Knowing the BBC, the following link is likely to disappear after about 7 days. Why? Because BBC policy is to remove podcasts for (some?) shows after a week. Why? Nobody knows… not the fellow who responded on behalf of the BBC to my question and not the thousands of listeners, many of whom pay for the BBC as a public service.

Anyway if these podcasts interest you, get them now!

Peter Day’s World of Business page

Press Under Pressure, part 1

Press Under Pressure, part 2

Sigh,
-pmh

ps: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to share these legally downloaded podcasts with those who were unfortunate enough to have missed the publication window. These podcasts will self-destruct in 7 days.

If you meant to take it offline then a redirect would have been polite, no?

-pmh

What has finally moved the Portable Consultant to post after all this time? Frustration!

So-called “matrix teams” come from different work units, by definition. In my current business environment we come together for a project, apply our subject matter experience, and go on to the next project when done. Each member reports to a different organizational unit, with a ‘dotted line’ to the Project Manager.

Unfortunately, the collaboration systems we use are all too often designed by, and for, those separate work units rather than for the projects.

This results in the following (in no particular order):

• Separate repositories for the business analyst, the infrastructure architect, the project manager, etc.

• Where cross-discipline access has been considered it is likely to be hit-and-miss, depending on who asked for access to the repositories of the other groups and when. This results in name-based rather than role-based access.

• Different naming conventions between repositories.

• Different taxonomies (folder structures) for each work group.

• A general lack of consistency in meta-data (where it exists) and searches (which should be based on that meta-data).

The diagnosis of the To Each His Own approach to collaboration is confirmed by the high number of email attachments that are necessary for the matrix team to keep members informed and documentation current.

In my current situation it wouldn’t even be enough if the project manager were to set up a shared repository – there are two PMs: one for ‘the business’ and one for ‘IT’. Even these PMs don’t share the same repository.

The solution for this To Each His Own approach varies from situation to situation. The first step in all instances, however, must be a realization of how fruitless it is to invest in collaboration without some form of inter-group oversight or cooperation to support the matrix team environment.

Have you encountered this where you work? Did anyone try to address the situation? What approach succeeded? …failed?

Yours sincerely on a typical Monday (but posted on a Tuesday),

Cheers,
-pmh

Let’s be clear: if your property can be altered, recalled, or reclaimed by the seller without your permission and knowledge you never really owned that property. Home foreclosure and car repossession are other examples that come to mind. The CBC article is right to refer to it as the Amazon Kindle Service – a service may be discontinued at any time.

George Orwell would indeed smile to see Amazon fulfilling his vision of the future – along with such better known examples as MS Windows (Genuine Advantage program and the .NET framework assistant) and locked cell phones.

Yes, there are probably legitimate copyright issues here – but this is no way to run an eBusiness. Bad Amazon… bad, bad!

-pmh

Update:

1. This MSNBC article on the Amazon 1984 scandal has a more humorous (sarcastic?) tone.
2. This Fictionmatters article provides balanced and deeper coverage of the underlying issues. (…but I still say “Bad, Amazon… bad, bad!”)
3. Microsoft has apparently updated its .NET Framework Assistant to allow you to uninstall it from Firefox without the need to edit the Windows registry, locate remove system files, etc.

Update 2, The Apology:

Here’s word on Amazon’s apology but note that “…the apology failed to state that Amazon would not do the same thing again in similar circumstances…”

My own use of the online games is minimal because I was always concerned about the permission statements that you get when you sign up for them.

That’s not how I personally use Facebook anyway, but the recent ‘conversion’ of a cute aquarium game (send pretty fishes to your friends’ aquariums) to a dating service with constant emails (“Honestly, Dear… all those speed date emails are spam. All I ever did was send her a fish!”)… well, that was downright naughty. Bad Facebook, bad, bad!

I was struck by one item in the news report that would be funny if it weren’t true:

“- Facebook keeps the profiles of deceased users for “memorial purposes” but does not make this clear. Recommendation: Information about use for memorial purposes should be in Facebook’s privacy policy.”

…Thank you, Facebook, but when the time comes The Portable Consultant would rather have family and friends handle any and all memorials. All social networking sites should delete accounts after an agreed period without any logins, at the very least. (This is a much larger issue, of course.)

Facebook needs to get its act together, but users/consumers also need to understand how important personal info is …and take care not to sign it away without due diligence.

Cheers,
-pmh

Yes We Scan - Carl Malamud

The other day The Portable Consultant caught this interview with Carl Malamud on an IT Conversations podcast. Having enjoyed his 1992 book Exploring the Internet: A Technical Travelogue, I was interested to hear that he is still pursuing his attempts to free public information from the reluctant hands of bureaucrats. In Exploring the Internet, he discussed his attempts to get the International Standards Organization to distribute international standards over the nascent Internet. Now he’s running for the position of Public Printer of the United States, a public office for which only one other person has bothered to run since it’s inception under President Lincoln.

