KDiddy's

Cloud Computing Google World View Notes

2009-04-14T15:46:00.000-07:00

Presenter:
Mike Repass, Product Manager (reminder: Product Managers at Google are technical folks and not marketing folks like other companies, his words not mine, ex-MSFT dude).
You can follow him on http://twitter.com/mdrcode/

Websites:
http://appengine.google.com/
http://code.google.com/appengine/

Highlights
- Cloud computing based platform is in the managed platforms (non-machine) space, more on this later.
- Free Trial for ever.
- Buddy Poke ( http://www.buddypoke.com/ ) and www.whitehouse.gov/OpenForQuestions are examples of site using it
- Billing and Quota just released (This pay as you go is the secret source of cloud computing in my opinion )
- Support only for Python runtime 2.5 modified no other language is supported
- Uses same Google infrastructure
- Data export tool available in case you don’t like the service and want to take your stuff somewhere else (remember: Google does no evil!)
- Approach is very Developer centric, which is great! No assemblies required

Lowlights
- No IDE for Development, SDK + Documentation can be downloaded from the site. Last company that did this almost lost the runtime war somewhat at least, Java SDK released with no IDE back in the day. Everyday Developers (not hardcore, command line switching guys/gals love IDE, it’s a productivity issue.
- Support for only one language
- No message queuing support, so your website cannot do transactions, at least none that is meaningful
- No support for large files, this is on the roadmap though, there is a limit to the size of document you can upload.

Cloud Computing: Amazon Web Services (AWS)

2009-03-31T13:29:00.000-07:00

Early March I attended a presentation on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS), it was the second in a series of presentations on cloud computing put together by the washing technology industry association. The first event in the series provided an overview of cloud computing, while subsequent events focused on vendor specific take/implementations.

AWS combines various aspects of cloud computing, the EC2 service is largely a virtual environment, S3 provides storage while Cloud Front, SimpleDB and Simple Queue Service are web services that have been used by Amazon for its own internal development now made available to outside developers. Mechanical Turk, is an interesting addition to the AWS suite, provides people in the cloud that can get pretty much any tasks completed for you from research restaurants in your area, to development (coding). According to Andy Jassy (VP, Web Services), there are about four hundred thousand developers using AWS today and the presentation included customer evidence from two companies leveraging AWS and on-premises deployment. I don’t recall the break-down of the figure though and I wonder if Mechanical Turks coders are part of this number.

Also interesting is a comment by Andy that only about 20% of computing resources deployed by companies is utilized, not sure where this number came from but I can understand the low utilization figures considering the fact that most capacity planning exercise basically consider the maximum load expected plus a growth rate factor in determining what resource needs to be provided to accomplish the desired performance metric. This maximum load however may only ever be reached a few times during the day but the resources have to be available throughout the day since computing resource could not be acquired on-demand for this peak period. Hence the value of cloud computing, pay for only what you use.

With the ability to pay per use (this is the gem on cloud computing) AWS offers potential huge saving when compared to the on-premises model. In addition, it offers the ability to scale as necessary by simply requesting more resource as your application’s user base grows. In addition, a number of vendors e.g. IBM now allow customer to take existing license and use it in the cloud or purchase per usage licenses for their products in the cloud. EC2 now offers Windows on a pay per use basis.

Tood Fasullo of SmartSheet (S3/CloudFront/MT) and Mike Harrington of Picnik (EC2) both discussed their use of AWS. They both combine AWS with on-premises/hosted deployments.

There were no real surprises at this event mainly because I’ve followed AWS development since Wall Street dogged Jeff Bezos for spending too much money on it.

MLK Day 2009 Thoughts

2009-01-19T22:45:00.000-08:00

Today is MLK day, I spent it catching up on my African American history, overdosing on the Inauguration broadcasts, the rhetoric on the significance of the inauguration of the first Black President and something about what Michelle Obama will wear to inaugural balls. In all of these, I kept searching for why is this really significant to blacks in America, why do blacks talk about this inauguration as the realization of the dream? Why does the rest of the world care about an historic moment in America? The latter question is somewhat easier to answer (I said somewhat), "I have a dream" is a well recognized phrase across the world as is its author and I want to believe that for years the world watched to see if the dream will ever be realized in America and by electing the first black president the dream is fulfilled and the American dream lives on.

The former question was a little harder to crack. Understanding segregation and recognizing racism is tough if you haven't lived through. Yes I have seen the pictures and I've spoken to enough black people who have told me the stories of the time, eventually my answer came from the following text in Dr. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in response to a statement issued by the Alabama Clergymen.

"When you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; ..... when your first name becomes "nigger", your middle name becomes "boy" .......... when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."

It's true the signs have come down, the N-word became politically incorrect (unless of course you are black then it’s ok) and Lyndon Johnson signed The Voting Rights Acts but that degenerating sense of “nobodiness” lingered on for the most part until November 4th, 2008.

On January 20th, 2009 blacks in America will undoubtedly be celebrating the historic event of the inauguration of the first black president with a reassured sense of being somebody.

Happy MLK Day!!!

The Longest Night

2009-01-04T19:41:00.000-08:00

One Easter Sunday, the Alaska Ranger—a fishing boat out of Dutch Harbor—went down in the Bering Sea, 6,000 feet deep and thirty-two degrees cold. Forty-seven people were on board, and nearly half of them would spend hours floating alone in the darkness, in water so frigid it can kill a man in minutes. Forty-two of them would be rescued. Here’s how http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_7619

I was drawn to Sean Flynn's incredible story of rescue in the Bering Sea partly because my company shares an office building with a fishing company and the Alaska Ranger is owned by a fishing company based in Seattle. Sean Flynn did a great job in this article, I was reading the story on a plane ride back to Seattle but Sean's style put me smack in the middle of the action, I felt the cold and darkness experienced by the survivors and the adrenaline rush experienced by the coast guard.

I'm a firm believer that if you enable smart people by providing clear goals and guidelines they will accomplish exceptional results and this story exemplified that. The decisions made by the coast guard personnels on the scene were sometimes against standard procedure but these decisions were critical in increasing the odds of survival of the distressed crewmen. There is definitely a place for not following the rule if you understand the ultimately objective which in this case was to save life.

Since the last time .....

2008-12-23T23:09:00.000-08:00

Its' been a quite while since the last time I blogged and it's not because I didn't have anything to talk about. In fact, I had too many things I wanted to write, just could find the time because I was preoccupied with, well, life.

