Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 17:01:50 -0700
Mr. Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496
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Subject:
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SDS and market research
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Rod,
[Responding to your email
citing comments
in SDS....]
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I do not intend to imply that SDS should adopt *anything* just because it is
cool or popular.
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I do want to stress, though that just because something like email allows fools
to be even more foolish doesn't mean that there are not elements that it does
address that do in fact reflect real needs.
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One aspect of SDS for example is that it is not necessary to start from scratch
with the entire list of possible things to do today in order to determine what
is important - that is cared for by remembering past decisions in selecting
follow-up dates and things of that sort.
..
Something like a Wiki, for example is much more useful if it is possible to
determine automatically when there has been activity in an area that is of
interest rather than having to review the entire structure every day. This can
be achieved with an appropriate search and sort rather than email, but the
ability to have a system inform you of actions or conditions of interest is a
worthwhile feature, regardless of the fact that it is on aspect of email that
makes it popular, even though this very feature is abused.
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Consider something like the instant outlining that Dave Weiner built (as
reported by Jon Udell
http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a//webservices/2002/04/01/outlining.html
...) and in several messages on the OHS-DEV group.
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I would never suggest that SDS should do this just because it sounds neat.
However the basic notion of being able to share different parts of a record
with different specific individuals for purposes of collaboration is an idea
that should not be discarded just because it originated in a technology which
is otherwise not of interest.
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[Quoting a major portion of
Rod's letter
earlier today...
-----Original Message-----
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From:
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Rod Welch [mailto:rowelch@attglobal.net]
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Sunday, June 16, 2002 11:59 AM
Garold (Gary) L. Johnson
Harrow, Stuart; Jones, Morris E.; Blodgett, Max R
SDS and market research
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Gary,
Just a couple of comments on your excellent letter today.
Identifying features that users "appreciate" (also "care about") has
short and long term components.
Email has a lot of features people like in the short term, i.e., out
of the box: it is free, fast and easy, and brings reminders. Morris,
Jack and Eric have mentioned these features that people "appreciate"
for "easy diggings" that bring an abundance of fools gold.
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SDS has features that some people may appreciate "out-of-the-box":
integrated schedule and diary with doc log and contacts that provide
natural organization, flexible, organic structure, ability to find
things quickly and present the record showing chronology of cause and
effect. The marketing challenge is delivering these features that
people can fairly readily grasp in a form that can be used long enough
to discover the long-term benefits of knowledge that overcome
long-term harm caused by short-term benefits of email for generating
information that mask the need for investing time for working
intelligently.
..
It is fairly fast and easy to grab email and incorporate it into SDS
in the manner you indicate today, by linking things up to related
context of history, objectives, requirements and commitments, as you
see in SDS records.
The thing that is time consuming is investigating and creating organic
structure that increases understanding, expands span of attention and
enables immediate retrieval, as Jack and Eric have noted previously.
The marketing challenge is that most people don't place a big value on
understanding by expanding span of attention until the "horse is out
of the barn." When a mistake occurs, then Murphy's Law is blamed and
people wonder why the government doesn't do something? In other words,
even when problems occur, people don't realize the cause is lack of
understanding due to limited span of attention, because the error
usually occurred in the distant past by people far removed from on the
scene where the problem boiled up, blah, blah, blah, see POIMS and
NWO.
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There is another major aspect of any tool, and SDS more so than most,
that I keep stressing from my experience - people need to want the benefits
that the proper use of the tool and associated techniques could provide.
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In the environment where I work, for example, there is no interest in
doing anything at all that you and I would call "good management". Some of this
is due to ignorance, some of it is dues to perceived lack of time, and some of
it is simply because the sloppy way things are handled suits management
purposes very well.
..
We are on a "cost plus" contract, and we are the most likely candidates
for the follow-on sustaining and maintenance contracts. Therefore, the
self-interest of the corporation is to make the effort last as long and cost as
much as possible, while producing something that no other group can be expected
to handle. As difficult as it is to credit, the management and the organization
has next to no interest in producing requirements documents that are any better
than is necessary for them to get paid for the work and to be able to continue
doing more of the same.
