Organic KM: Enterprise 2.0 Would Signal The End Of The Corporate KM Function

Organic KM: Enterprise 2.0 Would Signal The End Of The Corporate KM Function

Having read it I was trying to imagine what The Pope would think of going back to paganism...

It's a Moody World

I subscribe to a news service called Future Brief which provides a daily email...

...to the busy professional who wants to remain aware of trends in a rapidly changing world, yet not be buried under a mountain of information

Normally 3 stories with just a paragraph on each, it is easily digested and some of their snippets are quite interesting. Today's included a link to an article in New Scientist (here) which describes a site launched in June 2005 that tracks mood swings across the 'blogosphere'.

Moodviews captures and provides analysis of posts on the US LiveJournal blog hosting service - a total of about 10 million blogs with about 250,000 new posts a day. About 60% of these posts use the 'mood tag' feature, where the poster can choose from 132 different moods. To the original Moodgrapher, which plots aggregate levels of use of each of the tags over time, they have added Moodteller, which does an analysis of the text of blog postings to determine mood.

Now they are adding Moodsignals, which detects words and phrases which are associated with a given mood in a given time interval, using statistical frequency comparisons and burstiness models. It looks at unusual peaks in the levels of mood annotations, and then tries to explain the peaks found by analyzing the language used by bloggers. In looking for explanations, Moodsignals searches news archives.

And, finally, they also provide a Moodsticker giving the latest information on the most popular mood, updated every 10 minutes.


Fascinating, but I'm finding it difficult to see applications of this outside market research and PR. I wonder if there are any mashup applications of this in retail?

Mashups created by Unconferencing

It all started with an "IT Business Hot Story" that appeared in my email pointing to a Blog entry from Vinnie Mirchandani entitled SOA = SOS that aroused my interest. This item is full of links to quotes from the great and good about SOA, but finishes by contrasting Enterprise SOA approaches with an alternative....

In the meantime, in the Valley, young (and old) kids, oblivious to all these weighty questions are writing their own SOA in very small letters - in mashup camps

What the heck is that all about then? Now I really was interested.

Over the course of two days, more than 300 people turned up for Mashup Camp at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California (right in the heart of Silicon Valley). At last count, more than 980 photos were loaded into Flickr. Not only do the pictures document some of the content that was generated during the event, they also show the attendees having a great time. Close to 40 distinctly separate discussions were proposed and held during the 2-day unconference.

So what is a mashup? And what is Unconferencing?
Let's take them one at a time...

A mashup is a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into a new combination. Mashups take advantage of emerging simple and lightweight public APIs and Web feeds, which make it relatively easy to design and build on sources such as eBay, Amazon, Google, Yahoomaps and Salesforce.com. Coupled with technologies like AJAX which allow the development of powerful clients, you can build quite rich applications combining data from inside and outside an enterprise.

It has been getting quite a bit of press recently because of interest generated by Mashup camp. Here's what one of the organisers, David Birlind said on ZDNet - Mashup ecosystem poised to explode. I think that remains to be seen, but The Programmeable Web currently references 192 APIs and 569 mashups.

As for Unconferencing, well I'm not sure I like the name, but it does convey the idea that it takes an opposite approach in some ways to a conventional conference.

One element is the escape from the "No space" phenomenon described so well by Naomi Klein in No Logo - the pervasive influence of sponsorship, where so many conferences have become merely marketing pitches from vendor representatives, rather than genuine discussion about the nitty-gritty of getting technology to work.

The second element, is that at an unconference there are no spectators, only participants. As Dave Winer puts it, the fundamental law of conventional conferences is...

The sum of the expertise of the people in the audience is greater than the sum of expertise of the people on stage.

So, instead of a bunch of prepared powerpoint presentations (Who hasn't experienced Death by Powerpoint? In the extreme, some people believe Powerpoint is Evil, but I digress...) followed by Q&A sessions, there are facilitated discussions where everyone is involved. Each session has a leader and covers an important topic and people go to whatever session they want to participate in. See
**here**, for example, the way mashup camp 2 is being organised, which embraces the practices of Open Space Technology

One of the best known is O'Reilly's FOO camp (FOO = Friends of O'Reilly)which has been running since 2003. Somewhat inevitably (as any LISP programmer would tell you)a spin-off/imitation of this called BarCamp was created. BarCamps are now being scheduled all over the world. Mashup Camp is another.

David Gammel's blog has a useful comparison of Conference v Unconference which summarises the main contrasts.

So, just think. What could you achieve with an Unconference of architects? What might the themes be? Maybe we should organise one. But first we need a Wiki....

Lexicon Managed Service

Following on from an earlier post on recording our lunchtime briefings...
I was set the challenge of podcasting them. So I thought I'd try and create one

Our briefing on the 9th March was given by Mike Smith from the Lexicon account. In it he described our Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings in the B2B communications space - our Kappa and Omega services. The briefing consists of a
Powerpoint Presentation and audio presentation in two parts : Part 1 and Part 2

I wonder how this will work....
Well, the short answer is it didn't - the file produced by feedburner failed validation by Feed Validator. Rats. I'll have to try something different.