John McCain convinced me that the economy was fundamentally sound so I slept easy. Then I couldn't sleep for days, not because the economy happened and there was total meltdown on wall street, but because John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential candidate, I thought GWB was clueless but SP made GWB look like a genius.

Then the 2008 presidential election campaign happened, a guy better known for electing GWB and crafting some of the most divisive political campaigns I've ever experienced was among those predicting that Barack Hussein Obama (a Muslim, socialist/communist terrorist non-us citizen) would win the Presidential elections and become the First African American President of the United States of America. Why BHO is classified as African American rather than "half-cast" is a separate topic for discussion, but Black folks will certainly take it for all of what it is worth since by law BHO isn't White anyways.

Then Nov. 4th 2008 night happened. Work closed early (smart move by CEO!!!) so I went home to watch the election returns announced. Armed with my electoral college map (I simply stole Karl C. Rove's), my TVs tuned to CNN, MSNBC and FOX, my sister-in-law running results and making my predictions on the path the victory for BHO, the whole episode ended rather abruply. After two elections with hanging chad and other craziness in Florida, I was ready for a very long night. But then it didn't happen, it was over, BHO was President-Elect. To be honest I was partially disappointed that night, the good comeback that McCain promised me did not happen!!!. The day after I suddenly found that I had so much free time I didn't know what to do with myself. I had completely forgotten that the economy was still headed for recession.

Then the economy happened again and I finally realized the 2008 Presidential election was simply my distraction from the economy. I was a 2008 election junkie, my days (sssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh yes even at work I was pouring over those damn polls ) were mostly consumed by them damn polls and analysts on CNN, MSNBC, FOX News and any website that feed my election junkie head. I even had my own poll of polls and some of the things I was spewing will definitely make my parents proud :)

Then reality knocked (or rather slammed upon us), business climate became tougher and then it was back to dealing with business.

Managing with Heart

2008-10-03T18:11:00.000-07:00

"Leadership is not domination, but the art of persuading people to work toward a common goal" - Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman

Is that IP worth Protecting?

2008-08-30T13:02:00.000-07:00

I attempted to watch the movie Hancock before its theater release. I say attempted because I was doing this online at one of the bootleg movie distribution sites, it wasn't exactly the entertaining experience I'd hoped for. The movie was distributed in three separate streams/downloads and the quality was very poor, but I got the gist of the movie and decided after watching the first stream that I should probably go see it at the theater.

The experience got me thinking though, why don't movies theaters release a low quality, multiple stream versions of the movies before release? Would the movie do better or worse at the box office as a result? Isn't this low quality version similar to giving away free samples of your product or content? If they are concerned about their brand why not just support the bootleg sites? My guess is that the main blocking issue is protecting the copyright.

These thoughts/questions led me to other question closer home; why don't we publish our product documentation online on the company's website? I asked a few folks here at work and the response I got was we didn't post the documentation to protect our intellectual property (IP) and maintain our competitive advantage. Does this really give us a competitive advantage or is the IP captured in our product documentation after the product is released really worth protecting? My personal opinion is that we stand to gain more from sharing the documentations than we stand to gain by not sharing. I believe it gives potential customers an opportunity to evaluate the product and be more prepared to ask questions based on an understanding of the literature. It is also a great complement to our scripted demo which covers the products only at a very high level and showcasing the features we consider most appealing.

In any case, it looks like the product documentation will make it online with the next revision of the company's website. I might even get luck and talk people into release portions of our source code as well. Doing that might encourage some rogue Developer to build SharePoint integration application using our source code as the foundation and we might be able to charge him/her good bucks if/when they get stuck ...... who knows.

Controlled or Valuable? That is the question

2008-08-27T06:19:00.000-07:00

I got the following feedback on an article I'm writing for KMWorld (which arose out of my The Long Tail Of Enterprise Content Posts) and thought it was interesting enough to share the feedback and my response to it:

Comment:

Ok, there is something bothering me about the word “Value” all content within an organization is valuable, that is the point of SharePoint, our connectors and search working together. Is the left axis really value or “Controlled”.

My Response:

I agree that organizations have typically “Controlled” ( the 80/20 rule I mentioned) content in the enterprise to varying degrees, the question is how what is controlled is determined. It is in answering the question of what to control and how the long tail theory applies to content in the enterprise that I’ve used the content’s value which can be determined through computation e.g. risk analysis. We are also in agreement that all content within an organization is valuable, however I believe the relative value of content differs ( i.e. some more valuable than others) hence the tail of the curve, although it tends to zero it never touches the zero value line (i.e. the x-axis).

Content to control, in my opinion, is determined by the value of that content to the enterprise e.g. if regulation requires that the content be placed under control and there is a penalty for non compliance, then the relative value of the content is higher than content not subject to the regulation. Other factors as I indicated in the article can also be used to determine the value of a piece of content and hence if it should be controlled or not.

If, as you are suggesting, you graph the decision made after the content’s value is determined i.e. what goes into the Advanced ECM systems (typically the controlled content in the enterprise) versus what does not (typically the less controlled content in SharePoint and other non Advanced ECM repositories), you will not have curve let alone a long tail. You will end up with a bar graph or pie chart of categories of controlled content which does not lend itself to analyzing The Long Tail theory and it’s applicability to enterprise content.

Heaven Sent?

2008-08-17T13:02:00.000-07:00

I like the song Heaven Sent by Keyshia Cole so much that I wanted to know the lyrics. Since this is the year 2008 I searched the internet for it, found it and in the confines of my bedroom belt out the lyrics to the song. Interestingly though, it brought back memories of the times before the internet, the days before CDs, DVD, MP3 etc.

Back in the day, my whole family would congregate around a tape recorder (yes I'm that young!) trying to decipher the lyrics of our favorite song. There usually was an operator, a scribe and the rest of us listening. Those where the good old days when we would simply wear out the tape from several Play, Stop, Pause, Rewind, Fast Forward sequence or worse still have the tape jammed and delicately remove it from the tape recorder's head. Deciphering the lyrics to songs was certainly a family activity we all participated in and probably enjoyed with each of us listening intently to the song till we completely build out the lyrics to the song and then on to the next song, till we completely an album (sometimes) - I think we did this for Lionel Richie's Can't Slow Down album.

