• is afraid of change
• not interested in improvement
• has a rigid top-down process development style
• doesn’t care what you think

I think the greatest problem is the organisation basically doesn’t trust it’s employees to know what they are doing. It doesn’t matter that you may know something better or that you care about improving the company’s performance.  I find when I hear this sort of phrase from in companies I’m consulting at, you soon discover all manner of other issues, idiotic decision making processes, strange convoluted internal processes, inflexible management styles, complete reliance on reporting and long meetings for project visibility, and completely rigid thinking.

What the upshot of all this is, is usually a company that then is left with workers that accept their situation rather then improving it. Ultimately, when such companies confront the reality of their situation and require change to avoid failure, they fail because their employees don’t want change – they’ve had it ground down out of them over the years.

Stasis as a corporate strategy only works for so long.

DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life? And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true. And I became fascinated with that. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

ERROL MORRIS: Why not?

DAVID DUNNING: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.” But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas. And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.

I don’t hold that software makes an existing business process “efficient” at all. Rather I think software makes possible a new process, which should be more “efficient” in terms of money gained less dollars spent – but its a new process, not the old one. In effect, new software creates new business opportunities. New software will only make an existing, unchanged process, less efficient, if a new business process is not designed along with the new software. If the business just wants new software without changing “what they do” they are wasting their money, IMHO.

Of course there is the possibility (probability?) the business doesn’t actually understand what it is they actually do anyway. This is not an uncommon position for many businesses that are happy to cruise along in neutral making some marginal profit on some marginal activity. Usually these businesses are also found to be beating their workers with sticks (usually only metaphorical ones unless they ‘offshore’ their operation to countries where killing your workers is just a part of ‘Business as Usual’. Typically they hold that marginal process can be made ‘better’ simply with just more exhortation (or threats) to greater and greater efforts at a totally demoralized (if not actively hostile) workforce, but I suspect that’s a story for another day!

The problem for Glassfish, as the second sentence of this ServerSide article states (see it straight from Oracle’s mouth here, and see also here) is that Oracle view it as being used for “non-mission critical department apps”. Glassfish’s superior technology (or otherwise) just doesn’t come into it. It’s not a factor (as it rarely every is).

Not so long ago Oracle spent a big wad of money acquiring an app server (Weblogic) and then a stack of more money porting all its other products into it and branding the resulting mess platform “Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g”. Now not only do they have their third app server (OC4J/OAS, Weblogic and Glassfish), but the Sun product suite includes products that compete with various Fusion Middleware 11g products (portals, ESBs, and so on). So on one hand you’ve got a “departmental” application server, which you can either licence for free by downloading the open-source version, or buy support for the fancier ‘Enterprise’ version, and on the other, an expensive, full-stack-integrated (all the way to the IDE), fully-branded strategic platform that Oracle just invested a vast amount of money into, and have been pushing like crazy onto customers the past six months. And it is the same sales team that will sell both this licensed “departmental” Glassfish. Therefore if you say the magic words like “need a cluster” or maybe “we might build a portal”, or “we are considering adopting a service-orientated architecture”, lo and behold you’ll find the molto-dinero “Fusion Middleware” based solution installed all over your sorry arse quicker than you can say “can you please explain this per-core with special CPU-architecture-loading-factor licencing schema to me once again and why is it a different price if I upgrade my hardware without adding any additional cores???“.

Let’s dissect those “key points” of Oracle’s strategy announcement:

Key Point	What they meant to say
GlassFish continues as the Java EE reference implementation and as an open source project.	We see it as the way to dominate the direction of Java EE for at least two years, but for Larry’s sake don’t try to use it in production.
Oracle’s strategic application server, Oracle WebLogic Server, together with GlassFish, provide world class Java EE infrastructure.	Oracle’s strategic application server, Oracle WebLogic Server something something something provide world-class something something infrastructure.
GlassFish Enterprise Server and WebLogic Server expected to share core components.	We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Oracle plans to add GlassFish Enterprise Server all WebLogic offerings.	Hey, look at this cute free “reference implementation” thingy that comes free with Weblogic! You could use that to run your departmental Wiki instead of having to pay us another fortune for more Weblogic licences. Did you say “WIKI”? Did we tell you all about the great wiki-like Enterprise 2.0 features available in the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g offering? How many test environments did you say you needed licences for?
GlassFish Web Stack maintained for existing customers.	Not available for sale.
GlassFish Message Queue remains as the GlassFish messaging infrastructure.	We’re not expecting to sell any licences of this. Just use Oracle Fusion Middleware’s SOA Suite 11g already. We’re fairly sure that’s got a message queue in it.
Oracle plans to license GlassFish Enterprise Server and Java System Web Server with all WebLogic Server offerings.	See above.
GlassFish also available as standalone offering.	Are you sure you didn’t mean to say “Weblogic”? No? Can you call back next Thursday at 2pm and ask for Fred? We’re reasonably certain he might know something about that Glassthingy.
GlassFish will continue to be supported and maintained for an extended time period for customers current on support.	Well, the lawyers said we had to. We know how to do this. Ask any 10g customer.
GlassFish open source projects thrive	As long as we will let them.

