03.25.07
Posted in Technology Adoption, Software Requirements, Corporate Life, Process, Politics, IT management at 9:29 pm by ngkaboon
I just saw a master seasoner seasoning mackerel on TV. It is impressive that he can grab 20g of salt each time with his bare hands. He demonstrated by grabbing salt and scattering it onto 3 electronic weighing scales. On the first attempt, he was off by 2g on one of the scale. In the second attempt, he managed to “weigh” 20g consistently on the 3 scales. In practice, he is able to salt the mackerel with such consistency 10 at a time in 2 seconds flat. That is what we call a true master.
It reminds me of what I set out to be. I have to strive on being the best in the line I am in. Being the best currently means to be able to make impossible projects finish in record cost and time covering the most scope and attaining the highest quality. Only when I am able to do that consistently for all projects would I be able to call myself a true master.
Unlike operational work, project work is not repetitive and hence, to be able to see patterns across projects is challenging. To be able to master this, I need to work on impossible projects. To work on impossible projects, I first need to show to people that I can do the simple projects well. In addition, I need to be doing projects across multiple domains to be able to comprehend different types of projects and understanding the patterns. So far in my career, I have a fair bit of switches from research to technical to people management, from pharmaceutical to products to projects and from supply chain to regulatory to financial accounting.
Some of the hard projects I have seen as one or more of the following characteristics:
- Same data coming from different sources
- Processes driven by legacy and regulation that nobody really know absolutely about
- Organization structure mismatches
- Strong resistance from key business stakeholders
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08.11.06
Posted in Technology Adoption, Corporate Life, IT management at 8:23 am by ngkaboon
Recently I visited a dentist for a root-canal treatment. I have always hated visiting a dentist all my life. In fact, I gave advice to a colleague for her kids, (1) Bring the kids to friendly dentists so that they will not be afraid of dentists and (2) Make sure their teeth are in proper arrangement so that it will not suffer from dental problems in the future.
Recalling my work as an IT professional, I realized I am sometimes being perceived as a dentist. People, over the years in dealing with misappropriate IT professionals, have become afraid of dealing with IT people. And like visiting a dentist, once you are on a dentist chair, there is nothing you can do to complain (at least not through your mouth). Does it not sound like the inept helpdesk that we keep encouraging our user to call? In a long session like a root-canal treatment, you do not even know what happen if the dentist keeps on working on your teeth. Drawing on the analogy, it would seem that it is important for your users to find an avenue to raise their discomfort (like raising hands in a dental session) and it is important to provide constant feedback on what is happening in the session.Â
As for the earlier pair of advice, there is nothing much I can do about exposing first time users to the right IT. And for the latter advice, the closest analogy would be to fix the information problem and make sure the information is well-organized. In this way, even when system upgrades, the migration would be simpler.
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01.15.06
Posted in Technology Adoption at 12:17 pm by ngkaboon
The telephone is a relatively new invention but we have see how far and how deeply it has impacted our lives. One anecdote I can quote as a parent is that we are teaching our girl, barely 1 year old, on how to use (or pretend to use the phone).
I wonder how long it would take before my descendants would be taught how to blog or how to email when they are one year old.
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01.08.06
Posted in Web 2.0, Asia, Technology Adoption at 10:17 pm by ngkaboon
When my best friend first showed me her blog, I was unimpressed by the technology. That must have been 4 years or so ago, circa 2001. In Singapore, blogging was definitely not mainstream. Nothing was written on the papers about it. We still did not know famous bloggers in this region.
Now 4 years later, blogging is a mainstream word. You are starting to hear the word blogging from older people (but no, my parents still do not know much about blogging. Note that my dad uses the internet but it is really for pure utility rather than social interaction. He visits youtube for example to see my baby daughter latest achievement. My mom, who is totally internet unsavvy, knows about yahoo, and no, she does not know google). Any case, blogging has definitely hit mainstream.
I had the opportunity to talk to her again this morning over breakfast. I asked her if she heard of RSS and she said no. I did not bother to probe too much about her knowledge of Web 2.0. Interestingly, she also does not know what a wiki is (but yes, she heard of wikipedia). She bought an IPod Video and had convinced her colleague at the office to buy an IPod too.