The internet is definitely Heaven Sent, it saved me hours of trying to do this, especially since I would have done it alone - see we are all grown now, live in different countries and don't have much spare time - plus tape recorders are pretty much extint now. My simply search also gave me a bunch of information on the artist. It however won't replace the memories of a time I shared with my siblings. Anyone up for a tape recorder reunion?

The Long Tail Debate

2008-07-20T20:05:00.001-07:00

Anita Elberse's recent piece Should You Invest in the Long Tail?, Harvard Business Review July-August 2008 has stirred up a debate among long-tail enthusiasts and critics. Prof. Elberse's academic work on the Long tail is great for the Long Tail theory. With such academic challenges of the Long Tail theory, Chris Anderson - who coined the term/theory - gets a good chance to defend the theory giving the new context and data presented by challengers. It is through such challenges that the theory gets refined and the boundaries of the theory's applicability defined.

Prof. Elberse's research validated the Long Tail theory and reveals additional patterns about consumption in the long tail: (1) the long-tail is long but extremely flat and (2) light users have a disproportionately strong preference for the more popular offerings. Her definition of what constitutes the "head" (and hence the tail) of the power curve is certainly a point of contention/difference between the Long tail theory and her analysis. She defines the head as the top 10% of titles in her data set while Chris considers the head as akin to the amount of content that can be shelved at the largest wal-mart store. I believe his definition is a better base-line especially when considering how the internet is lowering distribution cost and the fact that this is probably the theoretical limit of a brick and mortal store.

In her advice to producers and retailers she offers nothing new in the way of strategy implication/formulation which I was looking forward to. Overall it was a good piece and I'm only surprised at the level of criticism especially since she didn't invalidate the Long Tail but rather offered some new data to support it as well as tease out some additional conclusions.

Product Roadmaping

2008-07-18T00:41:00.000-07:00

Kids do not try this at home without the supervision of a responsible adult. Why, you ask? You won't have to take responsibility for getting it all wrong.

I presented the product roadmap to the management team today. I won't tell you if I was booed and kicked out of the room or fired for my crazy ideas but I figured at best I should share my experience with anyone who cares to read my blog. I wouldn't recommend my approach only because I figured there has got to be a better way to doing this than flying solo and blindfolded. It would have been great to have a research team pouring over customer survey data, industry analyst banter etc but as my luck goes none was available so I had to distill whatever information I could find internally and on the internet and make the best of it.

We had commissioned Forrester to do some work for us on an unrelated project a couple of months ago so I had data from that exercise which was quite helpful. Although I'm sure innovation technology purist will tell you these analysts can't provide good data on new and groundbreaking technology but I needed a place to start and that was the most recent data I had so I went with it. In addition, I read my hearts out, AIIM website and magazine, CIO Insight, KM World etc. It at least gave me an idea of where the industry is likely to go and also because I know our customers are reading those magazines as well (nothing wrong with getting on the same page with your customers). Then the fun part was condensing all that to product features and a timeline to deliver innovative solutions which address the problems no one else has been able to solve for your customers and make lots of money!!

My final slide deck consisted of the following titles:

>Industry Trends and Competition
Quick summary of what is going on in the industry and what product attributes your competitions are touting to your customers.

>What do customers want?
What business problem have your customers told you they want to solve? I like to have customers explain what they need accomplished instead of the rundown of features that they sometimes give. I believe this will help you focus on the product attributes that will be of value to them.

>Things to Keep In Mind
Since I made some assumptions, this slide was essentially my disclaimer slide as well as what I plan to do to edge against any failed assumptions. At least you can always point to this if you are ever acused of not getting it right.

>Project Vision
Every product should have one.

>Key Scenarios
The customer scenarios will are going to address with the features planned for release

>Product Roadmap
Your project timeline including project goals

It will certainly take months to deliver on what was outlined in the roadmap and many more months after to find out if customers respond to the products with their pocket books.

Books I've read lately and will recommend

2008-06-29T12:56:00.000-07:00

The Euro Cup finals is on right now, howver it is half time now so I figure I'll kick off this post before the game resumes. A friend asked me to recommend business books to read, he's the JD type and works for an Insurance company, so I'm guessing he wants to know what other people read and I'm probably the closest person to other people that he can come up with ( he's entire family and friends are JDs ). Anyway here is my list:

Business Strategy/Excecution
- Innovator's Delimma (C. Christensen)
- Innovator's Solution (C. Christensen)
- Crossing the Chasm ( G.A. Moore)
- Information Rules (C. Shapiro, H.R. Varian)
- Seeing What's Next (C. Christensen et al)
- Blue Ocean Stategy ( W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne)
- Competitve Strategy ( M.E. Porter)
- Freakenomics ( S. D. Levitt, S. J. Dubner)
- The Long Tail (C. Anderson)
- Enterprise Architecture as a Strategy (J. W. Ross, P. Weill, D. Robertson)
- Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (R. Charan, L. Bossidy )

Leadership
- Leadership and Self Deception (Arbinger Institute)

Finance
- Financial Intelligence (Karen Berman, Joe Knight, and John Case)
- Ahead of the Curve ( J.H. Ellis)

Software Development
- Microsoft Secrets (M. A. Cusumano, R. W. Selby)
- Agile Project Managemet with Scrum (K. Schwaber)
- Agile Estimating and Planning (Mike Cohn)
- Applied User Stories ( Mike Cohn)
- Software Project Survical Guide ( Steve McConnell)
- ShipIt! (J. Richardson, W. Gwaltney Jr.)

Start-up
- Bootstrap ( K. L. Hess )
- The Art Of The Start (Guy Kawasaki)

I'll add more titles in the future.

Happy Reading Bro!!!!!

Taming Off-line Content

2008-06-06T03:02:00.000-07:00

In my posts on the long tail of enterprise content it appears I neglected to address the issue of content stored on the desktop, flash drives and other storage devices (off-line content) of employees. Although it is difficult to assess the value of these content, I believe that, for the most part, these content simply extend the long tail to the right of the curve. The challenge with this situation is still the same as for any content in the long tail: how does the organization ensure that content that meets its criteria for risk (or other value attribute) is placed under control of the designated systems. However, content stored on an employee's chosen device, outside of the control of the enterprise content management system, presents an additional challenge for discovery, retention and destruction. Locating this content when the time comes to take action, such as destruction, can be a problem. Think about a document that an employee as copied to their flash drive for "safe-keeping", if the organization is required to retain this document for 3 years, how does the organization ensure that all copies of the document including the one taken off-line is destroyed at the end of the retention period?. The organization can certainly define policies for document handling and also block port access to prevent external storage devices from been attached to company issued computers etc. It may also consider blocking e-mail with attachments and locking down computer hard disk so nothing can be stored on it (good luck with that one!).

