Joel Spolsky has written another article for Inc magazine, this time about the way that incentive schemes and commissions always end up backfiring.
Worth a read, and applicable to any process, not just sales. As I pointed out in a recent post, assessing a development team on lines of code, or number of bugs or any other deceptively simple measure fails because of the same problems.
For me, the solution is the same. Give everyone enough information and authority to improve the whole system, not just maximise local perks.
How Hard Could It Be?: Sins of Commissions, Marketing and Advertising Article – Inc. Article
Cloud computing is taking up more and more space on my virtual radar at the moment. Implementing an actual project on a commercial distributed virtualised platform is becoming a high priority for my scant spare time. It’s nice to see that the cloud market is beginning to mature, with increasingly diverse offerings and even price reductions.
Alan Williamson provides a handy calculator for calculating your cloud storage costs.
The self-organizing, collective responsibility aspect of agile teams is sometimes hard for a hierarchical organization to get to grips with. Sriram Narayan notes a great response to the common question “who do you report to?”
XPloring around: Who do you report to?
I’m very interested in both mobile technology and education, particularly distance learning, so the concept of “m-learning” (mobile learning) is doubly interesting. Clark Quinn has put together a useful summary of the field.
M-Learning Devices: Performance to Go
A lot has been written about “wi-fi cities” and “wireless communities”. A variety of projects have been considered around the world, some with more success than others.
One thing which seems to have been missing from most of the proposals I have seen is the issue of content. Simply making the open internet available across a geographical area is one possibility, but that does not seem to offer as much potential pay-off for the sponsoring authorities as a more integrated approach.
Obvious choices include negotiating with local businesses, but another option is to use such a wireless plan to also enhance the skills and education of people in the area. This is a traditional role of municipal and area authorities and a good candidate for a “cheap win” deployed over a wireless area, for example the “learning communities” in this Canadian report.
The London underground map has long been held as a classic of information design, eschewing unnecessary details of distance and geography in favour of a symbolic connection between stations.
Max Roberts delves in to the way that the modern incarnation of this classic is becoming progressively overwhelmed by “information pollution”, arguably reducing its effectiveness.
Information Pollution on the Underground Map
I have seen many software products fall into the same trap. With each new version or upgrade a few (individually small and potentially valuable) new features are added, and the original clear, expressive and usable design is compromised. After relatively few such iterations the software has the appearance of being complex and bloated, with no clear indication why.
An object lesson for all HCI and usability designers in evolving systems.
I saw this out of the blue. It’s interesting, especially in the context of other municipal wireless initiatives, many of which have been cancelled because of naive finance models. I wonder how Boris plans to fund this grand initiative, especially after all the fuss about the 2012 olympics has died down?
BBC News: Mayor sees London as ‘wi-fi city’
It can sometimes seem hard to overcome real or imagined objections to a need for improved hardware. There often seems to be an assumption that developers all just want the shiniest toys and that the job of management and company finance is to save expenditure by curbing that desire.
As developers, maybe we should get more practice making sensible business cases for the times when hardware improvements really make sense.
Kris Kemper » Blog Archive » Saving lost developer time with better hardware
A thoroughly enjoyable presentation from RubyFringe, one of the best I have ever watched.
It starts with a few minutes of demonstration of a reasonably cool music tool, but the real meat is in the presentation which follows – a fast paced, insightful and downright humorous rant about a wide range of topics from Leonardo daVinci to mountain lions, web applications and venture capital.
InfoQ: Archaeopteryx: A Ruby MIDI Generator
For years Frank Carver has been paying attention to the strange world of convergent technology. During that time he has discussed and researched broad subject areas, come to some surprising conclusions, produced and distributed digital media, scattered ideas and opinions like sparks from a firework, and above all consulted for businesses both large and small to help develop and deploy successful systems, services, and products in this highly complex arena.
