In the vein of Coté’s White Collar Survival Guides, here are some suggestions of my own for knowledge workers.

The Three Horsemen of the Productivity Apocalypse - and how to slay them

There are a few constants of corporate life that are pretty much universal, and those are email¹, meetings, and slides. All three are widely hated, and someone is always trying to kill one or other of them. I have even heard people say that these three factors have ruined their lives.

I would say that the truth is a bit more nuanced. "With great power comes great responsibility", as they say, and certainly all three are powerful tools.

Email

Ah, email. If I had a Euro for every time something had promised to kill email… well, I could start by filling out my dream garage, but I’d still have plenty left over after that. We should probably amend the old saw about only cockroaches surviving nuclear war to include Sendmail running somewhere. Despite everything, it’s still the best tool at its job.

The problem is that most of the time we use email wrong. Email chains devolve into endless back and forth, with unhelpful subject lines like "Re: Re: Fwd: RE: Re: …". This is why, amid all the froth about the latest would-be email killer, I was interested to spot an article discussing how to do email right. In particular, the counter-intuitive recommendation is to write longer emails.

A key rule for e-mail is to keep it brief. The recipients are pressed for time – and perhaps, on their mobiles, cramped for visual space – so keep it to a sentence or two.

Wrong, says productivity expert Cal Newport.

His recommendation is something called "process-centric email":

• When sending or replying to an email, identify the goal this emerging email thread is trying to achieve. For example, perhaps its goal is to synchronize a plan for an upcoming meeting with a collaborator or to agree on a time to grab coffee.
• Next, come up with a process that gets you and your correspondent to this goal while minimizing the number of back and forth messages required.
• Explain this process in the email so that you and your recipient are on the same page.

The desired result is to spend a little more time on each individual message or thread, but reduce the number of visits you need to make to your inbox over time.

This is not that dissimilar to the time-tested format of the VITO letter: grab your correspondent’s attention up front, then articulate your message and the reasons why they should care, and close with concrete actions. Of course you will take more time when writing to an actual VITO than to a run-of-the-mill correspondent, but it’s still an effective tool.

The only problem with both these techniques is that they work well one-to-one, but fall down with those huge sprawling email threads that we all know and love to hate. As more and more people get added to the conversation, skirting Dunbar’s Number, any chance of useful communication breaks down.

Modern tools like Slack can supposedly make this situation better, or at least more tolerable, but the problem there is the requirement that everyone adopt the new tool. As long as not everyone is on the new channel, it’s more trouble than it’s worth to either verify someone is on board or to bring them on board. In time-honoured fashion, people default to just adding more and more people to the same old email chain.

The problem is compounded by the perfect confusion which reigns over email etiquette, with no agreement over who goes in To: and who goes in Cc:, let alone anything about hierarchical ordering of participants.

Still, email is better than all the alternatives, for one simple reason: it works, almost always and almost everywhere. That is a high bar for any new offering to clear, as I have written before.

Meetings

Meetings share many of the same problems as the big multi-user email chains that I was just complaining about. Sure, the attendee list for an in-person meeting is limited by the size of the available meeting rooms - still the most in-demand commodity in any office. Online meetings and conference calls, of course, do not share this limitation.

In either case, though, some attendees may be disinterested, others may be there mainly to be seen, and some may actually be negative. Unless the agenda is enforced ruthlessly, the discussion will move off-topic very rapidly - which anyway is probably a good idea, otherwise why have the meeting in the first place?

One way to optimise the use of meetings comes from Amazon.

In senior executive Amazon meetings, before any conversation or discussion begins, everyone sits for 30 minutes in total silence, carefully reading six-page printed memos.

What makes this management trick work is how the medium of the written word forces the author of the memo to really think through what he or she wants to present.

I have criticised some Amazon quick-fix management practices before, but I think this one makes a lot of sense. In the typical meeting agenda, quite a lot of time is spent level-setting, making sure everyone agrees on the situation to be analysed before proposals can be put forwards. Inevitably, people who are already up to speed - or who think they are - will hijack this process by asking questions, and there are only so many times you can promise to "get to that in just a couple more slides", especially with senior people, before you start losing your audience.

Amazon’s two-stage approach, with the author clarifying their thinking by setting down their analysis and proposal in writing, and the other participants absorbing that message in full before starting to discuss and question it, seems like a really productive way of avoiding the problem.

Sure, it takes a long time to write six-page documents, so maybe save those for the big strategic meetings - but if there is time for a meeting, there should be time for at least a one-page recap of the situation to date, some high-level proposals, and desired outcomes of the meeting. If there is no time to either write or read such a succinct summation, is the meeting really a valuable use of anyone’s time?

