The Integrative Stream

CFOs replacing CIOs?

John Norman, one of my esteemed co-authors on Java Enterprise in a Nutshell, pointed me towards an InfoWorld article from last week: Are CIOs headed for extinction? In short, Sarbanes Oxley compliance requirements have tied corporate IS departments closer to the finance functions. Some companies are eliminating the CIO post entirely and shifting responsibility to the CFO.

There was some discussion in the business press over the last year about the trend to shift the responsibilities of COOs to CFOs as well. So when is an empowered CFO not a CFO anymore?

Tablets and Keyboards

I just upgraded my laptop to a ThinkPad X41 Tablet. It’s too early to actually review it (and I’m still getting used to interacting with it in tablet mode). My initial impression is positive, though. The best thing about it, maybe a little oddly for a tablet PC, is the keyboard. I’d forgotten how good ThinkPad keyboards are, particularly compared to my old Dell.

And while we’re on the subject…

Joel Spolsky has a few words on wild-eyed enthusiasm for Web 2.0, along the lines of this earlier post.

Architecture Astronauts

Helpful Interview Hints

Stupid Interviewing Mistakes. Obvious things, which people nevertheless manage to forget.

I’ve certainly interviewed more than one person whose resume turned out, under slight probing, to be little more than an exceedingly thin tissue of lies. I could generally tell from the phone screen, if the resume itself wasn’t a giveaway. I bounced at least one person who was probably qualified for the job at hand, but managed to blow his credibility by trying to make himself look qualified for every other job at hand, too.

The moral, at least for technology job applicants, is to not list experience on your resume if you don’t have it. Sure, an extra buzzword or two might get you an interview, but they won’t get you the job if the person doing the hiring is even half-way competent.

So beer is good for you…

From MedGadget, a fun read for a Sunday afternoon:

“Medical Beer” and Prohibition

Design for Users

The lead designer of GMail had a post on the Google Blog yesterday, commenting on the “birthday” of email (Guess what just turned 34?).

The history stuff is nice, but the interesting bit is the technology vision for the GMail product itself:

Of course that wasn’t the only reason why I wanted to build Gmail. I rely on email, a lot, but it just wasn’t working for me. My email was a mess. Important messages were hopelessly buried, and conversations were a jumble; sometimes four different people would all reply to the same message with the same answer because they didn’t notice the earlier replies. I couldn’t always get to my email because it was stuck on one computer, and web interfaces were unbearably clunky. And I had spam. A lot of it. With Gmail I got the opportunity to change email – to build something that would work for me, not against me.

He’s right. This is exactly how one should go about building good software: create something that works with the users, not against them. I couldn’t sum it up better. If you want to create software that people will use, this is the mental framework to use.

The post goes on to mention that Google’s philosophy is to give users as much as possible, and to make it free whenever possible. That is, of course, a somewhat disingenous statement, at least at the corporate level, since that’s not Google’s raison d’etre at all. Google exists to create opportunities to show advertising, and simply happens to do it by creating valuable information utilities. It is not a charity, however heavily subsidized by the public markets. But I digress.

SciFi Meme

Not usually a meme person, but the sci-fi movies meme is just fun. Bold the ones you’ve seen. I’m like this list because it hews pretty closely to what science fiction actually is, rather than mingling SF and fantasy in the manner of most bookstores. I’m much more of a book person than a movie person, but I have seen a surprising number of these, and own copies of more than a few.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!
Akira
Alien
Aliens
Alphaville
Back to the Future
Blade Runner
Brazil
Bride of Frankenstein
Brother From Another Planet
A Clockwork Orange
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Contact
The Damned
Destination Moon
The Day The Earth Stood Still
Delicatessen
Escape From New York
ET: The Extraterrestrial
Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (serial)
The Fly (1985 version)
Forbidden Planet
Ghost in the Shell
Gojira/Godzilla
The Incredibles
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version)
Jurassic Park
Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior
The Matrix
Metropolis
On the Beach
Planet of the Apes (1968 version)
Robocop
Sleeper
Solaris (1972 version)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
The Stepford Wives
Superman
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
The Thing From Another World
Things to Come
Tron
12 Monkeys
28 Days Later
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
2001: A Space Odyssey
La Voyage Dans la Lune
War of the Worlds (1953 version)

The U.N. and the Internet

Senator Coleman has introduced a measure slamming proposals to shift Internet governance to the UN. I’m not generally afraid of black helicopters and world government, but I can’t think of any major benefits that might derive from shifting Internet governance to the international public sector.

