Mike Schubert

When you have a 14 hour drive, all sorts of random and sometimes deep thoughts cross your mind.

Wind farms don't seem to be ugly. I've always heard that the aesthetic aspects are what makes them undesirable. I seem to recall an effort to put them on Martha's Vineyard some years ago and the Kennedy family saying that they are great as long as they can't see them. So much for being a friend of the green environment. There were several such installations in Northern Illinois and they broke up the corn nicely. I tried to get a picture, but every time I snapped one with my iPhone a mound of corn stalks rose up and blocked the view.

Speaking of corn - Holy Corn, Batman! What on earth do we do with all this corn? For HOURS it was just corn fields as far as the eye could see. I thought we were paying farmers NOT to plant this stuff. I have heard of government cheese (aka gument cheese), I wonder if there is government corn? I did notice signs encouraging the development of motors that could run entirely on corn ethanol (if that's what it's called).

Speaking of signs, I guess having frontage on an interstate highway is akin to having a broadcast radio frequency. There were many messages along the way. There appears to be a call for alcohol reform in Wisconsin (probably those pesky college kids causing problems). There are also some folks who want to carry concealed weapons. Their signs read: When you outlaw concealed carry <next sign> Only outlaws will carry concealed <next sign> Guns Save Lives. 

Speaking of lives, I have compassion for people who have lost loved ones prematurely due to accidents. BUT, what's up with all the road-side memorials? This is what cemetaries are for, people! This activity causes two problems. First, the memorials themselves can be very distracting. Pile up a bunch of balloons, flowers, and teddy bears and everyone will ogle assuming that a child lost his life. Second, the people setting these up are stopping on the highway and creating obstacles. At one time I heard a proposal that would set up periodic memorial stops for families who lost someone between miles x and y. Sort of like a rest area but for grieving. Weird.

Speaking of weird, who names fireworks stands? Has there been market research to indicate that I want to buy fireworks from Crazy Eddie? I think I would rather purchase my explosives from someone named Cautious Carl, but maybe that's just me. One thing I did notice was that you don't see any Four-Finger Freddie's fireworks stands. 

That's about it for now. Off to get in an open water swim in Lake Monona!

2009 has been a much different year than 1999 was.

Microsoft is working with Intuit to help develop a file conversion process that will help Money customers more easily convert their existing data files to Quicken. Both Intuit and Microsoft hope this will be ready to go for the new release of Quicken this fall.

I never thought I would see that coming. Money management seems to be as equally pervasive as the need for the Office suite. Perhaps even moreso.

Read More -> Microsoft Discontinues Money Programs

This woman kills two cyclists while driving under the influence of morphine and barbituates, after shoplifting at the local Safeway. She gets 3 years in jail. WTF? I am beside myself right now. She had a summons to appear for a hit-and-run incident she was involved in two years before.

Thomas struck and killed the men at S. 26th Street, minutes after leaving the West Colorado Avenue Safeway. Police said she had been shoplifting and banged into a man's car in the parking lot before driving off. The man followed her and saw her hit the bicyclists as she tried to turn left onto Westend Avenue -- without yielding to oncoming traffic -- in her 1986 Ford F-350. Police found her speech slurred and her eyes bloodshot, according to an arrest affidavit.

Read for yourself -> Woman gets 3 years in death of bicyclists

During a recent software launch, we added a screen that presents an updated technology agreement and put accept/decline buttons on it. After you decline a certain number of times, your manager starts to get an email. The agreement is not actually optional - all users must accept it just like they must accept the email policy, the technology usage policy, etc. By displaying a "decline" button, we inadvertently made it appear optional.

Perhaps we should have given them a "Defer" button and allow them some number of grace logins before they had to accept. This would've given them time to print out the agreement and review it so they understood what they were reading. However, just like the shirnk wrapped EULAs that come with software, this agreement is mandatory and should have been positioned as such.

Today's Best of Mike post comes from September 20, 2005. I recently flashed back to this post following the Connections launch. We had an existing "white pages" search at McKesson, but Profiles was to be that and more. After we launched, we got reports of certain things not working, including the ability to search on a person's user id. Neither I nor the business side PM was aware of that capability, so when we were verifying that the people search capabilities preserved existing functionality, we did not consider this use case. Hopefully we now have the best blend of new functionality and desired existing functionality.   

It Needs To Do What It Does Today

Mark Cuban had a post recently about doing things simply because that's the way things have always been done. I've been thinking a lot about some of the project kickoff and requirements meetings I have had for system upgrades over the years and one of the phrases that has always stuck out at me is "It needs to do what it does today."

Exactly what is that? In some cases, companies are able to produce documentation that shows the intentionality of a system from its conception all the way through every feature change and bug fix report. That is really the exception, though. Even as a system expert for many systems, I'm not entirely sure what some of these things "do today." My exposure to them as a software architect is generally in terms of what they don't do today or, more precisely, what they don't do well today.

Companies of all sizes would be best advised to assign software owners within their business units. The knee-jerk reaction to that is to say that IT needs to own it. IT should only own the plumbing, though. Things like the hardware (PCs, servers, network, switches, etc) and commodity software (productivity suite , email, operating system, etc). If the finance dept. decides to use T-Value, one of its members should become an expert with it, field questions from co-workers about it, and act as a liaison with the company that wrote it if problems arise. If the accounting department requests a custom reporting facility be built on top of their JD Edwards implementation, someone within accounting should be appointed system owner and be responsible for making sure the requirements are understood by all parties, the product developed is properly tested, and users are trained. They should know the system and have documentation of what it is supposed to do. System owners should also have someone to back them up in case they win the lottery or otherwise leave the company.

I see a future where the IT department isn't a silo sitting off on the horizon. In particular, I see developers within departments other than IT. They undoubtedly still report to Software Development Managers and up the chain within the IT department, but the organization chart will probably start to show dotted lines across to another department as well. Bringing a sense of system ownership within other departments is the first step towards bridging the gap between the geeks and those that run the business. And isn't system ownership what the American Dream is all about?

As for my response to people who say "well, it needs to do what it does today" ... "Great - we're already finished."