Slides

What can I say? I’m a fan of PowerPoint. There, I said it. Much like email, PowerPoint can be (and often is) used wrong, putting audiences at risk of death by PowerPoint, but it’s very effective when used well. Not to blow my own horn, but I get a lot of compliments on my presentations. Partly of course this is because people are used to such a low standard that it doesn’t take much to stand out - and partly it’s because I put thought, preparation, and the results of formal training into my slides. Sometimes this takes a bit more effort than it should, but the results are well worth it.

Invest in a couple of books - I like Slide:ology and Resonate by Nancy Duarte, and of course Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. If you can get to a training session, so much the better; talking through this sort of material with an instructor is really effective.

See you at the meeting

I’ll drop you an email about it, and send you my slides afterwards.

Image by Nirzar Pangarkar via Unsplash

Sure, blame the user

Because there isn’t enough recent security news, everyone is all worked up about the 2012 LinkedIn breach. Okay, it’s somewhat newsworthy because some lowlife is now trying to sell the data. All the security vendors have jumped on the bandwagon¹, but in particular lots of people are mocking the fact that people are using common or easily-guessed passwords:

• 123456

• linkedin

• password

• 123456789

• 12345678

Now a bot has emerged which attempts to reuse known leaked passwords to log in to sensitive sites such as online banking systems. Predictably, the main response has been mockery, with El Reg opining that If your Netflix password is your banking password, you'll get what you deserve.

This sort of victim-blaming has got to stop. It may be fun in an elitist, look-at-the-lusers sort of way, but it’s not actually advancing the cause of better security.

Obviously the real villains of the piece are the people exploiting those credentials, but those sorts of people are probably going to be with us until the ultimate heat death of the Universe, so blaming them is not a particularly productive exercise. Law enforcement could and should do more to bring the perps to justice, but that can only ever happen after the fact, when it’s too late for the victims.

Among people we can actually expect to influence, I would start with the banks. Given that people are out there trying to break into banking systems, because that's where the money is, and given the potential consequences of a breach, the design of those systems must include more advanced security than a simple username and password pair.

For reasons too complicated and boring to relate, I actually have two bank accounts with different institutions in different countries. Both, however, implement two-factor authentication. One has a challenge-response device that works with my ATM card, while the other requires me to make a call from my registered phone number and enter a one-time code. Any bank not implementing something along those lines in 2016 is negligent with their customers’ security. If your bank does not offer two-factor authentication, you should run, not walk, to the exits.

But what about the (l)users?

Users certainly bear some responsibility for not sharing passwords - but in the real world, there are already far too many services that require me to create an account with a username and a password for no good reason. Log in to comment, log in to review, log in to purchase, log in to make a reservation… No wonder people share passwords between services!

It’s fine to sit in the ivory tower of security policy and blame people for doing this sort of thing, but it’s the reality. At least nowadays most places accept an email address as the user account, so that’s one thing less to remember - without worrying about whether this particular site right here wanted a username of less than eight characters, exactly eight characters, or more than eight characters, or whether somebody had already picked my chosen user name so I made a variant, or whatever.

Passwords themselves are still a problem, though. Logging in via Google, Facebook or Twitter is becoming more common, but there the issue is that I don’t necessarily want to share my social ID with every random website that I need to have a one-time interaction with.

The result is that I reuse passwords for unimportant services all the time. However, all the important ones are unique - including my LinkedIn password, since my old one was caught up in that 2012 breach. Security needs to be done in layers. If someone gets my Random Website password, that won’t get them into my LinkedIn - and if they get my (new) LinkedIn creds, that still won’t get them anywhere with my online banking.

And here’s a pro tip - for all those one-time, "log in to use our wifi"-type deals, just do like my good friend Annie Onymous, who is always happy to share her email address: ann.onymous@myo.biz.

Stay safe out there.

The ongoing conversation about English's domination as the international lingua franca can sometimes feel extremely repetitive. It is true that the ascendancy of English may be founded first in British imperialism, and then in its upstart offspring, American imperialism¹. However, to state that today non-English-speakers learn English purely to communicate with Americans and Brits is to miss a large part of the point.

Very odd to hear presentations in a language you don't speak on a topic you know well. With all the keywords, you can *almost* follow along.

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) May 18, 2016

As I have written before, English today is the common language that people from different backgrounds use to talk to each other - whether or not there is a native English speaker present! In fact, I have seen native English speakers fail to communicate any better than people with rudimentary English. Indeed, I have frequently seen them communicate worse than those for whom English is a second language.

Why does this happen? Surely native speakers should have an advantage when communicating in their own language?

Actually, that facility may be hindering rather than helping. Native English speakers will use idiom and cultural references that foreigners may not be familiar with, while someone speaking English as a second language is likely to restrict themselves to vocabulary and phrasing that are shared by their audience.

