Shahid’s Perspectives

As most of us probably know, Windows Server is currently the most popular choice for most “mission critical” packaged applications for office automation — but, that’s changing. According to Forrester Research, “firms name a wide variety of operating systems (OSes) that they use for critical apps, and 29% name two or more. More than half of North American enterprises would consider switching OSes, and among them, Linux is the top choice, with 37% of switchers.”

What does this mean? For one, don’t just assume Windows is the only game in town. It also means that your customers are going to want more control over their OS decision. My own work in the government consulting arena has shown that non-Windows server are gaining popularity as well (anecdotally).

The best way to “future proof” yourself is to choose an operating system that you can easily deploy as a virtual appliance. I’ve been recommending this to most of my clients for the past few years but it’s even more important now. What this means is that instead of shipping package software with an installer, just ship a completely stripped down virtual appliance running either Linux or or free operating system and include your database, OS, app, and everything together in one “system”. Later, if users want to move to a different database they simply switch configurations.

To help with your virtual appliance building, installation, and maintenance check out rPath. They’ve got some nice solutions when you’re building either physical or virtual appliances.

Are CIOs seen as obstacles to innovation? In a nice interview with Gary Hamel, Allan Alter at CIO Insight writes:

The efficiency-focused management model has run its course, says strategist Gary Hamel. To see the future of management, look to the Internet, open source, free markets and democratic institutions.

It’s a good article. Some other interesting snippets:

Has management as we know it reached the end of the road? Strategy expert Gary Hamel thinks so. Yes, traditional management approaches have led us to achieve great things. “If you have a couple of cars in the garage, a television in every room and a digital device in every pocket, you can thank the inventors of modern management,” he writes in his upcoming book The Future of Management (Harvard Business School Press, October 2007; $26.95). But our century-old emphasis on planning, organizing and controlling won’t help companies solve their 21st century problems. In an era marked by global competition and commoditization, adaptability, speed and creativity are essential for survival, says Hamel, whose previous books, “Leading the Revolution” and “Competing for the Future” (with C.K. Prahalad), earned him a reputation as one of the great strategic thinkers of our time. “The old management model is simply not good enough.”

The future management model is taking shape, but some aspects are already evident, Hamel told CIO Insight executive editor Allan Alter. Companies will finally begin to be as open and democratic inside their doors as societies are outside those doors. Go/no-go decisions on projects and investments now made by a handful of executives will be made collectively by hundreds of employees.

Talent will matter far more than titles. And one of the most important catalysts and models for 21st century management will be the Internet.

If you’re a manager today, especially an IT manager, it’s a good article to check out.

I’ve written thousands of lines of ColdFusion in my web-career (the last line being around 2001) and I was always impressed by CF’s capabilities. I just ran across this new freeware (not open source yet, though) project that allows ColdFusion to run on Java without paying anything for a CF server. Seems very cool.

Check out the Smith project:

Smith is a freeware, cross-platform ColdFusion engine, written entirely in Java. Running on the top of Java Runtime Environment and Java Servlet Container, it can be virtually deployed on any operating system and work with any web server. Smith represents lightweight, yet reliable alternative to the existing ColdFusion servers. It supports most important CF features (see Features) and already drives several large ColdFusion applications.

Deeply integrated in J2EE, Smith works as part of ordinary Java Web application and can easily be used together with servlets and JSPs. The server behaviour is easily configurable through the simple Web interface where database connections, debugging options, server mappings and more can be set.

Smith is freeware software, which means that it comes with permission for anyone to use, copy, and distribute it. It is also being seriously considered to open-source it.

Download and try fully functional version of the Smith engine.

