Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Dehumanization
I just read the abstract for an upcoming talk at work. One line spoke of the "vision of establishing and running a virtual business, a business in which most or all of its business functions are outsourced to online services". Wow! The complete commoditization and abstraction of human labor is at hand. Isn't that grand!
Others at my place of employment are working on everything from building nanoscale sensors that can be deployed anywhere and everywhere on the planet to the data extraction and analytics algorithms that will be necessary to process and act on - in realtime the terabyte streams of data those trillions of sensors will produce. I'm sure they'll put those to use in good, non-surveillance-type applications!
Maybe my "John Henry and the Steam Hammer" allusions are too much, and maybe "1984" had more impact on my thinking than it should have, but I can't help feel that I'm witnessing - and in my own small way, contributing to - the undoing of civilization, if not humanity.
How did I get so damn vested in such a system? How do I break free without becoming some dirt-eating hippie?
Others at my place of employment are working on everything from building nanoscale sensors that can be deployed anywhere and everywhere on the planet to the data extraction and analytics algorithms that will be necessary to process and act on - in realtime the terabyte streams of data those trillions of sensors will produce. I'm sure they'll put those to use in good, non-surveillance-type applications!
Maybe my "John Henry and the Steam Hammer" allusions are too much, and maybe "1984" had more impact on my thinking than it should have, but I can't help feel that I'm witnessing - and in my own small way, contributing to - the undoing of civilization, if not humanity.
How did I get so damn vested in such a system? How do I break free without becoming some dirt-eating hippie?
Friday, November 13, 2009
Man, Was I Feeling Emo When I Wrote This, or What?
I wrote this a little over 5 years ago:
A big aching crater
A bunker of despair
To know that it's my own
for no one else to share
A bleeding ulceration
A gash through soul and flesh
To know that it's my own
And is forever fresh
Everyone is hurting
as they twist the knife
Everyone is grasping
for a slice of life
It's my own creation
indeed of my design
To know that it's my own
this cancer of the mind
Deep and dank and lonely
The demon lurks within
To know that its my own
the consequence of sin
Everyone is hurting
as they twist the knife
Everyone is grasping
for a slice of life
A big aching crater
A bunker of despair
To know that it's my own
for no one else to share
A bleeding ulceration
A gash through soul and flesh
To know that it's my own
And is forever fresh
Everyone is hurting
as they twist the knife
Everyone is grasping
for a slice of life
It's my own creation
indeed of my design
To know that it's my own
this cancer of the mind
Deep and dank and lonely
The demon lurks within
To know that its my own
the consequence of sin
Everyone is hurting
as they twist the knife
Everyone is grasping
for a slice of life
Next Wave
Global labor arbitrage - finding ever cheaper sources of labor - has made a tremendous impact on the bottom lines of Fortune 500 companies, US workers, and workers in emerging markets with benefits coming to the first and last largely at the expense of the middle. (I know, Americans got cheap stuff to buy at Walmart as a result, but hey, when you factor in that they were mortgaging their homes to buy that crap, it doesn't look like such a great deal, huh?).
Anyway, the cigar chompers are running out of cheap (or rather, cheaper) labor sources, so what's the next stop in the drive to eliminate labor? (And don't kid yourself by thinking a) senior executives don't want to do just that or b) I'm 'white collar', not ~shudder!~ labor. They do and you are - unless you've got a 'nut' that wouldn't be exhausted by you or your children, even if you never worked another day in your life). The next stop is Automation. Why pay Indians or Bulgarians or Costa Ricans to run your data center when you can have the systems run themselves? Why pay analysts in the EU and the US to munge business processes and design improved systems when you can automatically capture and analyse user interactions with business apps and programatically generate design improvements? And once you know enough to improve a process and its supporting systems *automatically*, you can certainly begin to reduce the number of people it takes to actually *run* those processes while simultaneously improving output.
I'm talking about a John Henry and the Steam Hammer scenario here, but on a global scale. Only this time it will be massive declines in the demand for 'skilled' labor (though I wouldn't have told John Henry to his face that he was "unskilled"). And not just in the US, but globally. Factor in that a large percentage of the people who are displaced by either labor arbitrage or automation will no longer be "good consumers", and the pressure to improve the bottom line as the top line falls only increases.
All of this is going to have a tremendous impact on social and political stability, around the globe. Unemployed people are restless people. Are fearful people. And are often all-to-malleable in their thoughts and consequent actions.
Just sayin'.
Anyway, the cigar chompers are running out of cheap (or rather, cheaper) labor sources, so what's the next stop in the drive to eliminate labor? (And don't kid yourself by thinking a) senior executives don't want to do just that or b) I'm 'white collar', not ~shudder!~ labor. They do and you are - unless you've got a 'nut' that wouldn't be exhausted by you or your children, even if you never worked another day in your life). The next stop is Automation. Why pay Indians or Bulgarians or Costa Ricans to run your data center when you can have the systems run themselves? Why pay analysts in the EU and the US to munge business processes and design improved systems when you can automatically capture and analyse user interactions with business apps and programatically generate design improvements? And once you know enough to improve a process and its supporting systems *automatically*, you can certainly begin to reduce the number of people it takes to actually *run* those processes while simultaneously improving output.
I'm talking about a John Henry and the Steam Hammer scenario here, but on a global scale. Only this time it will be massive declines in the demand for 'skilled' labor (though I wouldn't have told John Henry to his face that he was "unskilled"). And not just in the US, but globally. Factor in that a large percentage of the people who are displaced by either labor arbitrage or automation will no longer be "good consumers", and the pressure to improve the bottom line as the top line falls only increases.
All of this is going to have a tremendous impact on social and political stability, around the globe. Unemployed people are restless people. Are fearful people. And are often all-to-malleable in their thoughts and consequent actions.
Just sayin'.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
More Learnings...
As I reflect on my last position, here are some things I would do differently:
- Don't let a desire for perfection kill your project schedules. Most of the time 80% is good enough, at least for a first release.
- Make sure service standards exceed expectations, but not by much. Pouring effort into providing a level of service that is unappreciated keeps you from aggressively pursuing new opportunities.
- Remember that fear is a poor long-term business driver. Said another way, being overly afraid of layoffs or budget cuts is a sure way to incur both.
- You can only do what you can do.
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