Saturday, April 6, 2013
Big data in the age of the telegraph
In 1854, inundated with the amount of data coming from the telegraph, Daniel McCallum created the Org Chart to better organize the flow of information from the field back up the organization. What this article shows is that the proper handling of data at the "edge" of the enterprise, enabling remote decisions and consuming only useful data centrally, has not changed in all the years between the introduction of the telegraph to today's Big Data initiatives. This is +GlobeRanger's founding vision. McCallum called it "a proper division of responsibilities", we call it the Edge... decentralizing real time decision making and shielding the enterprise from the vast amounts of raw data generated at the edge absolutely vital.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Monday, October 29, 2012
Favored Sons and Bastard Stepchildren Don't Work Well Together: Zuckerberg abandons second-class developers
Perhaps he hasn't abandoned the developers themselves, but Facebook has announced that their product teams, the teams of first-class developers making all of the “cool stuff”, would now be responsible for monetization of the products they create, such as the News Feed or Messaging.
Profound Shift In Zuckerberg's Attitude - Business Insider
Where they used to have a separate team of developers doing the icky work of advertising while the product teams had all of the fun, Zuckerberg has finally realized what so many software companies figured out long ago: you can't isolate teams from each other and expect their end results to work well together.
Part of it is the Founders’ Passion, but it may come from elsewhere in senior management, and many software companies have seen it. Teams of elite developers are isolated and shielded from the “business” while another team is isolated and ignored like annoying stepchildren.
Sometimes this happens to work out well; you may have your cash cow team slaving away, all but forgotten while other teams work on all of the cool stuff that will bring tomorrow’s business and are showered with perks. That was what happened at Apple. As Guy Kawasaki is fond of saying, the Apple II division made all the money while the Macintosh division spent it.
However, that mentality is especially toxic when the results of these two teams are supposed to work together in the wild, just like Facebook’s advertising and product teams. The cool product stuff took up most of the page, and they left a little side bar for ads to run on. This is very different from the cash cow that is expected to be replaced someday, the two teams’ fates are joined; the ad team does not exist without the products, and the products cannot exist (anymore) without the ads (they could early on, before that ugly word “profit” came into the picture).
I've seen this story play out myself. It’s the perfect example of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.
Sure, you often have to have separate teams. But, when their fates are so connected and the product of their labor expected to work together to support the company, their goals have to be shared from the beginning. Sometimes this means merging teams. Sometimes it means rotating people between to give everyone a holistic view of the forest. Sometimes it takes creating a more collaborative environment.
Take a look around and see if this describes your environment. It’s a problem with many solutions, but often goes unnoticed by upper management until it’s too late.
Profound Shift In Zuckerberg's Attitude - Business Insider
Where they used to have a separate team of developers doing the icky work of advertising while the product teams had all of the fun, Zuckerberg has finally realized what so many software companies figured out long ago: you can't isolate teams from each other and expect their end results to work well together.
Part of it is the Founders’ Passion, but it may come from elsewhere in senior management, and many software companies have seen it. Teams of elite developers are isolated and shielded from the “business” while another team is isolated and ignored like annoying stepchildren.
Sometimes this happens to work out well; you may have your cash cow team slaving away, all but forgotten while other teams work on all of the cool stuff that will bring tomorrow’s business and are showered with perks. That was what happened at Apple. As Guy Kawasaki is fond of saying, the Apple II division made all the money while the Macintosh division spent it.
However, that mentality is especially toxic when the results of these two teams are supposed to work together in the wild, just like Facebook’s advertising and product teams. The cool product stuff took up most of the page, and they left a little side bar for ads to run on. This is very different from the cash cow that is expected to be replaced someday, the two teams’ fates are joined; the ad team does not exist without the products, and the products cannot exist (anymore) without the ads (they could early on, before that ugly word “profit” came into the picture).
I've seen this story play out myself. It’s the perfect example of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.
Sure, you often have to have separate teams. But, when their fates are so connected and the product of their labor expected to work together to support the company, their goals have to be shared from the beginning. Sometimes this means merging teams. Sometimes it means rotating people between to give everyone a holistic view of the forest. Sometimes it takes creating a more collaborative environment.
Take a look around and see if this describes your environment. It’s a problem with many solutions, but often goes unnoticed by upper management until it’s too late.
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