Something I do a lot of at work is Bids. Most people are presumably unaware of the machinations that go on when a large company, government or military organisation buys itself a monster IT system, but they're complex, all right. And hard.
Here in Europe, it starts when the organisation publishes an ad in the European Journal, laying out the thing they want - a callcentre, a document management system, a system to help the police solve crimes etc. (Non-Europeans can substitute their own objects and establishments.) Next, interested supplier companies who think they can do the job write in, 'expressing an interest'. The Client then sends the suppliers a Pre-Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ), which usually asks basic question about the Supplier's finances, ability to tackle the job, previous work references and so on.
If the Client thinks you have what it takes, they will then send the Supplier an Invitation to Tender (ITT), and this is where the going gets tough and expensive. An ITT is usually a thumping great document that the Client has built up over months - even years - and which details exactly what they (think they) need. The nasty bit is the client Statement of Requirements (SoR), which will specify everything from the number of system users to the response time for data accesses. Essentially, they put down every damn thing they can think of. Somewhere in the document, they'll usually break those SoR requirements out into a spreadsheet-style matrix, with each requirement numbered, supplementary information if any, and some sort of flag to say whether the requirement is Mandatory or just Desirable.
The Supplier then has to submit an actual Tender - another even bigger document (usually about the size of a large novel) that describes in even more detail exactly what they plan to do in order to satisfy the SoR. You have to satisfy all of the Mandatories, and unless the competition is pretty weak, you'd better satisfy all the Desirables too.
Consider the size of this task: you have to design a complete, large, complex IT system. It has to satisfy many tens, and sometimes hundreds, of tightly-framed user requirements, including performance times. You have to build the system out of existing commercial software packages as far as possible. Custom code is expensive: it costs a lot to develop; it breaks and costs even more to fix; operating system upgrades break it; upgrades to the other packages in the system break it; no-one else in the world is using it, and your company is the place where any future buck will stop.
The commercial packages in the system have problems of their own: they, too, break. Operating system upgrades do strange things to them. Their long-term interoperability with other packages can't be guaranteed forever. Sometimes a new version of a package will have some characteristic that makes it useless as part of the system. Sometimes the company that developed the package will take years to respond to an OS upgrade, holding the rest of the system back.
So you have to be careful, and that's even harder than it sounds. Chances are that at least some of the features in some of the packages you'll need to use are things you don't know well. Sometimes the whole damn component will be new to you. Under those circumstances you're pretty much forced to take the word of the package supplier on trust, and those guys are very keen to sell product.
You're following a Client specification that probably took them from six months to a couple of years to write. You, on the other hand, usually have less than a month from receiving the ITT to the day you hand the Tender in.
The ITT is written by people intimately involved with the context of what's missing from their lives - they know all about problem. Trouble is, they don't really know all that much about the solution, or they wouldn't be asking someone else to do it for them.
Note that the fact that you're designing this thing on paper, and don't actually have to build it on the spot, doesn't really give you much room for guesswork. If your creation is accepted, your company really will have to build it - at the cost you specified. We're talking millions of quid here. If you get it wrong, and the actual solution needed is bigger and more expensive, you can be sure that the extra money will be extracted from your gluteus with pliers. And then they'll fire you.
Not only do you have to design this system from scratch in a few weeks, your solution has to be cheap, too - at least cheaper than the competition's, and, of course, you don't know what they're going to be charging. The ITTs always have some burble about how they don't undertake to accept the cheapest quote, and that it's 'value for money' that they're after. The fact is, though, that any Supplier who is not the lowest bidder better have a damn good story to tell, because the Client's bean-counters will usually have the final say, and technical excellence and other considerations tend to be secondary.
(So serious a factor is this, that dark rumours abound of companies who virtually give their solution away at cost, and then squeeze money out of the client using every possible trick: £100 to make a phone call; £2000 for an on-site meeting and so on. Anything not written into the bid is charged for, at vampiric rates)
The result of this cost-cutting is not, as one might have hoped, a massive saving to the taxpayer. Instead, it means that over time the IT infrastructure of government, police and military is powered by systems that were probably at the end of their tethers from the day they were installed, and from which every conceivable unstipulated spare capacity has been shaved. The next time you hear about some gigantic, newly installed tax computer or hospital resource management system falling over a week after installation, reflect that some bloody accountant probably insisted they go for that one, even though the engineers knew that a much better system was on offer for a little more wonga.
