Adventures in home working

I am being bombarded by information and initiatives that relate to thinking from all directions.  I thought it would be interesting to list the main ones and try and identify the many different perspectives.

Structure and rigour.  It all started with David Pollard’s structured problem solving process, which although not a perfect fit for me was an interesting insight into how formal and rigorous the process could be.

Quick and intuitive.  Then I read reviews of books that discussed rapid decision making, I have not explored them further but they support my gut feeling that my intuition is a valuable skill that I should nurture.  I don’t have a very good memory for facts, but am good at remembering relationships. I have specifically avoided learning memory improvement techniques because I worry that whilst I will be better at remembering names my intuition and innovation will suffer.

Innovation.  I came across a blog entry on types of innovation, quickly followed by one of my colleagues sending me a presentation, which led to me exploring innovation processes, in particular TRIZ and some of the tools that support it. 

Mind maps.  I then had the opportunity to use Mind Maps to help me brainstorm and structure the early lifecycle phase of a project, and interesting this linked me back to using TRIZ with Mind Maps, and David Pollard and his experiments with Mind Maps.

Blogs.  I have always thought that blogs are a great way to help provide other people to get an insight into your thinking processes, so I liked the fact that a few people were discussing them for use in that way.  Probably the best of example of this in action is the way that Kim Cameron developed his Laws of Identity.  This page documents the laws and links to the blog sections that helped to evolve each law.

Intelligence and thinking.  Then I got a nasty shock whilst reading The happiness Purpose, where de Bono shows how intelligent people may not actually be very good thinkers because they tend to rapidly come to a conclusion and then use their intelligence to defend it.  Now my IQ is only 135 so I may not fall into that trap, but it’s worth watching out for and certainly worth making sure I follow a process, this blog entry shows there are quite a few processes to choose from.

Perspectives.  Then in discussions at work around architecture I found myself amazed that I needed to defend the concept of having different people in the team to represent different perspectives of the solution, eg usability and supportability.  This got be thinking about the whole topic of taking different perspectives when thinking about a problem which led me to The Six Thinking Hats, which I was surprised to find my kids had been taught at school.  This led me to de Bono’s other book on Lateral Thinking

Happiness.  I am undertaking a mini study on happiness, this study so far has taught me one major lesson, happiness depends more on the way you think than any other factor.  If you look for things that are wrong, compare yourself to others and see success in terms of material things rather than experiences then you are going down the wrong road.  I have a category of my blog on this topic.

Concepts.  Last month I needed to understand a whole new subject area, Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture, so I decided to map the relationships of the WS* specifications using a concept map, here is an example.  This helped tremendously.

Communication.  Then one of my friends pointed me to a web site called beyond bullets all about the challenges of communications with presentations, in particular PowerPoint,  now this site promotes the idea of story telling, I happen to think mind maps and concept maps have their place as well, but its worth a read.

Horizon.  Finally last week I watched a disturbing episode of Horizon on cold fusion.  In this episode it became clear to me the terror that must be felt by any scientist with a new idea that challenges mainstream thinking in an area of science where funding and ego are issues.  The ferocity with which work, which may actually represent significant process, was torn to shreds by those with vested interests, eg funding or ego, was staggering.  It was clear that such reactions stifle creativity, what happened to the idea of “not fearing failure”, and “treating failure as a learning opportunity”, certainly not a philosophy shared by scientific researchers!

Momentum is building around forms.  At a recent panel discussion Bill Gates was asked about all of Microsoft’s different forms technologies and indicated that the InfoPath technology was the best long term bet.  Here is the full text, but this is the crucial snipit:

BILL GATES: No, I think that hits it. They- today, a little bit you have to think of HTML, and then our rich forms where InfoPath is the one that’s definitely on the rise there. What we want to get to is where InfoPath’s at the high-level, then we have all these rich controls you can use, and underneath we have the Avalon runtime. We have a roadmap for InfoPath where it gets richer and richer, embraces our rich controls, and sits on the latest presentation system. We also have some ways that if you do your work in InfoPath in future versions, we’ll be able to project that onto classic HTML, although today you have to think, do you want to be pure HTML or be able to assume InfoPath? That’s the one that will rise in usage even as we’re compatible with everything we’ve got.

As Chief Software Architect, drawing these roadmaps and making them clear is a pretty important thing. Forms is the one that it’s taken us a long time to get a clear message out.

I am not sure that the statement above is a CLEAR MESSAGE, but it is a message none the less.

Of course Adobe has its built in forms capability in Acrobat and OpenOffice.org are not standing still, driving along the Xforms route.  XForms is discussed in more detail in this InfoPath article.

As a person who likes to research it’s always worried me how rapidly some people make decisions.  At the same time I have also found that my gut feel and instinct is very accurate and so that has given me some comfort.  There are a couple of books that address this topic and Thinking faster discusses both, as well as adding its own perspective.

What I did not understand until last night was that I had established in my own mind the amount of information I needed to begin making a decision.  I went with some friends to see Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote The Tipping Point and Blink.  In Blink, his latest book, Gladwell evaluates how people make quick decisions based on less than complete evidence, and the risks and opportunities that present themselves in making decisions like that.  What I took away from his talk were two things:  first, people do make good decisions with over a short period of time with little information if they have a lot of experience in the topic, and two, most of us have biases that color our decision making that we may not even be aware of.

Me and some of my friends have been debating the subject of “how to” support, which represents a significant amount of a service providers costs.  We have tried the approach of centrally managed knowledge bases, but they only take us so far.  My view that the virtual Internet community and the internal intranet community of peers will become increasingly important.  Also the richness of the support experience will increase as well.  Eric Mack provides a great example with his pod cast on delegated task management, and even better a discussion thread has started that refines his advice.  Others are going beyond the podcast to video and screen-casting.  The progress in this area can be tracked monthly, which is really quite amazing.

I work in a group that works a lot on technical architecture.  Having just watched this video I now see the potential of the next generation of design tools.  Its a Microsoft centric view but its compelling viewing none the less. 

Even better it makes the physical server configuration of your deployed service just as easy.  Combined with utility computing automated provisioning model it makes many technical architecture activities almost point and click.

I guess the next step is to do the same for configuration and instrumentation of the applications themselves.  The IT world starts to look a lot simpler.  Just makes me pleased that my focus is on how to use and exploit the IT and not how to deploy it!