Gaining Control: Self-Containing/Describing Content

So far organizations have managed to get a good handle on content sent as e-mail attachments (at least somewhat), however there does not appear to be an easy answer for off-line content without doing something so drastic that any productivity gain an organization had anticipated is largely eroded. The more I think about this issue the more I'm convinced that the silver bullet (if there was ever such a thing) is to have content that can tell you everything about itself. Content that can carry around with it more just its metadata (e.g. author, department, type, age etc) but also information such as: (1) its access control list; (2) the application that was used to create it (not just the mime type or document extension); (3) what business processes it participates in; (4) what organization owns it and (4) what organizations are allows to read it etc. These metadata must be persisted with the content and readable by any operating system and/or application software.

The implementation of this concept will require cooperation by leading vendors in both application and operating system software and standards organizations. Existing technologies such as XML, DRM contain aspects of what is required to implement this concept but portability of DRM solutions today remains an issue for various reasons. WinFS, a technology from Microsoft (MSFT) has some of the critical operating system support needed for this, it has however had its own share of problems. XML is really not self-describing especially because to consume a piece of XML you must first understand its structure and the relationship between the elements to get any meaning out of it.

In any case, while we wait around for the industry to provide the necessary infrastructure support for true self-describing content, organizations can either reward employees for not taking content off-line or punish employees who do so. I'm not advocating either approach to solving the problem, just a suggestion.

What will Microsoft do next? Future of ECM Software Industry

2008-06-01T19:33:00.000-07:00

The nature of competition in the ECM industry is changing, the disruption of the industry by SharePoint is well under way. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 is really the first version of the SharePoint technology that you can even begin to consider as an ECM product/solution/platform and I expect Microsoft will use the same evolution strategy it has used to successfully compete in other areas to compete in the ECM software market by offering a controlled migration up the ECM software technology trajectory.

Advanced Functionalities
I expect Microsoft will continue to improve SharePoint and move it up the ECM software technology trajectories. It expected to offer improved Business Process Management (BPM) and Compliance features will provide potential beachheads it will use to advance upstream. In addition, it will continue to provide Application Programming Interface (API) support so third-parties can develop/integrate off-the- shelf and custom workflow packages for specific industry verticals. With respect to compliance functionalities, it is expected to provide deeper integration between its records management features (which still needs improvement) and Microsoft Office Outlook application/Microsoft Exchange Server. Most knowledge workers spend a significant amount of time working in Microsoft Office Outlook compared to any other desktop product, this integration will put Microsoft right at the hub of the content transaction flow, a critical point to enforcing retention policies.

Visual Studio Integration, Training and Certification
With its unsurpassed experience with Developer tools, it is expected to provide deeper integration into Visual Studio and .NET platform for developers. This integration will include tools and platform technologies to support authoring on its ECM platform, which will, amongst other things, lower the skills required to create complex work flows. In addition, it will offer training and certification programs for developers and administrators which has the net effect of reducing the total cost of ownership of SharePoint technologies.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server versions
As Microsoft moves SharePoint technologies up the technology trajectories with Advance functionalities, it is expected to maintain its low-end products to prevent low-end market disruption by another vendor. It already offers a free version that ships with the Windows Operating System - Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) - and will probably offer a Professional version for Departments and an Enterprise version for Corporations. SharePoint in the future which will allow organizations to integrate and manage all of its SharePoint deployments. These versions will not only satisfy the needs at the different levels of the organizations, it will also include functionalities for corporations to deploy enterprise-wide policies that can be applied to all MOSS deployments such as the central content repository for all content regardless of which sharepoint version is used to store the content.

Will incumbents pull pushes? It is hard to tell, if the way they have responded to the threat of SharePoint todate is anything to go by, the following lessons learned from the effects of networks and positive feedback in railroad gauges summarize what I expect:

"Those left with the less popular technology will find a way to cut their losses, either by employing adapters or by writing off existing assets and joining the bandwagon"

I don't expect EMC, to put up a strong challenge as MOSS becomes dominant in the Enterprise. At the core of its business is really information storage and regardless who wins, as long as the content is stored on EMC devices, EMC will be a happy camper. IBM will certain give a good fight but again, IBM has demonstrated that it will sell anything the customer wants as long as it can make service dollars from such deals. I expect both to continue to invest in sustaining technologies such as Adapter to MOSS or move their products to serve niche markets. Their value network and cost structure will make it extremely difficult for them to launch any meaningful defense against a competitor such as Microsoft. But then, this is the technology industry afterall and there is nothing to say that these companies won't happen on their own disruptive technology or some yet to be named startup won't disrupt the industry.

100 Million SharePoint Users

2008-05-29T05:06:00.000-07:00

In this post, I continue my rant on the disruptive nature of SharePoint. Well before Microsoft’s entrance into the ECM software market, the incumbents (market leaders: Documentum and FileNet ) had abandoned customers in the low-end tiers of the market, who did not need all the bells and whistles provided by the Advanced ECM capabilities in their solution offering. Their strategy focused on moving up the technology trajectory by developing features that will sustain their position and protect their market share in the ECM software market. By targeting these non-consumers of Advanced ECM solutions, Microsoft was able to established a beach head in the ECM software market with the launch of SharePoint in 2001. I doubt that the incumbents initially perceived SharePoint as a threat to their businesses, especially because SharePoint 2001 was positioned as a Collabotion/Portal solution and it's ECM capabilities where rarely touted/non-existing.

Borrowing from the principles of the disruptive innovation, I will speculate on the factors that may have also contributed to the incumbent's initial/continued reaction to Microsoft's entrance:

SharePoint was simpler, cheaper and lower performing product and therefore did not threaten the revenues from the customers served by the incumbents;
A lower price point/margin product such as SharePoint was not going to provide the next growth opportunities required to justify their stock price to Wall Street;
The most influential/profitable customers wanted an Advanced ECM functionality.

