Book: Crooked Little Vein

Posted on by Coté

The writing in this book is good, and I’m always a sucker for noir.

But it gets tiresome after awhile, all the balls-out crazy stuff and topics.

There’s a lot to study about fiction dynamics here though fueled by the picador plotting: lots of interesting characters, lots of mini-plots; paring characters; the weak male/strong female trope; unlimited budget; snarky, but weary direct address tone to the reader; maybe world building, but just as the back-story for the various characters you meet (the serial killer on the airplane, the Roanokes, but the Bob character is ignored/anemic in this respect); social commentary as asides (from Trix, often); sex for titilation.

Obviously I liked it enough to quickly read it.

Book Review: Maximize Your Investment: 10 Key Strategies for Effective Packaged Software Implementations

Posted on by Coté

The premise of this book, for most anyone, is painfully boring: planning out and project managing the installation of COTS software. This is mostly lumbering, on-premises ERP applications: those huge, multi-year installs of software that run the back office and systems of record for organizations. While this market is huge, touches almost every company, and has software that is directly or indirectly touched by almost everyone each day (anytime you buy something or interact with a company)…it’s no iPhone.

If you’re in the business of selling enterprise software and services, however, Beaubouef’s book is a rare look inside the buyer’s mind and their resulting work-streams when they’re dealing with big ol’ enterprise IT. As a software marketer, I read it for exactly that. I was hoping to find some ROI models (a scourge of my research). It doesn’t really cover that at all, which is fine.

There’s a core cycle of ideas and advice flitting in and bout of the book that I like:

  1. COTS software will do, you know, 80% of what you like. The rest is customizing it through configuration, your own code layered on-top, or getting the vendor to add in new features.
  2. The more you customize the software, the harder it will be to change. But, the less you customize it, the less it creates differentiation for your business processes.
  3. Most of the problems and challenges you’ll encounter, though, will be human based.
  4. Much of these human problems are about managing the requirements process to make sure the software is matching the needs of the business.
  5. Process-wise, to do this we like to take on a waterfall approach (try to specify everything up front, implement it all, then verify if it works). This results in a lot or risk of waiting for that final verification to see if it works and you were right about matching the COTS implementation to business needs.
  6. Instead, and iterative approach that focuses on learning and honing the COTS/business match-up seems like a good idea.
  7. Role-wise, getting someone(s) who have a tops-down view of the business process and enough technical understanding to map that to the COTS project is a really good idea, though hard to put in place.

While the book focuses on on-premises software, the overall thinking could easily apply to any implementation of a large IT-driven, vendor provided system: SaaS would work, and to an extent the kind of infrastructure software we sell at Pivotal. As the points above go over, the core thrust of the book is about managing how you make sure your IT is actually helping the business, not bogging down in its self.

If you’re pretty vague on what you should do in these large IT initiatives, you could do a lot worse than read this book.

Check out the book: *Maximize Your Investment: 10 Key Strategies for Effective Packaged Software Implementations *

Programming society with big data and small cash payments

Posted on by Coté

The mathematical modeling of society is made possible, according to Pentland, by the innate tractability of human beings. We may think of ourselves as rational actors, in conscious control of our choices, but in reality most of what we do is reflexive. Our behavior is determined by our subliminal reactions to the influence of other people, particularly those in the various peer groups we belong to. “The power of social physics,” he writes, “comes from the fact that almost all of our day-to-day actions are habitual, based mostly on what we have learned from observing the behavior of others.” Once you map and measure all of a person’s social influences, you can develop a statistical model that predicts that person’s behavior, just as you can model the path a billiard ball will take after it strikes other balls.

Source: Big data and the limits of social engineering

Posted on by Coté

PowerPoint and its infamous bullet points have been so abused in later years that the term “PowerPoint death” has become widespread, to the extent that some voices claim that PowerPoint is making us stupid or threatening our thinking and reasoning.

It’s understandable that as a reaction some very popular books published in the last couple of years about presentations focused on creating minimalist slides, with stunning visuals and little text. These decks might be appropriate for ballroom-style presentations before large audiences expecting to be motivated and/or entertained.

However, the vast majority of presentations in the business world are boardroom-style presentations in which these design guidelines have little application.

El Arte de Presentar’s review of Speaking PowerPoint. Indeed. I love that sentiment and always struggle to explain it to the children of Zen Presentation-think.