Virtual Travelog

August 22, 2004

Online Banking with Quicken for Mac. Why I don't give a damn about free checking.

One day towards the end of 2000 my wife finally lost her financial patience with me. As she threw a pile of bills and receipts at me she screamed "That's it! I'm never doing the accounts or paying the bills again. You never collect receipts, you never write a memo in the checkbook, and your work expenses are impossible to understand!" She then stormed out of the room. I was in no doubt that she meant it and she has remained free of the household accounting burden ever since. I unfortunately have not. It is true that until that day I had never balanced a checkbook in my life and habitually threw bank balances in the trash without even opening them - another contributing factor to my wife's rant. In fact the only time I ever knew my bank balance was when the ATM refused to dispense cash. So it was with great trepidation that I began my fiscally responsible life. I figured that as I had designed and built large financial software systems I ought to be able to use a small one. So after some research I selected Quicken as they had a large share of the market and had a version for Mac.

I have been using Quicken, on a Mac, for all our finances for four years now. I can monitor our financial activity at any level of detail. I can find any transactions in any account, and can create summary reports and graphs showing spending in various categories, for any time period. I can even calculate my net worth - a depressing activity! It takes between 15 and 30 minutes a week to maintain our accounts depending on the amount of financial activity that has occurred during the previous week.

In bringing our accounts under control I have come to realize that complete and accurate financial information is a powerful thing. We recently bought a house, and were able to calculate exactly what we could afford based on four years worth of data. Without Quicken we would have been guessing. Looking back over the past four years using Quicken I can now see that I have gone through several distinct phases. These phases are parts of an unconscious optimization process aimed at reducing the overall cost and effort involved in managing our finances. I did not plan this process it just became obvious once I had access to complete and accurate data. The result is that the banks get less of my money and I spend less time managing it. From the banks perspective financial management software like Quicken is a "bad thing" because customers who use it are less profitable. The following sections describe the optimization process that emerged and some of the pitfalls I encountered.

Stage 1 Account Setup

It took about three months to get everything setup. First I had to find out what accounts we had - quite a few as it turned out. As I discovered each account I set it up in Quicken. The actual setup was trivial but finding all the required information and getting my account "activated" so I could access it through Quicken took many phone calls to the customer support desks of each financial institution. Getting technical support from a bank is like getting medical advice from a hairstylist - it lacks authority and can be completely misleading. Sometimes, it was not until I had been passed through several customer service representatives that I finally heard "Oh ! we don't support that feature for Quicken on a Mac!" Once the account is setup it takes at least one billing cycle to cross check the paper statement with the Quicken managed data to make sure they reconcile.

Quicken for Mac provides four levels of support for maintaining an account. These levels provide increasing control for the user and decreasing control for the bank. Most of the tradeoffs I made were to do with the cost and level of service I would accept from an institution for the benefits I would get. The four levels of support are described below.

Manual maintenance

This is the worst solution. If your account has more than a few transactions a month entering them by hand will be a major headache. This is the only solution for financial institutions that provide no support at all for Quicken. I avoid these institutions if I possibly can.

Web connect

This is the basic level of support provided by most financial institutions. It requires a visit their website once a month to download a file containing all the transactions which must then be imported into the correct account in Quicken. You can get data more frequently but you have to remember exactly what dates you have already downloaded since you can get duplicate transactions if you are not careful. This approach is ok if you have a limited number of accounts but rapidly becomes a pain if you have more than a few accounts.

Direct connect

This is the best approach if you need to monitor the account on a daily basis. Transactions are downloaded whenever you request and are automatically loaded into Quicken. I have this option for all my bank and credit card accounts. I will not open a new account of this type unless I can get this level of service. I pay $3 a month to my current bank for this service. But my credit cards provide it free. It is interesting that credit card companies will provide this service free but banks will not. I believe the banks fee for this is a deterrent intended to drive customers to use the banks web based service instead.