Bids - horrible, stressful things, requiring blood, sweat, lousy hotels, grim food and late nights. I have to do them all the time.
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Ailment Files 1
I have ADD, I reckon.
My company has this irritating habit of forcing mandatory 'training' on its employees, apparently believing this to be a panacea for its various weaknesses. The worst of this is when those in the uppermost levels of management become excited about some new marketing philosophy, or efficiency system.
So excited, in fact, that they decide everyone in the entire company would benefit from knowing about it. So they send forth a diktat that all employees - and there are many tens of thousands - shall complete a training course on whatever it is, with a pass mark of >80% by a given date. This has happened several times in my six years.
I find these courses horrible. I just can't focus on anything I'm not fundamentally interested in - and these are thoroughly uninteresting subjects. By the time I reach the end of the course, I've forgotten what happened at the start.
So I always make use of the mechanism employed - I assume - by most of the other tens of thousands of employees: I get the crib sheet. There's always one around by the time I get round to doing the course, and in fact by that time the said sheet is usually pretty sophisticated, with answers to all the multiple choices. This sheet allows everyone to achieve passes in the 90th percentile, and everyone's happy - except for those of us who don't like such subterfuge, but don't see any choice.
I can say with complete honesty that I can recall nothing whatsoever of any of these courses. I don't even remember the subjects, but I do know that none of this rubbish has ever had any benefit to my work. At all. Ever.
But the most recent one did provide me with a revelation. I was gazing glumly at a screenful of hypothetical situation intended to illustrate a point. I was part-way down the page, and had found, yet again, my concentration drifting off onto a totally unrelated subject. For the umpteenth time, I mentally slapped myself, and tried to focus back on the text.
And of course my concentration drifted again. Why is studying so difficult for me? Why can't I concentrate on this stuff? It's as though I have an inability to concentrate. As though my concentration is defective. As if I have a deficit in my attention. An attention deficit… heeeyy…
So I went looking. I found a WHO paper with an ADD assessment, did it, and got an A+. I read up on symptoms and experiences, and they fit. I signed up to an Adult ADD online support group, and found myself in a crowd of people whose lives were exactly like mine. School had been a disaster for them, as it had been for me. Though acknowledged to be at least as intelligent as their more successful classmates, their academic record had gone into free-fall in the first few years of school. Few of them made it to university.
Their work careers were similarly chaotic: dozens of jobs, many ending acrimoniously. Few advance far up the chain of promotion, most remaining in low-paid and blue-collar positions.
(Which makes me, at least at the moment, a long way off the curve. I'm in a senior position, dealing with complex technical projects, and being paid way above the national average. I have no debts or relationship problems. It wasn't always thus: 15 years ago I was penniless, single, lonely, squatting in a hovel in Whitechapel, and developing a dangerous heroin habit. But right now I'm much less of a typical ADD adult.)
And ADD produces other, less directly related issues. Inability to finish things, once the interesting part is done - leading to work, and life, littered with projects started and then abandoned or forgotten.
I learned that Adult ADD (aADD or ADDA) had taken some time to be recognised as a real disorder. In the US, it's now well-established, but here in the UK its very existence was ignored until very recently. ADD in children is a fully-recognised phenomenon across the world, but for some reason it was always assumed that the disorder somehow simply went away in adulthood. I suspect that the symptoms become less overt over time as the individual learns coping mechanisms, and also that adults' ability to concentrate is under less scrutiny than their younger counterparts.
What treatments were there for this condition? Sadly, not much. Here in the UK, even those are hard to get at. Only a few medics are able to prescribe them, because medications like Ritalin are not licensed for use on adults, so GPs can't do so until their use has been blessed by one of these few. Perhaps there's some sense in requiring a formal diagnosis before handing out the pills, but there must be many ADDA people out there going untreated because of these obstacles.
The more I read up on Ritalin, the less I liked what I heard. It's a stimulant, an upper, and I really don't like those. They tend to make me uncomfortable unless balanced by a suitable downer. As I understand it, the paradoxical reaction that occurs in ADHD kids is one of the diagnostics for the condition: this upper makes them sleepy. Been there, done that, but it's not a peaceful experience. It's tooth-grindingly edgy, and no fun at all. If the stuff is another one of these, then small wonder that the kids don't like to take them, and patient compliance is a problem.
Apart from these, nothing to speak of, apart from the usual pile of 'complementary' junk. There's some Behaviour Modification stuff, but it seems that these are likely to be coping mechanisms, and I reckon I can work out a few of my own.