Simpler, Cheaper and Lower Performance
The first versions of the SharePoint Technologies: SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2001 and SharePoint Team Services (STS) provided very basic document management functionality. STS was a free version of the SharePoint technology which shipped with Windows 2000 server. An administrator could easily enable it (SPS or STS) for a team’s use without additional software or cost. SPS was targeted at departmental use, the document library feature it provided was limited in functionality and the workflow support had to be removed in the next version. It sold for about $50/cal and less than $5000.00 per server license. It lacked support for enterprise deployment and management features. Its main customers were departments or small businesses who needed a simple system for collaboration and document storage. It had a simple interface and was easy to install. It was more widely deployed as an Enterprise Portal solution and an Enterprise Search solution than an ECM solution.

SPS 2003 was only marginally better than the first release of the product. It addressed some of the issues and bugs that prevented the deployment of SPS 2001, but provided no new major functionality. It still lacked critical features to support enterprise wide deployment and use. However, SPS 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services, the successor to STS 2001, were widely deployed at the departmental levels largely because they were more stable and provided the basic feature set needed for a departmental collaboration and document management. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (2007) can be considered Microsoft’s ECM version 1.0, again its simpler, easy to use feature set made it appealing to the masses. It now has support for server farm and significant improvements were made to support enterprise wide deployment, management and scalability.

Despite these improvements in functionalities, SharePoint does not directly threaten the core businesses of the incumbents. Incumbents see the rapid growth in the adoption of SharePoint as an opportunity to integrate its department level document management capability with their Advanced ECM capabilities. Their strategy is to position their platform as the central repository for all content in the enterprise even when the content begins life in SharePoint. This is a win-win scenario for them with SharePoint occupying the departmental tier and their Advanced ECM platform occupying the enterprise tier of the ECM market.

Lower Price/Margin Product
Customers at the lower-tier of the ECM software market are price sensitive, therefore they are willing to accept a good enough feature set at a reasonable price. The incumbent's value network of distributors, solution providers and sales associate will find it hard to justify any investment in a low-end product. Profit at the lower-end, lower price point tier will have to come from volume sell which the incumbent’s value network and cost structure is not equipped to do. It is also doubtful that the internal process, used by incumbents to justify investment and select projects would have approved the developing of a product with such low margins compared to the high margins enjoyed by their current product offerings.

On the contrary, Microsoft’s resource allocation framework, project approval process and value network can support a product at the price point that MOSS 2007 is offered. Microsoft's Sales Professionals and Solution Providers have developed a good process for making profit at the price points through volume sale and services. In addition, it appears that Microsoft’s internal process supports funding for disruption technologies as long as they show growth and profit potential.

Customer Demand
Business Process Management (BPM), Records Management and Compliance issues dominated the ECM industry for years. The customers targeted by the incumbents already had an ECM system with advanced capabilities and therefore the performance attributes they desire from their ECM software shifted to these areas. It is only natural and logical that the market leaders spend their R & D dollars to satisfy these needs, thus investing in sustaining technologies to maintain their market positions. The market size for these sustaining technologies can be readily determined and computing a rate of return above the company’s hurdle rate is a much easier exercise. Additionally, the customers – a key holder of resources (money) needed – are not asking for a simpler and lower performing product, for which they have no use. These customers now demand that SharePoint work with their Advanced ECM systems and naturally the market leaders are investing in sustaining technologies by building adaptors to integrate SharePoint with their platforms.

100 million users can't be wrong, ok 100 million user licenses can't be wrong, SharePoint has certainly crossed the chasm. A search for "Microsoft + SharePoint" returns almost 4 million hits, a similar search for "EMC + Documentum" and "IBM + FileNet" returns 352,000 and 544,000 hits respectively. Microsoft now has a SharePoint Only Conference which is well attended and the incumbents are not left out of the frenzy, they now have SharePoint sessions at their respective conferences which are sold out. Amazon.com has over 1200 titles on SharePoint. Disruptive innovations create opportunities in their value chain and SharePoint has certainly created it's share of opportunities for Microsoft Solution Providers and ISV partners. Vorsite Corporation, my employer, is a beneficial of the opportunity created by SharePoint's rapid adoption.

Is SharePoint a Disruptive Technology?

2008-05-27T10:47:00.000-07:00

First, a brief history/overview/introduction, with the release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, Microsoft (MSFT) delivered a product which provides some of the enterprise content management features already available through the leading Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendors, but at a fraction of the price. SharePoint was first released in 2001 as SharePoint Portal Server and targeted at the Enterprise Portal and Collaborative software market. MOSS 2007 however, positions Microsoft to directly compete with the leading providers of ECM software.

AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Industry Association, defines ECM as the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow for the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists. An ECM software system typically has the following components: (1) Document Management, (2) Digital Asset Management, (3) Document Imaging, (4) Business Process Management/Workflow, (5) Record Management and (6) Collaboration.

The ECM software market is currently estimated at about $14b with revenues expect to reach $67b by the year 2010. The leading providers of software in the industry are FileNet (an IBM company) and EMC Corporation (EMC), with market shares of 22% and 13% respectively. Both became major ECM vendors through acquisitions. EMC, the leader in information storage, acquired Documentum, the leader in enterprise content management software, in October of 2003, in a move designed to strengthen its Information Lifecycle Management strategy, for $1.7b. The acquisition gave EMC access to technology which manages enterprise content that can be stored on EMC’s storage devices. In a similar move three years later, IBM acquired FileNet to advance its On Demand strategy. The acquisition of FileNet according to IBM will make it the clear industry leader in the growing Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management. On July 26, 2007 MSFT reported that its Office SharePoint Server business unit generated almost $1b in revenue for the fiscal year. This announcement, which is an unprecedented move by Microsoft as it does not generally comment on revenues for individual products, is a clear indication that SharePoint has crossed the chasm to the mainstream of ECM software. It is no longer a technology for the innovator and early adopter types, but is now a stable mainstream ECM software product for the early majority to consider.

The Disruptive Innovation Theory by Clayton M. Christensen, points to situations in which new organizations can use relatively simple, convenient, low-cost innovations to create growth and triump over powerful incumbents. The theory holds that existing companies have a high probability of beating entrant attackers when the contest is about sustaining innovations. But establised companies almost always lose to attackers armed with disruptive innovations. SharePoint is a relatively simple, convenient, low-cost ECM platform that has brought 100million non-consumers into the ECM world. ECM purist will argue that SharePoint is not a "real" ECM platform/solution or that it is not an "Enterprise" Content Management solution. This is certainly true especially when SharePoint functionalities today are lined up against the ECM definition provided by AIIM. However this is the nature of a disruptive technology.