Atom becomes an IETF standard

I read in the IEEE Internet Computing,July/August 2005 (Vol. 9, No. 4)
IEEE Internet Computing,July/August 2005 (Vol. 9, No. 4)
that Atom is now an IETF Draft for which the URL is
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-sayre-atompub-protocol-basic-00.txt

The IEEE article gives a comprehensive history of syndication interoperability and how we got from the RDF Site Summary (because this is what RSS meant)and the early work at Nescape to ...this Atom-based Blogger blog.

SQL Server 2000 Scalability

The client has a problem with Scalability. I've yet to see the design configuration, but started looking for some material to help.

A scan of CSC RFA camme up with a response with an attached paper from ORACLE Data Warehouse with SQL Server response giving ORACLE's views on the weaknesses of SQL Server.

That paper references a site called SQL-Server-Performance.com. There are some useful tips here.

A paper that describes the use of Distirbuted Partition Views to scale up can be found here.

There are several versions of SQL Server 2000. The MS SQL site explains
here.

Decent overview of options for scale-out and failover are
here.

Now I know I've got some stuff on scaling SQL Server from previous assignments - I just have to find it....

Web Services Testing

I recently raised an RFA on Web Services Testing.

What strategy and tools are people using for testing Web Services in CSC? My client is currently starting to build some but has no environment or tools in which to test. The providing application is expecting WS-I Basic Profile-compliant SOAP/XML calls. Some orchestration and performance testing capabilities in the testing environment are desirable.

One response pointed me to Web Services Help a website run by Peter J Wood (a fellow CSCer)which discusses use of a tool called SOAPscope from Mindreef. Peter himself recommended looking at Optimyz which allows you to test the orchestration layer (BPEL) in addition to discrete web services, although he says it is not as mature as SOAPscope.

But nobody really answered the question about testing strategy. I found a couple of useful White papers on the Wipro site, but, curiously, the one on testing web services seems to have gone. But Red Gate's paper Web Services Testing describes the same approach, i.e.

Proof-of-concept testing

Functional testing

Regression testing

Load/stress testing and

Monitoring

The paper goes onto describe how their tool supports stress/load testing. It misses testing out the orchestration aspects, though - I think this is another required testing step. Anybody got any other pointers?

Identifying and Specifying Web Services

A question I am worrying about at the moment...
My client intends developing a set of Web Services to allow 3rd parties to sell (and possibly service) their insurance products. The question is, how do they decide what services to expose and how?

This is actually a huge and distinctly non-trivial question to answer. I'm curious as to how things have moved on from when we did the Archtiectrue Conundrum work a couple of years ago. [The Blog we created of some resources we found is still here].

From a thread in the CSC RFA, Glen Best has provided a few links on service modelling. RFA Response.

It seems to me that you need to define a framework and set of patterns you are going to use before you start building. Questions to answer include:

What does the orchestration (or choreography) of the services?

How are the services monitored and managed?

How do you provide resilience and performance?

What is the security model and how is it implemented?

By the way Andrew's Blog has an excellent discussion on Service Versioning, which is part of the story.

As for how to expose the web services, there are some who would say that the services should be "RESTful". See here for example, for some tips on that. How well is this accepted? Or are people just using XML/SOAP?

Of course Web Services Interoperability is an important part of the story. But what is the level of adoption of the standard and when should we look to intercept which standards as they are defined and ratified?

Questions, questions... I've got a bit of catching up to do. Not least to find ouy what Zapthink are saying these days - I was quite impressed with their analysis in this area a couple of years ago.

Downloading.....

I thought I'd test the new image embedding functionality. Thanks are due to Mike Dyer for this.
His message was :

Just in case you are wondering what I'm doing in my spare time.....

(What else do you expect from a Performance Engineering expert?)

Sound Editing

As an alternative to the expensive option of using BT's service for recording a telephone conference of £280 per event, I spent £44.50 + VAT to buy the Telesto Telephone Conversation Recorder device, cables and software to allow me to record our lunchtime briefings conference calls. I piloted it yesterday on the 1hr session on SOA.

Having recorded the call I ended up with a 74Mb WAV file. I then needed to convert this to something that I could upload to the CSC Portal (with its 10,000,000 byte file limit). (Yes it's true. The limit is 10 million bytes, not 10 Mb. Wacky!). Having tried a shareware tool called MP3 WAV Converter, and used up the 5 free conversions without getting a usable result (My final attempt with MP3 WAV resulted in a file of 10,077,000 bytes. It took me ages to figure out why I couldn't upload it!), I looked again and came across this rather good Freeware tool Audacity.

Not only is it free, but it has got lots of useful functionality, including mixing, editing and format conversion. It allowed me to turn my 74Mb WAV file into 2 MP3 files of c 8.5Mb each. Then all I had to do was upload them to the portal....