I'm doing so. Armed with my new knowledge, I know in advance the likely outcome of some events.
I've located a private clinic I can go to, to get a formal diagnosis and then be referred to one of the licensed docs for a prescription. But I rather think I'll try to work this out on my own for a while. I have some things in my favour. I'm reasonably clever, and it seems I can make out in whatever field I find myself in. I'm stuck with being a Generalist, because specialising would mean having to learn things about a single subject beyond the point where it really interests me. And generalists are useful, too.
My company has this irritating habit of forcing mandatory 'training' on its employees, apparently believing this to be a panacea for its various weaknesses. The worst of this is when those in the uppermost levels of management become excited about some new marketing philosophy, or efficiency system.
So excited, in fact, that they decide everyone in the entire company would benefit from knowing about it. So they send forth a diktat that all employees - and there are many tens of thousands - shall complete a training course on whatever it is, with a pass mark of >80% by a given date. This has happened several times in my six years.
I find these courses horrible. I just can't focus on anything I'm not fundamentally interested in - and these are thoroughly uninteresting subjects. By the time I reach the end of the course, I've forgotten what happened at the start.
So I always make use of the mechanism employed - I assume - by most of the other tens of thousands of employees: I get the crib sheet. There's always one around by the time I get round to doing the course, and in fact by that time the said sheet is usually pretty sophisticated, with answers to all the multiple choices. This sheet allows everyone to achieve passes in the 90th percentile, and everyone's happy - except for those of us who don't like such subterfuge, but don't see any choice.
I can say with complete honesty that I can recall nothing whatsoever of any of these courses. I don't even remember the subjects, but I do know that none of this rubbish has ever had any benefit to my work. At all. Ever.
But the most recent one did provide me with a revelation. I was gazing glumly at a screenful of hypothetical situation intended to illustrate a point. I was part-way down the page, and had found, yet again, my concentration drifting off onto a totally unrelated subject. For the umpteenth time, I mentally slapped myself, and tried to focus back on the text.
And of course my concentration drifted again. Why is studying so difficult for me? Why can't I concentrate on this stuff? It's as though I have an inability to concentrate. As though my concentration is defective. As if I have a deficit in my attention. An attention deficit… heeeyy…
So I went looking. I found a WHO paper with an ADD assessment, did it, and got an A+. I read up on symptoms and experiences, and they fit. I signed up to an Adult ADD online support group, and found myself in a crowd of people whose lives were exactly like mine. School had been a disaster for them, as it had been for me. Though acknowledged to be at least as intelligent as their more successful classmates, their academic record had gone into free-fall in the first few years of school. Few of them made it to university.
Their work careers were similarly chaotic: dozens of jobs, many ending acrimoniously. Few advance far up the chain of promotion, most remaining in low-paid and blue-collar positions.
(Which makes me, at least at the moment, a long way off the curve. I'm in a senior position, dealing with complex technical projects, and being paid way above the national average. I have no debts or relationship problems. It wasn't always thus: 15 years ago I was penniless, single, lonely, squatting in a hovel in Whitechapel, and developing a dangerous heroin habit. But right now I'm much less of a typical ADD adult.)
And ADD produces other, less directly related issues. Inability to finish things, once the interesting part is done - leading to work, and life, littered with projects started and then abandoned or forgotten.
I learned that Adult ADD (aADD or ADDA) had taken some time to be recognised as a real disorder. In the US, it's now well-established, but here in the UK its very existence was ignored until very recently. ADD in children is a fully-recognised phenomenon across the world, but for some reason it was always assumed that the disorder somehow simply went away in adulthood. I suspect that the symptoms become less overt over time as the individual learns coping mechanisms, and also that adults' ability to concentrate is under less scrutiny than their younger counterparts.
What treatments were there for this condition? Sadly, not much. Here in the UK, even those are hard to get at. Only a few medics are able to prescribe them, because medications like Ritalin are not licensed for use on adults, so GPs can't do so until their use has been blessed by one of these few. Perhaps there's some sense in requiring a formal diagnosis before handing out the pills, but there must be many ADDA people out there going untreated because of these obstacles.
The more I read up on Ritalin, the less I liked what I heard. It's a stimulant, an upper, and I really don't like those. They tend to make me uncomfortable unless balanced by a suitable downer. As I understand it, the paradoxical reaction that occurs in ADHD kids is one of the diagnostics for the condition: this upper makes them sleepy. Been there, done that, but it's not a peaceful experience. It's tooth-grindingly edgy, and no fun at all. If the stuff is another one of these, then small wonder that the kids don't like to take them, and patient compliance is a problem.