Direct connect with online bill payment

This provides all the benefits of direct connect but also allows payments to be made through Quicken. This feature means I hardly use checks at all anymore and I can schedule payments to be made at any date in the future. I pay my current Bank $6.95 a month for this service. Again I believe this fee is a deterrent and a way to make up for lost income as I no longer use checks. Paying this fee is a compromise, as well as online banking I want access to a large network of ATMs. I can avoid out of network ATM transactions and do online bill payment through Quicken.

Stage 2 - Categorization

Once my accounts were setup I started to classify transactions. Initially I used Quicken's default categories but over time I started developing my own categories tailored to my needs. This meant I started to monitor the things that mattered to me. After a while I began to see patterns of spending where we could easily make savings. These patterns were only visible because of the customized categorization scheme.

Stage 3 - Cost Reduction

One of the obvious costs that could be reduced was banking fees. Firstly we decided to only get cash from our Bank's ATMs. Those $2:00 fees for using other banks ATMs add up quickly. Then there was the $10 fee for automatic transfers from the savings account to the checking account at the end of the month. With the forward view available in Quicken I can anticipate these events and transfer money to avoid any fees. Cumulatively these savings easily cover the cost of the yearly software upgrade.

Stage 4 - Account Consolidation

The next big realization was that we had too many accounts. By consolidating accounts we could further reduce banking charges and the effort required to manage them. For example one savings account was under the threshold balance for free banking. As a result we were being charged once a quarter for the privilege of leaving our money in the account. So I consolidated our savings in a few accounts. This put the account in question over the threshold and stopped the charges.

Stage 5 - Increasing Ease of Use

I have now reached the stage where the main driver for my financial decisions is the ease with which I can integrate new financial institutions into my system. There is enough choice out there that if an institution will not support my computing needs then I will take my business elsewhere. Even my primary checking account can be moved if necessary. I don't rely on my bank for anything other than acting as the interface between my software and the rest of the financial world. In short they have become a utility provider. The telephone companies provide dial tone and my bank provides the financial equivalent and that's it. I believe this is why banks make it so difficult to integrate their systems with personal financial software and why they try so hard to get you to use their proprietary online banking systems. They want to lock our data into thier systems and prevent their services becoming commoditized.

Quicken is without doubt the most valuable piece of software I use and has returned the small investment I made in it many times over. It is also a valuable weapon for managing the sharks of the personal finace world.

Posted by John R. Harris at 10:29 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 29, 2003

Linksys BEFW11S4 Wireless-B Broadband Router Problems - Low Reliability and Poor Fault Tolerance

Background

A few months ago I had to setup a home office and decided I would take the opportunity to upgrade my home network. My Linksys BEFSR41 Etherfast Cable / DSL Router had never given me any problems and so I decided to upgrade to the Linksys BEFW11S4 Wireless-B broadband Router. I now have everything working reliably but getting to this happy state and resolving the problems took a lot of luck and in the end the solution was far from obvious. Judging by the bad reviews on Amazon and elsewhere it appears that many people have been unable to fix similar problems with this device. Below is my description of the problem and a solution that worked for me. Hopefully this will help others, but as always, your mileage may vary!

Configuration

I have two Macs running OSX on my home network, both machines have static IP addresses and are wired to the router. I wanted to add a wireless Windows Laptop with a DHCP assigned IP address. I purchased a Linksys BEFW11S4 Wireless-B broadband Router and at the same time I bought a Proxim ORiNOCO Gold 802.11a/b/g ComboCard for the Laptop this came with a Proxim client utility. Installation and setup of the laptop card was very easy. Simply plug in the card, insert the disc and install the driver. The card immediately picked up my neighbors open network and I was on the Internet. Setting up the router was a bit more challenging; I copied the configuration from my previous device and enabled DHCP to start issuing IP numbers out of range of my 2 static machines. Everything worked and I was connected to the Internet via my new router.

Symptoms

The wireless network seemed to work fine for several days but then it "hung". The only fix was to turn off the router and turn it back on again. This hang affected all machines connected to the router. Whenever they attempted any network operations they would time out. However the Proxim client utility and the laptop claimed the wireless network was still running! The network hung once or twice a week - Annoying, but tolerable. Then I upgraded the laptop from windows 2000 to XP and things got worse! The network would hang one or two times a day. At first I did not connect the OS upgrade with the router problems, besides, I had another bigger issue.

