automatically better.

“Disruption” is a two-edged sword when it comes to innovation. As Greger notes regarding legacy systems:

Existing software is much more than a series of decisions to keep it. It embodies a huge number of decisions on how the business of the company should work. The software is full of decisions about business objects and what should be done with them. These decisions, embodied in the software, forms the operating system of the company. The decision to switch is bigger than replacing some immaterial asset with another. It is a decision about replacing a proven way of working with a new way of working.

Disruption involves risk. Change involves cost; disruptive change involves higher costs. In “Innovate or Execute?”, Earl Beede asked:

So, do our employers really want us taking the processes they have paid dearly to implement and products they have scheduled out for the next 15 quarters and, individually, do something disruptive? Every team member taking a risk to see what they can learn and then build on?

Wouldn’t that be chaos?

Beede’s answer to the dilemma:

Now, please don’t think I am completely cynical. I do think that the board of directors and maybe even the C-level officers want to have innovative companies. I really believe that there needs to be parts of a company whose primary mission is to make the rest of the company obsolete. But those disruptive parts need to be small, isolated groups, kept out of the day-to-day delivery of the existing products or services.

What employers should be asking for is for most of the company to be focused on executing the existing plans and for some of the company to be trying to put the executing majority into a whole new space.

This meshes well with Greger’s recommendations:

Conservatism is often the best approach. But it needs to be a prudent conservatism. Making changes smaller and more easily reversible decreases the need for caution. We should consider a prudent application of fail fast mentality in our decision-making process. (But I prefer to call it learn fast.)

Informed decision-making (i.e. making decisions that make sense in light of your context) is critical. The alternative is to rely on blind luck. Being informed requires learning, and as Greger noted, fast turn-around on that learning is to be preferred. Likewise, limiting risk during learning is to be preferred as well. Casimir Artmann, in his post “Fail is not an option”, discussed this concept in relation to hiking in the wilderness. Assessing and controlling risk in that environment can be a matter of life in death. In a business context, it’s the same (even if the “death” is figurative, it’s not much comfort considering the lives impacted). Learning is only useful if you survive to put it to use.

Lastly, it must be understood that decision-making is not a one-time activity. Context is not static, neither should your decision-making process be. An iterative cycle of sense-making and decision-making is required to maintain the balance between innovation churn and stagnation.

So, why the tank?

The M-4 Sherman, in addition to being the workhorse of the U.S. Army’s armor forces in World War II, is also an excellent illustration of avoiding the switcher’s curse. When it was introduced, it was a match for existing German armored vehicles. Shortly afterwards, however, it was outclassed as newer, heavier, better armed German models came online. The U.S. stuck with their existing design, and were able to produce almost three times the number of tanks as Germany (not counting German tanks inferior to the Sherman). As the saying goes, “quantity has a quality all its own”, particularly when paired with other weapon systems in a way that did not disrupt production. The German strategy of producing multiple models hampered their ability to produce in quantity, negating their qualitative advantage. In this instance, progressive enhancement and innovating on the edges was a winning strategy for the U.S.

Innovation – What’s Old can be New Again

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Roman Road Ruins

There’s an old rhyme about what a bride should wear for luck on her wedding day: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue…”. While reading an article on the origins of the US highway system, I thought about this rhyme in relation to the concept of innovation. Part of that article related the US Army’s interest in highways as a means of moving troops, etc.:

When the war ended in 1919, the Army sent an expedition from Camp Meade, Maryland, to San Francisco to study the feasibility of moving troops and equipment by truck, and it was a disaster. At an average speed of seven miles per hour, the trip took two months, and many of the vehicles broke down along the way. The rough journey convinced the officer in charge—a young Dwight D. Eisenhower—that impassable roads were a risk to national security and that building good roads should be the highest priority for the nation.

During World War II, Eisenhower’s views were confirmed by the Allies’ use of the autobahns in the invasion of Germany (ironically, the German military had been much less enthusiastic about their military potential, preferring the older, more established railroad system). Eisenhower would go on to spearhead the construction of the Interstate Highway System when elected President after the war.

While the construction and use of high-quality roads for military purposes was an innovation, it certainly wasn’t a new development. The Romans had “been there, done that” long before. It became innovative again due to the fact that the social and technological context had shifted, making it more effective than the previous transport innovation, railroads.

There’s an old saying that “history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes”. Recognizing when something old has regained its relevance can be a path to innovation. In my post “Innovation on Tap”, I talked about Amazon’s plan to open physical bookstores and embrace the concept of “showrooming”, something that traditional retailers have been struggling with for years. Other companies are jumping aboard. What I find interesting is that this concept was the business model of a company headquartered in my home town. They operated from 1957 to 1997, when they went bankrupt. Now, less than twenty years later, that model is seen as innovative. Once again, it’s the shift in social and technological contexts that has changed it into an effective solution. It’s the value that makes it innovative.

This is part 17 of an ongoing conversation with Greger Wikstrand on the topic of innovation.

[Roman Road image by Phr61 via Wikimedia Commons.]

“Want Fries with That?”

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Hamburger and French Fries

Greger Wikstrand and I have been trading posts about architecture, innovation, and organizations as systems (a list of previous posts can be found at the bottom of the page) for quite a while now. His latest, “Technology permeats innovation”, touches on an important point – the need for IT to add value and not just act as an order taker.

It’s funny how this series of innovation posts keeps taking me back to posts from the early days of this blog. In my last post, “Accidental Innovation?”, I referred to my very first post, “Like it or not, you have an architecture (in fact, you may have several)”. Less than a month after that first post, I published “Adding Value”, which had the exact same theme as Greger’s post: blindly following orders without adding value (in the form of technical expertise) is not serving your customer. In fact, failing to bring up concerns is both unprofessional and unethical. Acceding to a request that you know will harm your customer without pushing back is tantamount to sabotage.