I have seen this mechanism play out many times. A native speaker talking to a mixed audience of native and non-native speakers may make some reference or use some phrase that is perfectly clear and familiar to the other native speakers - but completely loses the non-native-speaker part of the audience. They might say that something is a "red herring", or that they aim to "get to second base" on something - simple verbal shorthand to them, but concepts that require a lot of unpacking to an audience that is not familiar with those phrases. Both are real examples I have heard used in international business meetings, and that I have had to help local colleagues understand.

In fact, that second example illustrates the cultural aspects of language use. The idiom of "getting to second base" comes originally from baseball, but mutated into sexual slang for "making progress" with one's date. Both are peculiarly American forms, and might not be especially familiar even to a British audience, except possibly from films.

It is a good idea in general to keep your audience in mind when speaking (or writing!). On top of the immediate benefits of making your message easier to follow, it is also a good way to clarify your own thinking. Concepts come across better when they do not rely on clichés and received phrasing - even when the audience does not have any linguistic barrier at all.

Famously, George Orwell came up with six key rules in his essay. Politics and the English Language:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I would say that all of these rules represent excellent advice, and even more so when non-native speakers are present. Those metaphors, similes, and longer words may not be familiar to them, and complex passive constructions may confuse them.

One last note is that phrases that English imported from other languages come with their own set of booby traps for the unwary. The pronunciation of words, ordering of acronyms, or even the name of a phenomenon may change from one language to another. Stick to a plain description in common terms if your objective is to be understood and get your point across.

A wonderful example of someone explaining complex ideas with simple words is Randall Munroe’s Thing Explainer:

In Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, things are explained using only drawings and a vocabulary of the 1,000 (or "ten hundred") most common words. Explore computer buildings (datacenters), the flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates), the things you use to steer a plane (airliner cockpit controls), and the little bags of water you're made of (cells).

As Ernest Rutherford is reputed to have said, "A theory that you can't explain to a bartender is probably no damn good." Whatever you are trying to explain, it probably isn’t as complicated as what he had in mind!

And of course, never say or write anything outright barbarous - no matter what.

Image by Anders Jildén via Unsplash

Since I just renewed the insurance on the ridiculous thing, I thought it an appropriate time to look back on a year with a very silly car.

A year ago I had just quit my job. The old job was one of the few that still came with a company car, so I had to get myself a new car quickly to be able to drive to the airport for the new gig. Luckily I’m a fool car nut, so I had a short list ready to deploy. (As it happens, I have a short list for every occasion…)

I ran the short list past my wife, AKA the sensible person in my house, and she immediately nixed all but one of the options. So that was easy.

So what did you get?

I got myself a Porsche Cayenne (955) Turbo S. No, the new job was not as a bank robber! I found a lightly used one that was eight years old by the time I got it, and despite the low mileage and generally excellent condition, it cost about the same as my wife’s new mid-spec Golf. Still an extremely silly car, but not entirely idiotic.

Let's review some of the relevant stats (emphasis mine):

It was powered by a twin-turbocharged 4.5-L V8 that produced 521 PS (383 kW) and 720 N·m (530 lb·ft) of torque. Acceleration from 0–60 mph (96 km/h) was 5.0 seconds and the top speed was 171 miles per hour.

Beyond a certain point, I think car manufacturers should just do like Rolls-Royce and simply declare horsepower to be "adequate".

Since I bought it I’ve put 30k on it with zero maintenance issues so far, apart from a single burned-out light bulb (touch wood). Sure, it drinks like a drunken sailor with a drinking problem who’s really thirsty and also isn’t paying for his own drinks, and likes to wash its drink down with the occasional drop of oil too - but every time I put my foot down I forgive it. Basically it’s the cheapest way I could find to drive something fun that could haul the kids and all their clobber. It also very definitely has presence - looming suddenly into someone’s rear view mirror generally causes them to jump out of the way pretty promptly, and if they don’t move over, the xenons are probably bright enough to give them sunburn.

What’s it like to drive?

It’s surprisingly capable in the twisty stuff, unless the going gets really tight. It’s definitely better than it has any right to be, especially with the air suspension dropped a notch and set to Sport mode. I have had the tyres chirping a few times on late night drives - the rear tyres, note. Even though it can feel like it’s reluctant to get its nose into the corner, you can drive around that and find a surprising level of agility. Okay, it’s no Caterham, but compared to other big SUVs I’ve driven, it’s night and day. "Worst Porsche, best SUV", as the saying goes.

Straight-line speed is, predictably, ridiculous, being apparently unrestrained by mere laws of physics, but only by the driver's desire to hang onto their license. Amazingly, I have so far managed to avoid speeding tickets too. Probably jinxed myself on both counts (that and maintenance) now!

I will say that having this much power under my right foot has paradoxically made me a more relaxed driver. Knowing that I can at any moment summon the thunder and disappear into the distance in a cloud of dust means I don't feel the urge to floor it at every possible opportunity, and am more likely to view aggressive drivers' antics with amused condescension than as any sort of challenge.