What does all this tell me? Pyra started blogspot in 1999, and I first heard of it two years late. I started writing a journal in a .plan file in my then-unix account in 1998 and for that reason, I was unimpressed. It was exactly what I could have done with an unix account and I had a symbolic link set up on my web pages directory. In other words, what I write could be viewed by the internet and if the geeks wrote the right script, they could even subscribe to my plan.html. The one thing I did not understand then was that without hyperlink, my text was “flat”. My page is lengthy (ten of thousands of lines) and because my entries were sorted in chronological order, from past to future, you had to scroll down to read the new entries. I reasoned that people would want to read it that way to get the flow. I was very wrong. Later, when comment links were added to her blog site, my public viewable text file became even more “off”. Also, no images could be added to the text file. What started out as almost the same is not the same anymore. I could not understand this well enough. I even wanted to make my blogspot site look like my text file. I did not understand that my old method was being disrupted and now looking back, I am blinded by the faith in old school technology. When a new technology arrives at the scene, you think it is the same as the old and the old is even better in some ways than the new. It is no surprise that people in sustaining technology tend to miss the boat when it comes to exciting new technology. Logically, I could have been an early embracer but I end up adopting blogging 4 years late.
That was the first point. Now, for the second point, despite the success of wikipedia, wiki, on its own, is still relatively new and has not hit mainstream, or even early adopters, at least in Asia. Nobody wants to host a wiki yet. Based on my first point, I certainly do not want to make the same mistake again of thinking everything was the same as before. Wiki promises social editing and self-moderating. Now, you ask, wouldn’t a joint account blog be the same? Yes, it looks the same but the subtleties are important. And most often the subtleties lies in usability and convenience. Wiki may not necessary disrupt blogs though. We should watch what its disrupts and hopefully this time round, I can be wiser.
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01.07.06
Posted in Web 2.0, Asia, Technology Adoption at 8:40 am by ngkaboon
This is a repost from my 360 site.
It is interesting to note that Asia is in a lagging position in terms of information technology. This place is clearly not at the centre of innovation, compared to numerous US locations, some European locations and Israel (to a certain extent).
I spoke to a Portfolio Manager in a technology sector recently and he exclaimed that most of the concentration of funding is in hardware-related companies. Asia has made great strides in terms of hardware, but unfortunately, most of these hardware-focused technology companies are not positioned at the highest value segment of the information technology value chain. The locus of value is still very much with the US and to a lesser extent, European, counterparts.
Given that India is the single most largest software vendor in the world, it is also strange that very few (if none) of the new wave of start-ups originated from India. The attack has been predominantly on being lower cost and when considered as a whole, the strategy is to do simpler programs and lower cost and hopefully eat up the higher value (read more complex) business later on. According to Christensen, the incumbents will flee up to high-end market and eventually paint themselves into a corner. In this race, the plot is quite different, not only do the incumbents move up market, they also convince the customers to move up as well. As a result, if they can continuously force the consumers to go up, Asia vendors will always be selling only commodities.
The main reason for this state of affair is that the US is currently the single largest market for IT products and innovation is driven by customer needs. Hence, if the Asia market grows to become as large (or larger) than the US market, the game should change. We have already seen the change happening in the mobile phone market (or cellphone for the American folks). Players like Samsung are able to penetrate the markets of South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore easily because they can intuitvely understand the culture and the needs of the customers in those few areas, and these few areas make up a large enough user base to promote innovation.
Web 2.0 has largely been a US-driven wave where you see very little play in Asia (or even in Europe). Social web is still at its infancy and the largest market of the social web is still in the US, by virtue of the number of geeks in the US. If the number of geeks in Asia (with internet access) increases to a extent that it becomes large enough to support innovation, there will be an Asia-driven wave of 2.0 users.
The main obstacle facing this new wave is that Asia is disparate in languages (cultures are surprisingly not that far off from each other). This obstacle can be crossed either by technology, perfect translation service or by people’s will to change, to switch to English for geek communications. These are indeed interesting times.
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