Month: October 2016

On the simplicity of experts systems

Software

by paul on October 28, 2016 0 Comments

Today I want to share with you an unfinished thought. Perhaps because I have been working non stop all week, perhaps because people keep complaining about apple correct strategy of fleshing out their devices’ design (remember how everyone complained when they removed the CD player?), or perhaps because I’m not sure I ever will reach a satisfying definite answer on the matter. At any rate, here is the question: what’s the optimal ratio simplicity/features of experts software systems?

The state of the art

If you’ve ever been in contact with someone who has to use a computer system beyond browsing the web or desperately trying to string 1000 words together the night the essay is due, i.e. had to work with any software at all from point of sale retail, to graphic design passing by cloud CRMs, you will notice a common thread: that piece of software is awful. These complaints usually boil down to one of these three categories: the software is either buggy, too complicated to use or missing functionalities. Leaving aside the unstable aspect inherent to the current process of software development, the other categories seem to be two ends of the same spectrum. And this is what keeps me up at night. Probably for 30 seconds, then it’s my kids crying.

Developing software in a customer is king world

Having worked for years for B2B software providers, where sales cycles are long, requirements are complex and clients must be satisfied, I can tell you that most of these pieces of software require training in order to be used to their full potential (which in part drives the sales through maintenance and support costs). In this world, roadmaps always add functionalities, new modules and new ways to customize a product. Ultimately, this renders the sales, delivery and support extremely complex (and why I have a job).

A new era of software delivery

However, in the recent years we have seen a new development with Software As A Service. Companies are limited to the SaaS current version’s functionalities. Because of the effectiveness of the cloud sales model and the centralized maintenance of these pieces of software it is much easier for software publishers to prioritize, consolidate and even drop features according to what clients are actually using. With SaaS, customization is often out of the question. Yet, more and more companies are moving to software as a service and have clear initiatives to simplify their current eco-system.

My dilemma

First, since when did dilemma lose its ‘n’? I digress. In all seriousness, and as I argued before I do believe that simplicity is key to software success. Thus, when do you decide to add functionalities to your software to respond to market demand? How do you ensure that this addition is not only relevant but it also does not throw away your user experience, brand and sales process? Ultimately, I think that finding this balance is really more art than science. And this is always going to bug my extremely rational mind.

Choosing the correct DBMS – Gartner Reprint review

Big Data

by paul on October 21, 2016 0 Comments

Choosing the correct DBMS – Gartner Reprint review

If you haven’t had the chance to look at it yet, I encourage you to read this gartner reprint: Critical Capabilities for Operational Database Management Systems. This report is extremely interesting if you’re into data at all. I’m in too deep, so I’m going to talk about this report for the whole length of this marvelous post.

The importance of specific use-cases

The first thing that jumped out to me, was that Gartner uses the word DBMS Gartner, thus highlights the fact that the dichotomy between traditional relational database management systems and what has been labelled “NoSQL” is fading out. Instead, Gartner advises to “Classify the use cases under consideration and map them to the costs, deployment options and skills requirements of the products evaluated here.”. This is extremely important and a departure from some of the preconceptions I witness amongst my fellow professionals. Often enough, I get confronted with consultants trying to categorize DBMS by capabilities (distribution capabilities, support of languages, etc.). More importantly, these platforms are marketed through those capabilities. As I argued before, and confirmed by this report, end users, consultants and software provides alike should select, recommend and market according to the use-cases at which they excel instead of the capabilities inherent to a specific platform (see previous post: The importance of specialization in software sales).

Evaluation criteria

But enough surrendering to my own confirmation biases in order to pat myself on the back and delude myself into thinking that my observations may be going in the same direction as Gartner’s. The report evaluates different vendors (selected themselves base on the set of Inclusion Criteria), using the following criteria:

High-Speed Ingest and Processing

ACID Support

Tunable Consistency

Multimodel Support

Automated Data Distribution

Cloud/Hybrid Deployment

Programmability for HTAP

Administration and Management

Security

These criteria are then weighted according to four different use cases:

Traditional Transactions

Distributed Variable Data

Lightweight Events and Observations

Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP)

I’m not going to spend time describing the criteria, Gartner put up very readable charts to compare the different vendors. In short, it seems that Oracle is leading the traditional transaction world while DataStax is leading the distributed one. On a personal note, I’m super excited for DataStax, I get to work with many members of their team and the company I am working for leverages their solution, so it’s excellent recognition.