I connect to work via a Cisco VPN client which seemed to be working ok but all of a sudden (in fact immediately after the XP upgrade), Microsoft Exchange slowed to glacial speed. It would take hours to sync with the Exchange Server. This was not acceptable. I had to fix things. I called our company technical support and got through to the guy who manages the VPN. He said "What order did you install the wireless card driver and the VPN client? Because they don't play nice together and you must install the wireless card driver first and then the VPN client".

Solution

• Download and install the latest firmware upgrade from Linksys. This is not enough to fix the problem on its own. I tried this first and the network still hung. But it's a good idea and this solution may not work without it.
• Uninstall the Cisco VPN client and the Proxim client utility from the laptop
• Reinstalled the Proxim client utility on the laptop
• Reinstalled the Cisco VPN client on the laptop

Outcome

The network has been running for 10 days without a single hitch.

Cause

I'm still not certain what the cause was but this is what I suspect. The VPN client and Proxim client utility share something in common dlls or configuration or something! When installed in the wrong order things get messed up and in unusual circumstances the laptop sends network traffic that is somehow malformed. This affects the router and causes it to hang. Basically the router appears to be intolerant of glitches in low level network messages and this leads to low reliability. Not a great explanation I know and it may be completely spurious but my network now works reliably so I'm happy!

Posted by John R. Harris at 03:15 PM | Comments (60) | TrackBack

October 31, 2003

The Evolution of Cooperation - Social Software and the Shadow of the Future.

The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod is an outstanding book. First published in 1984 it has increased in significance with the evolution of the Internet. In the book Axelrod examines how cooperation can emerge and stabilize in multi-participant environments. The book is fascinating as an analysis of the evolution of cooperation, but is of particular interest to anyone seeking to establish effective; social software systems, peer-to-peer networks, or multi-player gaming environments. Axelrod builds his thesis on the analysis of a gaming tournament he organized. He invited multiple people from many different fields; economics, computer science, evolutionary biology, etc, to submit computer programs employing well defined strategies to play a series of games of Prisoner's Dilemma. Each program played several hundred games against every other program. The results were surprising and enlightening.

The Prisoner's Dilemma

In the game of Prisoner's Dilemma there are two players, who each have two choices. Each player chooses simultaneously, to cooperate or to defect. If they both choose to cooperate they both get R - the reward for mutual cooperation. If they both choose to defect they both get P - the punishment for mutual defection. If one cooperates and the other defects then the defector gets T - the temptation, and the cooperative player gets S - the suckers payoff. The dilemma comes from the fact that the best strategy depends on the opponent's strategy and a smart player knows this, so players must both second guess each other.

The following table shows the scoring system used by Axelrod for the Prisoner's Dilemma tournament.

		Player Two
		Cooperate	Defect
Player One	Cooperate	R=3, R=3 Reward for mutual cooperation	S=0, T=5 Sucker's payoff, and temptation to defect
	Defect	T=5, S=0 Temptation to defect and sucker's payoff	P=1, P=1 Punishment for mutual defection

The results above are one specific case. Any game is a Prisoner's Dilemma if it satisfies the following inequalities:

T > R > P > S
And
R > (T+S)/2
(This second inequality means it is better to cooperate than alternately defect and cooperate)

In the Axelrod's tournament one of the simplest strategies was the clear winner. Axelrod calls this strategy Tit-for-Tat - Cooperate on the first move and thereafter do whatever the opponent did on the previous move. Why this strategy is so successful and what it means is the subject of the rest of the book.