I know I’m a completely cynical bastard about these things, but I will wager within a few months that even if you deliberately ask for Glassfish Enterprise directly that you’ll have to fight off the Weblogic borg absolutely tooth and nail to the last man as they repeatedly try to board your IT department brandishing their integrated-wizard-driven Red Stack. I predict that, basically, after a year of not even trying to sell any Glassfish licences – because if you ask for any of the features that are in the licenced version and not the open-source one, you’ll be pushed to Weblogic (and anyway, at ten times the price they’ll prefer to sell you Weblogic as a default position, after all “Glassfish comes free with Weblogic”) – Oracle will announce, “there’s no sales in it”, then probably ditch the licenced Glassfish version completely, leaving only the open source version. Finally sometime after that they’ll cut the open source funding off and it will have to limp along without hardly any of the resources it formerly had. Maybe they’ll donate it to the ghetto of an Apache incubator project where it can die unnoticed a couple of years after that. It’s a pity because IMHO Glassfish is ten thousand times a better app server than anything Oracle ever produced, or even bought before this.

In terms of the article, I agree it has been my experience for many years where I have faster/better personal technology than my workplace. At one place we had to put a “business case” for getting every developer a two monitor setup. Well, it was trivial and the developers got the monitors. In my view all attempts to control the desktop are at best essentially futile, and at worst, actively counter-productive.

Nowadays I simply will refuse jobs where the “SOE” means I must use Windows. It is a question I ask at the first interview. Windows is great for people who have needs that don’t extend beyond word processing, spreadsheet, and corporate email. But that doesn’t mean those technologies have to be forced on those users! Compatible systems for all these choices exist on most major operating systems.

However I believe that technical users and developers like myself are better served with Unix or Unix-like derivatives, e.g. Linux or Mac OSX, mainly because the Unix shell is one of the most powerful standard tools any developer can learn. And I am certainly a digital rogue. I use a Macbook Pro. Well as a consultant I provide my own equipment and that’s that. I use a VMware install of Windows if I have to for some reason. Given a lot of corporate systems that we build nowadays are done as web apps, I don’t think the personal choice of desktop systems matters terribly much anyway nowadays! In my view, companies should tell the user the budget for their system and they should buy whatever they like with it. And yeah, desktop ops guys, suck that up and deal with it just like us apps guys have had to deal with “heterogeneous environments” for over a decade now. Reading the article you can see what some companies like Kraft are doing in this area and it is definitely the way of the future.

In my view the number one thing that stops desktop nirvana is the Microsoft application stack – Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, etc. This stuff is the spawn of Satan as far as I’m concerned – have you ever used the Exchange web app not in I.E.? It’s worse than the first versions of Squirrel Mail ! There’s not even a functional search function (at least on Exchange 2003), i.e. a total joke.

In the development context, I’m a great believer in allowing developers to choose whatever IDE they are comfortable with, that the code base ought to be totally independent of the artefacts used to edit and manipulate it. Their productivity will soar as their deep knowledge of their existing tools ceases to be a roadblock in getting stuff done. It’s really depressing when these app server / suite vendors release completely integrated environments from the production server all the way to the developer desktop. This is a productivity sink if you have to retrain your Eclipse/Netbeans/Intellij/Emacs/vi developers to retool on some new right-mouse-point-and-click-context-menu style development environment that is completely locked to the vendor. This is not a good story in my view. The vendors need to consider strong de-coupling of their deployment environments from their development tools.

In recent times I’ve seen this often enough that I think it’s really a failing of the IT industry in general, and we need to educate business IT users about the various scenarios and categories of software.

The simplest analogy I can think of is to say the website or portal is the letter, and the platform is the word processor.  Regardless if you use Word, Wordperfect, Pages 09, your email program or just plain old ‘notepad.exe’, at the end of the day the time to write the letter is pretty much the same effort and therefore the task is basically identical. If you said “I want you to help me to write a letter to my member of parliament”, should  I ask you whether you’re using the new letter wizard in Word? Have you seen this great “clippy” feature? Have you considered the new upgrade to Office 2007? Tell you to buy a Mac? Or would I be better off asking who is your member of parliament and what’s the matter about? When we get these sorts of naive clients we need to concentrate their minds on what their actual problem is and the best way we can solve it, when they’ve got their head in the sand thinking about that great drag-and-drop wizard feature the vendor showed them they totally thinking about the completely wrong thing.

