iReconnoiter

In my opinion, distressed managers and business-owners have been fantasising that software development is a manufacturing process at heart. Software requirements specifications are churned, and software architects turn these complicated specifications into a high-level technical vision. Software designers charge up the architecture with detailed design documentation, which is handed to zombie robot-like coders, who drinks isotonic water in one hand while sleepily typing in the software design’s implementation with the other. Finally, Inspector Quality receives the completed code, which doesn’t receive his stamp of approval unless it meets the original specifications.

It’s no surprise that managers want software development to be like manufacturing. Managers understand how to make manufacturing process work. Programmers have decades of experience in how to build physical objects efficiently and accurately. So, applying what they’ve learned from manufacturing, they should be able to optimize the software development process into the well-tuned engine that their manufacturing plants have become.

In the so-called software churning factory, the employees are the specialists. They sit faithfully at their place in the assembly line, fastening plain old Java components together. Inspector Quality is a tester by trade, software components move down the line, and he tests and stamps them in the same way each day. J2EE designers design J2EE applications. C++ coders code in C++. The world is very clean and compartmentalized.

Unfortunately, the manufacturing analogy doesn’t work here. Software is at least as malleable as software requirements. Things always change in business, and businesspeople know that software is soft and can be changed to meet those requirements. This means architecture, designs, codes, and tests must all be created and revised in a fashion more agile than the leanest manufacturing processes can provide.

In this kind of rapidly changing environment, the flexible will survive. When the pressure is on, a smart businessperson will turn to a software professional who can solve the problem at hand. So, how do you become that person whose name comes up when they’re looking for a superhero to save the day? The key is to be able to solve the problems that may arise. What are those problems? That’s right: you don’t know. Neither do I.

What I do understand is that those issues are as diverse as deployment problems, critical design flaws that need to be solved and quickly reimplemented, heterogenous systems integration, and rapid, adhoc report generation. Faced with a problem set as diverse as this, poor Inspector Quality would be passed over pretty quickly.

It’s not enough to think about what technologies you’re going to invest in. After all, the technology part is a commodity, right? You’re not going to be able to sit back and simply master a programming language or an operating system, letting the business people take care of the business stuff. If all they needed was a code robot, it would be easy to hire someone in another country to do that kind of work. If you want to stay relevant, you’re going to have to dive into the domain of the business you’re in.

You might be “just a programmer,” but being able to speak to your business clients in the language of their business domain is a critical skill. Imagine how much easier life would be if everyone you had to work with really understood how software development works. You wouldn’t have to explain to them why it’s a bad idea to return 100,000 records in a single page on a web application or why they shouldn’t pass out links to your development server. This is how your business clients feel about you : Imagine how much easier it would be to work with these programmers if they just understood what I was asking them for without me having to dumb everything down and be so ridiculously specific?! And, guess what? It’s the business that pays your salary.

You should think of your business domain experience as an important part of your repertoire. If you’re a musician, when you add something to your repertoire, it doesn’t just mean you’ve played the song once. It means you truly know the song. You should apply the same theory to your business domain experience. For example, having worked on a project in the health insurance industry doesn’t guarantee that you understand the difference between a HIPAA 835 and a HIPAA 837 EDI transaction. It’s this kind of knowledge that differentiates two otherwise equivalent software developers in the right situation.

Just like technologies that become hot, business domains can be selected in the same way. For instance, web services and web 2.0, are the big things right now in software development. If you learn them, you can compete for a job in one of the many companies that will employ these technologies. The same is true of business domains. You should put the same level of care into selecting which industry to serve as you put into selecting which technologies to master.

In light of the importance that you should place on selecting a business domain when rounding out your portfolio, the company and industry you choose to work for becomes a significant investment on your part. If you haven’t yet given real, intentional thought to which business domains you should be investing in, now is the time. Each passing day is a missed opportunity.

With energy demand in the emerging nations escalating and the world supplies static, the influx of money has helped chase prices of oil higher. Generally in most markets, skyrocketing prices would result in increased supply and decreased demand – that would cause prices to ease and balance up to the equilibrium eventually. Unfortunately, the oil market is not working that way.

Supply is essentially fixed in the short term because it takes painstaking years to find new oil fields and bring them up and running. Demand, on the other hand, is also essentially fixed, since there is no ready substitute for petroluem, diesel, jet fuel. Flush with cash from investors of all kinds, traders observing these factors have bid prices higher and higher …

The digital economy is a culture of abundance. It’s virtually costless to duplicate something online, whether be it music, movies, games, softwares. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, and MySpace all compete eagerly to attract customers to their plentiful free offerings. On the other hand, the oil economy represents the culture of scarcity, wherein traders try to guesstimate just how much petroleum is left in the world and just how high the price of oil can go.

The high cost of oil actually accelerates and perhaps push the shift into the virtual world, as people and businesses substitute digital connections for physical interactions. Managers will rely on video-conferencing instead of flying across the country or the world to meet in person. Newspapers/Magazines, faced with rising energy costs for production and delivery, will make the big decision to drop their print versions and go completely online. Socialising will shift increasingly to the Web from pricey evening dates or gatherings. And teenagers will do more of their driving in online MMORPG rather than spend $100 to fill the tank of their family car.