The Shadow of the Future

Axelrod defines a term "w" for weight (or importance) of a future result. He assumes that w always takes a value between zero and one (0 < w < 1). If w is 1 then future results are as important as current results, but if w is 0.5, for example, then future results are half as important as current results. The current value of the next result is calculated by multiplying the payoff by w. High values of w mean the future is more important and low values mean it is less important. The net present value of a series of future results can be calculated according to this formula.

where w is equivalent to 1 / (1+rate)

Axelrod poetically calls the concept of a net present value "The Shadow of the Future". Increasing w increases the size of the shadow whereas decreasing w decreases the size of the shadow.

The concept of the net present value of future earnings is a common one in economics and is fundamental in many investment decisions. Future earnings are less valuable than current earnings because of risk and opportunity costs. It is not certain that two players will actually meet again or that they will behave in a predictable manner. External influences could change the expected outcome. And there are usually alternative strategies that could be just as rewarding for the same risk.

Collective and Territorial Stability

If the game is played in rounds (where each round consists of many hundreds of turns) and the population of players using a given strategy in the next round is determined by the success of that strategy in the previous round. Then the concept of invasion and collective stability can be examined. A collectively stable strategy is one where a large number of agents using the same strategy cannot be "invaded" by a single agent playing a different strategy. Axelrod shows that some strategies can invade a larger group if there is more than one agent playing the invading strategy. He goes on to prove that Collectively stable strategies are also territorially stable. That is if agents can play only with adjacent agents the same rules apply.

Axelrod's Propositions

Axelrod defines 8 propositions based on his analysis of the tournament. About half of the book is spent explaining these propositions.

1. If the Discount parameter, w, is sufficiently high, there is no best strategy independent of the strategy used by the other player
2. The Tit-for-Tat strategy is collectively stable if and only if, w is large enough. This critical value of w is a function of the four payoff parameters, T, R, P, and S
3. Any strategy which may be the first to cooperate can vbe collectively stable only when w is sufficiently large
4. For a nice strategy to be collectively stable, it must be provoked by the very first defection of the other player
5. The strategy Always-Defect is always collectively stable
6. The strategies which can invade Always-Defect in a cluster with the smallest value of p (the weighted average score an invader gets from games with other invaders and incumbents) are those which are maximally discriminating, such as Tit-for-Tat
7. If a nice strategy cannot be invaded by a single individual, it cannot be invaded by a cluster of individuals either
8. If a rule is collectively stable, it is territorially stable

How to do well

Axelrod provides four maxims for how to do well as a participant in situations similar to iterated games of Prison Dilemma.

• Don't be envious - The Prisoner's Dilemma is not a zero sum game. It is ok if your "opponent" does better than you. In fact if they don't do at least as well as you then you are not cooperating enough.
• Don't be the first to defect - Defection is an effective form of punishment but it is costly for both parties, it can lead to long periods of alternating defection. Stay away from defection until forced to act.
• Reciprocate both cooperation and defection - Reciprocity is a double edged sword. You must be prepared to consistently punish defectors as quickly as you reward cooperators.
• Don't be too clever - Consistency is important, reciprocity works as a strategy if your opponent can predict your next move. Tit-for-Tat is successful partly because it is a transparent strategy.

How to encourage cooperation

Axelrod provides another set of maxims for those trying to encourage cooperation among players.

• Enlarge the shadow of the future - The net present value of future earnings can be increased in several ways. Increase the frequency of interactions between players, and increase the importance of the current game of future games. The importance can be increased by making a players actions a matter of public knowledge. This is the beginnings of reputation.
• Change the payoffs - Changing the payoffs so much that the inequalities defined above no longer hold true will destroy the game, but within the inequalities there is still room for optimization. Increasing R or decreasing T and P can all have encouraging effects
• Teach people to care about each other - Ethics and ritual often evolve in environments of iterative Prisoner's Dilemma. These emergent features serve to enforce socially acceptable rules of conduct and can change players perception of the game to the point where cooperation is more "desirable" than the temptation to defect.
• Teach Reciprocity - Tit-for-Tat is fair but it has additional advantages. Tit-for-Tat encourages other players to use similar strategies. Players using Tit-for-Tat police their opponents and therefore provide a secondary benefit to other players using Tit-for-Tat
• Improve recognition abilities - Cooperation works effectively where players can recognize each other and remember how a given player behaved last time they met. Recognition and memory can be improved in several ways. Labels stereotypes, status and reputation can all play a part. Labeling players and categorizing them into stereotypes can help make large numbers of players manageable and make it easier to make fast decisions. Reputation is an emergent property of social groups. Players are generally recognized by the group as being reliable or unreliable. This is both a form of labeling and of collective memory.

