Heroes and Villains

It can be all too easy to see the world through dark glasses, especially when you have to deal with large companies that fragment themselves to try to inject energy into their being.

This method of breaking things up usually works in nature because something fills the gaps to prevent a vacuum. It is the controlled movement that creates new structures. The control in nature comes from fluids.

However, in business the gaps that are left are often not filled with anything and the individual elements separate and create self contained units that no longer have a connection between constituent parts of the original organism.

What is more, the vacuum is often filled with, 'not my problem gov, try somewhere else'.

It is so refreshing to come across people who fill this vacuum with real human extensions to badly designed systems rather than excuses for not being able to achieve what the customer needs.

I applaud two such heroes who have gone beyond 'standard' practice to make my life easier, after it had been made miserable by many others in the same organisations.

The first works for AXA Health insurance. Robin Masters is an individual you can trust to fix an issue rather than to pass the buck.

The second is from BT. Graeme Paterson, regained my confidence in British Telecom which has been dwindling based on my attempt to get a good service from them over the last few years.

These people obviously represent many other helpful individuals in these companies. However, the probability is that you are more likely to meet people that do the hours without putting their heart into the job.

But then who is the villain? The person who has no heart in their job or the person that gives people heartless tasks to perform by developing vacuous systems?

The best debugging occurs at the common (Human) language interface

NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming is a strange thing for an IT person to be interested in wouldn't you think?



We all know that we should base all requirements on use cases which are stated in simple english. However, what is simple english? Who wrote the use cases? What did the business person state as the requirement and what else were they thinking at the time besides what they communicated by voice. How was the statement perceived and recorded by the analysit, did they rely only on words or other non verbal activity on and around the business person that should not have been considered in the way that it was?



Elicitation and recording of facts is impacted on by feelings which can change the meaning of words by overloading them with extraneuos data that should have been contained in isolation from the current object of communication.



Take a look at http://www.nlpls.com/articles/metamodel/MetaModelFlashcards.php.



Then go to http://www.nlpls.com/articles/NLPmetaModel.php and learn about Meta Models and the people that have discovered and documented them.

Best practice to make perfect

One of the things that all of us lack to some extent or other is real world experience in something or other. The main reason for this is that the real world this year is not the same as the real world last year or the year before.

There is only one entity that can be all things to all, and to my knowledge that entity doesn't participate directly in IT projects. Therefore, a pragmatic approach to this requirement for the rest of us can be to use the real world experience of others. Which is why history is so valuable lest we continue to make the same mistakes again and again.

In the IT world our history is encapsulated in successful organisations like OpenSource, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, etc , alongside standards bodies and the standards these organisations contribute towards like ANSII, Prince, ITIL, OMG, UML (See Standards_organizations).

These are the result of many 'real world experiences' being shared to make a common unified real world for all to share and work in, also known as teamwork!

These then lead to validated software and documentation packages that can be used as business (functional - Sales, Finance, Production, Distribution, PerformancePoint Server, etc) and technical (Non Functional - RDBMS's, Object Orientation, The Web, Operating Systems etc) needs solution implementors.

However, we can throw all this away if we do not follow the best practices that are revealed by such historic teamwork.

Therefore, to put a check on deviation from standards we can implement testing. However, as we know it takes as much as three times as long to fix things as to do them properly in the first place. Also, the testing can get a bit tainted by politics.

Therefore, thanks go to MS for their 'MS SQL Server real world experience' gap filler :-

SQL Server Best Practices

Get the real-world guidelines, expert tips, and rock-solid guidance to take your SQL Server implementation to the next level. These SQL Server best practices draw on the extensive experience and expertise from respected developers and engineers at Microsoft, who walk you through the specifics on solving particularly difficult issues.

Ref: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb331794.aspx

Systems do as their 'Logic', or lack of it, dictates

In business there should be little room for illogical systems, otherwise how can these systems be trusted and how can there be continued progress of an organisation as it grows.

Sometimes lack of logical systems can come from speed of expansion of the responsibilities of the people who are supposed to implement the business logic, within the said systems.

At other times the use of illogical methods can be the outcome of old system survival tactics in a developing business environment.

At other times ....

However it occurs, it should not be allowed to contaminate an organisations strategy of survival and expansion, otherwise it can become difficult to interface with the wider business world in a synergistic fashion.

There are tools available to help weed out illogical thinking systems and to ensure that rules implemented within systems are implemented in a fair and unambiguous way, for all customers that interface with a given service supplier.

I came across a company that produces one of these tools as a result of some research I was doing into storing logic in databases as opposed to coding it. Thanks to a reference from one of Joe Celko' articles, Joe Celko offers his sage (if offbeat) advice,

I found a link to the following:-

For Business Analysts: LogicGem Video 1

A demonstration of how to use LogicGem to create a set of business rules and provide business analysts with the confidence that the business rule set is complete. Ref: http://www.catalyst.com/videos/logicgem/index.html

Take a look if you want to do things properly but don't have the time. Also have a look if you don't know what I am harping on about. Things may, ?, become clearer as you watch the video.

Course PreRequisites - Straight from the horses mouth?

Training is naturally a little bit more complicated than gambling and so needs to be taken seriously. And at the least, as seriously as knowing the health of the horse you are gambling on when gambling on a horse race.

So that there is no confusion about the pre-requisites for Microsoft courses that people may wish to attend. I offer a link to the site of Element K. One can use the information on this site to confirm their understanding of what they need to bring to the party in order for everyone to enjoy themselves when attending a course.

If you perceive something that conflicts with the information given by Element K, then you should worry because the latest Microsoft training material is designed around an educational strategy.

This is new to technology training from Microsoft and to be applauded, however, for this strategy change to work the educational offerings should be free of marketing and if the two get cross contaminated then we are in real trouble!

There are two main risks associated with such freedom of information.

The first is that it will scare the planners when they think of the time and cost involved in doing things correctly.

The second is that they will act on the fear and make the wrong decisions.

Be strong and enjoy the benefits of information sharing. This is what democracy is all about after all, isn't it?

Back to the future

This is a fantastic site. I am not sure whether you are up with this kind of thing but the acupuncture points used in Chinese medicine have been exploited to good effect without the use of needles, for thousands of years.

See Yin Yang House for the details.

If you learn better by being shown rather than by reading about things then look up EFT on the Internet. There are an increasing number of people willing to invest in learning and then helping others understand what is available! Gary Craig is one amongst many such nice people out there!

What hotels are there in this area of London?

I found this cool map when I was trying to locate a hotel near a customer site I will be working at in the near future. Very useful, you can zoom in and out and it changes hotels shown on the map also puts their names in a list on the right. Now thats something of a GISa (Google Is Special application) or (Graphical Information Systems applied) both work for me ;-)

Interactive guide to Hotels in London

You may not need it if your from London, but if your from outside then finding a hotel can be interesting. We were just chatting during a course this week and it's amazing the types of places people end up in when tryng to save the company money.