It is short, sharp, engaging and easy to read. Put down that Scandinavian crime novel, ignore your travel expense application issues and read this book instead. I’m perhaps reading too much into the title,  but I can’t help wondering if it isn’t a hat tip to the rock band Rage Against the Machine.  If it is, deeply nifty sub-editing coolness.   If not,  it is a lovely  unintended consequence.

The book highlights the accelerating disruption that technology brings to the workplace and to the very definition of work. There is dark side to technology, and the authors have done a nuanced job in exploring this.  It makes a worthwhile change from the technology=progress drum beat.

It was especially good to see a section on the growing gap between wage  and productivity growth.  To see disquiet about median wage stagnation from technology focused researchers is a very fine thing.  There is more than a whiff of valorization in their argument.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee make excellent use of statistics, and this work is no exception. They use numbers to illuminate, and they do it well. The Bill Gates in a bar story is a lovely explanation of mean and median. They explain, but don’t condescend.

As with much of US business academia, the book is centred on the US economy, with fleeting mentions of the rest of world.  I didn’t spot the dreaded phrase “Corporate America”, but it may have been lurking there. In particular the solution section was too US focused. Moaning about  H-1B visas etc… However suggestions 17,18, 19 are spot on.

17. Reduce the large implicit and explicit subsidies to financial services. This sector attracts

a disproportionate number of the best and the brightest minds and technologies, in part

because the government effectively guarantees “too big to fail” institutions.

18. Reform the patent system. Not only does it take years to issue good patents due to the

backlog and shortage of qualified examiners, but too many low-quality patents are

issued, clogging our courts. As a result, patent trolls are chilling innovation rather than

encouraging it.

19. Shorten, rather than lengthen, copyright periods and increase the flexibility of fair use.

Copyright covers too much digital content. Rather than encouraging innovation, as

specified in the Constitution, excessive restrictions like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term

Extension Act inhibit mixing and matching of content and using it creatively in new ways.

There are strong echoes of Larry Lessig in the IP section (as an aside I’d like to get the authors’ views of Lessig’s recent work on political corruption).

More broadly though I’d like to see business school academia and IT research engaging more with the rich research tapestry of sociology and political philosophy, how about more Jessop and Harvey, and Herbert Marcusse needs a serious dust off.  I fancy I heard the very faint clang of  Weber’s iron cage in this work. I’d suggest that Maslow and maybe Hayek can take a rest for a while.

This book is excellent,  but would have been seminal if it had built upon the work of that chap from Trier.

 Firstly: Dr Sue Black. 

I’ve not met Sue, except on twitter, but I have admired her efforts to support Bletchley Park for some time now. She blogs about them here. 

I think Bletchley Park should be a global heritage site. It is one of the cradles of our industry, and the work of the people there was as heroic as that of any soldier. Sue’s work in raising the profile of Bletchley is my main reason for featuring her, but her campaigning for women in technology is relentless, and her academic research is well worth a read too. 

 Secondly:  Theano.

I’ve not met her either, and she isn’t on twitter.

Theano of Crotona was the wife of Pythagoras.(born c. 546 B.C.),

According to tradition, Theano was the wife of Pythagoras. She and her two daughters carried on the Pythagorean School after the death of Pythagoras. She wrote treatises on mathematics, physics, medicine, and child psychology. McLemore writes that her most important work was the principle of the “Golden Mean.” But discerning what Theano actually did is extremely difficult. As stated in the article in the Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science.

That Theano continued to operate the school of Pythagoras after his death is often affirmed but not confirmed. Thus, it can only be stated that, according to tradition, Theano was a mathematician, a physician, and an administrator—someone who kept alive an important training ground for future mathematicians.

In addition, Damo (ca. 535-475 BC), the daughter of Phythagoras and Theano, is said to have published her father’s treatises on geometry as well as treatises on the construction of a regular tetrahedron and the construction of a cube.  via this site.

According to one source, Theano’s principal works included a Life of Pythagoras, a Cosmology, The Theorem of the Golden Mean, The Theory of Numbers, The Construction of the Universe, and a work titled On Virtue. None of the primary sources that remain, however, reveals anything of her personality.

Theano’s most important work is said to have been the principle of the Golden Mean. Like the geometrical constant pi, the Golden Mean is an irrational number that shows up in many relationships in nature. Its decimal value is approximately 1.6180. In geometry, a “golden” rectangle is one whose sides are related by the Golden Mean ratio, for example 13:8. Both the ancient Greeks and Egyptians designed buildings and monuments with proportions based on the Golden Mean. It is now known that some growth patterns observed in nature occur in accordance with the Golden Mean, examples being the spirals in the nautilus shell and the ratio of clockwise to counterclockwise spirals in a sunflower.

In a treatise on the construction of the universe attributed to Theano, she reportedly argues that the universe consists of ten concentric spheres: the Sun, the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Earth, Counter-Earth, and the stars. The Sun, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury move in orbit about a central fire. The stars are fixed and are not considered to move. In Theano’s theory, the distances between the spheres and the central fire are in the same arithmetic proportion as the intervals in the musical scales. via this site.