The Tiptronic S transmission is… fine. In automatic mode it shuffles ratios fairly competently, although it has the usual failing of automatics, where it is always either trying to hang onto a gear too long, or dropping two cogs at once. The former isn’t that big a problem with this much torque, just giving you a moment to enjoy the feeling of the building boooOOOOST, but the latter can leave you with a double-handful of unwanted revs and sudden acceleration. Fortunately there are steering-wheel-mounted buttons to control matters. Even one year in, I still find it odd that there is a + and a - control on each side of the wheel, rather than one side being + and the other being -. To avoid confusing myself, I tend to use each side for only one purpose. I don’t think I’ve ever shifted with the gear lever - not least because you can still use the Tiptronic controls while remaining in automatic mode. This will let you drop a gear or two for an overtake or a tight corner, and then revert to slushmatic mode a few seconds later - very convenient.

Being a Turbo S, the thing comes with front and rear locking diffs and a low-range gear box, so it’s probably more capable off road than I am. The worst terrain I need to deal with is the occasional dirt road, though, so I haven’t actually used those features yet beyond checking that they worked. I did overtake the snow plough driving up an Alpine pass one night, but that was enabled more by good winter tyres than any special drivetrain mode.

Surely it can’t be all good, right?

If you want a real-world picture of the downsides, I’ll just say that I’m now on first-name terms with the staff at my usual petrol station… The Beast (as it is nicknamed for obvious reasons) is picky about its fuel, too, preferring to drink the 98-octane-plus top-shelf stuff, which is only available at two locations that are convenient to me.

Also, even though I bought the thing on the right side of the depreciation curve (seriously, I paid something like one-sixth of the original list price), parts are still Porsche parts, with a price tag to suit. I had to fit new front brake disks, and each one ran over €900! I was actually braced to replace all four, since you don’t want to skimp on brakes, especially on something that big, fast, and heavy. However my local Porsche dealer was scrupulously honest, and after I had already approved replacing both fronts and rears, they called me up and told me the rears were good for another year or so. After that one, they’ve got themselves a customer for life.

Tyre prices are equally terrifying, but when you see the sheer acreage of rubber (245/40/20) next to more normal tyres, you begin to understand why - plus of course you need compounds rated for the speeds and loads the Beast puts on them. Once they’re on, they seem to last well enough; the new winter set that just came off looked nicely healthy and evenly worn, and still had plenty of tread left.

On the plus side of that equation, Porsche ownership gets you invited to Porsche events - so last weekend found me haring around the Circuito Tazio Nuvolari in the new 718 Boxster S, before hitting the handling track in the new 911 C4S (the one with the rear-wheel steering - very nice).

What would you change

I already changed the one thing that really bugged me, which was the in-car entertainment system. The Beast came with PCM 2.1, and that is really quite dated, with no Bluetooth, USB, or even aux-in - basically no way whatsoever of talking to the outside world. The novelty factor of the curly-cord handset in the armrest was cute, and I was able to get a second SIM card for my mobile number to put in the car, so I ran it like that for a while. However, after a few months I had had enough of having to swap out CDs in the six-disc changer in the back, not being able to listen to podcasts, and having nearly decade-old maps in the satnav.

I replaced the original ICE system with an Alpine head unit with CarPlay¹, so now I just plug my iPhone into the armrest where that phone handset used to go, and I have all my music, podcasts, and maps on the screen in the dashboard. There’s even a dedicated Siri button, so the Son&Heir can tell her to "play some Ramones" as soon as he gets in the car. I had to get an additional amp to feed the (very nice) Bose system that the car came with, but I am very happy with the results.

The only other thing I am tempted to change is the exhaust. There’s a lovely burble when starting the engine from cold, but unless you’re really hoofing it, it’s pretty subtle on the move. (Tunnels are great fun, though!) I would quite like to hear more of the engine’s voice, but I can’t really justify the four-figure cost, especially for something that would probably make my wife’s eyes roll right back into her head.

There is absolutely no call for chipping it, what with the amount of power it’s throwing about already. I love the looks just as they are, and the 20" Porsche OEM wheels are perfect too, so I think it will stay stock apart from the PCM swap.

Now tell us what you really think

Bottom line, I love the thing to bits, even though it has probably spoiled me for any other car that does not have heated electric everything and all the POWERRRR in the world. Buy with care, and you can have a lot of fun with one of these things.

Just a few days ago, I wrote a post about how technology and services do not stand still. Whatever model we can come up with based on how things are right now, it will soon be obsolete, unless our model can accomodate change.

One of the places where we can see that is with the adoption curve of Docker and other container architectures. Anyone who thought that there might be time to relax, having weathered the virtualisation and cloud storms, is in for a rude awakening.

Who is using Docker?

