Sorry about the Java – I would love to see someone amazingly awesome do this using SVG maybe, or JS+Canvas. I would give that person a bottle of reasonably nice wine, in fact!

In other news: NSID continues on apace, and is getting delightfully scruffy! Join the revolution!  If you’ve quit, rejoin!  Who dares oppose?

As promised last week, I have now put my presentation slides for my talk at FIRST2008 online.  I’ve also put up a video I recorded of a dry-run through the slides, in case you want to experience the talk, and not just read it.

Slides (CC-BY-SA):

• PDF
• PDF with speaking notes
• Original Keynote Files

Video (CC-BY-SA):

• Quicktime .mov format (52M – recommendations for compression?)

Thanks again to Mike Shaver for helping me put these slides together, and to all the people who reviewed them ahead of time.  I really enjoyed this talk, and hope to give it again – as I’ve said many times before, we have learned a lot of lessons the hard way; we should be sharing that experience broadly, since we’re one of the few organizations that can.

I would love any edits or suggestions for the slides themselves, or my presentation of them.  I’ll also accept offers of exciting cash and prizes to give this talk at your campus/company/private island.

As a happy coincidence, it happens to be one of the articles they chose for free online distribution, so you can get a full copy of the text in PDF format, if you’re interested.

Kicking and Screaming: Modernizing Today’s Help Systems

Please note, we had no role in choosing the photo to accompany the article. What’s the deal there? Two small CRTs, and a television? With an optical wheel mouse? Aroo?

Also, while trumpeting, I wanted to mention to anyone visiting OSCON 2007 that I (or a person with a similar, but misspelled version of my name) will be giving a talk on Wednesday the 25th about Security UI in general, and Firefox 3 security UI in particular. It would be really keen if I had an audience! Astute readers will note that phrases like “rogues’ gallery” are outside of my normal lexicon. The description was written by Gerv who, in addition to being British and using phrases like “spend the readies” as though they have semantic content, was going to give the talk before I showed up, but graciously bowed out so that I could sink or swim on my own two feet, as it were.

[Photo Courtesy of Billy Brown]

There is a passage on page 25 that I have to relate because when I read it, it caused me to stop and to put the book down on my lap and to smile. It’s actually a footnote to page 25, where she’s talking about the distinction between working to express yourself and the world you see around you, and grinding to make money or notoriety in business. It reads:

They will be uncreative in business as well as in everything else. For of course the creative power is expressed in business as well as in other things. I know a business man whose every sentence has more life, creative vision and generosity in it than those of many artists.

But the trouble with business expressing the creative power freely and prodigally as Art does, you cannot be recklessly generous in business, giving higher and higher wages and all your products freely and lovingly to the public.

There are lots of times in history that I would love to visit. I often think (more often than I should, really) about going back and chatting with Newton, or Darwin, and talking with them about which things panned out and which ones didn’t and where we’ve gotten to since. But there is absolutely no time in which I would rather be living than this moment.

I work for a company that gives its products freely and lovingly to the public, and we’re not the only ones doing so. I wish Brenda were around to see it.

Ken Jennings just linked to my blog from his.

That is all.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

LCDs are still a good idea, but one can accomplish the same goals in a cheaper, lower maintenance, and much more analog way. What I have made instead is a coil-bound flip book with 14 standard messages I might find myself needing, plus three laminated blank pages at the end on which I can add messages with dry-erase markers. The whole thing is designed to fit in my glove compartment, and has forward and mirror-image versions of each message on facing pages so that cars in front of you can read it through their rear view mirror. Obviously the messages have to be kept short to maximize font size, but other than that, the sky’s the limit. In the hopes that someone other than I can see the value in such a book, I present:

Building your own Car Quips booklet

First off, if you want to go the easy route, just use mine. This PDF will print the 14 standard messages in both orientations. If you lack the materials at home, take it to any Kinko’s or print-shop-of-choice and tell them:

• Double sided print
• On heavyweight paper (I use 110lb card stock) for extra survivability and rigidity when holding it up
• Coil-, wire-, or spiral-bound (basically so that you can use it as a flip book)
• Cut to fit (the PDF is built for 8.5×11 paper, but the actual usable book is only 4.5″ tall or so, to ease glove compartment storage.

As I mentioned above, you might also ask them to bind in a couple of blank, laminated sheets at the back for custom messages. This entire job should take less than 15 minutes for a print shop and should cost less than $10.

If you want to go custom (I kept cussin’ out of my messages, for example. Other drivers may be… inclined differently) you can download my source material here. Basically my process (probably needlessly complex was):

• Produce originals of each message in Adobe Illustrator
• Save PDF versions of each orientation (for each message)
• Use Acrobat to assemble the whole thing into a single printable with proper formatting and ordering

The copyright assertions in the original PDF should not be taken as restrictions – these are short English sentences we’re talking about here, so please feel invited to remix it all under a creative commons license. I would love to see the message set evolve, for example, so if you do produce your own, a comment or trackback here would be great.

