Mike Schubert

Those of you working for smaller, private companies may not have been exposed to the vernacular I am about to rant about. The same may hold true for government employees. But for whatever reason, when you get into a company with 10,000+ employees with shareholders, etc. you end up speaking a different language. A new website, Unsuck-It has come to the rescue to help you decipher these words and phrases so that you will understand what the person is REALLY trying to say. Here are a few examples:

Drink the Kool-Aid - Meaning to follow blindly. I assume the origin from this was the Hale-Bopp comet people that all drank poisoned Kool-Aid thinking they were going to join aliens on the tail of the comet. If nothing else, they left quite the legacy on corporate America.  Update: Drew corrects me via comments that "but the origin is from the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978 when Jim Jones convinced his followers to drink poisoned Kool-Aid."

Disambiguate - doesn't clarify sound so much better? I actually used this word in a meeting yesterday to poke at someone else's overuse of flowery language.

Operationalize - make it work. Could you imagine if management actually said you need to make something work? That would sound like they had a product that didn't work. Hmm....

Social Media Strategy - Hahahaha. Defined as "Typing into text areas." So true. I'm reminded of our social media guidelines at work, and the minor uproar they caused.

And my favorite: Ping Me - I recently said this to someone and haven't heard from her since. Coincidence? Further proof that you should avoid corporate speak in all of your conversations with non-co-workers. Check out Unsuck-It and see what words and phrases you should be avoiding.

I have spent a lot of time over the past year (really over the last 20 years) looking at the keys to success and failure that have been experienced by certain technologies and platforms. Many product organizations take a kitchen sink approach to delivering features in their product. This can lead to a "jack of all trades, master of none" perception in the marketplace. It can also confuse users as to exactly a product should do. On the flip side, you have groups that release products that seem to be incomplete.

Right now I am a fan of Apple and its approach over the past decade to personal electronics. They seem to have taken the approach of delivering a chunk of value, letting people adjust to it, and then have the customers say "it would be really nice if this thing did x."  iPhone OS 3 gave us the ability to cut / copy / paste. This function point has been ubiquitous in computing for the past 2 decades, and yet Apple decided not to include it in the original release. The same is true with multitasking - even the Palm platform in the mid 90's allowed a form of multi-tasking (such as it was) and yet Apple it's waiting to the 4th generation of it's OS to make it available.

When you first look at this, you may think "Gee, they just wanted to lock in a monetary stream of upgrades." But if you think further, they have really been delivering fully baked features at the time they really become needed. When the iPhone app store first opened, there weren't enough apps with functionality that would make you want to multitask. Who knew how quickly apps would catch on that people would want to copy / paste? Apple has done a great job of delivering features at a pace that allows the ecosystem to adjust, and the customers to understand how to use it.

Hopefully, on the next generation of our intranet platform, we can duplicate this success. For now, I'm calling it reductive feature design and I think that it can be viewed through the lens of technical and organizational readiness. If either of those two factors truly aren't ready to introduce the feature, it should be removed from the version stream and placed into the backlog. Now to pitch it to the rest of the folks and see if it flies...

I am joining a project at work that will revamp our intranet architecture and allow us to continue to bring innovative and cutting edge capabilities to our workforce. One of the issues that we've seen over the past few years had been that rich applications that have integrated with our portal have been too tightly integrated. In several cases, they have the capability to hog resources or even take a server offline due to a catastrophic fault. This is one of the areas that we want to prevent in the future and are working with our partners to articulate this desire.

This week, one of those partners was in town to talk through our needs and the analogy I came up with was that "Farmville should not take down Facebook". That is to say the Facebook is an application platform that provides base services (demographics, content, wall updates, etc) to applications that can then use them to do interesting* things. This is similar to a corporate intranet that knows who a user is, what permissions they have, and what their demographic information is and then exposes those to applications and portlets based on their permission. In my current environment, there are some of these constituent applications that use the same resource sets as the portal platform and thus, they could negatively impact the performance of the intranet. In V.Next this should not be the case.

*Pre-emptive snarky comment: I do not consider Farmville or any of those games to be "interesting things". In fact, I've never played a Facebook game. It's merely illustrative of the type of Platform as a Service (PaaS) model that we are striving for.

Engaging your customer in a conversation via the Internet is great approach for companies to take when they are trying to raise awareness of their product and build a sense of community. Competitor runs a print magazine division and is also the parent of the Rock N Roll Marathon and 1/2 Marathon series. The race series has a presence both on Twitter (@rocknroll) and it seems many of their races have a fan page on Facebook. The marathon that I filed my 2010 Country Music Marathon Race Report on yesterday has its own Facebook page. I am sure when these outlets were set up, the content owner was thinking how great it would be and everyone could stir each other into a frenzy and increase signups.