Sure, the latest Docker adoption survey still shows that most adoption is in development, with 47% of respondents classifying themselves as "Developer or Dev Mgr", and a further 15% as "DevOps or Release Eng". In comparison, only 12% of respondents were in "SysAdmin / Ops / SRE" roles.

Also, 56% of respondents are from companies with fewer than 100 employees. This makes sense: long-established companies have too much history to be able to adopt the hot new thing in a hurry, no matter what benefits it might promise.

What does happen is that small teams within those big companies start using the new cool tech in the lab or for skunkworks projects. Corporate IT can maybe ignore these science experiments for a while, but eventually, between the pressure of those research projects going into production, and new hires coming in from smaller startups that have been working with the new technology stack for some time, they will have to figure out how they are going to support it in production.

Shipping containers

If the teams in charge of production operations have not been paying attention, this can turn into Good news for Dev, bad news for Ops, as my colleague Sahil wrote on the official Moogsoft blog. When it comes to Docker specifically, one important factor for Ops is that containers tend to be very short-lived, continuing and accelerating the trend that VMs introduced. Where physical servers had a lifespan of years, VMs might last for months - but containers have been reported to have a lifespan four times shorter than VMs.

That’s a huge change in operational tempo. Given that shorter release cycles and faster scaling (up and down) in response to demand are among the main benefits that people are looking for from Docker adoption, this rapid churn of containers is likely to continue and even accelerate.

VMs were sometimes used for short-duration tasks, but far more often they were actually forklifted physical servers, and shoe-horned into that operational model. This meant that VMs could sometimes have a longer lifespan than physical servers, as it was possible for them simply to be forgotten.

Container-based architectures are sufficiently different that there is far less risk of this happening. Also, the combination of experience and generational turnover mean that IT people are far more comfortable with the cloud as an operational model, so there is less risk of backsliding.

The Bow Wave

The legacy enterprise IT departments that do not keep up with the new operational tempo will find themselves in the position of the military, struggling to adapt to new realities because of its organisational structure. Armed forces set up for Cold War battles of tanks, fighters and missiles struggle to deal with insurgents armed with cheap AK-47s and repurposed consumer technology such as mobile phones and drones.

In this analogy, shadow IT is the insurgency, able to pop up from nowhere and be just as effective as - if not more so than - the big, expensive technological solutions adopted by corporate. On top of that, the spiralling costs of supporting that technological legacy will force changes sooner or later. This is known as the "bow wave" of technological renewal:

"A modernization bow wave typically forms as the overall defense budget declines and modernization programs are delayed or stretched in the future," writes Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He continues: "As this happens the underlying assumption is that funding will become available to cover these deferred costs." These delays push costs into the future, like a ship’s bow pushes a wave forward at sea.

(from here)

What do we do?

The solution is not to throw out everything in the data centre, starting from the mainframe. Judiciously adapted, upgraded, and integrated, old tech can last a very long time. There are B-52 bombers that have hosted three generations from the same family. In the same way, ancient systems like SABRE have been running since the 1960s, and still (eventually) underpin every modern Web 3.0 travel-planning web site you care to name.

What is required is actually something much harder: thought and consideration.

Change is going to happen. It’s better to make plans up front that allow for change, so that we can surf the wave of change. Organisations that wipe out trying to handle (or worse, resist) change that they had not planned for may never surface again.

So what’s it like to live with the AppleTV? Have any of my complaints been addressed?

In a word: no.

I still don’t have access to Siri, for no good reason that I can determine. A couple of attempts to get a response from @AppleSupport over Twitter did not go anywhere.

Still no #Siri in the new tvOS update, regardless of language settings, unless you're in a blessed region. Still bullshit, @AppleSupport.

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) March 21, 2016

In fact, things got even worse, as a software update added "hold to dictate" prompts everywhere, which of course do nothing for me.

Dear @AppleSupport, if you won't give me Siri on my AppleTV, at least don't insult me with "hold to dictate" prompts everywhere. Thanks. 😡

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) March 31, 2016

. @AppleSupport Can you tell me when Siri will come to AppleTV set to to English language but in non English-speaking geo? VERY annoying!

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) April 15, 2016

@AppleSupport Done - but this is a bug IMO: tvOS prompts "hold to search", but Siri pref is disabled. Really limits value of AppleTV.

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) April 15, 2016

Subtle hint for Apple: if the system language is English, and Siri supports English, Siri should be enabled.

Apart from that, the thing has been - fine. It’s a substantial update from the Apple TV 2 which I had before. Even the new remote (despite having one button - the voice prompt - that is completely useless to me) is better than the previous one. People complain that it’s too easy to end up holding it upside down, because it’s symmetrical, but in my experience the combination of the rougher surface of the touch pad and the double-height volume control is enough to keep me oriented.

