I'm on the "admin." email list for a volunteer group that organises monthly tech. talks. I'm not the volunteer who orders the pizza, so normally I don't fuss too much over how many registrations have landed. But I recruited this month's speaker, and wanted to give him a rough head-count (especially since it was a higher than usual, which is always good to report).
One downside to flipping through all those EventBrite notifications, however, was the huuuuuuge and depressing preponderance of "anonymous" email accounts used to register for the talk. Clearly, someone--well, pretty much everyone in our almost-big-enough-to-be-statistically-valid sample--has had their workaday email address trammeled by someone before. And (more to the point) that's not news or even remarkable. It's merely evolution in action, really. In the sense that arms races can be considered "evolutionary," anyway.
Until now, I'd failed to see the extra irony in that response. GMail and Hotmail (and the odd Yahoo) accounts are, of course, a prophylactic against having one's attention-stream repeatedly crashed by spammers and scammers. Not unlike how single women will wear fake wedding/engagement rings as a prophylactic against being creeped-on. (Needless to say, its deterrent effect is never 100%, but on balance it's worth the clunky el-cheapo jewelry. Pro tip, ladies: A layer of clear nail polish over the metal of a dime-store ring will extend its lifespan by months. Trust me on this.)
So, in an attempt to preserve the online equivalent of personal space, people choose to trade their privacy and a certain amount of attention-span. Because of course Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are monetising both. Behind the scenes, naturally. Which apparently makes all the difference. It's difference between the creeper at the pub who won't take "go away" for an answer and the stalker who rifles through your garbage and eavesdrops at your window. But the latter is at least discreet about it--incredibly polite, in fact--and (best of all) you're not its only target. So it's not even personal, which almost makes it not-creepy, hey?
Please understand that I'm actually not slagging Google or Microsoft or Yahoo here. Blocking all the spam and worse spawned in the underbelly of the internet is itself an arms-race. Just handling the sheer amount of illicit email traffic chews up resources that your average I/T department can't afford. Bayesian filters require constant "training" and updates to the code to keep up with the latest scams, viruses, and desperately incompetent marketing hacks. Only huge corporations have the resources to A.) Scale up to the challenges, and B.) Pay for it all with targeted advertising revenue. "Targeted," naturally, implies sniffing email for keywords and (more importantly) patterns and embedding compatible ads in the user experience.
Within the confines of the free market, we're left with an imperfect system. In essence, we're allowing the stalkers to protect us from (most of) the creepers. To imagine any other outcome is reading History backward without remembering that it is lived forward. And also to forget that people people--perhaps as much as the corporate people of which Mitt Romney famously spoke--have zero conscience when it comes to externalising costs for things you can't actually touch. Maybe even negative conscience, given some of the rationalisations I've heard. Internet security, naturally, ranks high on that list. Which is precisely what criminals and griefers are banking on. And, as if we could forget, Marketing's sins are both legion and legendary--regardless of medium.
If it weren't for those inconvenient truths, I'd feel less futile in wishing for a do-over on email at this late date. Namely, a do-over that doesn't require the ghetto-isation of personal email. Because a tool that's so critical to modern life (on the clock and off) doesn't fit well into any of those flows on or off the clock. To say that I'm fussy about my tools (in software development as well as elsewhere) is a massive understatement. You take care of your tools, and they'll take care of you. I believe that.
Predictions of email's demise are over a decade old. (Just like predictions of the demise of many things. Particularly when made by people too busy penning tech. articles to read any Geoffrey Moore.) But let's imagine that the street-corner nut-job with the doomsday sign is correct and that The End is, in fact, Near. That would be our last, best hope for owning up to how much #FAIL is baked into the current system and keeping it out of the Next Big Next Big Thing, yes? Effectively, means that it's time to (finally!) put a price-the on "free" email that reflects all its costs: The internalised costs of our own context-switching as well as externalised costs of subsidising crime, giving viruses a vector for spreading, etc.