Flash back momentarily to the days before 2004. This company and these events would have their own websites to broadcast information and might have forums where people could post comments. These facilities would be provided by the company, be hosted on the company's servers, and the tone of the content would undoubtedly be monitored and if need be censored by the company. With Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets - this level of control is gone. Given the lack of planning I described yesterday, I'm willing to bet no one at the Rock N Roll series planned for what would happen if the masses turned on them.

Seemingly, that is what has happened. There is little official comment on the Country Music Marathon race site. The results page, which did have open comments going, has had the comments purged and ability to comment closed. But there is no closing Facebook and twitter. Here's a quick sample of what people are saying on the Country Music Marathon and 1/2 Marathon Facebook page:

David Threm writes, "$100 for race entry 800 miles driven, $160 on gas $175 for hotel Being diverted at mile 21 in a slight storm and having finishers complete hours after I (any many others) would have, plus; no decent communication from race officials PRICELESS!!!".

Mark Wagstaff shares my sentiments when he states, "Still upset. Still feel cheated. 20.5 miles only feels like 1/2 a marathon. It is the last 6 miles that is the difference between a marathon and a training run.".

Amy Cox sums it up soup to nuts in her statement that "What a terrible experience. Traffic getting to the race was a nightmare, and I say this even though I live in Atlanta. Even though I only ran the half marathon, I attended the event with a friend who was running the full. It was announced that because of the weather, anyone not on time to finish the marathon in 4 ½ hours would be diverted at the 11.2 mile split. Why then was he diverted at the 21.5 mile mark? And the race was started 15 minutes early with no notification? And it was hours before we could get out of parking lot N after the race. We were only able to get out when we did because a private citizen took it upon himself to stand in the rain and direct traffic. There were plenty of police officers around bu t they certainly weren’t directing traffic.I will not attend any more of the Rock 'n' Roll Marathon Series events.".

And Jim Toel really sums up the root cause of this problem as communication. "I too was pulled off at 21 miles and I am very disappointed. More so that I have not heard or read any official comment or press release from the CMM people on how they intend to handle us. I understand I did not run a full marathon but I did not run a 1/2 either..... Unlike my official posted finishing time on the website. I really wish they would tell us what we should do!!!!!!"

We marathoners are a rare breed and a tight group. We're crazy. And we're also forgiving. At the end of the day, we just want acknowledgement and to know that we are heard. It's a cliche, but after 48 hours of nothing official from race organizers, the silence has become deafening.

Clearly this is a public relations nightmare for an organization that wants to continue to bring in race entries and sponsors. How will they respond? We'll have to wait and see. As I alluded to yesterday, most participants did the half marathon and thus were not affected. Even the ones still on the course 1 hour after I was pulled off (yes, I could've covered that 10k in about an hour). I am anxious to see their response and how this race is handled in the future.

One of my missions in developing web applications for a Fortune 15 company is to emulate the dominant design of well known internet applications when designing new functionality for inside the company. I occasionally am beat up for not doing this. One recent example was an RSS reader portlet. The goal was to provide people with a customizable portlet on the McKNet homepage that would allow them to subscribe to various feeds within the company and see the 3-5 most recent updates for those feeds. When my management team saw the proposed product, they questioned why it didn't look and work like Google Reader. I tried not to laugh - you might imagine that it comes down to money. This was one function point out of 8 proposed in a quarterly maintenance release that was being worked on full time by a single programmer. I don't know for sure, but I'd say that Google Reader took someone more than a week to develop.

One of the things I've been involved with lately is establishing "maintenance" pages for each of our applications. These maintenance pages are just meant to say "sorry - we've got some planned maintenance going on, here are some links to other content that you may be looking for that is not currently impacted by our maintenance." Finding examples of dominant design for this are a little more difficult, since you have to find either a reputable site that is under maintenance or read a blog post about it. Today, I tried to go to My Cigna based on some mail I received yesterday and found they were under maintenance. Perfect! Here's a screenshot of what I saw:

This gives me a good idea, but also points out the pitfall. The idea? Let them know when the maintenance window is planned to end. In this case, it says "The site will return at approximately 12:00pm on Sunday, March 28th.". The down side is that you have to keep up with the page and make sure that it reflects an accurate date and time. You'll see I included the status bar from Windows to show that today is April 18th - 3 weeks after the above referenced date.  So now that I think about it, this isn't the greatest of examples. Guess I'll have to keep fishing for a dominant design of under maintenance pages.