American Express email phishing attempt ... by American Express. Click to see full size.

This email is signed, with a little jpg at the bottom, “Peter Newton”, Director of Marketing, because, you know, that makes it more trustworthy. BTW, at the bottom of the email (not in the picture) it says “You can contact American Express Customer Service for further information. Unfortunately we can not accept incoming emails to this address”, snail mail only, FFS.

It appears quite clear to me that American Express possesses an unbelievable commitment to training their customers to accepting any roughly legitimate-looking email or incoming phone call (see below) as authentic, and having them hand over their valuable financial information to who knows what is at the other end. This email is totally incredible – but yet it is legitimate, I checked the linked addresses before I, nonetheless, still marked it as a “phishing attempt” in Gmail. Look at those security melting links! “If you have forgotten your user ID or password, please click here” (!!!). Amex, you are not some pissy little forum I visited once three years ago that can send an email with a link to the password recovery, you are a bloody financial service. This stuff is a massive security FAIL, you idiots.

I will note in passing that my bank has a line in their online banking website that says to the effect ‘we will never email you about this service’.  They do send me an email that says “your online statements are available” but there’s not a single link in the email. Dear Amex, there is a good reason they never do that! Thank god my current credit balance is zero – although come to think of it that makes me more worried that someone could be stealing more of my credit limit right now.

As I hinted above with the comment about “incoming phone calls”, this is not the first time I’ve discovered that Amex likes to operate in complete contradiction to the rules of good security practice. A few years ago I was rung on my mobile phone by their customer service department; “This is xxx at American Express, we’d like to talk to you, but first can you identify yourself with the following information?”, ran the voice at the other end of the line. No amount of me saying otherwise could persuade them it was a very bad idea: “Well, if you are really Amex, you’ll have all that detail on file in front of you, perhaps you ought to tell me that information to prove you are who you say you are. After all you rang me … “  I said I’d call them back – the operator tried to give me the number but I cut her short and said I’d use the number I already have, thank you very much. After I cleared the issue, I asked to speak to their relevant people and attempted to explain what was wrong with the entire scenario, but I doubt it had much effect, they just claimed “procedure” and read me a lot of boilerplate about how secure they are. But they are not, and here’s the evidence.

Dolts.

Agile requires the discipline to move projects through teams. Multitasking is nuts in agile. Moving team members around to have the “best” specialist available for a particular team is nuts. Performance reviews for individuals is nuts. Managers have to change everything they do, if they want to move the organization to agile. Managers need to see the problems exposed by any given project’s transition to agile and work to remove those obstacles before transitioning to agile.

It’s too easy to think that just because you can get one of your teams to use an agile approach, that your organisation is now Agile. Too many managers “see the problems exposed by given project’s transition to agile” and decide to blame the agile process for the problems thus exposed.In far too many organisations I’ve seen have extremely capable teams delivering quality software in an agile process but remain – in some cases years later – completely unsupported by their senior management (and in some cases with very little support even from their CIO level).

That’s a very sad situation as it is and takes all your selling skills to get the management to “get with the program” so to speak. But this situation can be even more compounded when the management have been convinced that Agile is some sort of silver bullet that will cure all their issues. Whenever you are trying to sell agile to management, never waver from the fact that agile is hard (as everything worth doing is nearly always difficult anyway!). Agile takes discipline.

Johanna’s right to say you can’t adopt agile across an entire organisation in a big bang approach. But you can’t also adopt it without skill and commitment to doing so from managers and executives.

I’m working currently for a client, building a portal which will serve tens of thousands of users. In order to deliver reasonable functionality, we have to integrate to about a half-dozen other critical systems. Email servers (two different types/styles). Calendars (three different sources of calendar information). ERP systems containing customised enterprise information, HR and payroll, content management, identity management, and a couple of specialised web apps. This is supposedly held together with a single-sign-on system. The Portal, SSO, and ERP system all come from the one vendor, I won’t say which one, but it’s a big, major vendor. One Throat To Choke, they say. Well I call bulldust.

The thing is, the only throat’s that’s got any damage on it is the poor client’s, who has managed to have it’s own throat cut wide open and lies bleeding money on the pavement.

The really big gotcha, the huge hole in the way things get pitched to clients from vendors with the “we’ll take the blame” line, is the downright lies that get told to the client about the ease of integration. The portal technology we have, simply cannot propagate identity information across to the ERP’s web services (it’s even more fundamental than that, really). The whole part of this shooting match all comes from the same vendor – portal, ERP and authentication mechanisms. There is a slide in existence in a powerpoint that I’ve seen which claims this integration is trivial. I’ve seen a document from the vendor that claims this is possible, and gives a detailed procedure. But when you try it, it doesn’t work.