However, the culture of abundance could lose its ground under the weight of energy costs. The data centers supporting the digital economy are extreme power users of electricity. If oil prices stay high, electricity prices should soon follow – and how long will it be before the data centers become expensive drains on corporate profits? Anticipating this problem, Google and other major tech companies have built some of their data centers in areas where cheap hydropower is available. Nevertheless, most of their digital infrastructure around the world has no such immunity from rising energy costs.

Similarly, we have grown used to spending relatively small sums to purchase sophisticated routers, laptops, and smartphones. But these abundant supply of cheap electronics is based in part on making the gears many distance away in Asia and shipping it to our country. If the price of transportation continues to rise, will the price of tech toys have to rise as well?

These questions cannot be answered until we know whether oil prices are going to fall or soar to even higher levels.

The iTunes AppStore is now ready for your browsing pleasure. Just a click away from your iTunes Software Update button and you’ll be off exploring the huge array of iPhone applications made available for downloads.

Releasing the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) to public is definitely the way to go. Share the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to the world and let the third party software developers unleash their creativity. When comes to innovative ideas and inventions in the software arena – a million heads (the world) is surely better than a few hundreds (Apple).

On this note, Apple is creating a new, and possibly juicy revenue stream for themselves. Apple is leveraging on the “network effects” benefits that AppStore might potentially provide – the more people who own the iPhones, the more third party developers will be attracted and seize the opportunity to build and sell their applications in AppStore. And the more iPhone applications that are in AppStore, the more people would want the iPhone.

Now, it is not just the iPhone’s sleek user interface and user friendliness that made it the Phone of phones. It is now the repoirtoire of applications that can run on iPhone which makes it the killer phone.

I’m patiently waiting for my iPhone to arrive in Singapore this September 2008.

In addition to the constantly changing business environment in the Financial Services Industry, it is a highly competitive industry where many organisations aiming to gain an advantage edge through new innovative products, services and channels. FSIs are pushing ahead to become more customer-centric with innovative methods to optimise business processes, consolidate IT Systems and simplify customer service while complying with regulartory standards and enhancing security.

There are in fact many banks out there in the world, and wouldn’t it be a brilliant idea to conduct intensive research on these banks, extract best practices of successful banks, and consolidate them into an intelligence repository? That’s when The Asian Banker, founded by Mr. Emmanuel Daniel stepped in, and became the most respected provider of consulting and intelligence, embarking on leading industry research, publication and serving as a consulting firm in the financial services industry in the Asia Pacific and other emerging market regions, with a strong reputation worldwide.

The Asian Banker came along first as an intelligence publication, and subsequently added the benchmarking and consulting elements to make it the authoritative commentator on developments in the financial services industry that it has become. The consulting arm of The Asian Banker provides a wide range of world-class research and consulting services to financial institutions in a manner that contextualises global developments to the evergrowing needs of emerging market financial institutions. It serves as a Banking Academy that sits itself in the ecosystem of the Financial Services Industry, collating a reportoire of idea inventory via research, forums, summits, editorials. 

Despite the steep challenges posed in formulating benchmarking methodologies due to the inherent diversities of the banks – in terms of the area of business, or each bank having their own value system in conducting their business. The company developed core competencies in benchmarking in retail financial services, risk management and technology – answering FSIs core business questions with crystallised answers.

And if you’re an graduate or undergraduate student looking forward to immerse yourself to gain practical experience and deeper knowledge of Asia’s highly dynamic financial services industry, The Asian Banker do provide exciting Internship Opportunities, in the areas of Editorial or Research business.

My dear friend Levin was in trouble on 3rd of July when he fell from his keelboat during his regular sailing session. He went missing for about one and a half day before divers found him today. The news came as a great shock and with that, I wanted to leave a note for Levin in Facebook to bid my last goodbye.

Upon my visit, I was touched to notice overwhelming and heartening farewells and well-wishing notes that were left behind by his friends logging into Levin’s Facebook profile. It struck me this very moment that Facebook is not only used to connect and make new friends or to play fancy games, but it also served as a repository of fond memories when one had passed on from this world. Those posted pictures, videos, notes, wall posts, mini-feed logs – are memories stored in the virtual world for us to see and reminisce those times.

Levin, every new beginning is some beginning’s end, and here you begin your new journey, and you will find your happy place. God Bless You, always.

Three days ago, I turned on my MacBook, and heard a series of “clicking” sounds emitted from her, I dreaded that my harddrive in my MacBook crashed. Thankfully, I wasn’t in a middle of any critical projects else it would be a nightmare.

Fortunately, during “peace-time” I didn’t put in much effort in backing up my Mac. Yeap, all I did was just plugging in my external 160GB harddrive to my Mac at least once every 3 days for regular backups. Time Machine seamlessly runs its back up magic behind the scene whilst I’m working, and meticulously archiving all my documents and application settings with a breeze.

It was my first experience to put Time Machine to task and restore my MacBook now equipped with a brand new harddrive. And I must say, it was amazing and it did a incredibly splendid job – easy and without a hassle. After installing the Operating System, I plugged my Time Machine harddrive in, launched the nifty Migration Utility Assistant, and with a click of just one radio-button, boom, my Mac was restored like how it was 2 days before the crash.

Time Machine saved me from my perils of reinstalling applications and the pains of re-customising my application preferences. And best of all, it allows me to immediately carry on with my work, from where I left off. And strangely, I actually secretly look forward in experiencing my next backup restore! But only with Time Machine …