Cultural Differences

In a previous post, I referenced a book that said all problems are social and not technical. This article describes a study that goes into this topic in more detail. Cultural differences cause offshoring problems. Still more later.

Outsource Contracts - Large Adjustment Costs
SDA Asia Magazine - I think this quote (while focused on contract negotiations) says volumes about a the how short sighted some businesses (not all) can be:

Many buyers of outsourced services are approaching the contract negotiation process without a full understanding of the issues that negatively impact their bottom lines

'Nuff said?

Nothing to Do with Outsourcing...

Everything to do with the demise of the Developer Tools market and potentially commercial software in general..... I've always had a fondness for Borland's products and hence Borland as a company. However, I've often wondered how they manage to stay in business.

I went to Comdex in 1994 which at the time was the show in the industry -- Windows '95 was unveiled there, and who could forget OS2 v3.0? Anyway, if you were a vendor this was the place to be. The conference was huge. It took me until the 2nd to last day of the show to get the Borland booth on my agenda. When I got there, the place was completely empty. I asked the neighboring vendors and the response was, "they went home".

For at least the 2nd time in the history, Borland is walking away from developer tools:

Borland will reduce its workforce by approximately 300 employees, or about 20 percent of its regular full-time staff. The majority of staff reductions will come from the re-scoping of Borland's international operations. Upon completion of the workforce reduction, geographic consolidation, and planned divestiture of its Developer Tools Group (announced February 8), Borland anticipates annualized cost savings of approximately $60 million.

A followup conversation ensued about what happened to JBuilder that shows where developer tools are heading (or are already there).

Lately, Eclipse, an open source platform/IDE that is modular and highly extensible, has been taking over. Borland was one of the founding members of the Eclipse Foundation. In February of 2005, Borland significantly increased its support of the Eclipse platform and joined its board of directors as a strategic developer [1].

In the first half of 2006, Borland will move to Eclipse as the underlying integration platform for JBuilder. Similar to IBM's Rational Software Architect built on top of Eclipse with a lot (14 CDs) of IBM content, Borland will add value at a higher level (creating Eclipse plug-in modules for modeling, visualization, team collaboration, etc) in its JBuilder.

Call me "Mr. Abstraction"

This article generated a lively discussion at my work few months back. Since I am a Software Development Manager, one of my employees passed it along. The Development Abstraction Layer - Joel on Software. The thing he wanted me to take home was:

With a software company, the first priority of management needs to be creating that abstraction for the programmers.

He took it one step further, and told me it should be my only priority. I already knew this employee felt that way, this got me thinking that possibly all tech employees feel that way about their boss. How about you?

As you know from recent posts, if I am an abstraction layer, I must now abstract across the Atlantic. This presents both challenges and opportunities. More later.

Blogging Agile-ly

Recently I made the commitment to myself to blog a bit more. I've found/renewed habits for me to this more often while still earning a paycheck. One of the folks I read regularly and blogged on "Organizational Trust" was Brad Appleton. This post caught my eye. Brad Appleton's ACME Blog: Creating Globally Competitive Software, especially the book reference and the following, " everything is interdependent and is usually social, not technical."

Dude, What’s up with Sweden?
A few of you wrote wondering what I was doing in Sweden. No, it’s not a new job, just a twist to the old one. My company merged with a Swedish company. I now have a virtual group that includes people in both St. Paul, MNand Linkoping, Sweden. This was the “kick off” get to know you" trip to figure out the work before the Swedish team goes on summer vacation – for about six weeks. Nice cultural tradition that we Americans will need to learn.

The Triple Convergence
In my last post I said that I had several “convergence” moments. What did I mean by that? In Friedman’s book, “The World is Flat”, he describes the “triple convergence”:

1. The coming together of collaboration technology
2. People’s ability to apply it to change work and life behaviors
3. Along with 300 million new people doing #2 just in developing nations.

My triple convergence was that I was in a foreign country and not able to speak the language, reading an article that said, “there’s this thing called internet”, and programmers in Germany (the company was SAP) were just figuring that employment in Germany was not growing but growing in the Far East. While the first was my weakness, the other two seem so blatantly obvious that I could not believe they would even need mention in a major newspaper like the Financial Times. How was it that so many folks have missed the obvious?

Friedman describes what he calls “the other triple convergence” Those three are:

1. Equating the “dot-com” bust with the end of globalization.
2. 9/11 -- We were concerned about our security, and this is not a time when you “open-up” the borders of your thinking.
3. The 2004 presidential election – Thinking back (and reading many of my posts here), while I tried to be objective about this subject, I do remember thinking this was a political issue.

If there is one thing I take away from reading Friedman's book, it's while globalization affects politics, no amount of politicking will slow the need to respond (and quickly) to what globalization will do to our life, work, and politics.