Oh, by the way, I did also experiment for quite some time with using Skype, dialling into MeetMe with SkypeOut (including playing a file of the touchtones of the PIN code using Dialabc's generator) and trying to record that. I tried various shareware/freeware tools for recording the sound, but there's not a good solution (yet) to the problem of getting an echo when you use the Mono or Stereo Mix sound source to allow you to record. A pity. That solution would only have cost 84p/hr (the SkypeOut cost to a UK landline).

Now that's cracked, how about podcasting?

Wikis

I've been using a couple of free Wiki hosting services lately. I have to say I'm pretty impressed with Jotspot.

I particularly liked their concept of a hackathon as an innovation mechanism.

I'll also be interested to see how they get on with their Jotspot Live real-time wiki interface that allows multiple users to edit the same page at the same time

A new one that is pretty simple and extremely quick to to get up and running with is Pbwiki. As they say...
"Make a free, password protected wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich."

And if you are after some links re Wikis this is where I started from Wikis Galore. See also the links in The Public Wiki Forums listing in the original Wiki - the
PortlandPatternRepository.

And, of course, don't forget the stonking Wikipedia, now up to 635,000+ articles in the English edition.

Formatting problem

I've taken a drastic approach to sorting out the format problem by changing the template used. I then had to edit a lot of the posts for the columns to display correctly. But it's sorted now. Is it an improvement?

By the way, the new template allows us to display some stuff about ourselves. If we wish. I'm not sure I do!

Opening minds with open-source collaboration

neus.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Very interesting article. How to do 'transformation' and why introduce modern collaboration.

VB6 to .NET

I need to evaluate whether to recommend migrating a pile of stuff from VB6 to .NET.
Federico Zufaly, whose company Artinsoft built the migration wizards for Microsoft, is quoted in this DevX article... http://www.devx.com/vb/Article/16822/1954?pf=true as saying that VB developers first accept the following immutable truths:

• You should not attempt migration until after your migration team has studied and learned the .NET environment
• Migration, particularly the first time you do it, is going to be very frustrating
• Migration is in no way a hands-off process
• Some applications simply cannot be migrated automatically
• The only applications worth migrating are those which the company intends to significantly enhance with functionality that only .NET can provide.

In other words, if you've imagined a process by which one loads some VB6 code into the wizard, does a few days' worth of debugging and testing, and emerges with a VB.NET application, you are living a fantasy. And the sooner you abandon that fantasy the better off you will be.

And...

After a developer is sufficiently comfortable with .NET and has spent several weeks in studying the migration process with the tool, Zoufaly says that a migration should progress at an average rate of just 7,000 to 10,000 lines of code per week. Therefore, a 1 million-line VB6 application will take 100 weeks—two years—to upgrade. Seems a little slow for something that Microsoft had the hubris to dub a migration "wizard."

Hmm.

Any way, IT Toolbox has a number of useful looking links here.

Wake up!

Anybody alive on this blog? Has this community lost interest or are we all so busy as to forget why we started this?

Wiki Page

MyWikiPage3.jpg
Here is a Wiki with some loose thoughts on Dependable Systems. I find personal wikis useful for jotting down ideas when reading about a topic; then building them up into hierarchies and finally 'looking' at them as a provisional website by exporting to html, before they are placed under configuration management in a Repository

EA Alignment

Enterprise Architecture Alignment Heuristics:
See whether you can find something useful in this paper.
The alignment between Business Processes (BP) and Information Technologies (IT) is a major issue in most organizations, as it directly impacts on the organization's agility and flexibility to change according to business needs. The concepts upon which alignment is perceived are addressed in what is called today the 'Enterprise Architecture', gathering business and IT together. The focus of this paper is to show how alignment between Business and IT can be stated in terms of the components found in most Enterprise Architectures. (11 printed pages).

Folksonomies

Oh. And here's a discussion on folksonomies...
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66456,00.html

Taxonomies

Following up on a discussion around taxonimies that led to an article on folksonomies I came to del.icio.us. So I started capturing a few bookmarks using tags that include "ukarch".
See here...
http://del.icio.us/j.r.moody

As an alternative to this blog, we could individually capture bookmarks we want to share in our own bookmarklet collections by using this tag. Then they can be viewed here...
http://del.icio.us/tag/ukarch

And while you follow those links, you will see I am also looking at Wikis. I'm thinking this might be a useful resource for our solution team on the-project-I-cannot-name.

Virtual Machines

C97063.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Virtual Machines rediscovered... 40 years on, at long last, something serious is happening in the world of microprocessors. A new generation of computer scientists reinvented the wheel that their fathers once developed for mainframes. I'm sad it took so long but delighted that they realised that without hardware support any VM 'architecture' was bound to be weak. "Segments", "descriptors" and so many nearly forgotten concepts will once again become fashionable ;-) Well, I may even pick up my original trade myself, given that I never gave up hope and become 'a manager'. I wonder what Dlbert thinks about VT-x...