Yesterday I attempted to print some Canadian tax changes, from a recent budget, that might affect my taxes next year. They are found on an ordinary web page almost entirely made up of text.

Adobe’s Acrobat 9 Pro Extended failed to print the page in my Firefox browser and issued the following error:

%%[Page: 14]%%%%[ Error: LucidaSans,Bold cannot be embedded because of licensing restrictions. ]%%
%%[ Font vendor (B&H) does not permit this font to be embedded in PDF. ]%%
...
[Warning] The font LucidaSans-Demi could not be embedded because of licensing restrictions.
Text may display incorrectly on platforms that do not have this font installed.
...
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

Now, I like to keep such documents in PDF rather than cutting and pasting into text files so I turned next to the freeware printing utility CutePDF and found it had no problem. It printed the web page as a PDF file just as I had asked Adobe to do… only CutePDF had no compunctions about embedded fonts being licensed to my machine. CutePDF uses the open source Ghostscript PostScript to PDF converter.

This is why open systems will win out every time against the forces of DRM. When DRM tries to stop us from legally accessing and ‘owing’ a copy of public documents it fails to meet the criteria of a reasonable and fair constraint on the use of intellectual property, in this case a font.

Carl Malamud understands the necessity for free and unrestricted access to public information – documents and databases. He understands the underlying technologies. This is why Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, Tim Bray and others who share these views are supporting his candidacy for the position of Public Printer of the United States via the Yes We Scan campaign.

For what its worth, I do too.

In fact, there are some governments on this side of the border who should also be paying attention to his candidacy and his platform for the fair dissemination of public documents and data.

Adobe… shame on you!

Cheers,
-pmh

The Portable Consultant is feeling understandably low, therefore, when against this bleak backdrop he is exposed to an ECM project that seems to model much that can go wrong with an ECM initiative.

While the following is not intended as a comprehensive list, these are some of the Do’s and Don’ts that the principal consultants on the project failed to be aware of. In no particular order they were:

• Do have a Project Charter… an SOW is nowhere near good enough for the implementation of a critical enterprise infrastructure such as an ECM.
• Don’t undertake ECM as an IT Department driven technology project… ECM is more dependent on business requirements and business processes than, say, a new firewall. These days the IT guys should be tightly integrated with the business; e.g., the head of IT should be a CIO who ensures C-level priorities, not technology, drives IT.
• Do establish an ECM Steering Committee that is representative of the whole enterprise and leverage them to provide guidance, impetus, and a high-level sign-off for company-wide issues such as the corporate taxonomy, key metadata, and security models as well as critical SLA and Disaster Recovery (DR) requirements. Specifically…
  • Don’t confuse backup/restore requirements with DR. DR is about business continuance after the entire office and/or data centre has ceased to function while backup/restore is about a broken server, corrupted database, or some such.
  • Don’t just sit down some afternoon and enter new metadata fields into the production system on the fly without first gathering, documenting, and having affected parties sign-off on the relevent requirements.
• Do not rely on business units to gather and present their own requirements without extensive guidance from knowledgeable ECM consultants who can speak to the business in their language, the language of business processes not software configuration.
• Do not expect one of the Big 4 consultancies to necessarily know all this and manage the project according to ECM Best Practices… sometimes just one experienced independent consultant can be enough to help even a large global enterprise to navigate the treacherous waters of ECM deployment… without all that excess overhead. <grin>

Sigh. Time to crawl back into my burrow, I suppose. Wake me up in another six weeks.

Cheers,
-pmh

The Portable Consultant is increasingly amazed at how excited folks get about Cloud Computing and Google Apps while simple, basic tools like Gmail Notifier and the Google Talk client are only available for Windows (and perhaps Mac) systems.

Surely these should be OS agnostic utilities in this day and age!

Ok… the Google Talk tool is available as a ‘gadget’, but if a download-and-install version is desirable, why only for Windows? (Which, by the way, the Google Talk download page does not make clear although the Gmail Notifier page does).

A silly grumble, perhaps, but in this day and age one expects better from Google.

Cheers,
-pmh

link rot
Over time, especially Internet time, web links break. It’s a part of the natural changing order of things. But the Portable Consultant is particularly sorry to see knowledge, freely offered by a company as part of its marketing, removed completely from the web after a merger or acquisition.

The Oracle Corporation is good at this – or bad, depending on your point of view.

It happened when Oracle acquired Stellent, a well-known ECM company.

