barton's business and technical blog

Patent Awarded for Speech-Enabled Interactive Translation System

barton@netspheres.net — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

I am proud to announce that a patent has been awarded for my work on the development of a novel interactive translation system for Berkeley-based startup Spoken Translation, Inc. It was a great pleasure to work on this system and quite rewarding to see that this work has now been formalized in this fashion.

Employee Engagement - not just for breakfast anymore

barton@netspheres.net — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:00:00 GMT

At Luminous we have known for a long time is that employee engagement increases the success of any collaborative business system. We are known by our clients and peers for putting people before computers and for this reason, we always include ethnographic interview, participatory design, and the development measurable and meaningful metrics as services included with any system we build for a customer. It so happens that these services increase employee engagement and we have observed a net positive effect on the organizations we work with.

That's why we are so pleased to see more research being published that confirms what we've known for some time. For example, the paper Engaging for Success: enhancing performance through employee engagement, published in July 2008 and presented to HM Government at the request of the UK Secretary of State takes an in depth look at employee engagement and correlates it with many other critical business outcomes: increased profitability, performance, innovation, all of which are highly prized achievements for any organization.

We submit that if the manner in which the workforce performs is a primary determinant of whether companies or organizations succeed, then whether or not the workforce is positively encouraged to perform at its best should be a fundamental consideration for every leader and manager, and be placed at the core of business strategy.

Another example, The Meaning of Employee Engagement by William Macey and Benjamin Schneider and published in Industrial and Organizational Psychology in 2008 attempts to ascribe the notion of employee engagement with a greater degree of scientific rigor.

We see an impending mainstreaming of employee engagement on the horizon and believe that it will become a centerpiece of strategy for an increasing number of organizations who realize that in the current business climate, only those companies who realize that the quality of service we aspire to – organizations and individuals alike – will only be achieved by placing the enthusiasm, commitment and knowledge of people at the core of business strategies.

Luminous are pleased to offer their proven engagement services as part of our broad range of services.

Barton Friedland interviewed at Webinale / Presentation for Download

barton@netspheres.net — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:00:00 GMT

For those of you who were not able to attend Berlin's Webinale conference or my presentation there entitled "Bringing Web 2.0 Inside: Dynamic Capabilities multiplied", you read an interview about my presentation here: http://bit.ly/hqU0r.

A copy of the slides are available here: http://bit.ly/4HoXA.

Software I am excited about

barton@netspheres.net — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Microsoft recently released for download beta 1 of Visual Studio Team System 2010 and .NET 4.0. There are many new features and lots of improvements, and I have only just started to explore. Many of the capabilities, however useful, are not usable since this is a beta product and will not be RTM for several months. However, there are a couple of gems I've already uncovered that are available for Visual Studio 2008 - so you don't have to wait to use them.

The first is PEX. It is smart analyzer for your methods that generates parameters and will generate unit tests for your code based on that analysis. This tool will really help developers write more useful unit tests quickly. The second is Contracts, an extension to the .NET framework that provides pre-conditions, post-conditions, and object invariants (if you have worked with Eiffel, the "design by contract" approach will be familiar). Contracts extends both static and runtime checking capabilities in very powerful ways that help programmers ensure that the code they write is used as intended.

There is theme emerging here in this wave of technology from Microsoft. .NET has matured now to the state where it is taking on aspects of almost every known language (in .NET 4.0 there is a LISP-like functional language called F# and the DynamicLanguageRuntime is enabling languages like Python to be supported). .NET continues to be a convergence point that takes the best qualities of languages and aligns them to the capabilities of the underlying framework and tooling found in the Visual Studio IDE and Team Foundation Server.

Then there is Google's Waves, the application that redesigns and leverages what we've learned about email, instant messaging, and collaboration in the last 20-odd years and presents a single integrated application that adjusts how messages are delivered based on the contexts of the users involved.

The only other technology innovation that is catching my interest is Stephen Wolfram's new web-based Mathematica-cum-Natural language query engine. WolframAlpha is definitely a new kind of application and I see a bright future for it.

There certainly is no shortage of interesting and helpful new ideas out there, and all of this makes me feel very positive about where we can go from here.

