Monday, July 14th 2008 --it's-the-toolset-stupid
The strange symbiosis between process and technology
When you're rolling out a new process within an organisation, or adapting an existing process and trying to automate it, there's always some sort of toolset limitation that will throw off your plans.
The issue arises when you realise the careful workflow that you've lovingly crafted and socialised for weeks has a fatal flaw. An Achilles tendon of logic that your chosen toolset just won't support. Generally, to get an automated (or augmented) system humming, the three things you need to think about are People, Process, Toolsets. You also want to think about them in that order.
First you need the right people. All of the slick process and smart tools are nothing if the people involved are not enthusiastic and willing to embrace a new way of doing things. Entire books have been written on the subject of getting people out of their under-performing comfort zones and into high-performance process driven environments, so I won't belabour the point here.
Then comes the process; and then the toolset - or does it? Here's something I've noticed after years of doing this process-to-technology mapping. In almost every case a toolset was either selected or in-place before a process was written.
So is this a symptom or a cause? I think its a little bit of both. What's happening is that the organisation has a set of general requirements. Things that they know they want. When a company decides to "go ITIL", this is a little easier to envisage - "okay, so we're going to need Incident, Problem, Change and Config as a start..." and off we go and select a toolset. In effect, the organisation already has a process - or at least thinks it does. ITIL being descriptive rather an prescriptive needs a bit of customisation to get a right fit in a company - and no two ITIL rollouts are the same. So in effect we have half a process. But that's OK because out of the box, you usually get half a toolset.
The trick then is to marry these two areas, process and toolset, together. It turns into a bit of a moving target because on one hand you're determining what the organisation needs, and on the other figuring out what the toolset can give you. Its a coordinated Tango danced by hundreds of people on both sides of the fence - vendor and customer.
In a perfect world, we'd be able to create our perfect process and then select a toolset which will give us exactly what we want. In the real world that never happens. What we end up with is an approximation of what the company wanted and what the vendor envisaged their imaginary customer would want at the time the toolset was written. Process toolsets are by definition an insulating layer that attempts to do some things for you. Although most of them are wildly (and impressively) flexible, there are some things that just can't be done. If you want a toolset that can do anything you can imagine, I suggest reading a good book on advanced C programming.
This is not a bad thing, however. Most companies don't "just do process". The ones that do are either auditing people or writing toolsets. Companies that are rolling out these processes are usually doing other things like shipping heavy stuff from one area to another, or digging stuff out of the ground and selling it, or making sure people get their paychecks on time or whatever. The point is that being flexible to the toolset when designing your process may unlock some doors to better and more efficient ways of doing things. Companies should not be hard and fast and fight with the toolset to implement things exactly as they see them. This path leads to trouble (and I've seen it first hand). Instead, it can be beneficial to accept that sometimes the toolset's method is better than you had in mind and adjust your process to suit.
You end up effectively shifting your touchpoints between toolset and process until you have a good fit - and that's the hard part about the customisation. But once you have it set, the results can be impressive.
Perhaps the three things should be thought of as two: People, Process & Toolsets.
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Sunday, May 18th 2008 --minor-fix
Typo in link in Peacemaker fixed
I got caught out with a minor bug in Peacemaker. On the enter income page, the link to enter another income page actually takes you to the expense page. It's now fixed and Peacemaker version 1.11 is available for download.
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Friday, May 9th 2008 --clive-barker
Taste the darkness, D'Amour. It's been waiting for you!
I know I said I wouldn't blog about movies, but I recently re-discovered an old 1995 horror film which was one of my faves when it was released straight to video. Clive Barker's Lord Of Illusions wowed me when I first saw it and it has the same effect on a viewing now. I love the original storyline and the disturbing imagery that Clive Barker's direction evokes.
There's something about Clive Barker's horror style that is compelling for me, and Lord Of Illusions certainly stays true to his vision. A must see for any Clive Barker fan.
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Thursday, May 1st 2008 --live-recording
Another cool thing dvgrab does
In addition to my previous post, I've also discovered that dvgrab can allow you to record straight to harddrive, completely bypassing the tape. It appears the Sony HCR-HC3 will quite happily stream whatever is appearing on the CCD straight down the firewire cable regardless of whether the record button is pushed or not!
The method is straightforward. We connect the camcorder via firewire to the computer. Set the camcorder to record mode (but without pressing the record button) and point the camera at whatever we want to record. Using the dvgrab command as before, we capture what we want and then hit CTRL-C to stop grabbing video. The resulting .m2t file contains the footage we just shot.
Applications for fixed cameras in film studios that point at the talking heads immediately come to mind. If you use a long firewire cable you can move around a bit, though for anything more than that tape is obviously the go. For fixed installations that do a lot of footage though, using the tape and then re-capturing is extra work that this method can avoid.
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