Category IT

Anything related to information technology

Why is it important that we talk about feelings?

Geir Isene 20 Comments

Because they are the only real markers we have.

You can present uptime statistics, production efficiency, delivery times and numbers of this and that as much as you want. At the end of the day, it is the customer’s feelings that determines if he will continue buying your products or services.

Our emotions, our feelings are the sum of the impressions we value. And our emotions direct our actions. It matters little that you complied 100% with the SLA if the customer doesn’t feel like renewing the contract. You may think it’s unfair, that you did everything you could, or that it is irrational on the customer’s part. But the fact remains, if it doesn’t tickle the customer’s fancy, he will vote with his feet.

This is precisely why it is so important to talk about feelings. Invite the customer to open up. Make it safe to talk about that elusive airy-fairy stuff that women have been babbling on about for eons. Just as you tell the customer straight what you think, just like you open up fully about your emotions, so should you help the customer open up to you. Get underneath each other’s skin. Only then will you be able to figure out what’s really going on.

But a customer’s feelings toward you are usually not conglomerated only from his experience with you. He may have had a bad day, a quarrel with his wife or an excellent weekend trip camping with his daughter. They are elusive, these feelings. But to figure out what you can do about his experience with you, you need to get him to talk about it. Only then can you better sift out what emotions he may have specifically toward you.

Management frameworks tend to disregard emotions. Frameworks such as ITIL or PRINCE2 treat them as irrelevant and tries to supplant them with SLAs and the like. Other frameworks, such as Hubbard’s Management Technology treat them as contemptuous… HE&R (Human Emotions and Reactions) is an example of inventing a term to belittle another’s feelings.

All this goes for other relationships as well. The more important the relationship, the more important it is to talk about feelings. If you value the other person, value his or her feelings.

I hold that your feelings are your most important markers in life. It is the zest of living and should be treated with utmost respect. It is what we live for, the reason to enjoy the games we love to play, even the game of life itself.

Overconfidence

Geir Isene 105 Comments

Having started and run several companies and a few IT companies in particular, this latest story from Slashdot particularly grabbed my attention. The point of the story, “overconfidence” is applicable is many fields and situations besides that of estimating IT project. First a copy-paste from Slashdot:

“Dan Milstein from Hut 8 Labs has written a lengthy post about why software developers often struggle to estimate the time required to implement their projects. Drawing on lessons from a book called Thinking Fast and Slow by Dan Kahneman, he explains how overconfidence frequently leads to underestimations of a project’s complexity. Unfortunately, the nature of overconfidence makes it tough to compensate. Quoting:

Specifically, in many, many situations, the following three things hold true: 1- ‘Expert’ predictions about some future event are so completely unreliable as to be basically meaningless 2- Nonetheless, the experts in question are extremely confident about the accuracy of their predictions. 3- And, best of all: absolutely nothing seems to be able to diminish the confidence that experts feel. The last one is truly remarkable: even if experts try to honestly face evidence of their own past failures, even if they deeply understand this flaw in human cognition they will still feel a deep sense of confidence in the accuracy of their predictions. As Kahneman explains it, after telling an amazing story about his own failing on this front: ‘The confidence you will experience in your future judgments will not be diminished by what you just read, even if you believe every word.’”

And then quoting Laurens van der Post: “Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond any doubt that they are right.”

And when people are convinced about their conviction, things tend to go south pretty fast. This is seen also during Internet discussions as well as real life discussions. People seek certainty. And the quest for certainty is the real value, not the attainment of it. Quoting Voltaire: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”

Thinking back to my childhood, I remember with fondness how I cherished the mysteries and uncertainties of life. I loved how I didn’t know, how I wanted to know, and my quest for new knowledge. But as time went by and I grew up, I unfortunately became more certain, less fondly in awe about life’s mysteries and less inquiring.

I am currently trying to find ways to kill my own certainties, be more open for new views and uncertainties and to bring more awe back into life.

Hugs.

Scrap the SLA (Service Level Agreement)

Geir Isene 14 Comments

According to Wikipedia, an SLA is:

“A service-level agreement is a negotiated agreement between two parties, where one is the customer and the other is the service provider. This can be a legally binding formal or an informal “contract” (for example, internal department relationships).“.

SLAs is a hot item in IT, and is given much weight in the organizational framework called ITIL.

Almost all IT directors I talk to rely heavily on SLAs or blame the lack of proper SLAs for lack of success.

But seriously, do you have an SLA with Google? With Facebook, Twitter or the scores of Internet services that you use personally? No – and if you are unhappy, you simply find another solution or service provider.

An IT service provider would be wise to simply scrap the SLA or any contract that seeks to bind the customer. Instead, let the customer be free to choose and move to another vendor if they feel like it. In that way, the service provider will have to be constantly performing better than the competition. And that is the best solution to keep the customers.

Instead of locking the customer with contracts, service the customer like no one else.

No contracts, no lock-in and you have no choice but to become and be the best.

Without even intellectual property protection, you would have to rely on pure and excellent service to retain your customers.

Customer lock-in mechanisms makes for laziness, dwindling creativity and thus ironically opens the door to better service providers.

SLAs are only warranted where the customer are not free to choose another provider, such as when the business strategy dictates the business units to only use the internal IT department.

Feel free to ask

Geir Isene 545 Comments

q

When the traffic gets high, when posts get more than 500 or even a 1000 comments, I am bound to miss questions from my readers.