Shirky's Restatement

In his recent essay A Group is its own Worst Enemy Clay Shirky simplifies and restates similar findings by suggesting "four things to design for" when designing a social software system:

1. If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.
2. You have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or "member since."
3. You need barriers to participation. This is one of the things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.
4. You have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.

Emergence of Social Structures at the boundary of Cooperation and Defection

These lessons can be usefully applied to a variety of networked communities such as; peer-to-peer networks, multi-player gaming environments, and other social software systems if the community in question is playing a close analogue of the Prisoners Dilemma. This is true when the payoff scheme has equivalents to the payoffs R,P,T,S, and these equivalents satisfy, or can be made to satisfy, the inequalities T > R > P > S and R > (T+S)/2.

In his fine book Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. , Mitchell M. Waldrop states that systems evolve most rapidly when they are pushed to the edge of chaos and order because this is the region where complexity emerges spontaneously. The inequalities that define the Prisoner's Dilemma describe a similar boundary, between cooperation and defection, where complex social structures like ethics, ritual, and reputation emerge. I believe the most interesting social environments are the most adaptive environments, that support the emergence of complex social structures, that are only possible because both cooperation and defection are permitted. I believe it is therefore worth pushing networked environments towards this edge by making cooperation only slightly more attractive than defection. In other words R > (T+S)/2, but only just!

In many cases existing environments could be greatly improved if the payoff scheme were brought more into balance. It is common for the payoff scheme of these environments to be out of balance, either defectors go unpunished or there is no opportunity to defect and everyone becomes a sucker ripe for exploitation. By applying some of the maxims defined by Axelrod the payoff schemes of these environments can be moved towards a more balanced state typical of the Prisoner's Dilemma. The important point to realize is that the option to defect is necessary because it is this option that drives the emergence of many social structures whose purpose is to encourage cooperation. These emergent features are only found where they are necessary to tip the balance between cooperation and defection in favor of cooperation.

Posted by John R. Harris at 07:56 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 25, 2003

The Biomorph Personal Desk

I recently had to setup a home office. The hardest decision to make was which desk to buy. Given that I will be sitting at this desk for many hours and I have lower back problems, from playing too much rugby, I wanted an adjustable desk to match the Aeron chair I already have. It's surprising that while there are plenty of adjustable chairs around there are not that many adjustable desks. In the end it came down to a choice between the AdjustaBench from Anthro and the Personal Desk from Biomorph. The Biomorph won on price and looks. It came flat-packed in a huge wooden crate, construction took an hour or so and the engineering quality was evident from the precision with which the parts snapped into place. The best features are:

• The ergonomic shape - The split desk allows the back surface to be raised higher that the front surface and is robust enough to support the heaviest of monitors. The curve of the desk matches my arms-reach so everything on the back surface is within my grasp.
• The height adjustment - With a few effortless turns of the hand-crank the surfaces of the desk can be independently raised or lowered. I can even work standing up.
• The cable management systems - All the cables and transformers for charging the; cellphone, pda and laptop are held on a tray under the desk surface out of sight.
• The robust engineering - Living San Francisco means one is always looking for a place to hide during The Big One. I now know where I shall be.

Posted by John R. Harris at 12:50 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 26, 2003

Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig

I just watched Lawrence Lessig's speech, Free Culture (8.4 MB Flash 5 required) for a second time. This recording was made at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2002 where Lessig delivered the keynote. It is a superb example of a well designed and delivered power point presentation. It is also very persuasive.