It is a shame that the work of both Theano and Damo is lost in the mists of time. It is my view that many of the great scientists of the past owe much more to their spouses or sisters than history lets on. Programmers may have heard of Theano as a python library.

(cross posted at my personal blog)

It is full of excellent nuggets. Obsess about your customers, not your competitors. Invent. Think long term. Be prepared to be misunderstood.  I wonder how many other CEO’s could present their business principles in this precise yet genuine way?  I believe the presentation was mainly aimed at the employees of Zappos. Amazon recently acquired them.  If I was a Zappos employee this would go a long way to making me feel welcome. 

Last night I was chatting to a colleague of mine in the US about ERP’s future. We then ended up discussing the history of the software industry. At what point do the ERP vendors of today face significant new forms of competition, and how will they react, what will threaten them, who will adapt and who won’t?  History can be a useful guide. We briefly touched on DEC, IBM, Dun&Bradstreet, Cullinet, ADR and so on. I suggested that he read Martin Campbell-Kelly’s excellent "from Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog- A history of the software Industry."  While we were talking he ordered it on his Kindle so that he could read it on the beach. He then proceeded to convince me that the Kindle was "awesome", which in turn then led me to read some Gartner Research on e-paper so that I could figure out how the Kindle could work in bright sunlight when I should have been working on my e-Recruitment Magic Quadrant.

The Kindle has started a bit of a blaze (bad pun I know). I’m following the "1984" incident with interest. Bezos’s apology was rapid, genuine and appropriate, but as Cory Doctorow points out, there are more issues around the Kindle that require resolution.  The Kindle is not only creating issues for Amazon, it is creating challenges for copyright law, publishers, and authors. How this plays out will impact fundamentally how we read. That is a big responsibility.

click here if it doesn’t display.

Take the case of  the newly named Archer’s Road. (via the Guardian)

A street in Sheffield that has been the butt of jokes for many years has finally won a battle to change its name to something less … behind the times.

Residents of Butt Hole Road long ago stopped seeing the funny side of the legions of titterers taking pictures of themselves with their pants down next to the road’s sign. After clubbing together to raise the £300 necessary to pay for a new sign, the local council has agreed to name the road Archers Way, in honour of its half-mile proximity to Conisbrough Castle.

There are many cases when a change in name makes good sense.

But why is it that some software companies keep changing their product names every few years? Do they understand and care about the pain, irritation and cost it inflicts on their customers?  Who exactly do they think they are helping other than the brochure department? Do they realise the vast forests of systems documentation that are made obsolete? The hours wasted doing find and replace in Powerpoints, and worse in the application code itself? The helpdesk and partner confusion?  The environmental impact alone of a large vendor changing product names is material. I wonder if I could plug that into a carbon footprint calculator? I bet it would be equivalent to a few jumbo jets or negate the impact of a newly minted LEED compliant building.

I’m beginning to think that we need to start referring to such applications as the application formerly known as…and…and before that….and before that….and originally. When road names change and country names change for the public good, it is normally because the people living there demand a change. I don’t know about you, but I’m not seeing lots of enterprise software customers clamouring for the renaming of the systems. Most of them still call them by the original names anyway.  

Last week I suddenly felt like one of those people you meet in IT who keep telling you that computing hasn’t really changed since punchcards or Fortran, and that everything just repeats itself. Either that, or I had stumbled upon the flux capacitor. I shuddered briefly.

Let me explain myself.

Just after I joined SAP in the mid-nineties, PeopleSoft won a significant deal at Siemens. This really shook SAP up, and led to significant investment in the HR part of R/3, especially for the global market.

Then PeopleSoft stumbled, sucked into the joyous complexity of German payroll.

A few years later, SAP won back large parts of the account. I didn’t really realise it at the time, but SAP was pretty agile in its response to the loss. It had long term positive benefits for SAP’s HR product.

At first sight this month’s win for SuccessFactors seems remarkably similar.

But history doesn’t always come around the same way. For history to repeat itself here, three things need to happen:

1. SuccessFactors stumbles.

2. SAP delivers a comparable offering via SaaS

3. SAP convinces Siemens to change back.

SuccessFactors today is more globally aware than PeopleSoft was in the mid-nineties, and it has the chance to learn from history. It has a broad European customer base, and well established operations here. It is also steering clear of German payroll.

In the mid-nineties, R/3 was already on the way to dominating the client/server ERP market. Today SAP is dabbling with SaaS in various forms, but I do wonder if it will react to this with the same agility and focus that it did back then. Also, the Siemens of today is different from the Siemens then.

Earlier this year I wrote a note about the SAP German HR congress ( Gartner clients see) Observations From SAP’s German HR Congress (G00165965), 06-MAR-2009 One of the things I said was.

"German organizations are in a good position. SAP perceives that it has significant competition in the talent management space and is strengthening its products, while best-of-breed vendors see an opportunity to gain an increased foothold in the market. There is nothing like a DAX 30 company selecting a best-of-breed vendor to focus the minds of SAP management and its development organization, as no organization likes to lose at home.