I would however perhaps have had another two criteria: integration ecosystem and cost. Regarding the latter, I would have created two sets of charts: one considering the cost and one not considering it. Of course, I understand cost is a delicate and fluctuant subject and I understand Gartner’s decision. Integration ecosystem however is very important. Being able to evaluate how easy it is to integrate and use data once it is in these DBMS is extremely important when making an architecture choice.

Personal Conclusion

I’m always impressed by the conciseness of Gartner reports. This one does not fail in that regard, and gives a very good basis to one evaluating data management systems. That being said, and to make sure that horse is dead, think of your use-case before going for an RFP. Many DBMS can do many things, but few excel at all use-cases.

3 essential features of the perfect software

by paul on October 7, 2016 0 Comments

I have recently been thinking quite a bit about what make a piece of software successful. Very early in my career, I got to temper my idealistic view of computer science and the world in general, quite well captured by the saying “you don’t have to be the best to be the first”. As I progress in my professional journey, I have been trying to identify key aspects that make a software go head and shoulders above their competitors or see a exponential growth in a niche of the market not exploited at the time. While it is most likely impossible to find the 3 magic words you have to pronounce to make the perfect software appear, I am still going to pretend I did this, for web traffic purposes, because I have no integrity. All bad humor aside, and for the sake of readability, I did try to funnel my thinking into 3 major aspects which, combined, are a successful piece of software. Quick aside: the purpose of this piece is not to dive into what technical aspect of a piece of software is valuable, but rather to present the software features to which the market responds positively. With that out of the way, let me present you the current state of my cogitation: the perfect software is:

SIMPLE

Simplicity is essential for the end-user to open their eyes. While the algorithms, architecture and other under-the-hood building blocks can and will most likely be complex, the idea here is to present something that is simple to understand. Simplicity can be driven by multiple factors. It could be for instance the front end of your application. This is why UI/UX is such a sought-after skill, and while it is predominant in the B2C industry it is severely underused in the B2B world. It could also be driven by the product packaging. If building a platform with many potential uses, packaging them into specific solutions recognized by the industry is a fair way to achieve simplicity. It could also be targeted: focusing on solving the problems of one vertical for instance.

NON-INTRUSIVE

This characteristic is epitomized by the success of cloud computing. Software As A Service particularly is the perfect example of non-intrusiveness being a successful business model: end users do not want to have to install and maintain software. It is an obvious cost reduction feat for big enterprises, it is just as much a reality for consumers: no one wants to have to install a software on their computer, and the ones we do install are the ones we hate the most (he who had no complaint about Microsoft Word cast the first stone). Even more interesting, web software like appointment booking, ticket sales and so on are considered websites and not pieces of software, but I digress. That being said, and as I argued as early as last week, SaaS isn’t the only model and non-instrusiveness can be characterized by other traits. Backward compatibly or maintenance of current set of existing skills and application is a great way to ensure a non intrusive model. One of the reason why I think disruption is nonsense, see previous rant.

ACTIONABLE

Being simple and non-intrusive are essential qualities, but your software must actually do something in order to be valuable. The important question here is: what’s in it for your user? What is the value? And I don’t think that a value proposition such as “we are doing it better than the others” is enough, nor is “imagine what you could do with that”. You need to be able to be able to show tangible results right off the bat, drive your customer through a story of what they will be able to do now that they weren’t able to do before. This feature is in my opinion one of the hardest and most often forgotten feature for a software to possess, especially put in relation with the other two. Indeed, innovation while maintaining non-intrusiveness could be seen as an oxymoron. In reality, the perfect unique innovative actionable value that of which no one thought before does not exist. That being said, many tech companies today start by building technical prowesses instead of focusing on creating value. My recommendation is to think about the value first, then focus on making the solution simple and non-intrusive, which is ironically why this article is written in the opposite order.

Conclusion

Can a piece of software truly possess all these qualities fully? Probably not, but at I think it is at least an ideal to strive for. As mentioned awkwardly at the beginning of this article, this is also a very preliminary assessment of my thought process. I do believe that if a piece of software possess a good balance of theses 3 features, it is set for success. More importantly, I think that these features should drive the development of new softwares. I know that I have a few ideas about what to develop, and I’m going to make sure to keep that in mind.

Monthly Archives