Apart from these, nothing to speak of, apart from the usual pile of 'complementary' junk. There's some Behaviour Modification stuff, but it seems that these are likely to be coping mechanisms, and I reckon I can work out a few of my own.
I'm doing so. Armed with my new knowledge, I know in advance the likely outcome of some events.
- I know that things I start will probably never be finished, so I don't start them unless I expect to enjoy the journey, and actually reaching the destination isn't that important.
- I know that I can be distracted utterly by almost any diversion. In the middle of something important, the slightest attention-getting interruption will make me drop the original project and forget it entirely. I have to structure an environment that constantly forces me to be faced with the important work.
- And I know that studying something that doesn't interest me is a useless exercise. I have to avoid it wherever possible, and if I'm forced to, I have to set my own and others' expectations of the result.
I've located a private clinic I can go to, to get a formal diagnosis and then be referred to one of the licensed docs for a prescription. But I rather think I'll try to work this out on my own for a while. I have some things in my favour. I'm reasonably clever, and it seems I can make out in whatever field I find myself in. I'm stuck with being a Generalist, because specialising would mean having to learn things about a single subject beyond the point where it really interests me. And generalists are useful, too.
Friday, November 25, 2005
Religion and Society
It's widely held - almost axiomatic - that regardless of its truth or falsity, religion has a good effect of society. It teaches, say its proponents, morality, good behaviour, respect for authority and various other useful rules for living that benefit both its adherents and the populace as a whole.
Oops! - no it doesn't. Have a look at this research, in the Journal of Religion and Society.
Having dispensed with that aspect, let's talk about what other reason there may be for religion's existence.
Oops! - no it doesn't. Have a look at this research, in the Journal of Religion and Society.
Having dispensed with that aspect, let's talk about what other reason there may be for religion's existence.
World's Nastiest Ex-Cop
Is Sheriff John Bunnell the most objectionable person in the world, or is it just something he puts on for the show?
I reckon the blustering, bellicose, sneering persona he projects comes straight from the heart. There was an early cop show some years back - before he became a TV personality - that showed him working as an actual cop, carrying out a bust of some sort. Even then, the characteristics that Stojanovich presumably regarded as Star Quality were clearly visible: his undisguised contempt for those he was hunting; his fanatical dedication to his cause, and his unshakeable faith in his own personal righteousness.
The show, of course, is a perfect amplifier for these qualities. I don't know who writes the purple prose, but Bunny delivers it with real feeling. It's formulaic, but he pours all of his bile into each line, no matter how often he repeats them.
Every time the cops do something dangerous or deranged, they're being 'brave'. Each time the Bad Guys do anything unusual, they're 'crazed'. When the cops get lucky, it's a clever plan. The Bad Guys never get away, it seems, unless the footage is so good they really can't bear not to use it - in which case their escape tends to be glossed over as another clever plan.
How dangerous is this stuff, really? It's pretty nasty propaganda, which apparently tries to convince the viewer that all the felons shown are barely human scum, for whom no cruelty is unjustified. The Good Guys, in contrast, are valiant, superhuman heroes whose power and authority is absolute, and demands total, cowering respect.
The intended audience for this rubbish will probably contain a fair number who will be young and gullible enough to be impressed by it. That can't be good for society. Then there's cops themselves, presumably another key audience sector. While it may be good for their morale to have this superhero image fed back to them, it can't be good for their sense of proportion.
I reckon most people in the
And they do this on camera! Heaven knows what happens when no-one's looking - though there's footage of that, too...
Initial misgivings
OK, two people have so far told me I should do a blog. So I will.
I'll probably forget about it before long.
Who'll read this thing? How will they find it? Presumably it's supposed to be organic: some stray berk stumbles on to it via a search engine, and natural selection takes over.
So if I want to tout for custom I should give this thing a high cross-section for search engines - say things that people search for. Like what? Sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, perhaps - yeah, I do all of that.
We'll see.
I'll probably forget about it before long.
Who'll read this thing? How will they find it? Presumably it's supposed to be organic: some stray berk stumbles on to it via a search engine, and natural selection takes over.
So if I want to tout for custom I should give this thing a high cross-section for search engines - say things that people search for. Like what? Sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, perhaps - yeah, I do all of that.
We'll see.
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