We will be watching with interest.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

Well. Here we go. For this I have decided to go local and historical.  Ladenburg, where I live, is one of the cradles of the automotive industry. It is where the Benz family lived.  My Ada figure is Bertha Benz.

Bertha Benz (née Ringer) (born 3 May 1849 in Pforzheim, Germany, married inventor Karl Benz on 20 July 1872, and died 5 May 1944 in Ladenburg), was the first person to drive an automobile over a long distance.

On 5 August 1888 and without her husband’s knowledge, she drove her sons, Richard and Eugen, fourteen and fifteen years old, in one of Benz’s newly-constructed Patent Motorwagen automobiles—from Mannheim to Pforzheim—becoming the first person to drive an automobile over more than a very short distance. The distance was more than 106 km (more than sixty miles). Distances traveled before this historic trip were short, and merely trials with mechanical assistants. (From Wikipedia.)

Other interesting information about that trip. She repaired a fuel line blockage with a hairpin, and fixed the ignition with a garter.

Without this expedition, it is quite unlikely that Karl Benz would have had the successes that followed.  She took on the conventions of the time and proved to the world that this newfangled thing had a purpose.  Not only was this brave, but I reckon it was one of the greatest advertising and marketing moves in history. With this one trip, she turned the Patent Motorwagen 3 from perpetual beta into the real thing. Just think what impact this would have had on the male ego of 1888.

It seems to me that this was a family business, and Bertha deserves just as much credit as Karl got.

There is now a sign posted route following that first drive.

This is goodness, but next time you see a  Mercedes-Benz, pause, and think about Bertha.

As the automotive industry now faces its biggest crisis, it would do well to look to Bertha Benz’s legacy for inspiration.   Thanks Bertha for taking that drive.

It is about this shed.

(photo via wikipedia)

This is not just any shed. It is part of Bletchley Park. It is here that women and men deciphered codes in WWII. It is here that the first practical computers were used.

There is a campaign going on to help restore and maintain these buildings. Those of us who work in the computer industry owe this hut a debt of gratitude. Without this hut there would be no SOA, ERP, SaaS  and Cloud computing.  If you have a moment, give this worthwhile project your support. For the British citizens reading this, there is a petition you can sign here. Thanks to Dr Sue Black for getting this campaign going.

As an industry we are so tied up with thinking about the next great thing, sometimes we forget to look back at those that made what we have today possible. Allan Turing, although now immortalized in the eponymous test, was persecuted after the war for being gay, and he  committed suicide because of that persecution.

We ought to pause more often and reflect on those that shaped our industry. We also need to do more to make the software profession more inclusive, whatever the gender, creed and persuasion.  That reminds me I need to write my  Ava Lovelace post soon.

from rpongsaj‘s flickr cc license (thanks)

Today is International Privacy Day, and it is all over the blogosphere. This is a good thing. Generating awareness about privacy is goodness indeed.

But I find Eric’s position on Techcrunch  that losing your privacy is the price to pay for on-line participation and collaboration rather depressing.

The more of our lives that we put online, the less privacy we have. It is as simple as that. And this is a problem that will just get worse over time. You cannot be fully engaged on social networks, blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, and all the rest without opening yourself up to phishers, scammers, and identity thieves.

It is a false assumption, and a easy way out for software vendors and companies that process our data. Merely shifting the responsibility to private citizens is a cop-out. It is technological determinism of the most invidious kind.

Privacy is a fundamental human right, at least where I live. It is time that software makers, data processors of all kinds realise that, and build that into their product designs and business processes. It is also time that governments get more serious about enforcing the laws.

It took a few decades for the automotive industry to take responsibility for car safety, and it took a lot of government pressure and effort to bring down the accident deaths. There are of course still too many, but car safety has become a shared responsibility between manufacturers, government and drivers.

Data breaches in the US  since January 2005 now total 252,276,206 records according to privacyrights.org.  Just like pollution is a externality in manufacturing, privacy failure is an externality in a software. Users can’t fix it alone.

So yes, change your passwords, check your privacy settings, watch what you share. But it is now time that software makers and governments take privacy far more seriously. It is not a zero sum game, we can have a rewarding on-line experience without sacrificing privacy, but it will take a concerted effort from all the parties.

For vendors in the HR technology space, I’d be really interested to hear what you are doing to protect and enhance the privacy of the personal data that you process or enable the processing for. This is part of my research agenda this year.

One of the great  mathematical rivalries was between Newton and Leibniz over who came up with Calculus first. It turns out that they were arguing over second.

A Palimpsest rediscovered showed that Archimedes had a grasp of the principles of calculus 2000 years before either Newton or Leibniz. You can read more about the discovery here.

I wonder how many other inventions and discoveries that we hold so dear are in fact rediscoveries?  Palimpsests do make prior art literature reviews rather difficult.

(photo from the cc collection of lambageek, thanks)