Enterprise Content LT: Getting a Handle on it

2008-05-23T17:50:00.000-07:00

Given the challenges of the LT of enterprise content, organizations are probably tempted to manage the long tail by controlling its spread. This is a losing proposition at best, organizations need to put in place an content management strategy with the following components (1) Content repository Agnostic; (2) Make all content available available (3) Help Employees find the available content in the organization and (4) Multi-product solution.

Content repository agnostic solutions are harder to come by chiefly because each vendor tool stores data using proprietary formats. In addition these applications are tightly coupled to a chosen repository. One way to work around this issue is to invest in adaptors to help connect the different systems in use.

Making all content available and helping employees find the content can be achieved by deploying a search solution along with a taxonomy/folksonomy solution. These should allow access to the disparate data/content repositories in the organization from a single search user interface.

Employee content management needs may vary by various dimensions (functional grouping, department, tasks etc); therefore a short-list of enterprise content management tools to be used and supported in the organization should be provided for employees to choose from based on their needs. Adaptors may be needed to ensure that content can be accessed across these systems.

Enterprise Content Management & The LT Challenge

2008-05-16T08:36:00.000-07:00

LT forces in enterprise content, (1) Democratization of Content Creation (2) Democratization of Content Distribution (3) Connecting Supply and Demand, gave rise to the vast amount of content and digital assets created in the course of doing business. In essence, these forces drove content creation towards the tail of the content-value curve.

The x-axis of the graph is the amount of content and the y-axis indicates the value of the content as defined by the organization, this value will vary across the organizations and between organizations, examples of value to consider include (1) Risk Factor; or (2) Regulation factor.

The Head of the curve is where you will find content that an organization considers high value, access to this content is typically restricted, a retention policy is applied to the content and it tends to participates in one or more business processes. Organizations have managed thise content by deploying advanced enterprise content management (ECM) systems such as IBM FileNet and EMC Documentum.

The Long Tail of the graph, which I believe contains the vast majority of content created in the enterprise, is the domain of several other applications most notably of which is SharePoint/MOSS 2007. This tail is the result of a combination of (1) the availability of content authoring tools especially Microsoft Office; (2) the lowered cost of distributing the content created and; (3) search technologies which allows all content stored to be indexed and searched. The deployment of these applications was largely limited to the departmental levels in organization and the central IT groups did not pay much attention. The deployments of these applications became so widespread that several niches developed and most of the valuable content that IT investments in Advanced ECM systems was deployed to cater to was no longer finding its ways to the advanced ECM systems.

The growth of the tail presents several challenges to the organization. For central IT groups, it is an infrastructure/support challenge, largely because the applications that enabled the tail where not central managed. Central IT is reigning in the uncontrolled deployments of these applications by incorporating them into the organization’s IT infrastructure and planning its deployment across the organization.

The LT is also a risk management and compliance nightmare for organizations. Organizations continue to struggle with what to do about the content in the tail as the value of content increases i.e. moving the content in the tail to the head. Companies would like to leverage the capabilities of their advanced ECM platforms and years of investment in developing business process, retention policies and compliance initiatives for these platforms. CIOs want to mitigate the risk and address compliance concerns while allowing employees to continue to collaborate in the knowledge creating activities which drives innovation and business results.

The challenge for organizations can be summarized as follows (1) moving content from the tail to the head as value increases (2) making all content readily available within the constraints of the access rights established for the particular content and regardless of the system in which the content is stored and (3) helping employees find content to promote sharing of best practices and reuse.

The Long Tail Forces in Enterprise Content

2008-05-15T08:12:00.000-07:00

In my previous post I introduced the idea of The Long Tail (LT) of Enterprise Content, in this post I'll discuss the tree LT forces in enterprise content.

- Democratize Production
- Democratize Distribution
- Connect Supply and Demand

Democratization of Content Production
The democratization of content production in organizations started with the release of word processing software for the PC. As the use of PCs as a productivity tool increased with deployments across the enterprise, employees began to do their own word processing tasks. Further advancement in the PC hardware and software industry: (1) inclusion of hard disks in PCs (2) networked computers (3) Windows OS (4) Computer Server significantly lowered the cost of producing and storing content which led to more content that ever been created.

Democratization of Content Distribution
With the release of Portal/Collaboration software such as SharePoint Portal Server and Plumtree, employees began to collaborate in ways they were not able to in the past. Granted, employees had been able to share content through e-mail or by putting them on file servers, the content on these file servers were however not indexed therefore finding anything was a nightmare. Portal/Collaboration software however democratized the distribution of content, employees can now share and collaborate on content in ways they are not been able to do before. For example with SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) any employee can create a document library ( a repository for content), invite others to collaborate on the content and the content in the document library is available to anyone using a web browser.

Connecting Supply and Demand
Another effect of Portal/Collaboration software was that is connected previously un-findable content to the demand for the content through the enterprise search solution that was a common component of the portal software. For example with SPS, employees could now search for content stored on either file servers, SPS Document libraries, Exchange Servers, Lotus Notes and several other repositories by simply entering a search term in SPS search UI. The search component of portal software helped to connect the supply of content with the demand for it.

The Long Tail Of Enterprise Content

2008-05-14T02:52:00.000-07:00

Organizations have applied the 80/20 rule in addressing the challenges posed by the vast amount of content and other digital assets created in the course of doing business. CIO's have generally focused their enterprise content management efforts on content considered to be highly valuable ("the hits") to the organization. A content's value was largely determined by one of the following factors; (1) an organizations need to mitigate risk; (2) expert opinions (3) regulations governing the organization's industry and (4) participation in business process automation applications.

The "modest sellers" of enterprise content, content deemed not so valuable, as defined by the organization, was largely left unmanaged; at best some organizations provided a file server where employees could store this content. In recent years however, organization have come to realize that the combined value of these modest sellers was equal to the value of the highly valued content. This is the Long Tail (LT) of enterprise content and managing the volume of content produced by employees is a huge, enterprise content management, challenge for organization.

Chris Anderson coined the term “The Long Tail” to describe how the internet has made possible a world in which the combined value of modest sellers (in the world of movies, books and music) equals the sales of the top hits. The long tail has been applied to other industries and I will explore its applicability to enterprise content and in defining an enterprise content management strategy.