Throughout the presentation Lessig repeats the refrain:

1. Creativity and
   innovation always
   builds on the past.


2. The past always
   tries to control
   the creativity that
   builds on it.


3. Free societies
   enable the future
   by limiting the past


4. Ours is less and
   less a free
   society.

He concludes with the observation...

Extending copyright perpetually... is itself a form of theft - a theft of our common culture.

It worries me when a lawyer as smart as Lessig calls on people to defend long held freedoms. He strikes me as very level headed and clear thinking and when he claims there is something to be defended I believe he is probably right.

Posted by John R. Harris at 02:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 21, 2003

Using a Balanced Scorecard to align Enterprise Architecture and System Architecture with Corporate Strategy and Business Strategy

The Balance Scorecard Approach

The concept of a balanced scorecard was developed by Dr. Robert S. Kaplan of the Harvard Business School, and Dr. David P. Norton, and is explain in their book Translating Strategy into Action. The Balanced Scorecard. The basic idea is that the, vision and strategy of an organization can be expressed as a set of goals and their associated objectives, measures, target values and initiatives. I covered defining goals and objectives for system design in a previous article. The Balanced Scorecard approach extends the scope of goals and objectives to the entire enterprise. Originally this approach was suggested as a business-measurement system but it has evolved into a business-management system. By continually measuring progress toward the objectives, the execution of a strategy can be monitored, corrections can be made, risks can be reduced, and the chances of success increased.

The key innovation of the balanced scorecard approach grew out of a simple realization. Most businesses only track progress in a measurable way from a financial perspective. Kaplan and Norton claimed this, single perspective view was "unbalanced" and that this lack of balance is inappropriate for "information age" corporations. They identified three additional perspectives, or areas of concern, that most businesses should also monitor. Listed below are the four perspectives they identified.

• Financial
• Customer
• Internal Processes
• Learning and Growth

In subsequent analyses it has been found that companies which use a balanced scorecard and place greater emphasis on the Internal process perspective are more successful. These companies typically assign approximately 1/3 rd of all objectives to internal processes and then equally divide the remaining objectives among the other three perspectives. This is the essence of the balanced scorecard. Kaplan and Norton claim that just 20 to 25 objectives, with measures, across the four perspectives can be sufficient to communicate and implement a strategy. There are entire books, software systems, and companies dedicated to the explanation, implementation, and monitoring of balanced scorecards but, in principle at least, the approach remains simple.

Defining Objectives with both Leading and Trailing Indicators

As the Balanced Scorecard developed from a business-measurement tool into a business-management tool it became more important to track leading indicators of progress toward goals as well as trailing indicators that measure achievement of goals. In some cases a single objective can have both leading and trailing measures that can be used to ensure progress is being made and indicate when the objective has finally been achieved.

Linking Objectives to Create Cause and Effect Relationships

Kaplan and Norton state that

A strategy is a set of hypotheses about cause and effect.

They also point out that while many balanced scorecards are just collections of objectives grouped into four perspectives the best scorecards link these objectives into chains of cause and effect. These chains typically link objectives across all the perspectives. They often start with objectives for learning and growth and show how they are intended to create improvements in Internal Process. These improvements are in turn supposed to positively affect customers' behavior and thus lead to financial benefits (The diagram above illustrates this type of linkage). By creating cause and effect links an entire strategy can be clearly expressed in a measurable way that can be monitored and corrected as needed.

Cascading the Balanced Scorecard through an organization

After defining a corporate balanced scorecard an obvious next step is to cascade balanced scorecards down through the organization. Just as a balanced scorecard can be developed for an entire corporation, one can also be developed for a business unit within a corporation, or even a team within a business unit. Kaplan and Norton insist that the structure of balanced scorecards must reflect the organizational hierarchy. Presumably this ensures unambiguous ownership of goals and objectives although they offer no explanation. Ensuring that lower level balanced scorecards are aligned with higher levels is crucial. The goals and objectives at lower levels should be clearly linked of those at higher levels that they support. The process of cascading a balanced scorecard is not easy. It is often difficult to map the general measures defined at the corporate level to specific measures that the business unit can affect.