Many of my younger colleagues often ask about what some of the most important leadership aspects are for technical managers like team leads or architects. There are no hard and fast rules but here are some things I’ve learned over the years:

• Make Decisions. This is one of the most important aspects of leadership — just making a decision and not analyzing for weeks or months. No amount of evidence or information will ever “be enough” and at some point you’ll need to make a decision. Your team can see if you are timid or if you take risks. Leadership is about decision making and if your decision making skills or risk taking ability are limited, don’t bother trying to lead. I’ve seen many architects and so-called “team leads” that try to get their bosses to make their decisions for them so they don’t get in trouble for making “the wrong ones”. Big mistake.
• Lead by Example. Leadership is about direction and if you want to lead, you’ll need to make sure you take charge and establish that you know where you want to go. But, be prepared to demonstrate that you do what you ask your team to do. If you ask everyone else to do something but don’t do it yourself, your team will lose respect.
• Be transparent. You work with bright people and although they may not be your equals in experience or knowledge, they will know when you are making decisions based on whim or reason. If you can’t explain your decisions in a way that your team can comprehend then you’re not a good leader.
• Mentor. Good leaders create the next group of leaders, not just bark orders. If you’re not regularly mentoring and training, you’re not doing your job. And, if you mentor well you can let your team make many of the decisions without you and you’ll be able to trust that their decisions will be as good as yours.
• Be inclusive. You’re the leader and can make all the decisions and everyone knows that. But, if you’re not including input from everyone you’re losing valuable data and a chance to build a cohesive team.

Very few of us deal with the kinds of problems that engineers at NASA face — except for perhaps other engineers working in safety critical fields like avionics and medical devices. I live nearby NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), which is home to one of the most advanced software engineering labs in the world. As you can imagine, they take their engineering processes very seriously so when they put together an event open to the public I usually attend.

Recently they put together a talk on Independent Verification and Validation: The NASA Approach. This presentation described how verification and validation is executed within NASA. It “described what IV&V is and what it is not, the process that NASA uses to determine what projects the IV&V Program will work with, the approach that the IV&V Program takes to planning the tasks to be executed and how those tasks are executed.”

• View the abstract and speaker bio
• Watch the event
• View the PowerPoint presentation

In case you haven’t seen them before, it’s interesting to look at how different computer languages implementations fare on different hardware. Check them out at The Computer Language Shootout Benchmarks.

My friend Eric Spiegel’s just finished a nice article on working with startups. It’s a great explanation to customers on why they should do it and what some of the challenges are. 

The challenge that early stage firms encounter is that customers don’t usually understand they need to deal differently with a startup than an established technology vendor. Let’s be clear what “early stage” means. A company with 50 employees, a few million in revenue and a version three product is not early stage. A company with a handful of employees and almost no revenue with a version one (or beta) product is most definitely early stage.

…

By working with an early stage vendor, you can gain a competitive advantage on your competitors who aren’t willing to take this risk. You’ll have first access to thought-leaders and an innovative product. This will enable you to build and fine tune processes and best practices to get the most out of the new product. When your competition finally discovers the vendor, you will be light years ahead in getting the most out of this investment.

Read more: The Benefits of Working With Tech Startups

If you’re looking for a good overview of available data modeling tools (includes open source and commercial ones), check out this link: Data Modeling Tools.

NIST Special Publication 800-95 addresses security needs for networks in which automated Web services are being deployed in service-oriented architectures.  It’s only in draft but it covers the basics fairly well. If you’re doing business with the government and you plan to offer consumable services it’s worth making sure you follow the recommendations since the NIST requirements will start showing up in RFPs soon.

 I saw an interesting service offering recently. Check Autoriginate: Intelligent testing made convenient. Here’s how they describe themselves:

HostedQA is the industry’s first web-based QA solution. With a focus on making automated testing convenient and ensuring that the resulting test scripts are intelligent, HostedQA is generations ahead of the competition. No longer do you have to settle for automating only the playback of your tests. HostedQA automates the entire automated testing cycle. We’ll guide you through everything from setting up your databases and application servers to taking simple-to-understand visual screenshots of each step in the test.

I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but I’m going to check it out further.