Worse, after you struggle with this integration for several days, and log a support call to the vendor (who by now, having banked the cheque, has disappeared from the site completely). Well, that’s a whole new kettle of fish trying to tell each and every newly minted support technician who deal with your support requests just what is meant by WSRP (you can substitute your own appropriate acronym which is central to your particular technology if you like), or even, the logical sequence of what you’re trying to do, which things are of significance, the repeated asking for the same basic irrelevant information over and over, the failure to understand what the question is, ad nauseum. Oh, then and only then do the special “support notes” come out, the ones which which warn against the particular configuration of products that the client has been sold, when the sales slides, and available documentation, and the sales pitch, told exactly the opposite as to what you get after you actually try it and experience the massive whoosh of fail that gushes out the products concerned. I’m just lucky that mostly, it’s not me who is having to deal with this particular problem. I grieve for my colleague though. We’ve lost days and days on what is a completely critical integration. Sold on a lie by people who don’t even know what it is they are selling. Where’s the blame, where’s the throat being choked? The vendor won’t take reponsibility for their own damn product suite’s lack of interoperability!

Just the other day on a different and unrelated support call for a different problem I had to explain how to read a stack-trace, twice, to the support personel involved. Although we cleared the support problem ourselves, that is we found a tedious work-around that at least got us back on the path of writing code, we want an explanation as to what the product is actually doing, so we’ve left the job open. But in that case, the support feedback has been dead a week with no follow up on the matter with the job still critical, unresolved and outstanding, as far as the vendor should be concerned (because we told them so).  Hello? <cue cavenous reverb effect>. <tumbleweeds>.

The hilarious thing is, the funky little systems the client has already installed, with competent programmers in the client’s own employ looking after the other end, look like a joy to integrate against: trivial, almost. Developer on site.

I can’t believe in this day and age these big vendors sell anything to anyone. Hasn’t everyone been burnt like this one too many times? I’ve dealt with other similar big vendors in the past. They are all the same basically. Snake oil salemen selling an oily tar-pit of overcomplexification as if it were the acqua vitae.

anon 9:04PM
[about that code]

crazymcphee 9:05 PM
well, it WAS perfect … CRAZY perfect

anon 9:06 PM
lol… no doubt it even spans a 2yr time frame and 2 organisational puchases later, with no impact

crazymcphee 9:07 PM
exactly. all future and past and alternative universe combinations taken care of forever. no changes necessary.

anon 9:08 PM
sweeet… it should be a product

crazymcphee 9:08 PM
oh it already is just not in this instantiation of the multiverse

anon 9:08 PM
this instance has finished run level 3 yet

crazymcphee 9:08 PM
but in those OTHER multiverses, Oracle already bought it for $500mil

anon 9:09 PM
hahaha, i can see you partying with ellison and his geisha girls ;D

crazymcphee 9:09 PM
tried a ‘sudo shutdown’ but something’s threadlocked the kernel

anon 9:10 PM
then I stepped in a core dump

crazymcphee 9:10 PM
that’s why i’m hard at work building a mutiverse portal so i get me a slice of sweet ellison geisha-girl action

and here you are thinking about some OTHER sort of portal when i said i was working on an ‘Oracle 10g Portal Implementation’

anon 9:11 PM
don’t forget to add some proprietary and intrusive components that spread like a virus and grind all the other appservers to dust

crazymcphee 9:12 PM
well, that’s what at least half of those 10^100 multiverses full of new Indian IT grads are working on

I just send them a 500 page spec each month and they will get it to me at sometime before the death of this multiverse

anon 9:13 PM
that means it should be about ready by now, well as in it probably compiles in at least one of those multiverses, will be fully cmm lvl 5, yet not actually do what you asked

crazymcphee 9:13 PM
(oh by ‘spec’ i mean, a drunken rant shouted into my mobile phone on the walk home)

well, yes, but i’m fully expecting it will meet oracle’s stringent marketing requirements

anon 9:14 PM
well shit, they have to do some work, what do they expect, 4 u to write the code as well

yes marketing tickbox on the packaging is the only requirements they really need

crazymcphee 9:15 PM
yeah, i mean, hell, we pay at least $5.50 a day per developer …

oh we don’t tell the DEVELOPERS about the marketing tickbox requirements! they are super-secret. we just slap those on the box at the end. when i say ‘end’ i mean end of the box design process which has been ready for about 8 months now.