Text input is terrible, but that’s pretty much inevitable without a keyboard - and that’s when I turn to the Remote app on iOS. I think it’s a safe enough bet that Apple TV owners will also have at least one iOS device lying around.

I can’t really comment on the games; I tried out a few, but the sad fact of the matter is that I’m just not that much of a gamer any more. Sure, Alto’s Adventure is fun, but if I hadn’t already owned it for iOS, I doubt I’d have bothered. I tried out a few racing sims, and didn’t even finish the free levels.

This probably says more about me than about the Apple TV’s capabilities as a gaming console. I’ve never been a console gamer in the first place; I was always a PC guy, preferring big sprawling RTS and sim games. The problem I have is not that those don’t translate to iOS (or tvOS), it’s that they require hours-long play sessions, and I just don’t have plural hours to spend gaming any more.

For my purposes - streaming from my local iTunes library, from the iTunes Store, and from YouTube - the Apple TV is fine. Most of the exciting cord-cuttery stuff isn’t available in my geo, and there just aren’t that many other categories of apps that make sense on a TV as opposed to on a phone or a tablet.

So what are you saying?

It’s not a flop, it’s a very capable fourth-generation device. It’s not transformative, but not every device has to be.

I am also coming in with low expectations, because even if Apple had somehow negotiated deals with content owners, I am certain that I would not have access to them in Italy. Seriously - we don’t even have visual voicemail over here. Forget about HBO or any of that stuff. Even what we do have, like Netflix, is crippled.

Much like iTunes and Apple Music, it’s perfectly fine for what it does. Could it be better? Sure. Should we demand more from Apple? Absolutely. But calling it a flop, a failure, a mess, an embarrassment? That’s going too far.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some YouTube to watch on my Apple TV.

The current big debate in Enterprise IT (now that we have mostly moved on from arguing about hybrid cloud) is Bimodal IT.

To recap: the idea is that enterprises will have both stable and predictable services, sometimes unkindly referred to as "legacy", and new, unpredictable services just being developed. These two types of services have different priorities and expectations: the former focus above all on reliability and availability, while the latter instead need to deliver quickly on new requests, evolving rapidly by definition. These differing requirements are sufficiently at odds that - so the theory goes - they should be split off and operated by two different teams.

So far, so good. The objection is that few people will want to work on the "legacy" services, preferring to hone their skills on more cutting-edge, trendy technology. Over time, this will hollow out the legacy support team, undermining its mission of quality and reliability.

Why it’s not that simple

Personally, I think both positions are over-simplifications. First of all, mainframe people aren't dinosaurs; they're just solving for a different set of variables (Simon Wardley’s Town Planners). I've been in the room when someone was presenting version 56 (!) of a mainframe product, and people were excited to hear about what it could do for them and how it could improve their jobs. Also, the idea that there are no jobs to be had on the mainframe side of the house is rubbish: it's a niche, sure, so absolute numbers are low, but if you specialise in that niche, it can be very profitable. The first person in my graduating class to get a job - in the teeth of the post-bubble, post-9/11 complete lack of IT jobs - was a friend of mine who had been one of the few to take the COBOL class.

Secondly, the Bimodal IT picture is a snapshot of a moment in time. To extend bimodal to the classic three modes of Pace Layering: right now, mainframes are systems of record, classic ERP middleware represents systems of differentiation, and the new DevOps-Agile-Web 2.0-whatever brings the systems of innovation. Over time, though, things flow down the stack and sediment at lower layers. SQL used to be the neat new thing that had all the promise. Now? Now everyone scoffs at relational databases and the cool kids at the conferences are all about the NoSQL. Meanwhile, all of those relational databases are still humming away, keeping everything up and running.

This looks a little like fossilisation: the dynamism of a freshly-introduced service dries up, because it's generally not a good idea to change the foundations too much once you have started building on top of them. Messing around with foundations is a major effort, and the sort of thing that makes the news.

As a rule, you want to put your efforts into making those foundational systems as stable and reliable as possible. This will ensure that the layers further out are free to innovate on top of those solid underpinnings. The whole point is that nobody worries about the database being up, they focus on how to query it and what to do with the results.

Innovation trickles down

What all this means is that instead of treating this conversation about Bimodal IT as an argument between Old and New, we need to pull back and focus instead on the lifecycle of individual services. Once we have an idea of which systems of innovation are catching on and making the transition to systems of engagement and record, we need to start taking decisions about how we treat those systems and allow for their dependencies. Today’s fast-moving top of the stack is tomorrow’s mid-stack connective tissue and next week’s bottom-of-stack foundation element.

The good news is that none of this should be new. Interestingly, the two extremes have more in common than the centre, if you squint a little. Both mainframes and modern distributed services share a focus on small units of work, defined interfaces and checkpoints, and no assumption of reliability on the part of other components in the pipeline. Arguably, the intervening generation of relatively monolithic and rapidly-obsolescent enterprise IT is the aberration.

