Clarke Ching - Split Infinitives and Beyond.

Malcolm Gladwell latest New Yorker article - online

Malcolm Gladwell's article "Big and Bad - How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety" is finally online at http://www.gladwell.com/archive.html.

It's a good one. I even bought the magazine.

Freedom of the Skies by James Fallows

"You are flying through the air at three hundred to five hundred miles per hour during the part of your trip that is in the commercial airplane. But your average speed from when you left your home to when you arrive at your destination is only fifty or sixty miles per hour."

- Daniel Goldin, Adminstrator of Nasa, 1998, quoted in Freedom of the Skies by James Fallows in www.theatlantic.com

Nobel Prize–winning economist Daniel K ahneman parses the roles of emotion, cognition, and perception in the understanding of business risk.

"A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Almost everyone feels the temptation to answer “10 cents” because the sum $1.10 so neatly separates into $1 and 10 cents, and 10 cents seems the right price for a ball (small and light) relative to a bat (big and heavy). In fact, more than half of a group of students at Princeton and at the University of Michigan gave precisely that answer — that wrong answer.

The right answer is: The ball costs a nickel."

from Daniel Kahneman: The Thought Leader Interview By Michael Schrage in www.strategy-business.com (reqs quick registration)

Real life conflicts in data warehousing

A few days ago David Anderson, author of Agile Management for Software..., asked me to respond to a comment made to this blog entry. He was looking for examples of the TOC thinking processes used within software development. I gave the following example (reworked 7th Feb, 2004):

Several years ago I was Data Architect for a very large data warehouse project. Data Warehouses are very large databases of historic, operational data held in a format that can handle very large queries.

We were considering two conflicting approaches for building a datawarehouse. The first was to use the traditional design approach and fully normalise the tables, eliminating data redundancy and minimising disk-space. The alternative was to design the tables as a Star Schema, which uses much more disk space to store the data but results in far, far faster queries.

The evaporating cloud looked like this:

....D - use properly normalised tables
..B - minimise disk-space used
A - build a successful datawarehouse
..C - fast query performance
....D' Use denormalised (star schema) tables

[Read this: "In order to A we must B and C", "In order to B we must D", "In order to C we must D'" "D and D' are in conflict with each other".]

Initially we thought we could evaporate the problem because B-D (In order to "minimise disk-space used" we must "use properly normalised tables") might not be true: even if the data tables were small, the server would probably require a massive amount of working diskspace to cope with the types of queries being run.

We were discussing this when our manager popped his head in, took one look at the cloud and said "Why are you guys worried about disk-space? It's dirt cheap these days, our disk space will be doubled next month when we upgrade the server, and if we need more I've got plenty of budget". Duh!

In term's of the evaporating cloud, the arrow between A-B (In order to "build a successful datawarehouse" we must "minimise disk space used") was evaporated since diskspace was cheap relative to labour and other hardward costs. That is, we didn't care about B since it wasn't necessary for A.

Goldratt / Peoplesoft contest

hmmmm ... this TOC competition looks interesting. What would I do with a new Toyota? Nothing apparently - only U.S. and Canadian (excluding Quebec) residents are eligible to enter.

Thanks to ski for mentioning the competition on the cmsig list.

James Surowiecki writes about Iraq,

James Surowiecki writes about Iraq, the army and outsourcing in the The New Yorker

"Sometimes the lack of competition is explicit: many of the contracts for rebuilding Iraq were handed out on a no-bid basis. And many of them are "cost-plus" contracts. This means that the contractors' profit is a percentage of their costs, which gives them an incentive to keep those costs high. That's hardly a recipe for efficiency or rigor."

Cost plus: wish I could get me some of that...

Mo’s Mixed-Up Management Discoveries

www.gallup.com's Management Journal has a free excerpt from the cheeky and charming book "Animals, Inc: A Business Parable for the 21st Century" by Kenneth A. Tucker and Vandana Allman.

"Mo was learning how to run the farm as a business. While pigs are reputed to be hard workers, it is well known that they often sleep as many as 12 hours a day. Asked about that once, Mo admitted it was true, but explained, "That's only because we don't have much else to do with our time." Certainly that was no longer true. Mo ordered every business text he could find and devoured them -- figuratively, of course. He would read all day and into the night, usually until his wife, Princess, demanded that he come to pen."

I say it looks cheeky and charming purely based on the excert since I haven't read it yet. Perhaps it's just me that's cheeky and charming :)

HOGMANAY - where was Plan B?

From The Scotsman - Opinion - 100,000 people want to know: where was Plan B?:

"HOGMANAY was literally a damp squib in Edinburgh and Aberdeen as "bad" weather led to the last-minute cancellation of New Year celebrations, including the traditional fireworks. However, "bad" weather is something of a Scottish stock-in-trade in winter, so it is quite reasonable to ask - and many disappointed foreign visitors are definitely asking - why there were no contingency plans to allow the celebrations to continue in another form. Comments that Edinburgh, in particular, has just been lucky with the weather in the previous 11 years are beside the point: that bonus should have meant that any potential problems had long since been eliminated from the event."

Edinburgh, Scotland, is famed for it's Hogmanay (new years eve) street party. It was cancelled this year because it rained. Edinburgh is also famed for its rain, snow and general meteorological gloominess - especially during the winter. The people are fantastic, just very pale. If you were planning an outdoor event, in the middle of winter, what would be top of your risk list? Bad weather - perhaps?

Hello World

Hello. This is the first entry in my professional weblog.

My name is Clarke Ching. I am a New Zealander but I live in Scotland with my Irish wife Winnie and Scottish daughter Aisling (pronounced Ashling).

My professional interests are Theory of Constraints and agile software development. I am just a few months away from finishing an MBA in tecnology management with the Open University.

I currently work as a systems analyst for a large financial organisation, although in the past I've developed in Cobol, C, Visual Basic on IBM mainframes, Unix and PCs, I've managed projects and had a brief (and barely profitable) stint as an independant consultant.

This blog will focus on Theory of Constraints and software development topics, with the odd recipe and amusing link thrown in.

Clarke Ching
A kiwi in Scotland