Speaking at Webinale in Berlin on May 27th - Bringing Web 2.0 Inside: Dynamic Capabilities multiplied

barton@netspheres.net — Sun, 10 May 2009 08:00:00 GMT

I am very happy to announce that I have been invited to speak at Webinale, the holistic web conference exploring aspects of business, design, and development for the future of the web in Berlin on May 27th.

This conference is the perfect venue to speak about my most recent research work that addresses the question of the relationship between web 2.0 technologies and the development of dynamic capabilities in the organization.

For some time now, I have been researching the convergence of a number of disciplines on to a central topic of emergence. For example, despite being in very different disciplines, Henry Mintzberg, Ricardo Semler, Margaret Wheatley, Rich Gold, and Kent Beck are all looking at the same issues of emergence, self-organization, transparency, and sustainable growth. Our interest at Luminous is to look at how various disciplines, ranging from management science, computational science, psychology, behavioral sciences, anthropology, and others can inform the design of systems that work better and make people more productive.

For more about my upcoming session at Webinale, click here.

Where We Are Headed

barton@netspheres.net — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 08:00:00 GMT

I have been thinking a lot recently about some of the phenomena that are described and associated with Web 2.0 technologies and the economic forces behind them. In her book “Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide”, Amy Shuen does a great job surveying various features and capabilities found in Web 2.0 companies as well as explaining how these are driven from an economic perspective, sometimes in ways that are essentially redefining economics, or at least permanently changing the landscape.

For example, she discusses how financial analysts calculate the value of Web 2.0 companies using different kinds of metrics than than non-Web 2.0 companies. She explains that financial valuations of Web 2.0 companies are no longer calculated based on earnings multiples but on new models that were originally designed for subscription-based businesses such as cable or cell phone services where revenues are tied to customer fees rather than unit prices. This makes sense, as Web 2.0 companies generally don’t sell products that they make but instead attract customer bases that in many cases do pay subscription fees.

But for most people, there is a general myopia about the origin and nature of the underlying phenomena that are emerging from and being attributed to Web 2.0 companies. That is to say, when ideas become successful, people who are experiencing for the first time naturally associate those ideas with the entities those forces came to their awareness with. But in fact the ideas emerging now and experiencing success are not new in the same way that touch screens and multi-modal interfaces existed before the iPhone became popular or, reaching back a bit but staying within the same theme, Apple did not invent the user interface. There is a often a significant difference between popularizing something and inventing it, and that difference can have the effect of delaying the actualization of the capabilities its inventor(s) intended.

Vanevar Bush’s 1945 “As We May Think” is a canonical vision for the machine that helps us think. Ivan Sutherland’s 1959 thesis entitled “Sketchpad” presented the world’s first graphical user interface did so with the aim of “man and computer to converse rapidly”. In the late 1960’s, when Douglas Englebart had demonstrated the first use of a computer mouse and fully interactive computer interface, it was his research goal to utilize computers to augment human intellect.

Yet ironically, despite these initial visions for the utility such machines would provide, the mass commercialization of computational technology has not, to date, gone in the general direction of stimulating or inspiring people to think better than they did before. In fact, in many cases, as technologies have made it easier to to more things, such as publish typographical documents, make music, or create images, an unfortunate side effect of this additional capability is that people who do not understand typography have created ugly documents, some very poorly crafted music has been created, and, thanks to digital cameras and video, we easily find all sorts of poor quality images.

We now live in a world interacting with people and things, with many of those things being machines that we built and (which some of us) designed to help us perform tasks ever more efficiently and easily, or perhaps to entertain us, or perhaps to help us, as in the case with Web 2.0, leverage our collective and individual intelligence in more powerful ways. But Web 2.0, as well as all of the other technologies that we have designed and built, are not in themselves the source of the changes that we see, but rather one of the means through which the forces of continual improvement are made manifest in the world.