Jez Humble articulated this point in a widely-shared piece:

Gartner’s model rests on a false assumption that is still pervasive in our industry: that we must trade off responsiveness against reliability. The conventional wisdom is that if we make changes to our products and services faster and more frequently, we will reduce their stability, increase our costs, and compromise on quality.

This assumption is wrong.

The responsiveness-reliability dichotomy is a product of fragility. The attitude of "if it ain’t broke, for pity’s sake, don’t touch it!" comes from knowing that the whole thing is a massive pile of cards:

Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There's a team at a Google office that hasn't slept in three days. Somewhere there's a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she's dead. And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.

Fortunately, this situation is now the base assumption of any sane IT architect. IT used to work to grandiose Soviet-style Five Year Plans:

IT will firmly implement the CIO's new strategy, new concept and new mission, promote structure adjustment, layout optimisation, and transformation and upgrading, as well as insist on green power strategy, overall lean management, staff innovation and creation, harmonious development, profit increase and strengthen the Party enterprise construction in an all-round way in order to further solidify production safety foundation, speed up the development method and mechanism adapting to the "new normal", and go all out to launch IT’s innovative and balanced development of the "13th Five Year Plan to update the CMDB" successfully.¹

Today, we work with what we have, and assume that will change - often in unpredictable ways, since the IT department is no longer the gatekeeper of IT adoption in the company.

People, Process, Technology

Technological solutions are emerging to help with this transition. My own employer, Moogsoft, is part of this trend, helping to bring monitoring data from all the different tools and systems in the enterprise together in a way that is comprehensible and actionable for humans.

As usual, though, the technology is the easy part. The hard parts are the people using the technology, and the process according to which they do so.

I already hinted at one people problem: if you divide IT into the Cool Kidz and the Old Fuddy-Duddies, pretty soon you’re going to run out of people to take care of the mainframes (or SAP, or Oracle, or whatever tech is actually running big chunks of your business). Also, you’ll find that suddenly consultants in that area have added a zero to their hourly rates, and are booked up for months in advance.

A process problem is that you simply cannot freeze even the systems of record, as the faster-moving systems still need to interface with them to get their job done, and will require changes. Maybe you can’t do two-week sprints, especially if your release process itself takes a fortnight, but you still need to allow for that continuous delivery process. Otherwise, the change you can’t accomodate in-band will happen out-of-band when management starts screaming, and it doesn’t take too many of those before something breaks.

To quote Antoine Lavoisier:

Dans la nature rien ne se crée, rien ne se perd, tout change.

Or in our world:

In nature IT nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything changes.

Change is in the nature of the beast. Let’s sit down together and figure out how to accomodate it.

Images by Vladimir Chuchadeev, Patrick Tomasso, Erol Ahmed and Gabriel Garcia Marengo via Unsplash

The perennial question when creating #content is where to post it so that it will get maximum traction and build the author’s personal #brand. Back in the dark ages of blogging, when I first started out, the received wisdom was that you needed to post to your own server, with your own domain name, and pretty nearly roll your own CMS to manage the blog - or just hand-code every single entry.

These days, the buzz is all about big platforms like Medium and LinkedIn. Even Coté has given in and moved to the bright lights of Medium. So I decided to try a little experiment and post the same piece on my own blog, on LinkedIn, and on Medium. It’s pretty much exactly the same post in each case, except for minor differences like footnotes and a different header image.

So, what happened?

The results seem pretty conclusive: on my own blog, I got 22 unique users looking at that post. On Medium, I got a whole 6 reads. And on LinkedIn, I got 132 views, 18 likes, and 5 comments - well, 4, because one of those was me responding to someone else.

Pretty conclusive.

In fairness, the subject matter of that post is well aligned to LinkedIn, and perhaps less so to Medium, but the disparity is huge, and very significant - unless LinkedIn is counting something different than Medium and Google Analytics are. I feel I gave each post roughly the same amount of promotion via social media (very little), so it’s more about how each platform presents its content and how users interact with it.

Medium is just too much of a firehose for anyone to be able to engage with everything on the site, and its recommendation engine seems to focus on popularity rather than relevance. It may also be the case that I just haven’t fed it enough metadata, but writing only for people who spend time relentlessly honing their Medium preferences seems like a losing game.

There are other reasons not to write on Medium, too. Remember the old saw: if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product, not the customer. In the case of Medium, writers and their #content are definitely the product.

Of course a similar situation exists with LinkedIn, but the point there is to raise your professional profile, no matter how much some might disagree. What I am doing there is absolutely professional self-promotion, and so my interests and the platform’s are perfectly aligned in a way that is not the case with Medium.