The Stellent site remained for a time, but links to free resources like white papers broke quickly and those to training programs followed soon after. It was reasonable, perhaps, in the case of training as that function came under the control of Oracle University. It was sad in the case of the other online ECM resources and white papers that disappeared. Some of these still exist but have been buried without the Stellent name, no doubt because the branding was inconsistent. If the Google search that lists any of these has a broken link you might try looking on Oracle.com under Fusion Middleware (say, What?).

re-branding trumps Search Engine Optimization
Such re-branding seems foolish in one important sense: a Google search on “Stellent training” does not offer any canonical links to Oracle training services on the first page of hits, but if you search the Oracle site you may find it buried in Oracle University under the incomprehensible name of Fusion Middleware. Right, as if all those who read about Stellent in (pre-acquisition) articles and reviews will recognize that Stellent is today “Fusion Middleware”.

No doubt this made sense to someone Oracle management.

Hyperion articles lost
It happened again when Oracle acquired Hyperion.

This time it was more personal. The Portable Consultant had written here about an article on the (former) Hyperion site, Unstructured Text and Structured Data. It took its theme from the George Lakoff book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (what categories reveal about the mind). The Hyperion article links categorization with data mining and Enterprise Content Management, describing several data mining approaches from various companies active in the space.

Sadly, that article is nowhere to be found on the Net. If it does still exist it is buried so deeply within the Oracle site that none of the unique keywords can retrieve it.

However, with some patience, I was able to retrieve a copy through The WayBack Machine at the Internet Archive.

What a shame that such articles should be lost for no apparent reason or for the sake of branding or a change in marketing approach. Thank goodness someone recognized the fragility of our Internet and is attempting to build our new Library of Alexandria.

The Open Text Index and the Internet Archive
I first heard of Brewster Kahle in connection with the intriguing WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers) distributed data search/retrieval system. WAIS indexed databases on Internet sites (not web sites, for this was before Berners-Lee created the world-wide web). As I recall, a central index led searchers to indexes, often at universities and research establishments – foreshadowing today’s Internet search engines.

Later, when Open Text Corporation’s Tim Bray had established the Open Text Index search engine, it became for a short time the back-end search engine for Yahoo! (circa 1995). As technical administrator of the OTI I regularly created a small pile of backup tapes for Open Text’s CEO, Tom Jenkins, to hold up at presentations as: “all the information on the world wide web”. For a time this was probably a fair approximation. Later, these tapes were passed on to Brewster Kahle to incorporate into the Internet Archive.

Today the WayBack Machine provides one of the few links (pun intended) to our Internet past. Whole sites are harvested at regular intervals to provide access, if sometimes spotty, to past web site versions and the information they held. I was able to find my missing article in a collection of pages from the old Hyperion site of 2006.

That I can retrieve Unstructured Text and Structured Data from the Internet Archive is a testament to the foresight of Internet pioneers like Kahle. That I cannot find it through an Internet search engine or retrieve it from an Oracle archive is an example of (understandable) short term commercial interests that do not practice knowledge management… including those companies that would be happy to tell you all about their KM software offerings!

Cheers,
-pmh

(It’s sad that this business show is relegated to the ridiculously early time slot of 5:45 AM in Canada’s centre of business, Toronto. As well, it’s ridiculous that the content of this show is not available via RSS as a podcast/netcast that could be accessed at a reasonable hour given that there are now dozens of other shows available in that format! …but I digress.)

It was telling that the whole second half of the minister’s time was on the issue of copyright legislation. Secondly, it was somewhat odd that he chose the example of a software program rather than anything related to the real issue of digital rights management versus fair use in the area of consumer entertainment media such as music CDs or movie DVDs.

Did you catch that? He said Canada needs “cutting edge” copyright legislation and gave computer software as an example, not DRM. Now I could just assume he’s been burned by Michael Geist’s ongoing Facebook campaign against the Conservative government’s proposed legislation. Or I could sarcastically suggest he hasn’t been listening very well to the lobbyists who have been pounding at him to align Canada’s legislation with the United State’s Digital Copyright Millennium Act (DMCA) rather than taking a more reasoned approach such as jurisdictions such as the European Community…
…or… or… I could make the paranoid suggestion that someone has been talking to the Minister about how Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is threatening software companies who follow the proprietary software model… and he’s become a bit confused about the two issues.

So, which is it?

• Avoidance of the issues? – expected of politicians.

• Confusion of digital media versus software programs? – expected of politicians renowned for their lack of technical understanding.

• A whiff of anti-open source lobbying going on in the wings? – ok, so that’s a paranoid thought… but… but… entirely plausible.

Since the Minister gave fully half of his interview time to this issue it would be very interesting to know, but unfortunately none of them reflects very well on the Minister’s approach, his knowledge, or the drivers behind his legislative agenda.

The host of Business Network, David Gray, did not delve into the Minister’s position at all… in fact, he only served as a platform for the Minister’s bland statements. He let the Minister off far too lightly, even for a business reporter. Hopefully, other CBC reporters will take up the slack. In any case, Canadians can inform themselves at Michaels Geist’s excellent blog post: Ten Questions for Industry Minister Jim Prentice.

Happy New Year!
-pmh