When the internet first went mainstream, we were treated to starry-eyed predictions of democratisation and broadened horizons and geysers of previously untapped human potential. To some extent that's happened...along with other things less laudable or savoury. But there's no excuse for not learning the lessons of the past two decades, and far less excuse for perpetuating its sins. I'm at an age where I don't have soaring hopes
for the future--after that whole flying cars and Mars vacations thing
didn't pan out and all. But I'm all-in for "not-creepy internet" Can we get it right next time?
Monday, January 18, 2016
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
"Day Two"
Bedtime reading the last two nights has been Erin Kissane's The Elements of Content Strategy, which (on the surface, anyway) is sorta-kinda tangential to what I do for a living. Simply substituting "data" for "content" doesn't always map in an apples-to-apples way, but one concept definitely does resonate for the career of an application programmer.
That concept is what Kissane calls "Day Two." It's shorthand for the time after the system (typically a company website) is launched, approved, and everyone settles back in to their "regular" jobs. In the case of any contractors or freelancers, it's the next gig (or looking for it). But in the case of employees--at least some--the definition of the "regular" job might have shifted.
Problem is, those shifts are not always recognised, much less budgeted/scheduled. (And if the consultants didn't hammer that point home during the planning phases, you probably don't want to hire them again.) Bottom line is that those extra hours of researching, writing, photographing, proofreading, vetting (by the Engineering/Marketing/Legal/Whatever functions of your organisation), etc. do not magically appear out of nowhere. (Nor, equally shockingly, does the time/money for training people when the launch crew moves on.)
Bigger problem is, no one is surprised to read about those realities. Yet too often the surprise comes when (through some evil influence or misalignment of the stars, no doubt):
Over in my more data-driven world, I'm usually, um, "lucky" enough to see somewhat less acute symptoms of the same disease. But it still means time devoted talking clients out of wasting their money.
Because the bottom line is that information that can't be captured as part of the normal course of doing business won't be backfilled later. It just won't. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. That's the bad news. The good news is that you will--or should--be talked out of that by any halfway decent/competent application developer. (Why? Because we frankly don't want the fallout and bad karma that comes from letting you do that to yourself. For ourselves personally and for our industry in general.)
Case in point: I worked for a company that had to make a whack of outgoing long distance calls--to the point of bringing in part-time help (and the owner's kid) three times a week for eight hours a day. Before my time, the company had had to fire someone who abused the system by making long-distance personal calls. For an hour. Five days a week. I know for a fact that it bugged the heck out of the company Accountant, because he told me the story twice.
For all five hours of lost productivity plus the long-distance charges add up over 52 weeks, it would have been sheer profligacy to force each employee to log all calls--either on paper or even the most user-friendly app. any programmer could devise. Even requiring the Accountant scan through the month's dead-tree phone bill isn't a negligible cost (especially as the company grew from 20 to 40 people and acquired two other companies in the process).
But when the afore-mentioned Accountant bee-bops into my office to mention that, hey, did I know that our new phone service provider supplies us with a downloadable plain-text version of our phone bill and is that maybe something I could parse and dump into a database so he can generate reports from it...now, that's a different equation entirely.
Sure, there was the up-front cost of my time (setting up the database, creating a user interface to allow the Accountant to upload the e-bill, and of course setting up the reports). But after that point, the system could scale up to any number of employees with no extra incremental time required for the Accountant to segment and sort and total the data any old way he needed it. Including, if necessary, importing it straight into his own software.
That, friends and brethren, is pretty much the gold standard of business automation. By which I specifically mean that data that would have been prohibitively expensive to manually log was mechanically collected in an easily consumable format (by our vendor). Better yet, the only business process that had to change was the Accountant having to remember to download the .CSV file and then upload it to our system. Trust me, he did not complain.
And thus, "Day Two" of that application was just "Day One" of Happily Ever After. That's how you want your story to end. And it should end that way if you're realistic about how you're going to capture the data you need to make decisions. Yes, I realise that it's all too easy to be caught up in the fresh promise of hackathons and project kickoff meetings and wireframes and mockups loaded with Lorem Ipsum. Just remember that software comes with an invisible fine print that reads "Data not included."