Innovation involves multiple disciplines. In a recent tweet, Brenda Michelson illustrated this important truth in the context of digital technology:

Both Brenda and Greger make the same point – successful innovation is a team effort. In fact, using Scott Berkun’s definition of the word, it’s redundant to say “successful innovation”:

If you must use the word, here is the best definition: Innovation is significant positive change. It’s a result. It’s an outcome. It’s something you work towards achieving on a project. If you are successful at solving important problems, peers you respect will call your work innovative and you an innovator. Let them choose the word.

In a recent series of post, Casimir Artmann noted that innovation comes in many forms: improving existing products, developing new products, and finding better ways to work. Often, as shown in examples of innovation in music, photography, and telephony, innovation comes from a combination of these forms. He sums it up this way:

Regardless if we talk about innovation for existing products, new products or new ways of working, inventions in technology is one of the drivers.

Internet of Things, Cloud, Autonomous devices, Wearables, Big Data etc, are all enablers for innovation in the organisations. The challenge is to find out the benefit our clients customers will have from these technology enablers.

Meeting that challenge requires integrating the expertise of both business and IT. Innovation and value aren’t picked from a menu and served up at a drive-through.

Previous posts in this series:

  1. “We Deliver Decisions (Who Needs Architects?)” – I discussed how the practice of software architecture involved decision-making. It combines analysis with the need for situational awareness to deal with the emergent factors and avoiding cognitive biases.
  2. “Serendipity with Woody Zuill” – Greger pointed me to a short video of him and Woody Zuill discussing serendipity in software development.
  3. “Fixing IT – Too Big to Succeed?” – Woody’s comments in the video re: the stifling effects of bureaucracy in IT inspired me to discuss the need for embedded IT to address those effects and to promote better customer-centricity than what’s normal for project-oriented IT shops.
  4. “Serendipity and successful innovation” – Greger’s post pointed out that structure is insufficient to promote innovation, organizations must be prepared to recognize and respond to opportunities and that innovation must be able to scale.
  5. “Inflection Points and the Ingredients of Innovation” – I expanded on Greger’s post, using WWI as an example of a time where innovation yielded uneven results because effective innovation requires technology, understanding of how to employ it, and an organizational structure that allows it to be used well.
  6. “Social innovation and tech go hand-in-hand” – Greger continued with the same theme, the social and technological aspects of innovation.
  7. “Organizations and Innovation – Swim or Die!” – I discussed the ongoing need of organizations to adapt to their changing contexts or risk “death”.
  8. “Innovation – Resistance is Futile” – Continuing on in the same vein, Greger points out that resistance to change is futile (though probably inevitable). He quotes a professor of his that asserted that you can’t change people or groups, thus you have to change the organization.
  9. “Changing Organizations Without Changing People” – I followed up on Greger’s post, agreeing that enterprise architectures must work “with the grain” of human nature and that culture is “walking the walk”, not just “talking the talk”.
  10. “Developing the ‘innovation habit’” – Greger talks about creating an intentional, collaborative innovation program.
  11. “Innovation on Tap” – I responded to Greger’s post by discussing the need for collaboration across an organization as a structural enabler of innovation. Without open lines of communication, decisions can be made without a feel for customer wants and needs.
  12. “Worthless ideas and valuable innovation” – Greger makes the point that ideas, by themselves, have little or no worth. It’s one thing to have an idea, quite another to be able to turn it into a valuable innovation.
  13. “Accidental Innovation?” – I point out that people are key to innovation. “Without the people who provide the intuition, experience and judgement, we are lacking a critical component in the system.”
  14. “Technology permeats innovation” – Greger talks about how tightly coupled innovation and technology are and the need for IT to actively add value to the process.

Let’s Talk Value (Who Needs Architects?)

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Gold Bars

Value is a term that’s heard often these days, but I wonder how well it’s understood. Too often, it seems, value is taken to mean raw benefit rather than its actual meaning, benefit after cost (i.e. “bang for the buck”). An even better understanding of the concept can be had from Tom Cagley’s “Breaking Down Value”: “Value = (Benefit + Perception) – (Cost + Perception)”.

The point being?

Change involves costs and, one would hope, benefits. Not only does the magnitude of the cost matter, but also its perception matters. Where a cost is seen as unnecessary or incurred to benefit someone other than the one paying the bills, its perception will likely be unfavorable. Changes that come about due to unforeseen circumstances are more likely to be seen as necessary than those stemming from foreseeable ones. Changes to accommodate known needs are the least likely to be seen as reasonable. This is why I’ve always maintained that YAGNI doesn’t scale beyond low-level design into the realm of architectural decisions. Where cost of change determines architectural significance, decision churn is problematic.

After I posted “Who Needs Architects? Who’s Minding the Architecture?”, Charlie Alfred tweeted:

One way to be seen as an asset is to provide value. As Cesare Pautasso put it:

This is not to say that architectural refactoring is without value, but that refactoring will be seen as redundant work. When that work is for foreseeable needs, it will be perceived as costlier and less beneficial than strictly new functionality. Refactoring to accommodate known needs will suffer an even greater perception problem.

YAGNI presumes that the risk of flexible design being unnecessary outweighs the risk of refactoring being unnecessary. In my opinion, that is far too simplistic a view. Some functionality and qualities may be speculative, but the need for others (e.g. security) will be more certain.

Studies have shown that the ability to modify an application is a prime quality concern for stakeholders. Flexible design enables easier and cheaper change. “Big bang” changes (expensive and painful) are more likely where coherent design is lacking. Holistic design based on context seems to provide more value (both tangible and perceived) than a dogma-driven process of stringing together tactical decisions and hoping for the best.