Marcato

It used to be that whenever I would go to the Web to find content, especially in the context of my daily work, I would simply go to Google, enter the search terms and then ferret through the results until I got the information I sought.  If you get the right search term this exercise is pretty simple, but it also can be quite difficult if you get it wrong.  My wife, as a professional librarian, is an expert at getting the right search terms every time.  I cannot claim the same level of success, usually.  I’m retrying searches multiple times so that the most pertinent stuff ends up on top.

With a tool like Twitter it can be pretty easy to find great content through their search engine, and you can quickly see what the “crowd” views as good content based on their comments in their tweets, or even their hash tags.  It has gotten to the point that I now start with Twitter to search for blog posts, videos or images relating to what I need.  This change in paradigm was inspired by the following YouTube video (recommendation: follow @equalman on Twitter – he’s really on top of all of this stuff).

I like to think of it as looking for the breadcrumbs that the experts left behind for me to find and harvest for my gain.  If you read the tweets, it does not take long to figure out where the good stuff is hiding.  And, usually they are kind enough to leave a link to follow.

Retweets are also important to note.  What’s happening here is that a tweeter thought something was important or especially good at wanted to share the tweet with his or her followers.  It’s also good Twitter etiquette to give the originator credit for the effort.  This is another opportunity to find an authority on a topic.  Find the original tweeter and follow him/her.

Google also is thinking this is important.  This blog post describes a new 2-way search feature that mixes results from Twitter into its search results.  The Bing “decision engine” also contains this capability, however it is somewhat buried as one of many options (follow the “More” link on the top to find the Twitter search).

The social media crowd is taking control of the web.  I think this phenomenon will shape the way we all search for relevant content.  As Twitter expands, it will only make it more valuable as an information worker.  See you in Twitterland!

If you are a Twitter veteran, this post is not for you. I encounter people all the time that express a level of confusion about the value proposition of Twitter. They see things like the following YouTube clip of a recent Verizon ad:

I say there is great value to be had. Twitter provides a great opportunity to get insight from thought leaders in industry. In my word, having a pipeline to leaders in the technical community like Bill Gates (@billgates) and Werner Vogels (@werner) to see what is happening in their worlds. They tweet about trends they see, as well as fun personal details that provide both insight and entertainment. As more and more leaders start tweeting, the possibilities will become seemingly endless.

It’s not necessarily about each individual tweets they write, but a composite view of these thought leaders can provide a new level of understanding of an industry that can prove to be very useful. The way to do this effectively is to use Twitter lists so you can isolate those thought leaders into a group so you can view their tweets together and scan them very quickly. Or, one can find lists that other Twitter users have created, which can be a shortcut to finding those leaders. I prefer to create my own lists as I then have the ability to manage it as I see fit. Whichever way you go, using a list make it is simple to detect trends that may be worth investigating further, or just hold back in the memory bank for later. I can say that having that type of information available has proven to be valuable on more than once occasion.

I have a few other posts in the queue relating to the usefulness of Twitter. In the meantime, how do you derive value from Twitter?

A friend of mine bought me a copy of “The Soul of a New Machine” by Tracy Kidder to read recently.  It turns out that because of my early hardware experience it is an interesting read for many reasons, but he gave it to me because it also digs deep into the personalities and mindsets of people that are involved in high stakes, high tension development projects.  He thought I would appreciate it and be able to relate it to other project work I’m involved in (and he was right), but little did he know the other gem I would discover.

I’ve spent time on this forum talking about why the medium of software is somewhat unique for applying Agile methods, so I was surprised to see descriptions of the team dynamic at Data General that sound remarkably like high-functioning Agile teams.  For instance:

Coca-Cola Bridge - North Shore, MN

“The entire Eclipse Group, especially its managers, seemed to be operating on instinct.  Only the simplest visible arrangements existed among them.  They kept no charts and graphs or organizational tables that meant anything.  But those webs of voluntary, mutual responsibility, the product of many signings-up, held them together.  Of course, to a recruit it might look chaotic.  Of course, to someone who believed that a computer ought to be designed with long thought and a great deal of preliminary testing, and who favored rigid control, might have felt ill at the spectacle.  Criticism of that sort flattered West.  ’Show me what I’m doing wrong,’ he’d say with a little smile.

In fact, the team designed the computer in something like six months, and may have set a record for speed. The task was quite complex.”  (pp. 120-121)

Why did they operate this way?  Frankly, out of desperation, although it was clearly how they preferred to work as well.  They were in a fight for their lives with both internal and external competition and had to take big chances and make big bets or their product would not see the light of day.

I’ve been in many different situations from startup to mature organizations, but one common theme in all of these situations is that we were always trying to prove ourselves and usually fighting for our own existence whether we knew it or not.  Complacent software organizations are teams that are about to have their world disrupted, they just don’t know it yet.

The move toward modern SAAS models and “the cloud” is proof of this – the traditional economics of licensed software and recurring support are giving way in all industries to models that depend on mass customization and efficient delivery at low margins.  In this world, software is expected to constantly evolve with high quality software constantly flowing out of the team and into the customer’s hands.  To quote General Eric Shinseki:  ”If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

Be Agile, or be irrelevant.

“The Soul of a New Machine” was written in 1981.  If you have earlier documented descriptions of Agile teams, I would love to hear them!