Tag Archives: process improvement

Getting Better (Or: We Used To Be Worse)

I’m a bit of a pack rat. Somewhere, I have encomia that goes back decades. And in the digital world, this is true as well.

So when I got a new computing device recently and needed to migrate a bunch of data, I had an opportunity to look back at projects we’ve done over the years, and that I had done for at least a decade before. What I found wasn’t all that surprising, but it was instructive.

Starting with my early work, it was, well, fair. I mean, it worked and all (in fact, one web application I wrote a decade ago is still in production use on a public website – think about how much on the web has changed in that time!). But it wasn’t coded all that well, and the emphasis was on getting it done quickly and briefly. (In other words, the code was hard to read and not well documented.)

Then I look at a project from five years later, and it’s all different: sure, sure, it works – that much is the same. But under the hood, the code isn’t just quick, it’s efficient. And there are actual comments throughout. The front-end design and the ‘look’ of the work is leagues better (by that time, I didn’t do it myself, and we had a team with expertise in that area). It’s a professional product.

Then I turn to a project we finished last year, and it’s more advanced yet. The amount of growth isn’t as dramatic, but it’s still there. Development patterns are being used effectively and both programmatic and business logic is easily intuited from the code (and its documentation), and the separation of functions allows for easy manipulation of pieces and parts. It’s a great result.

This progression is hardly unique, I think – every person and every firm, if they’re stretching themselves and striving for self-improvement, has something similar. But we don’t talk about it much, because we worry that clients (or, more specifically, prospective clients) think “we get better all the time” means the same as “we aren’t really ready for prime time yet.”

But that’s pretty shortsighted thinking. Even the best sports pros are always working on their game. We can always improve – after all, that’s the whole point of professional development, right?

It was heartening to see that transformation over the last couple of decades. Who knows what the next project will bring?

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.