That concept is what Kissane calls "Day Two." It's shorthand for the time after the system (typically a company website) is launched, approved, and everyone settles back in to their "regular" jobs. In the case of any contractors or freelancers, it's the next gig (or looking for it). But in the case of employees--at least some--the definition of the "regular" job might have shifted.
Problem is, those shifts are not always recognised, much less budgeted/scheduled. (And if the consultants didn't hammer that point home during the planning phases, you probably don't want to hire them again.) Bottom line is that those extra hours of researching, writing, photographing, proofreading, vetting (by the Engineering/Marketing/Legal/Whatever functions of your organisation), etc. do not magically appear out of nowhere. (Nor, equally shockingly, does the time/money for training people when the launch crew moves on.)
Bigger problem is, no one is surprised to read about those realities. Yet too often the surprise comes when (through some evil influence or misalignment of the stars, no doubt):
- The company blog has been dormant for a year, plus some fool lost the Hootsuite account credentials, so the Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook accounts are stale, too.
- News releases are being used as a political football between Legal and Marketing...and ultimately published (late) as convoluted fluff that no one with a shred of respect for the written word reads.
- Whitepapers cite the previous version of the product...and still have the old logo/branding--embarrassing!
- Calls to Customer Service (not to mention social media hissy-fits) creep up because the online help doesn't deal with new products and/or features.
- No one has any idea whether email campaigns are working or not, because who has time to set up A/B testing in MailChimp anyway?
- (My personal favourite) I/T receives cranky calls from Management because "No one's updating the website." (Don't laugh. It's soooooo not funny.)
Over in my more data-driven world, I'm usually, um, "lucky" enough to see somewhat less acute symptoms of the same disease. But it still means time devoted talking clients out of wasting their money.
Because the bottom line is that information that can't be captured as part of the normal course of doing business won't be backfilled later. It just won't. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. That's the bad news. The good news is that you will--or should--be talked out of that by any halfway decent/competent application developer. (Why? Because we frankly don't want the fallout and bad karma that comes from letting you do that to yourself. For ourselves personally and for our industry in general.)
Case in point: I worked for a company that had to make a whack of outgoing long distance calls--to the point of bringing in part-time help (and the owner's kid) three times a week for eight hours a day. Before my time, the company had had to fire someone who abused the system by making long-distance personal calls. For an hour. Five days a week. I know for a fact that it bugged the heck out of the company Accountant, because he told me the story twice.
For all five hours of lost productivity plus the long-distance charges add up over 52 weeks, it would have been sheer profligacy to force each employee to log all calls--either on paper or even the most user-friendly app. any programmer could devise. Even requiring the Accountant scan through the month's dead-tree phone bill isn't a negligible cost (especially as the company grew from 20 to 40 people and acquired two other companies in the process).
But when the afore-mentioned Accountant bee-bops into my office to mention that, hey, did I know that our new phone service provider supplies us with a downloadable plain-text version of our phone bill and is that maybe something I could parse and dump into a database so he can generate reports from it...now, that's a different equation entirely.
Sure, there was the up-front cost of my time (setting up the database, creating a user interface to allow the Accountant to upload the e-bill, and of course setting up the reports). But after that point, the system could scale up to any number of employees with no extra incremental time required for the Accountant to segment and sort and total the data any old way he needed it. Including, if necessary, importing it straight into his own software.
That, friends and brethren, is pretty much the gold standard of business automation. By which I specifically mean that data that would have been prohibitively expensive to manually log was mechanically collected in an easily consumable format (by our vendor). Better yet, the only business process that had to change was the Accountant having to remember to download the .CSV file and then upload it to our system. Trust me, he did not complain.
And thus, "Day Two" of that application was just "Day One" of Happily Ever After. That's how you want your story to end. And it should end that way if you're realistic about how you're going to capture the data you need to make decisions. Yes, I realise that it's all too easy to be caught up in the fresh promise of hackathons and project kickoff meetings and wireframes and mockups loaded with Lorem Ipsum. Just remember that software comes with an invisible fine print that reads "Data not included."
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