I suspect people are a little puzzled to see the driver next to them holding up a printed sign telling them their tire is flat, but to me it’s such an obvious idea I can’t believe it’s not already for sale in every auto parts store. Except why buy it when you can make it, and make it your own?

The rest of this post will be dedicated to reprinting an email exchange I just had with a DDJ reader in the States, in anticipation of the fact that he might not be the only person to ask his particular question. Future respondents can thus be directed here, saving the tubes literal hojillions of electrons. [Editor's note: Firefox 2's sexy new spellcheck doesn't like the word hojillions and recommends, instead, "gazillions." I love you Firefox. Pat, pat.]

AC wrote (name changed because I haven’t asked permission):

Hi,

Just read your article in DDJ about green threads, and would like to see about trying it out sometime … except – you never showed an example of one in your article, so I don’t actually know what one looks like (ergo can’t try it out).

Is there any chance you could share a (generic) one so I can at least see what it contains, how it is structured, etc?

many thanks,
[AC]

My reply (as usual, much longer than the question it answers):

Hi [AC],

Thanks for the note. I’m glad the article at least got you interested enough to want to engage in the process, and I apologize for not including an example. DDJ caps my word count, and IBM’s lawyers would probably cap my ability to disclose any of our internal threads since we view our focus on integration as something of a competitive distinguisher. All of which I think you neatly anticipated with your parenthetical “(generic)”.

As I mention in the article, the first time a green thread appears in print, before all the elaboration work is done, is on a powerpoint slide, and that’s really as much as it takes to express it, at the highest level. The key is to ensure that a) you’ve spoken with all the key stakeholders, most particularly (though not exclusively) your customers, so that you know you have the right focus to begin with, and b) that you are considering the entire end to end task flow. With that in mind, we could develop examples from other parts of business that IBM has no direct stake in.

Take, for instance, buying a car. If I were the CTO of an auto company, and I was interested in applying green threads to my technology base, I would first start with the key scenarios. We’re in the business of selling cars. Let’s imagine that our analysis indicates that a key flow for us to optimize is the first time buyer experience. Being first time buyers they have no brand loyalty and they have no existing information within our databases. They are also probably the most likely to walk away if the purchasing process takes too long, or if too much legwork is required. So the first step, identifying the green thread, might look something like:

First Time Buyer
Understand and look for process improvements in the IT flow for a first time buyer, from the time they first sit down with a sales agent to the time they drive a new car off the lot.

This simplicity is deceptive because, as I describe in the article, the next step is to engage all the owners/architects of the various IT systems and actually walk through the process. I imagine (IBM has relationships with various auto manufacturers but this is just my own imagination speaking here) that they have ERP systems for inventory tracking and manufacturing requests, CRM systems for managing customer profile information, as well as half a dozen sundry systems to do with warranty tracking and other administrative details. They likely also have systems for interacting with government agencies around licensing and pollution controls, and systems for interacting with credit bureaus and financing services. Exploding out the process for this green thread may take, as I mentioned, hundreds of pages. It’s probably also the first time that the owners of these systems have ever had a chance to really speak to one another about the way their systems are used together.

What happens as an automatic result of this process (the CTO or the green threads team can act as facilitators and note takers throughout, but the people tend to start talking on their own once they see how the process works) is that the technology owners start to understand their business context better, and they also start to quickly identify the pain points that are inevitably the result of this many disparate systems, e.g.:

• Why do three of our systems use Driver’s License Number as the unique ID, but two use SSN? If we asked for that information on the first piece of paper, we wouldn’t have to force them to fill it all out a second time on the second piece of paper.
• Why do we enter in custom manufacturing requests (model, colour, trim package, options) into a web based portal only to find out that some clerk at the head office manually picks up the phone for each request and calls the order in to the appropriate plant, each of which has a different request process?
• …

Obviously focus is key so that you don’t attempt to solve all problems under the auspices of one green thread; even my manufacturing request example above might be over-reaching – there might be a separate green thread devoted to custom manufacture if it’s suitably robust as a process.

Obviously too, this example is superficial since it’s the result of an email worth of speculation about another industry, not the distilled result of consultation with subject matter experts. Furthermore, I chose an example which isn’t actually a software development company, though to be fair, most large enterprises end up housing miniature software development companies within their offices to handle bespoke development wherever it is needed.

I hope the example wasn’t so superficial as to lose the meaning; please let me know if I’ve muddied, rather than clarified, the waters. Thanks again for your interest.

Cheers,

Johnathan

PS – As I should hope it goes without saying, everything here represents my own viewpoint and does not necessarily reflect that of my employer. I’ve clearly been hanging around lawyers too much lately.