How Social Media affects our Technologies

I am quite fascinated by the transformation we are going through, often without noticing. In a very short period of time, we have become either slaves of technology or masters of connectivity. It does not matter that you feel more like the former or the latter, you are part of a new world and as a result our lives and our innovation have changed.

In 30 years we went from very homes with a personal computer at home to a digital era. Over 75% of homes have a computer. Many kids I know have their own laptop before they are 10. People are sometimes questioning having a landline, but they would not stand a day with no cell phone. We are getting used to having our emails stick with us wherever we go. We are setting the expectation that an answer is due in hours when it used to be days. With twitter, we can also post updates on where we are, what we do or what is going on around us, all real-time. We are publishing our lives, and technology needs to follow, to accommodate those expectations.

That makes me think of collaboration. When workflow came out, it was some kind of revolution. Cases could be dispatched to workers. The rudimentary aspect of what we called then workflow is somewhat laughable now. Basically it was a database where we pulled records from… Not rocket science. It was a great step forward for collaboration though. A few innovative features such as electronic sticky notes made it more personable, more social. With time came other considerations, for techies, it was the emergence of “collaboration tools” for code sharing, code management, etc. The technologies may have existed before but the collaboration trend made them more relevant to the modern IT ecosystem, part of the processes.

The need for interactions, for collaboration translated into BPM technologies that govern the processes we want to enforce consistently. Combining machine to machine automation with human to human interactions, it helps create a fabric for functional entities within an organization to work together, to collaborate. We may have codified a bit too much those interactions, not taking into account the human factor, treating the person as a system with a given function.

I was listening to NPR yesterday. They had a couple of interviews on newly released books on loneliness. This made me think. Is twitter a solution to remedy for the lack of human emotions in our systems? Are we likely to post on those mini-blogs to express our feelings? I find it great to take the pulse of the industry but this is definitely more than a media channel. Although limited to 140-chars, those little posts transpire happiness, surprise, mockery or sadness. The tweeple empathize and provide some kind of support network.

Don’t you wonder what that means for our next generation systems? Will we see a wave of new applications that deal with the human aspect as being more than a data entry person? Is collaboration going to remain the main focus? How about reputation? Trend setting? The whole social media story?

The Yin / Yang of Geeks

-- Posted by Carole-Ann

A long long long time ago, I studied Math/Physics *and* Biology. The school I went to was specialized in Life Sciences. Although I think it is pretty much irrelevant now, I really believe this is influencing how I think and how I tackle problems.

I have always been quite fascinated by the brain and how we make decisions -- hence my passion for Decision Management I guess. When I started working in Paris in a small consulting firm, I realized that I had a unique way of handling complexity. Not completely unique as many people with my background tend to approach problems in a similar fashion. But unique enough in the environment I was in, surrounded by Math/Physics-only engineers.

Our French system teaches us to be extremely analytic by nature. We love to categorize, structure and rationalize. When complexity increases though different strains of engineers react differently.

My observation is that Math/Physics geeks want to control all aspects of the problem. It is important to them to have a theorem or an equation to explain every single detail. When complexity grows, they will come up with increasing complex models to describe it.

Math/Physics/Biology geeks are still looking for a good model but their approach is to rely on observations, facts, patterns. What I learned in my biology classes back then is that we do not know much. We think the origin of the world is such and such but much of it remains unknown. We think the human body works one way but in many instances we are not exactly sure. Even when we know, biology classes keep insisting that we used to know something different and realized at some point in time that we were wrong. We had some good laugh at really early "understanding" of the human body (I recommend taking a look at the nervous system for example). Who knows how much fun our kids will have when they read how we thought it worked in 2008?

My point here is that with biology in the picture, we, engineers, become more humble on our understanding of the mechanics of the world. When handling complexity, we always assume there is significant chance we don't know enough. As a result, we think more in terms of behavior / interfaces, etc. It does not really matter how it works internally as we typically don't know. In our software systems we likely end up knowing of course but we can comfortably proceed without the need to control / understand how this could possibly be designed. This has proven to be a good background for Object-Oriented technologies.

I am not advocating that this is the right way of looking at things. I am actually convinced that the two approaches are very complementary. In my professional life, I have always been "attracted" (professionally speaking of course) to the "other" kind of geeks. With one of us thinking about the interactions, feedback loop and other behavioral aspects and the other one focusing on figuring out how we could build such components, we have always made strong heterogeneous teams. The best of both worlds.

Fascinating.

A Product Manager's Random Thoughts

Welcome to this new blog. I have another blog for my work where I talk about the vision I have for the products I am responsible for. I created this one to share some completely different things such as my perspective on product management.

One might think that this discipline is well-known as we all know product managers and we have some idea as to what they do. To be honest I think it is not that simple. First there is a lot of confusion on what the role of product manager is, especially as it compares to product marketing. Second companies often get totally confused as well and treat product managers as glorified presales, only in charge of helping sales close deals.

My definition, which is in line with the teaching of Pragmatic or Sequent Learning, is way more strategic. To me, there is no doubt that product management is about charting a course. Knowing the industry and the market, the idea is to figure out an innovative way to solve a business problem. Part of it is expertise and part of it is art -- product managers can't be "simply" running a list of features.

Feels like Product Management 101, and it is, but I have met many many many product managers that do not get it and keep focusing on putting on paper what is requested without questioning the WHY. Why would anyone want that feature? What are the users really trying to do? Take a step back and visualize the problem, visualize the solution, question the approach, validate the approach and never rest ;-)