As Amy Shuen explains the value of “leapfrog links” or “multiple network effects” or even the simple value of networks through Reed’s law, it occurs to me that she is describing phenomena of innovation within the frame of Web 2.0 that are essentially grounded in culture. What is particularly interesting about the Web 2.0 technologies to me, especially from the computer science perspective, is that Web 2.0 seems to be the era of the emergence of user and especially community-centric algorithms. Whereas former glory went to the likes of Donald Knuth and his detailed cataloging of all sorts of useful algorithms for sorting and such, our emergence into a high-performance world of distributed computing has not invented a new era of credit card processing systems but instead is reinventing the way we relate to each other as people.

So, while it may have taken awhile, the ideas about augmenting human intellect are appearing in some high-profile places, many of which have nothing to do with Web 2.0. We see it more and more everywhere, from president-elect Obama’s “seat at the table” memo to the recent front-page article of Fast Company describing Cisco’s sweeping organizational changes that emphasize a shift from “me” to “we”. No more do we read ad infinitum about the problems of “information overload” but rather we find headlines like “User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload”.

For me, the underlying question to ask is not how to we maximize those forces, but rather, in what directions do we see those forces moving in and what new forms do we see taking shape as a result of the changes now in process. This question forces me to consider many possibilities and outcomes and begin to build mental models that describe those forces and the ways I see them interact with one another, with us, and with the world.

I am only beginning to explore what this looks like, but if I were to try to summarize it, we are witnessing both a shift and a convergence. The shift is from man-machine interaction to man-machine-man-community interaction, and as Amy Shuen will tell you, the multiple network effects have an accelerating effect on the benefits of such a system, like a sort of implicit positive reinforcement. The convergence is interdisciplinary, where, for example, many of the ideas embodied in movements like Agile software development such as transparency, adaptability, quality, iterative and continual improvement are now converging with ideas that have been developing in parallel in other domains such as business management in Mintzberg’s notion of emergent strategy, Prahalad and Hamel’s core competencies and Teece, Pisano, and Shuen’s own dynamic capabilities.

It is an exciting, dangerous time, full of possibility and extremes. But perhaps Mintzberg is on to something when he asserts that we are moving toward a “balanced society”. We have the tools in hand and are in the process of forming them into the kinds of tools they need to be to do the job of reshaping our society. Thus, it appears that the ideas of those who invented the technologies we use are actually beginning to take hold in our society. It remains an open question as to whether the world will collectively augment its intellect or how that should be measured. The next-generation tools to take these steps are at the beginning stages of standardization as we see mass adoption of systems like Flickr, Facebook, and other Web 2.0 companies, but the ability to innovate itself remains in my mind primarily a cultural activity.

Rethinking Ourselves

barton@netspheres.net — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

This interesting overview from Dr. Michael Wesch, a digital ethnographer at Kansas State University, presents some of the fundamental forces at play in "Web 2.0" technologies. In addition to explaining the technology, this video makes the crucial observation that people, not technology, are the drivers, enabled by the technology (see Engelbart). Wesch concludes his video by reminding us that Web 2.0 is causing us (among other things) to rethink copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, and ourselves. Thanks to Amy Shuen in her book "Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide" for this helpful reference.

Silicon Valley Code Camp 2008 Wrapup

barton@netspheres.net — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

We had a great day at this year's Silicon Valley Code Camp presenting "Mapping Agile Practices for Scalable Teams to TFS". In case you wanted to attend but were not able to, you can download a movie of the slide presentation here and an audio recording of the session here. We had a great time and it was good to share this information with such an attentive and interested group!

Luminous Group and Microsoft's BizSpark

barton@netspheres.net — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

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 full access to Microsoft's full suite of development tools - without having to pay license fees - until the startup grows up and creates a return on this investment.

So - if you are a startup and you are interested in working with what many feel are the very best tools for software development around, have a look at the startup program guide and consider joining this amazing program.

Mapping Agile Practices for Scalable Teams to TFS

barton@netspheres.net — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

I'm doing an overview of how agile software development practices can be more effectively supported with software tools at the upcoming Silicon Valley Code Camp on November 9th at 10:45AM with my colleague Don Robins. We'll be looking at how agile practices can be effectively supported by tools such as Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Suite 2010 to increase team coherence and performance. If you have some free time come and join us!