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I have repeatedly demonstrated problems with the documents, and with the
processes used to create them and have been ignored at every turn. I have
actually been told that getting the documents right is not a priority, but
betting them done is. Don't ask me how they can be considered *done* if they
are not *right* - I have no idea, but that is the fact, none-the-less.
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[Quoting a major portion of
Rod's letter
earlier today...
The good news on organic structure is that, for many situations, this,
too, can be fast and easy, once set up. An example is the FAR
requirements examined on 020504...
..
http://www.welchco.com/sd/08/00101/02/02/05/04/095827.HTM#0001
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Did Stuart complete the review mentioned in...
http://www.welchco.com/sd/08/00101/02/02/04/15/095536.HTM#5Q4L ?
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I absolutely agree that SDS could help manage government contracts.
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Much of the problem, however, lies in the way such contracts are structured in
the first place. So long as getting the work correct is not a defining part of
the contract, nothing much else matters.
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Clearly the use of organic structure is important for any approach that
attempts to do anything with information that people wish to organize.
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Topic Maps and Ontologies are examples of areas of work that I don't think that
SDS should take over as a methodology, but neither should it ignore what has
been discovered in these areas that is of interest. Just because Topic Maps are
currently dealt with mostly in XML doesn't mean that there aren't useful ideas
to be extracted for allowing people to manipulate organic structure in more
ways than we now support.
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[Quoting a major portion of
Rod's letter
earlier today...
People have spent several hundred years working out a useful knowledge
structure, and so applying it with SDS is just a matter of setup.
Takes a day or two, then folks are off and running. The same thing
occurs with building a car, a space ship or an office building,
bridge, etc., where there are plans and specs that guide performance.
Medical care is another good example of using SDS because the human
body has a set organic structure. You are familiar with the SRS
example from work at Boeing. In theory, you create and SRS and there
is a WBS, a set of accounts for budget and schedule; this kind of
thing make life a lot easier for SDS.
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Where time is a killer is stuff like what comes in on OHS/DKR where a
lot of random discussion is not tied to anything. SDS is designed to
manage this stuff, but it takes time to cover the full range of
issues, because there is no anchor, rather the anchor is constantly
being created in a many directions with multiple threads. Using SDS
for this purpose helps the mind find things and assemble things in
multiple views, but, like tending a garden, the cognitive overhead is
constant.
..
One day, there will be experts, consultants, maybe an entire
profession to create organic structures for particular subjects that
can just be popped into SDS, so that busy people can simply press the
reply button in email. Maybe we should be thinking about providing
with a commercial version of SDS some organic structure templates for
particular industries.
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I agree. I look at this sort of thing in much the same way as work that
has been done for programming in what are called "refactoring browsers".
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A refactoring browser is an enhancement to a source code editor that
makes it easy to collect and reorganize code so that it is better structured
than the structure that "just grew". The tool supports the use of specific
transformations that preserve code meaning while modifying its structure.
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This is the sort of relationship that I see as valuable to a user of SDS.
This would allow saving some incoming record (document, email, proposal, etc)
in an addressable form (similar in intent to "purple numbers") and then easily
add commentary to various SDS records (threads, whatever) that provide links
into the document tying it to the organic structure within SDS. This is an
attempt to get at the meaning contained within documents that weren't well
organized or didn't take the record into account.
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[Quoting a major portion of
Rod's letter
earlier today...
Another challenge with market research is that most people asked in a
controlled setting if they would tend the garden of knowledge in order
to save time and money would say "yes," because that is the
appropriate answer. But once on the job a thousand pressures drive
most people to just press the reply button, as Jack reports on 010908,
rather than perform the 8 steps for using SDS reported on 001219....
..
http://www.welchco.com/sd/08/00101/02/00/12/19/071408.HTM#4W4L
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Clearly the approach of anything, market research specifically included, of
asking people whether they would use a tool that facilitates there use of
procedures and concepts of which they are ignorant is foolish. When the FAX
machine was first introduced by FedEx, nobody could understand why they
should want to send a letter faster then overnight, and the idea never took
root. Once people found that they had reason to send letters faster than
overnight, FAX machines showed up everywhere and soon you couldn't be in
business if you didn't have them.
