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Luminous Group and Microsoft's BizSpark |
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By barton on
11/8/2008
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We're very excited to have been asked to be part of Microsoft's BizSpark
program for startups, making it easier than ever for privately-held
software development startups in business for less than 3 years and
have less than US $1 million in revenues to obtain full access to
Microsoft tools and technologies such as Team
Foundation Server and SharePoint.
We've known for some time that while these products help teams work
better, they are often cost-prohibitive, especially for startups who
are just starting out.
That's why we are so excited about BizSpark.
As a network partner, Luminous Group are able to sponsor young startups
for this program and give them ful ...
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Agile Open California Wrapup |
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By barton on
10/18/2008
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We sponsored the Agile Open California conference for the second consecutive year and the event was held last week. It is a really stimulating, interesting and non-traditional conference. For example, there is no conference agenda. Instead, it follows the open-space model for self-organization, where people put sessions on a centralized board in real time, and people show up at the events that are of interest to them. I find the format to be very dynamic and engaging, allowing for the ideas in one session to literally give birth to other sessions which follow.
If you are interested in learning more about Agile practices or have already adopted them and are looking to c ...
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Collaborative Systems as Cultural Constructions |
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By barton on
9/7/2008
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Many companies are unaware how their culture creates material effects within the organization. Social conflict and the deployment of new technologies can produce positive changes within an organization by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models.
Culture, those patterns of human activity and symbolic structures that give such activities significance and importance, is not generally included as part of the design and deployment process when a company goes forward with a new technology. Many significant deployment failures are attributable to cultural issues (Lorenzi
&
Riley,
2003)(Yeo,
2002).
While we do not normally think of computer systems as part of our culture, the manner, dress, language, belief systems, and norms of behavior found within an organization clearly extend beyond the boundary of a computational system, especially one that is collaborative. People define the essential meaning and structure of these systems. This is why w ...
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Patterns of thought in software adoption |
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By barton on
4/16/2008
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We've been doing a lot recently supporting teams in deploying and / or
upgrading to Team
Foundation Server 2008. It's been a very interesting and
enlightening period of our work at Luminous because it is field testing
and reinforcing some of the fundamental ideas we have held
about the underlying patterns of thought people experience when
adopting software.
Software adoption is a complex cultural process that is often relegated
to a functional discipline that is ill-equipped to address the
organizational and cultural requirements that support
successful adoption. Adoption is not simply putting someone
new in front of someone. Optimally it addresses the notion of enhancing
the capability of the individual, which inherently is about changing
the way people think about the world and their relationship to it.
Software adoption always occurs as some substep to a larger p ...
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Levelling The Playing Field |
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By barton on
8/29/2007
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While I am not an expert on the subject, in my tenure as a founder of the Bay Area .NET Users Group (Bay.NET), I am very much aware of cultural differences between programmers who work with the Visual Basic and C# languages. An excellent overview written by Nigel Shaw on these cultural differences can be found here.
Having lived in many places throughout the world I would consider myself as one who is most interested in culture and cultural differences. In my experiences, I have discovered in myself an inclination to find things I appreciate about other cultures (and people).
I think we all tend to look at differences, be they cultural, as in those who prefer Apple Computers to Windows or Linux and make some value judgments based on what camp we live in and what camp
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The illusion of the perfect computer |
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By barton on
7/15/2007
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I recently got a new computer preloaded with Windows Vista. I must say that when I got the machine I was extremely surprised at how well it worked and how easy it was for me to transfer my data to the new machine (Lenovo T60p). With all of the comments I had been hearing which indicated that many people felt that the Vista operating system was problematic, I was rather surprised at how smooth my transition was.
Alas, this was not to last, and what is rather ironic is that I have been subject to a number of issues in the past month that have been rather disruptive and taken some time to remedy and yet are not related specifically to any flaw in the operating system.
The first sign of trouble was when I shut the computer down after doing some work and found it would not start the next morning. I believe a file was (or files were) corrupted somehow on shutdown (although I do not know for sure) and were only able to get back to an operable state by restoring ...
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