Tag Archives: process

Creeping Dependencies

We had a client issue the other day where a system stopped working because a necessary third-party service just stopped, with little warning. It got me thinking about the nature of dependencies.

When building networked applications, there are necessarily aspects of which you don’t have control. You don’t usually control every mile of the Internet connection that reaches the user, for instance. So, for example, if it’s a user at home on a shared cable connection and it’s 4pm on a school day when every kid in the neighborhood just got home to stream video, they’re going to have a slower connection–and there’s not much you can do.

In this case, it was a service dependency, and that’s just as potentially problematic. After all, there are times when you can’t do it all yourself–maybe you need to poll an external database for information, or there’s already a cheap commodity service that will take care of an ancillary need.

But the trick, and one that we didn’t really execute as well as we should, is to note the risk upfront and do what you can to mitigate it. In our case, we had noted the risk and thought we had some ways to manage it, but when the outage occurred, we immediately saw breakdowns in the process. Paths for escalating the outage notification were unclear, and the error message created for the users was, shall we say, less than graceful.

Fortunately the outage didn’t last all that long, and the upstream provider of the service was very gracious and quick about getting things resolved. But it was a good reminder that every time you create a dependency, whether it’s an AJAX call that relies on a decently-fast connection or a threshold service for access, it’s critical to consider how to gracefully handle the situation where it fails.

Because it will. At some point. But in our interconnected world, what’s the alternative?

From Metrics to Meaning

OK, I’ll admit it. I may be carrying around a little more weight than I should. The idea of an elegant dinner out sounds far better than a sweaty afternoon at the gym. But I’m not worried–technology is coming to my rescue!

After all, there are fitness bands that relay all my activity to an intelligent program. There are apps that will track my intake and exercise and help me monitor those metrics. But there’s a key element missing: the meaning.

We’ve all become fond of metrics, perhaps instigated by the lore of W. Edward Deming, who was thought to have said “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” (Except he didn’t, actually, say that. In fact, his philosophy was quite inclusive, allowing (and even encouraging) people to make decisions that they knew to be right, even if they were unmeasurable.)

But anyway, back to the fitness path. So I get a band, or a device, or an app. Suddenly, I’m getting all of these metrics. I know how much I’m ingesting and how much I’m walking. Why isn’t my behavior changing?

Some might say willpower, some might say that last order of gyoza. But I suspect a leading contributor is the gap between metrics and meaning. There’s a step missing: okay, I know these are my stats, and something’s not working. But how do I get from point A to point B? What do the data mean?

This is not only a health issue, but a larger design one. Every time we show information to a user–every time–we should ask: what’s the context? What does the user need to make meaning of this data bit?

Think about breadcrumbs, as another example. Knowing what page you’re on in a complex website is useful. Knowing where that page fits into the site and your path within it is orientational. It changes one’s experience of navigation.

This is true on the analytics side, too — measuring clicks or session time is a good start. But what is the story that data is telling? Where do you go from here?

Over the last few years, we’ve seen an explosion of the amount of data available. We can measure more than ever before. But it’s not going to really transform us in the most profound way until we get just as good at providing meaning as we are at providing metrics.

In the meantime, it’s almost lunch…

Creative Destruction

With advances in technology, there are several ways to measure the pace and/or severity of change. Often, we refer to it in terms of speed (see, for example, Moore’s Law). Sometimes, we refer to it in terms of how it abruptly changes old practices (the idea of disruptive technologies, for instance).

At Square Lines, we make a practice of studying long-term technology evolution in addition to short-term jumps and leaps. One aspect of technology integration that often involves sustainability over time isn’t its pace or its disruption, but rather its erosion of current practices. A practice we (and others) call creative destruction.

When a system or process practices creative destruction, it is continually eroding away the oldest and freshly developing the newest. You might think of it as a bridge where one end is slowly crumbling as the other end is being built (in that analogy, it would be a bridge without gravity, but you get the idea).

I was reminded of the value of creative destruction this morning as I learned that InformationWeek, a venerable magazine for IT professionals that has been around since 1979, was stopping its print publication and going online-only.

For many years, they published (wait for it) weekly, with thick books rich with information, editorial, and advertising. Then, beginning about 15 years ago, the creative destruction began. The InformationWeek website started getting richer (and carrying more ads). Beginning about five or six years ago, the print issues began getting slimmer — and, remarkable for a publication with “Week” in its name, began appearing less frequently.

Behind the scenes, according to the editor of the publication, ad revenue balances began to shift. What was 95%/5% in favor of print in 2000 switched to the reverse in 2013. Given the cost/benefit and ROI of their print circulation, it only made sense.

But because they had been practicing creative destruction for over a decade, it wasn’t an abandonment and retrenchment. It wasn’t a collapse. It was (and will be, I think) an advance, a migration. As the parts of the bridge that were on the print side of the gorge eroded, they were building new bricks toward the digital side.

That having been said, time will tell as to whether enough “bridge parts” have been laid. The online-only tech space is far more crowded than the print/digital hybrid, and the direct mail distribution of a regular periodical surely helped penetration of the audience (even the digital one). But they are definitely better equipped for the transition than had they not been working the problem for well over a decade.

And that’s the beauty of creative destruction.