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The steps for making uses of SDS are indeed the correct ones for doing
serious work in thinking about an area or attempting to manage it. The next
trick is to get people to see any value in doing that. In the culture where I
work, even writing down guidelines for doing what we have already discovered
works is frowned upon and has actually been forbidden in at least one
instance. One of my "lessons learned" from this contract is never to ask
permission for something like that but to do it anyway even if only for my
own private use.
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[Quoting a major portion of
Rod's letter
earlier today...
This leads to the proposition that using SDS in its full range is
likely a specialized profession for Com Metrics, that complements the
role of accounting for aligning finances, and expands the role of FSR
developed by DCMA to aid Contracting Officers in implementing FAR,
reviewed on 010608....
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http://www.welchco.com/sd/08/00101/02/01/06/08/111431.HTM#3T8I
Again I agree that for this technology to be of real benefit, it must be
employed by individuals who understand the purpose of the tools and won't treat
it as just some other form of "organizer." The tool is a facilitator, an
augmentation. The power is in what the tools permits its users to do new things
they couldn't do before, not in being a different way of doing the "same old
thing".
..
[Quoting a major portion of
Rod's letter
earlier today...
So, your point about providing common tools is a good one; but, the
issue of adopting SDS goes beyond having common tools. Morris points
out that most people only use about 5% - 10% of the features in
Microsoft programs.
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Rod, sometimes you exasperate me. I *never said* that SDS was only about
having common tools. I agree that most people can't do a decent job of using
the tools they have even for the purposes for which they are suited, and
this is by no means limited to the feature bloated tools produced by
Microsoft.
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However, just because a tool is misused, or people misunderstand it, or
they don't know why SDS should be of interest to them is *no reason* to assume
that there is nothing to be learned by looking at the tools people do adopt,
what they use about them and what they don't. Since market research and other
notions such as usability studies are of little or no use, any improvements and
advancements that we make in something like SDS will come about because we are
able to define what we intend for the tool to allow us to do, and pay attention
to things that have proven to make things easier even if we don't use them in
the same way.
..
Your approach to "purple numbers" is a perfect example. Purple numbers
had several goals in mind, one of which was that links could be constructed by
hand, which meant that the numbers had to be visible. You rejected this idea
for SDS and came up with an approach that allows the record to be indexed in
the HTML in a way that is unobtrusive, aids in the positioning when following a
link, and makes it far easier for people who are interested to reference the
record without running SDS to do it.
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The fact that purple numbers alone are an incomplete solution doesn't
mean that they wouldn't dramatically improve the usefulness of the email
archive - I tried to reference some of the OHS-DEV emails in this reply, but it
got to be too hard to bother with. The addition of some of the basic ideas
behind purple numbers to the operation of SDS has been very valuable.
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When I originally commented on POIMS, I didn't link to the record as it
was just too difficult. The latest trip through the document resulted in
extracted information and commentaries that are fully linked back to the
record, and that is possible only because of your implementation of purple
numbers in the SDS record.
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If the addition of a part of a concept such as purple numbers, even in a
way far different than was intended, can improve SDS as much as it did after
the years of effort you put into it, looking at other things that have proven
useful in other tools is not misplaced.
..
[Quoting a major portion of
Rod's letter
earlier today...
Hope this contributes to the SRS for SDS.
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By copy letting Morris know about your thoughts, since he has worked
these issues for a long time. Also, keeping Stuart Harrow at DCMA in
the loop on this, since he raised the idea of the FSR role in relation
to SDS last year. Copying Max Blodgett at USACE, since he has actual
experience applying this method in a procurement setting, and may have
useful input on customer perspective that supplements his letter on
960406....
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http://www.welchco.com/04/00065/60/97/03/2801.HTM#1279
The fact that SDS was used to augment the RMS document management system
http://www.welchco.com/04/00065/60/97/03/2801.HTM#5002
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...is a good example of the sort of thing I am suggesting. The ability to
refer easily to whatever forms of information capture are in use is of value
even when it isn't the direct function of SDS.
Thanks,
Sincerely,
Garold L. Johnson
dynalt@dynalt.com