Regardless of the numbers, I’ll be keeping my own blog for posting things that don’t fit with LinkedIn - but anything that I do want to get out there is getting posted natively to LinkedIn from now on, not just linked from there.

Image by sergio_rola via Unsplash

The toughest thing… no wait. One of the many tough things about moving from a technical role into sales is letting go of the keyboard. Accept that someone else will be doing the demo, and they have their own style and way of doing it.

I remember being on sales calls as the pre-sales person and having a "backseat driver" sales person with me: "show them that thing! show them the other thing! you missed a step!". By the end of one of those meetings I was about ready to bludgeon the sales person to death with my ThinkPad. In fact, I was present when a colleague did actually snap, and - in front of the prospective customer! - turned the laptop around to the sales person, crossed his arms, and said "you drive".

This tendency to want to stay involved with the technology is a symptom of a wider issue. Technical gigs, whether pre-sales, product management, technical marketing, professional services, or whatever, are more similar to each other than any of them are to sales. I have seen people fumble that transition, getting bogged down in technical details that are no longer their job. This doesn’t work for anyone.

Part of it is also the cultural divide between tech and sales¹; it’s a big change in self-image to start to see yourself as sales, and there is a tendency to want to prove that you’ve "still got it".

Why is it that no matter what it says on my business card, I still end up messing with regexps on a semi-regular basis?

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) March 9, 2016

It’s tough to accept, but you have to let the tech team handle the tech issues; that is no longer your job. Meanwhile, they are relying on you, the sales person, to cover the sales stuff: is the deal qualified, have we met the economic buyer, do we understand the business case, what are the deadlines, and where are the pitfalls?

This is not to say that you should ignore technical details. Make sure you are current on what is a unique versus comparative differentiator, and how that landscape changes as both your own product and competitors evolve. It’s just that you are no longer using that information in the same way as you were when you were in a technical role.

This is as much a reminder to myself as anything else: give your technical colleagues feedback and inputs, but you have to let them do their job, which is no longer your job. It’s a sales team, and everyone has to play their own position.

Let’s see, the mother company just launched a hot new product and customers are emailing about it. I think we should ignore them and focus on pushing mediocre products on drive-by prospects.

If you tried this in any other industry, you’d be fired with extreme prejudice. But in car sales, this sort of thing seems to be standard operating procedure.

There was the time I almost had to rugby-tackle a salesperson in the showroom to get them to pay attention to me.

There was the time when, still pre-kids, I was looking at two-seater sports cars, and chased the dealership for six months (!) to get a test drive. Finally instead of just arranging a test drive, they comped me a full day of driving academy on the Monza F1 circuit, which they told me was several thousand Euros’ worth. This day gave me the chance to do several hot laps in the BMW Z4 M Coupe, plus messing around in a Mini Cooper S, a 135i, and a 330d M Sport, on the skid pan, in the cones, and generally left me with a huge grin on my face.

Think they followed up with me afterwards?¹

The current idiocy is over the new Abarth 124 Spider. The announcement made quite the splash, and I am thinking vaguely about a weekend car, so I messed around with the configurator on the Abarth site (not that you can do much with the spec), and then filled in the form to be put in touch with my local Abarth dealer.

Crickets.

Tumbleweed.

Okay, fair enough, they probably get a number of time-wasters wanting to drive their hot cars, and I’ll be the first to admit that my interest is tentative and not immediate. Still, it’s the twenty-first century. You can at least set up an auto-responder - "thank you for your interest", sort of thing.

I have already written off ever owning another BMW because of shenanigans my local dealer pulled - not just on the sales front, but in maintenance. Their shoddy workmanship left me by the side of the road and forced me to cancel a very important meeting, but the worst of it was that they refused to apologise when I called them on it.

Customers are fickle, but not that fickle. Treat them right, they can be yours for life. Treat them poorly, you’ve lost them forever.

The part of the process of engagement that makes the greatest difference is the point of contact with the customer. I love BMW products, regard their advertising as high-quality, and generally appreciate the company in every way - but I will not have anything to do with the local dealer. The process of terminating my Fastweb contract was so unpleasant that despite the fact that I had been a fan until then, I will not only no longer consider them for myself, I will go out of my way to advise others to avoid them.

The local VW/Porsche dealer, on the other hand, treated both my wife and me so well that I can see myself sticking to VAG products for the foreseeable future. Same goes for Vodafone: even when they have had technical difficulties, they have been so communicative and willing to engage that I have made allowances, and still recommend Vodafone over alternatives.

I try to do the same in my own sales engagements. I do my best to communicate in a clear and timely manner, and so far, it seems to work. My end of the IT market is of course a pretty small shop, so I am strongly conditioned to treat people well because I keep running into the same people over and over. Even in mass markets, though, people talk, and through social media, your actions will catch up with you.

As the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression. Make it count, whether you’re selling cars, phone lines, or enterprise software.