I want to answer your questions, and to ensure you are not left without an answer, I propose you ask any questions you may have to me as comments to this blog post.

Just add your question as a comment here and I will get back to you with an answer. Ask anything – from my views on life, IT, Scientology, my favorite HP calculator, music, art, preferences in any part of life or whatever else you may have on your mind. Do not hold back. I am not shy.

This post is not an arena for long discussions – or I may again miss some questions buried in long threads. Interesting topics may instead earn separate blog posts.

Amazing person: Emanuel Feruzi

Geir Isene 7 Comments

My African soul-mate is a chill, warm black guy worthy of praise.

Feruzi joined my previous company’s office in Dar el Salaam in 2005. He was looking at leaving our office in Tanzania when I decided I should freeze his ass off up in the cold Land of Santa. And so I imported an African Prince to the snowy north. It took some time for him to take off his jacket and hat while sitting inside in our office. And after several months, we managed to make a half-Norwegian out of this tech savvy Tanzanian.

Son of a King in the northern part of the country, raised as a prince with both his feet planted firmly on the ground. Feruzi is one of the most amazingly no-stress, no-fuss, chill people I’ve ever met. Even at his wedding he was cool, calm and collected. I had the pleasure to attend his second wedding party – not the big one with thousands of guests, but the “small” party with only 500 or so.

Feruzi is a caring person engaging in idealistic causes for his people – like making sure Firefox got translated to Swahili. If you’re ever stressed out, for any reason in life, call Feruzi. He’ll chill you.

Amazing person: Egil Möller

Geir Isene 5 Comments

While we’re in the technical territory…

I know a guy who can whip up a prototype of any IT application in a few hours. Others plan and work it out on the drawing board and go “figure-figure” for days until they finally start coding.

Egil simply DOES. He’s one of the most intelligent people I’ve met – and he transfers that intelligence to a sharp understanding of the problem at hand. And with swift creativity and ability to think outside the box, he’s a virtual geyser of ideas, solutions and new ways to go about the task.

A folk music dancing and singing, vegetarian geek with a warm heart and hard core personal integrity. Egil is a die-hard freedom enthusiast fighting for freedom of speech, expression and sharing. We share a world view when it comes to intellectual property, but are very different in our views on the reason for life. That has made for some interesting and valuable discussions over the years.

Egil is the technical lead on the amazing product Etherpad.

My wife and I sold our company in February – I really miss Egil, I cringe when I realized what people he now works for.

It would be great to work with Egil again sometime in the future.

Amazing person: Claes Nästén

Geir Isene 5 Comments

“This guy seems competent“, I thought. “Let me check out the code quality“. I pulled down the source code, opened some core files and started going through the lines of code. “Neat. Structured. Well built“. An hour of sifting through the craftsmanship of Claes Nästén made me walk into his chat room and send him a private message. Was he open for a job offer?

Not quite yet. He was 19 back in 2004 and had to finish his military service before he could come on board in my company.

On the very first day I met him, he managed to solve a technical problem in less than two hours that other technical very competent people had thrown more than 130 hours at without getting a result. And that was no coincidence. This guy turned out to be a freakin’ genius.

There isn’t a handful of magic instances where his genius came on display – it was every week for more than five years – like a constant magic show where he mastered one impossible technical problem after the other, or produced code or solutions like I’ve hardly ever seen before.

This ex-punk rocker, pierced, high-school drop-out, swede from up in the cold north is easily 50 times more productive than the usual university-grade IT-professional.

Claes is able to pick apart any code or IT solution and put it together in less time and with less effort than anyone I’ve seen.

Unfortunately I am not in the IT business anymore. If anyone reading this is in need of a programmer or sysadmin for highly complex IT-systems, you should get hold of Claes. Pay him whatever he wants and give him impossible challenges. He needs a bigger game to match his genius.

Bill & David’s garage rules

Geir Isene 6 Comments

Most readers of my blog knows about my passion for HP calculators. But you may not know the reasons why. First of all it’s about exploring new mathematics. Secondly, the old programmable calculators offer the most easily accessible environment for programming – the calculators are small and with a push of a button, you can start programming away. Thirdly, it’s the sturdy design and craftsmanship and the constant innovation that used to be the hallmark of HP. The very essence of Old Hewlett Packard is captured in the rules that Bill Hewlett and David Packard put up on the wall in the their first office space – a garage:

  • Believe you can change the world.
  • Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.
  • Know when to work alone and when to work together.
  • Share tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues.
  • No Politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage.)
  • The customer defines a job well done.
  • Radical ideas are not bad ideas.
  • Invent different ways of working.
  • Make a contribution every day. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.
  • Believe that together we can do anything.
  • Invent.

That mindset formed the foundation of what came to be one of the most successful technology companies.

These days, we find tech businesses more focused on focus than innovation. More focused on regulating people than encouraging them. And more driven by profit than their heart.

One day I will implement this mind set in an modern technology company. I will keep you posted.

hp

5000 reads on Scribd

Geir Isene 4 Comments

I swung by Scribd.com and found that my articles now have a total of more than 5000 reads. That would account for around half the number of total reads of those articles (the rest being read on isene.com and elsewhere). If you haven’t yet looked at the articles, now is the time to nudge you to swing by the same place 😉

Writing articles: Collaboration

Writing articles in collaboration with great people