Kaplan and Norton take care to point out that the four perspectives they define are not the only ones that can be used. Unfortunately many practitioners of this approach have reduced these four perspectives to unchallenged dogma. Despite this, in many cases, they are perfectly adequate. However it is my belief that as balanced scorecards are cascaded down an organization the relative importance of the different perspectives changes. In extreme cases perspectives may become unnecessary and some new ones may need to be added. This is particularly true in the case of Enterprise and System Architecture.

In a pervious article I described the interaction of Business Policy, Strategy, and Architecture in system design and concluded by saying

Understanding how a System Architecture supports it's Business Strategy within the framework of an Enterprise Architecture and how these in turn support Corporate Strategy and ultimately Corporate Policy is essential if systems are to deliver business value. This is not easy and is one reason why so many systems fail to deliver business value. The difficulty stems from the ever-changing business environment that forces continuous changes in goals and objectives. Making the goals and objectives explicit and then tracking them as they change is the only way to keep up with the game. But that is the topic for another time.

The Balanced Scorecard approach provides a way to handle these issues. The following sections describe an approach that handles the important distinction between corporate policy and strategy and introduces a new additional perspective to the four suggested by Kaplan and Norton that should be used when enterprise and systems architectures are involved.

Corporate Policy as a subset of Corporate Strategy

The goals and objectives of the corporate balanced scorecard should be labeled to indicate if they are corporate policy and therefore public knowledge or internal and therefore confidential. Corporate Policy is the subset of corporate goals and objectives that are discussed with investors and industry analysts in order to explain the corporate strategy. Some of the corporate strategy is kept internal to retain strategic advantage and strategic flexibility. These differences are important because it is easier to change internal strategy than it is to change corporate policy. Changes to corporate policy must be explained to investors and financial analysts. Changes to internal strategy need only to be communicated within the organization.

The Quality Attribute Perspective

When developing an enterprise architecture a new perspective should be added to the existing corporate balanced scorecard. This perspective should define the quality attributes of the enterprise architecture. Quality attribute definition has long been used to specify desirable features of software systems (I will cover the definition of software quality attributes in another article). What this approach has lacked in the past is a way to link the goals and objectives for quality attributes into the overall corporate and business strategy. By adding a quality attribute perspective to an existing balanced scorecard this problem can be solved. The new quality attribute perspective should be subservient to all other perspectives. Every goal and objective on the new perspective must be linked to one or more other goals or objectives in the other perspectives. There is absolutely no point in defining goals and objectives for enterprise architecture quality attributes unless they support some other business objective. Enterprise architecture has no meaningful purpose independent of the enterprise! By making the relationship between the quality attribute perspective and the rest of the balanced scorecard explicit changes in corporate strategy can be assessed in terms of their impact on the enterprise architecture and vice versa.

After the corporate balanced scorecard has been cascaded down through the organization. A similar process can be performed for the quality attribute perspective. If a business unit is developing one or more software applications then a quality attribute perspective should be developed for each system. Each quality attribute perspective must be derived from the Corporate Enterprise Architecture Quality Attributes. And must be subservient to, and supportive of, all the other perspectives created for the business unit.

It could be argued that software quality attributes to do not warrant their own perspective as they are merely a specialized form of internal business process objective. For some organizations this may be the case. But given the cost of software systems, the increasing reliance placed on them by businesses, the risks associated with failure and the alarming frequency with which they do fail. I believe software quality attributes deserve special attention. In particular many problems caused by continuously changing business goals and objectives can be identified and managed with this approach. Identifying and traking the changing relationships between strategic objectives, of different perspectives, at various levels, within an organization is difficult. It requires the support and active participation of all parties, it is a political and organizational process as much as it is a technical one. Fortunately the process of consensus building within an organization is not the subject of this article.

Posted by John R. Harris at 09:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 27, 2003

The Assassins. A Radical Sect in Islam by Bernard Lewis

The Assassins or Ismailis were a fascinating, enigmatic people that used assassination, and the fear of it, as a political weapon. Their influence was felt throughout the Islamic world for 2 centuries and in the 13th century extended as far as Karakorum, the capital of the Mongol empire. The Mongols targeted them for destruction in 1256 and within a year they were eradicated.

