However, the ‘new trend’ of allowing users actually provide feedback into the products that they are using has produced a professorship at MIT and been mentioned in the New York Times ::sigh::  IMHO, this is simply the realization that ignoring people is less effective than communicating with them, and less effective means less profitable.  I think the technology world should be embarassed that it is so disfunctional that this is at all new or interesting enough to study.

On a similar note, Ben Stein has some interesting thoughts about how to have a business conversation.  If you plan on doing anything other than pure solo work for the rest of your life it is mandatory reading.  Interestingly, it seems that the best conversationalists are the ones who are the most considerate and do the most listening.  Sounds like organizations might want to focus on having an actual conversation with their customers …

Recently, ran across DBPedia, an organization that is turning Wikipedia entries into RDF, the language used for the semantic web. DBPedia has actually has downloadable datasets based on Wikipedia that are available today. These are datasets that can be queried with existing tools and linked to other datasets. Wow!

Even if you aren’t a Wikipedia fan, this is really a big step forward for the enterprise. Think about the amount of knowledge that exists in your organization that isn’t captured, but is critical to your operations. It has always been a big pain to try and sit down and do formal knowledge engineering. However, most people are comfortable enough with a Wiki to sit down and start typing. For a small organization this might not be such a big deal, but for a larger enterprise this could provide some very useful information.

The first time your Director or CXO can make a financial decision based exclusively on the information from your company wiki, it will have proved its worth. Until then, it is just another trendy tool. The work that DBPedia is doing is an important step in making this a reality.

Most interesting to me was their grid service, which provides an on-demand capability for web hosting that allows a site to handle the slashdot effect without having to blink an eye. Sites (and their corresponding media and applications) are running on multiple servers, which allows traffic to be spread out seamlessly, allowing for spikes in service and usage. This is all done without significant additional configuration, which makes it all the more sweet.

Now, they have had some problems, especially with non-grid oriented applications. However, I think that these are pretty minor compared to the utility that high-performance sites will get from using a grid environment.

Absolutely worth a look …

Basically, when you are using EC2, everything on your server that isn’t statically defined before the machine runs goes bye-bye as soon as the machine reboots. Not a real problem for software, but for data this is a major bummer. Amazon makes S3 storage available without data transfer fees, which is wonderful. However, it takes real effort to transfer data back and forth between the systems (with something like jsh3ll), and most data-centric tools (especially database servers) expect real-time access to a working file system.

S3Infinidisk bridges this gap, allowing an EC2 instance to use S3 like a real Linux filesystem. While it is a bit of hack, it allows data tools to work the way they need to and it allows an EC2 instance to take full advantage of the AWS environment. This is a huge step forward in making EC2 a more usable environment for utility computing!

I haven’t had a chance to try the product out yet, but am excited to do so. I appreciate the licensing structure (free single-user version + commercial high-performance version), although I would prefer seeing open source. Also, since the tool is based on the FUSE subsystem, I could easily see this spreading like wildfire.

One thing I appreciated in the article was its realistic tone, which recognized the existence of shadow systems and the role that they play in the real world. While the article focused on spreadsheets, this doesn’t mean that they are bad and that centralized CRM is good (as a matter of fact I might argue the opposite in many cases). The real issue being discussed is the risk that occurs when information architecture doesn’t match the needs of the organization.

Looking Globally

For many low-importance, one-off operations, a spreadsheets is fine. It can be shared easily, and usually owned by one person. However, what normally happens is that someone sharp (and usually not someone in IT) decides to do try to build some infrastructure around a spreadsheet without considering the consequences. It is quick, cheap, and easy to do, to a point. The problem is that the point when a spreadsheet becomes unmanageable is often well after the point where an organization depends on its output to function effectively.

For any system, an information architect needs to consider:

• Cost
• Effectiveness
• Visibility
• Traceability
• Mangageability
• Quality
• Auditability

Furthermore, the situation needs to be considered from a forward-thinking perspective. That is, we need to try to understand how the landscape is going to look a few years down the road, and to make our systems flexible enough so that we don’t put our organization into a bind if we are wrong.

Spreadsheets are normally built only considering cost and effectiveness, something that is only discovered after time has gone on. It is often the case that a system would be much more effective living in a database, BI tool, or custom software application when considered over time.