The automatic argument against a UN role is that since the UN lets Cuba sit on a human rights commission, they’ll let China sit on the committees discussing Internet censorship. Realistically, this could run just as easily in the other direction, with pressure on China to ease up on its internal policies. I don’t really see either happening.

Senator: Keep U.N. away from the Internet | CNET News.com

Tech or Transcendence?

Nicholas Carr has begun to make a nice career for himself callings spades spades and asking good questions about whether accepted orthodoxy in business and technology should be accepted quite so readily. He made a splash with a Harvard Business Review article a few years ago arguing that information technology doesn’t matter–isn’t a competitive advantage–for modern corporations since they all have access to the same resources. Lots of knee-jerk reaction to that. I don’t happen to agree with him, but mostly because I don’t think strategic thinking has evolved to the point where we can treat IT strategy the same way we think about, say, pricing strategy.

But I digress. His recent blog post,
The amorality of Web 2.0, takes a look at the filters through which we see the web., and asks why so many of people in the technology world don’t talk about the Internet in terms of an information utility, but in terms of spiritual self discovery. On a more earthly level, he also draws some attention to the fact that the “cult of the amateur” represented by WikiPedia, the Blogosphere, and carped on by various commentators might not be such a great thing after all.

Worth the read.

University Tech Transfer

Interesting article from Nature on the downsides of technology licensing offices at universities.

news @ nature.com – The technology trap

Update, 10/18: This article is now protected by nature.com’s subscription service, and isn’t accessible anymore. Sorry! I try not to post references to things which will go away, although I will continue to post links to NY Times articles and other resources which are accessible after a free login.

FedEx and Micro Recessions

Yesterday’s New York Times — which I only got around to reading today — had an interesting article about the role FedEx plays in the economy. A few things in particular stood out. One is that FedEx is a major source of information for the Federal Reserve, which actually makes a lot of sense. No other company, except maybe UPS, has day-to-day information about the communication and shipping activities of most of the companies in the economy.

The really interesting speculation, though, is that FedEx is both an enabler and a manifestation of a new level of flexibility in the economy as a whole. One of the first things you learn about in business school is the whipcord effect of poor communications down a supply chain (relatively recent Sloan graduates will know exactly what I’m talking about). Traditionally, changes in retail sales might not be visible to manufacturers for weeks or months. So everybody spent a lot of time being surprised, and a lot of resources responding to facts on the ground that were generally already out of date. Excessive inventory buildup isn’t the only cause of recessions, but it magnifies them, since companies have to scale back massively.

The Times article argues that the ability of firms in a modern economy, enabled by companies like FedEx, to respond quickly to changes in circumstances could blunt future recessions. I think we’re already seeing evidence of this in the economic response to Katrina. Unemployment rates are up, but by less than most predicted. Energy prices are still going to spike, but just maybe we won’t see a repeat of the 1970s.

Have Recessions Absolutely, Positively Become Less Painful? – New York Times

Sun, Google Redux

Forbes summarizes it: not much going on.

Sun, Google Deal Much Ado About Nothing

Sun and Google

A quick comment on Sun and Google’s announcement that they’ll be cooperating to distribute OpenOffice, Java and Google Toolbar:

I don’t entirely get it. But not because it’s a small thing compared to what various folks were hoping for (although it is), but because it’s so unbalanced. Sun seems to get a lot more out of this than Google does. Bundling Google Toolbar with the Java runtime environment seems almost silly, and a little anti-consumer. After all, one reason I don’t have QuickTime on this computer is that I don’t like Apple’s insistence that I install iTunes at the same time. Still, a “Get Java” link on the Google home page would be a big deal for Sun.

The bottom line: I don’t think there’s actually very much going on here. Google, certainly, doesn’t seem to have gotten anything they didn’t have before.