I've been curious about the Assassins for some time, largely because the Mongols were so systematic in the way they set about destroying them. This book is one of the few books on the subject written by a scholar that is currently in print. The first few chapters explain how Europe gradually came to understand who the Assassins were. Lewis does a good job of explaining how layers of misinformation and second hand, often biased, reports were gradually stripped away as contemporary texts, sometimes written by the Assassins themselves, were discovered and translated.

The middle chapters of the book are a monotonous recitation of dates, names, places, and events with little analysis or explanation. This type of history I find unbearable it is data but it is not information! I have heard that Lewis's other book What went wrong is similarly unreadable. I could understand this approach if the book were liberally scattered with footnotes and references to source documents, it would at least be useful to historians if this were the case. But it is not, Lewis expects us to take his history largely on faith since he provides few ways to validate his claims.

If you manage to survive the boredom of the middle chapters and reach the final chapter Lewis provides a brief analysis of the Assassins place in history their methods and goals. Unfortunately by this point he'd lost my interest.

In general I find Lewis's analysis unconvincing. I must confess I do not know this period of History, which is why I bought the book, but there were a few occasions when Lewis drew parallels with events I do have some knowledge of and this was enough to destroy my faith in the breadth of his knowledge and the quality of his analysis. A few examples:

Page 129
In one respect the Assassins are without precedent - in the planned, systematic and log term use of terror as a political weapon. The stranglers of Iraq had been small-scale and random practitioners, rather like the thugs of India, with whom they may be connected.

The Thugs were an Indian cult that worshipped the goddess of destruction, Kali. They allegedly strangled more than one million travelers. Hardly "small scale and random"! Even if you believe, as some people do, that the thug threat was exaggerated by the British for political purposes, it is still a bad example precisely because of the confusion.

Page 91
The Ismailis in their castles might well have been in a position to offer sustained resistance to Mongol attacks - but the new Imam decided otherwise.

I find this hard to believe. If the Assassins had been able to resist the Mongols they would have been unique. No one in China, Korea, Russia or Europe managed to offer "significant resistance" to the Mongols. If the Assassins were different Lewis does not explain why. Within a year the Mongols had not only beaten the Assassins they had eradicated them.

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April 18, 2003

The Traveler Guitar - An Example of Fitness for Purpose in Product Design

I've been through so many airports recently I can't remember which one this happen at. But I was waiting at the gate when this huge Viking of a guy came and sat next to me with what looked like a rifle case slung over his shoulder. My curiosity was aroused and as I checked out his case he caught me looking at it, so I felt it best to ask him about his Traveler Guitar to show I wasn't just some loony staring at his baggage. He lit up with enthusiasm and proceeded to pull out the guitar and bolt on the arm support. Then he produced a digital sound processor the size of a cigarette pack, and some headphones. He plugged them all together and handed it to me. Cool! The thing was actually still in tune! He dialed in a nice funky sound and I was off, much to the amusement of the other passengers.

Some people get confused about quality. Quality is fitness for purpose it is not an absolute. This is the finest quality traveling guitar I've ever come across. But it's not a patch on my Fender Stratocaster for sound quality. The point is it doesn't need to be. The difference is all about fitness for purpose. The traveler guitar weighs in at only 4 lbs, half the weight of my Strat. It has a full scale neck with 22 frets. But the machine heads are buried inside the body so they can't get damaged or knocked out of tune. As an added benefit the neck is shorter as there is no head stock. The arm rest has two positions one for playing and one conveniently tucked away for traveling. And the whole thing looks great which is essential for an electric guitar! But best of all when packed for traveling it fits in a small bag that can be easily slung over the shoulder, unlike my fender which requires a flight case the size of a small coffin. Necessity is the mother of invention which is why this guitar could only have been invented by a pilot. But the high degree of quality coupled with the simplicity of the design makes this guitar a masterpiece in my book.

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