Leadership from Behind

2008-04-02T12:20:00.000-07:00

The following quote from Nelson Mandela's autobiography , Long Walk to Fredom, captures the type of leadership required for an agile team to be successful. In the passage, Mandela recalls how a leader of his tribe talked about leadership:

"A leader, he said, is like a sheperd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind"

Are you leading from behind?

Super Bowl XLII and Status Reporting

2008-02-05T07:19:00.000-08:00

If the New England Patriots were on a software project their status report before Super Bowl XLII would have read something like 95% complete. The project team would have felt comfortable that the functionality was almost done and there wasn't much to worry about. The current status may have even led the project manager to abandon all risk mitigation plan for the functionality, after all, there wasn't much that could go wrong at this point.

As it turns out the 5% that was not accomplished by the Patriots was the most significant 5% of the project. The loss to the New York Giants means that the project goals were not accomplished. You can attribute the loss to many factors: Tom Brady's Footgate, The Giants' defense etc. The important lesson is that the 5% that was not accomplished killed the project goals.

So the next time you are sitting at a status reporting meeting or you read a status report that says something is 99% complete, don't fall asleep. Ask about the 1% that has not been completed, make sure it is not the most important 1%, the one that is likely to put the 100% of your project goals at risk. Personally, I don't use or allow people on my team to report percentage complete numbers. I ask to know what is done (and be clear about the definition of done) and what is outstanding.

You've Got a Thick Accent ....

2008-01-11T11:17:00.000-08:00

I was in Wellington, New Zealand recently and I shared a Taxi, from the Airport to the hotel, with a colleague/friend. During the drive she asked the Driver for direction to the nearest shopping mall/district since her luggage did not show up in New Zealand, to which the driver responded "It's hard to understand you, you've got a thick accent, where is the accent from? ...."

As an immigrant in the US with my Ekiti accent, I get the "where is your accent from?" question every now and again to which I joking respond "What accent? I don't have an accent". Most Americans don't believe they have an accent, to most they speak the English language with the standard accent and the British speak with it with the English accent. Considering the US dominance especially in Entertainment and Global News Airwaves (read CNN and CNBC), the American accent may appear to be the standard but it is not. English is the language of the Englishman and that is the standard accent.

In any case, it was nice to observe my colleague's reaction and I couldn't help but laugh. I had finally been vindicated!!!

I'm no Scrum Purist

2008-01-06T21:47:00.000-08:00

The other day I was asked if our team was practicing Scrum in the purest form or a hybrid of Scrum which blended our prior processes with Scrum practices.

This got me thinking "Is Scrum a methodology or a framework". Without getting into the academic definitions of methodology and framework, a methodology to me describes a set of steps that must be followed as specified by the creator(s) of the methodology while a framework is a prescriptive guidance. With a framework you are welcome to use all or part of it depending on what works best for your environment/culture. I think of Scrum as a framework, it provides guidance on software project management, and best practices for project planning, communication, reporting, time management and team composition. You can certainly adopt portions of Scrum to enhance the productivity of your team and improve your project results, which is what we have done with our adoption of Scrum.

For example, the Microsoft Solutions Framework(MSF) Team model prescribes a team of peers with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. This in my opinion allows for individual accountability as well as team accountability. In addition, it incorporated the Scrum philosophy of self-managed team. This model worked well for us and there was no reason to change it, especially since it wasn’t anti-Scrum.

We however adopted Scrum planning, time management and reporting practices because we needed to improve visibility into our progress. Now progress is measurable at the end of every sprint and we no longer waste our time with status reporting that mean nothing.

Green is the color of my parachute

2007-12-05T12:32:00.000-08:00

Green, it is the color of the Greenback, the currency of United States of America, my adopted country. It is the predominant color on the flag of the land of my ancestors, Nigeria (Green White Green). I live in the Evergreen state of Washington, USA. Most especially it is my color, the color of my parachute.

I never gave my color much thought, other than in the contexts above, until I read Your Favorite Color: What it Says About You from greenliving. The greenliving piece was the first result on MSN’s A-List Search “What your favorite color says about you”. Below is what green says about me:

Green: The color of harmony and balance, Green symbolizes hope, renewal, and peace, and is usually liked by the gentle and sincere. Greens are generally frank, community-minded people, fairly sociable but preferring peace at any price. Green people can be too self-effacing, modest and patient, so they may get exploited by others. They are usually refined, civilized and reputable.

Is this even close? Your guess is as good as mine. What does your color say about you? Find out and let me know.

Coming to America

2007-12-03T11:00:00.000-08:00

Eleven years ago today, I arrived at JFK to my first winter weather. I still remember it like it was yesterday, it was harmattan season when I left Lagos, Nigeria's old capital city, with dry dusty desert wind blowing through the country. The temperature ranged from a low of about 75 degree F to a high of 90 degree F and the low of 75 was considered cold!!! So you can imagine how laughable I was in my warm wool suit standing outside, waiting to catch a connecting bus, from JFK International terminal to the local terminal, which seemed to take forever to show up. My final destination was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

I didn't really have an American dream, at least not in the stereotypical way. The opportunity to relocate to the US came when I got married to a Nigerian-American and her desire was to relocate. I figured it couldn't be a bad deal for me, I had start programming while in college and never looked back. My first job, after the government mandated National Youth Service Corp (NYSC) program, was as a Programmer/Analyst at a start-up, Baseman Systems. Baseman Systems developed software for the banking industry, after Baseman I went on to do my own thing. I founded PetFund Soft, developing software for processing multi-choice examination answer sheets for some of the National Entrance Examinations conducted in the country. I however always wondered what it will be like to play with the big boys, the best of the best in the software industry.

Therefore after my relocation, my goal/dream was to work for Microsoft someday. Working for Microsoft, for me, would be like playing Football in one of Europe's premier leagues or Basketball in the NBA, it was about playing with the best of the best in the business. A year and half later, that dream came true I got my first job at Microsoft as a Support Engineer. I was working for the #1 software company in the world, alongside all the other smart software professionals, the best of the best in the software industry.

Happy Anniversary to me!!!

Working with Partners Not Using Scrum

2007-12-02T11:18:00.000-08:00

The reality is that managing OEM (your software ships under another company’s brand) relationships/executing these contracts can be extremely challenging especially for the 'weaker' partner in the relationship. The teams executing the contract have two main goals/objectives (1) Delivering value to customers and (2) executing the OEM Contract. One would expect that if you get the first goal right the second should take care of itself; This, however, is not the case. You stand a better chance if you have agreement on what value needs to be delivered to the Customer.

