I found this to be a good reminder. I mean, the point of documentation is a simple one isn’t it? To convey ideas and intent clearly and without ambiguity. We write it down because we can’t remember long enough or clearly enough, or we don’t trust the people we are working with enough. (“I asked for X” “I thought you asked for Y” “well, let’s go look at the document!”)

If we worked in smaller iterations (with people we trust), our need for documentation would decrease exponentially. With contract thinking (ie, everything must be written down and signed) increases project cost by 30-50%. That’s a lot of waste for a problem that is pretty easy to solve.

I suppose there is a secondary purpose to documentation that focuses on tracking the history of an item. But let’s be honest – how many times do you go back and look at project documentation after it has been released into production? In my experience, the more detailed the document, the faster it becomes irrelevant and unhelpful.

“When making a choice between two options, only consider what’s going to happen in the future, not which investments you’ve made in the past. The past investments are over, lost, gone forever. They are irrelevant to the future.”

I agree. Too many bad things happen when people insist on preserving the past only because they paid a lot for it. It might be painful, but sometimes you have to true up and say: That might have been a good decision when it was first made, but it is not a good decision today. Be honest with yourself, and embrace the change.

In my mind, the difficulty of configuring down a complex piece of software is really just  as difficult as building up a piece of software from pre-built frameworks, plug-ins, and templates.

The intent with Buy is not necessarily to spend money (though I do know people that value software strictly on its price tag), but to follow a basic principle: don’t reinvent the wheel. If someone has already done it,  use that first. The question for me is: when does configuration cost more than building?

In my experience, configuring is very expensive. I think about my Java programming days when it felt like half of my time was simply spent figuring out how to configure the fancy and expensive server.

From a learning perspective, I’m all about the build. I would much rather have knowledge about a general-purpose framework than knowledge about a proprietary system. General-purpose knowledge has much longer-term value, and can be re-used over and over and over again.

What do you think?

I mean, have you ever seen someone write 1,500 words about how much they love their corporate expense reporting system? Or spend their free time mashing up the job posting system together with Google maps? Of course not. But why not?

Read more to find out what he thinks.

For 50 years, almost all experiences have shown that traditional waterfall development methods result in a poor user experience. The reason is simple: requirement specifications are always wrong.

Jakob says successfully integrating usability into an Agile approach involves 3 basic strategies: 

• “Perform usability activities, such as user testing, in a few days.”
• adopt “a parallel track approach, where the user experience work is continuously done one step ahead of the implementation work”
• build “foundational user research that goes beyond feature development”

[Thanks for the bookmark Striving Green!]

Hoping to end the merry-go-round of flawed CRM, Leishman turned to a new option—open-source CRM. “I was intrigued with the whole concept,” he recalls. “I wanted to use this technology so I could customize it…and also have it Web-based so I wouldn’t have to rely on terminal services or any other remote assistance-type software.”

CEO of GOTW rated CRM’s based on two criteria:

1. A flurry of recent activity online:  ”If there was little activity, obviously there’d be no community support to enhance or add more features”
2. A lot of downloads, because popularity increased the chance of long term support.

“I looked at some off-the-shelf products a year ago…but they cost more than what I’ve spent on development so far to do just a third of what our system does.”

One definition of “Enterprisy” Enterprisy: A system that, with the right tools and considerable effort, can be made to do just about anything, but cannot do any one thing well, with any simplicity or with any elegance.

You can even get an simple plugin that makes an otherwise good application, behave slow and “Enterprisey”. Nice.

Quickly and easily add computing capacity as your requirements change. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as you need.

I know it’s geeky, and I’ve probably lost most of my readers already (thanks for getting this far!), but doesn’t that sound really really nice?

1. Data value will become an asset that the CFO reports on the balance sheet.
2. The CIO will be responsible for data quality, which will become a new IT key performance indicator (KPI).

David Vellante over at Internet Evolution wrote up an insightful analysis, Your Budget Could Hang on Your Wiki.

Apple’s iPhone is weaker in messaging than the more mature BlackBerry platform, but stronger everywhere else, with a desktop class standards-based web browser (providing access to corporate IT web apps), advanced iPod media playback features, and an integrated store featuring everything from games to media to productivity apps. It will be much easier for Apple to match RIM’s messaging features [...] than for RIM to clean up the rest of its OS, which currently just stinks.

Especially considering that the iPhone natively supports Microsoft Exchange (ie, Outlook). Even Blackberries don’t integrate directly – they need the separate (and expensive) Blackberry Enterprise Server.

If you are interested and have time, I’d recommend the 4-page read.

Chinese software developer CDC Corp said it filed with U.S. regulators to withdraw the planned initial public offering of its software arm, CDC Software, in view of the downturn in the U.S. stock market.

Doesn’t look like the last year has been that great for them. More finance info over at Google Finance.

“researchers found that workers who used instant messaging on the job reported less interruption than colleagues who did not.”

Which is absolutely amazing because it’s the exact opposite of conventional wisdom. I can’t even tell you how many people I’ve heard shoot down IM because it’s “more ways for people to interrupt me”.

Who’s deploying and feeding these guerrilla applications (often of dubious engineering quality and even more questionable security)? It’s the users in the business departments [gasps of horror] who are installing and driving adoption independent of IT sanction and governance. The business users are taking matters into their own hands in an effort to improve their productivity and remain competitive. They’re turning to easy-to-use and flexible tools like wikis, blogs, lightweight content-management systems, social bookmarking tools, and others that are often grouped under the category of Enterprise 2.0.

Are you running rogue applications at work to improve productivity? What are you using, and why doesn’t your IT department like it?

“It used to be that you used enterprise technology because you wanted uptime, security, and speed,” said Douglas Merrill, CIO of Google (Nasdaq: GOOG). “None of those things are as good in enterprise software anymore [as they are in some consumer software].” Some 15 years ago, enterprise technology was higher quality than consumer technology, he added. “That’s not true anymore.”

What higher-quality consumer technology would you like seen implemented in the enterprise?

Signal vs. Noise predicts that this is the “beginning of two-decades of mobile domination by Apple”

Daring Fireball is cautious, but insightful with “This doesn’t make the iPhone a BlackBerry killer, but the iPhone can do more BlackBerry-ish things than the BlackBerry can do iPhone-ish things.”

Andy Ihnatko sums it up with “Apple has carefully lined up a series of white porcelain plates at the far end of a shooting gallery. Each one is labeled with a known percentage of the marketplace that “can’t” buy an iPhone for specific technical reasons. Annnd… plink! plink! plink!… they’re knocking them all down.”

Me? I think any executive would rather have an iPhone over a Blackberry and that alone will seal the deal for their enterprise.

What do you think?