If you find yourself involved with one here are some things to consider/discuss upfront:

- Who is the Product Owner?
- How do you conduct Sprint Planning/Review meetings?
- How do you conduct Daily Scrum meetings?
- What is your Release sprint going to look like?
- How do you align processes to get your work done?

Some Scrum artifacts that I consider a 'must have' include (1) Product Vision, (2) Product Roadmap and (3) Release Plans

It might be difficult getting agreement on the Product Vision/Roadmap, these are however worth the upfront pain, you should proceed cautiously without then. These relationships are a constant struggle and needs careful handling, get the items identified above resolved early in the process (especially during contract negotiation or during your kick-off meeting) it might save a headache or two later.

Six Sprints Later: A retrospective

2007-12-01T18:18:00.000-08:00

After six sprints (five + a release sprint), we released three products, two of which were sim-shipped with nine language packs (including one that was thrown in during the ship sprint). These were the first language pack releases for these products.

Delivering Value
Along the way we accepted and delivered a feature for a customer (an Oil Producing Company), something that would have been difficult to pull off prior to adopting Scrum. We delivered software for the customer to integrate with their solution and give us feedback. Although the customer did not move ahead with the solution (for reasons I will talk about at a later date), Scrum allowed us to be agile in our response to this request from the sales team and therefore delivering value to the company/customers.

We also passed a third party review of our software development process conducted by Construx Software - Steve McConnell's company. This was of course a big deal for us since it was part of a process we had to go through on a deal (it was the largest deal ever done by the company) we were working on with a large software company.

Sprint Retrospective
The sprint retrospective meetings were definitely the most valuable postmortem meetings I had ever attended. The team discussed what went well and what didn't in a very candid matter and people took personally responsibility for what did not go well and what they will do better next time. I thought I would never see the day but it did happen, holding yourself personally accountable in front of your team mates and making a commitment to do better, how powerful is that.

Project [Progress] Visibility
The feedback I received about the sprint review meetings were probably the most telling that we had done a great job with visibility. This meeting is attended by everyone in the company, outside of the Product Development team, as well as Program Managers who do the demos. We get feedback about the products as expected and we also get comments especially from the CEO about how the sprint review meetings give everyone a peak into what is coming and allows the sales and support teams to set customer expectations appropriately since they've had an opportunity to get clarifications on upcoming product features.

Our Scrum roll out was not all smooth sailing, I'll talk about the bad & the ugly and what we are doing to resolve them in my next post.

Congratulations Takeo, hope this is your last vacation :)

2007-11-27T19:52:00.000-08:00

Takeo, one of the Developers on the team, recently got married and he sent the following e-mail announcing it to the team:

Subject: After a few days on vacation ...........
Body: I have a wife now.

Congratulations to Takeo and his new wife!!
All the best
KDiddy

Scrum Adoption Cycle: Getting Started

2007-11-24T13:31:00.000-08:00

The Challenge
My guess is that adopting Scrum for us went a lot smoother than one would expect. We had our Sprint 1 even before the product development team was formally trained on Scrum. To most observers there was nothing wrong with our current process - at least there was nothing obviously wrong - after all, our last products shipped on time with acceptable quality. So why the change? Well we had our own share of challenges:

- We could not help the Sales team close deals in a timely manner. To get any new feature implemented, in response to the competition, they simply had to wait for the next product cycle since we locked down on the feature set for the current cycle.

- The big bang upfront planning we did meant we wrote functional specs, cost’ed the features, prioritized and dropped features based on priority/cost, updated our project schedule and finally on to implementation. Can you spot the problem with this process? Lots!!
- Most people outside the product development team had little visibility into the software until much later in the cycle, typically during our bug bash therefore we got little or no feedback until late in the game.

Change Agent Prepare Thyself

During the sprint I learned as much as I could about Scrum:
- Read articles on ScrumAlliance website
- Attended the two (2) day Certified ScrumMaster Training
- I read more books, the three listed below where most valuable to me
(Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby, User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn, Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn)

My goal was to help my team to be successful by educating myself so I could deliver the Scrum training they needed and also mitigate our adoption risk. In retrospect, I should have gotten an Agile Coach to get us started.

Get Stakeholders on Board: That is if you want to be successful

In addition, I did a number of presentations to our stakeholders (CEO, Sales, Marketing and Partners) on what they stood to benefit from our Scrum adoption. Also I wanted to highlight their roles this new framework. I believe the key selling points to these group were the promise that we could realize the following benefits:

- Better visibility into the progress we are making in development
- Better responsiveness to Sales requests
- Delivering products that address the key problem areas for our customers today

Ready your team for the change
At the end of the Sprint and before we jumped to Sprint 2, it was time go get the team formally trained. I delivered a half day long training on Scrum to the product development team. The training was largely based on what I learnt from the Certified ScrumMaster training.

Going ahead with Sprint 1 without formal introduction/training to Scrum was an easy call in this case, we used the MSF team model which laid the foundations for our Scrum Adoption. Our feature teams (Scrum Teams) were a team of peers and self managed for the most part so our culture didn't need a significant jolt to get us to adopt Scrum. We pretty much just substituted key Scrum terms for the MSF ones and we were on our way.

The Memoirs of a ScrumMaster

2007-11-22T07:19:00.000-08:00

Weclome to "The Memoirs of a ScrumMaster" (credit for the title goes to Mike Sherman one of the developers on my team). After years of using several different software development methodologies and finally settling for Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) and the Microsoft Product Development methology, I discovered Scrum. I had read about Agile software development but never came up against a challenge that MSF did not solve, for the most part, until I came to Vorsite (http://www.vorsite.com/).

The challenges we faced at Vorsite led me to re-examine my thinking about software development. At Vorsite, we actually managed to release our products on time and with acceptable quality (eventually!!). However, I questioned if the final product actually delivered value to customers and the company, did we deliver what customers wanted today versus what they told us they wanted six months ago? How do we make our progress more visible to our stakeholders instead of the status reporting mails we send out?

Eventually, I read "Agile Project Management with Scrum" by Ken Schwaber. I've had the book since 2005 but never had the time to read or just didn't care enough to read it. What I read made sense, so off we go, we implemented Scrum and six sprints later we shipped the first version of our products using Scrum. In the next couple of posts I will chronicle our journey to becoming an Agile software development shop, the lessons learned, how it has changed software development project management at Vorsite, some of the challenges that still remain and how we are addressing them.