I guess it has. And what a month it’s been. We’ve had the Services Leadership Summit, 2 operations reviews with Jonathan and staff for Software and Services respectively, a 2 day Johnny L offsite, multiple staff meetings, project reviews, demos, SunUp in Lisbon, new SPS deals, and a few customer briefings to boot. So I hope the lag in posting will be viewed through that lens…

I’ve got a bazillion things to write about, most of them important. Given that there are only a few minutes to write I’ll only hit one topic. (Guess this means you’ll see a few more entries as time emerges…)

Time to market. We’ve got to do things faster. How many of us have heard this? I know I have. Time to market is an outcome. What I want to talk about today is a mindset. The big elephant in the room is that we build monoliths. We deploy monoliths. We specify monoliths. We work hard (in truth, nearly kill ourselves) to produce these monoliths fast and with as high a quality as we can manage. It’s not a secret, and it’s largely why we can only release every six months.

We’re not lazy, stupid, or incompetent, but we never quite seem to hit the mark with what we’re doing. I’m hearing from a number of you in CNS in particular that you’re frustrated about being asked to do more faster. I’ve got breaking news, I’m frustrated too.

So, given the following context:

– Volume wins
– Our customer base is connected
– Content value leads to stickiness

We should consider the following hypothesis:

Maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t specify, design, build, deploy, and operate monolithic software and services.

Time to market is an outcome. The method to get there is not to work harder or faster, it’s to work differently and smarter. It’s not to sacrifice quality, it’s to break the problem down and approach it a different way. I propose we use the context of connected volume desiring content as a lever to change our thinking.

For instance, shouldn’t we have a space where we deploy a new feature or function before production where a user/customer can kick the tires? Something like Google Labs?

Why should we have a PRD that specifies a perfect solution that all needs to be delivered on date X? Could we pull interesting features and functions in priority order and work on them as discreet components?

Shouldn’t we publish continuous realtime context relevant content?

I submit we’re doing what we’re doing because that’s how we’ve always done it. We’re trying to get our customers high quality software expressed as a service built on a train schedule like Solaris. Given that we’re connected, given that our customers are content hungry, given that we’re talking about volume (think 20M JRE downloads/month), we’re not working smarter. We’re working harder. There is a different way.

Here’s our challenge: We’ve got this project at Sun now called Red October (I’ll write more about this soon) that is really going to cause us to take a deep look at ourselves and deliver more to the company faster – let’s get to grips with the monolith problem. If you’ve got an idea about how we should attack and address this, I want to hear about it. Please leave a comment – I’ll respond. Meanwhile, think small, think simple, think flexible, think agile, more to the point, let’s all THINK our way forward.

83% of IT projects fail in one way or another (over budget and late for instance.) Today, the SeeBeyond folks gave a demo and overview to the software executive staff. They had a number of statistics they referenced:

– 100 new IT projects started every hour
– 31% of all IT projects cancelled
– 53% of projects late and 189% of budget on average
– Resulting in an estimated $140B/year in extra cost

Source: The Standish Group’s Chaos Report.

I don’t know about you, but I find those figures shocking. That after 40 years of concentrated effort around IT we don’t have a better success rate than 17% makes me wonder why businesses invest….but I digress.

On the brighter side, the SeeBeyond acquisition brought significantly more to the table than I appreciated. The concept of composite application brings significant business opportunity to the table for Sun and potentially, could help address the problems contributing to the rotten metrics enumerated above.

I’m particularly pleased that the CNS Sun Connection Architecture will easily adapt and in fact, thrive in the world of the composite app. Now, we’ve all got to get busy making sure we specify, design, plan, build, test, deploy, and operate them in an efficient manner. No small challenge.

So I’m trawling the news sites this morning in lieu of my morning paper (so last millennium) and I see this:

StarWreck – A Finnish spoof of StarTrek created by 300 or so people working on personal computers working collaboratively over the course of SEVEN years. They’re doing something very interesting with their masterpiece, distributing it only over the internet (straight downloads, BitTorrent, etc.)

Image captured from the movie rendered digitally

How do they make money? Well, they don’t really. They’re selling t-shirts and charging for physical media (DVDs.) My guess, they’ll pull in more Euros than they think…they’ve got an estimated 700,000 downloads since September 30.

There’s a recent example that is even closer to home, the

Sun/Google deal announced yesterday. We’ll bundle the Google desktop with each Java and Office download to start – and Sun gets cold hard cash with each instance. This is a great example of monetizing a community by adding value to the community with frictionless distribution. This is just a start, stay tuned….

Well, I wondered when this would happen. For a long time I’ve had the notion of what I called a “personal productivity pod.” For those of you who might have inclinations like me, a place to kind of shut out the world, yet remain connected. It was really something of a joke that I shared with my wife.

To my surprise (and horror) this concept has been born in the The Oculas. Click to read more. Here’s a picture of the thing:

What does this mean in the broader work and cultural sense? I don’t know, but I’m not sure I like it….

Before I get into the core subject material, I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you for all the feedback and encouragement offered from my inaugural blog entry. As such, here’s another entry to critique.

Over the last few months I’ve had the honor to lead CNS, a disturbing trend has become evident. I think the root of the trend has to do with trust and respect of one another at heart, and I think the only way to address it is with consistent results, actions, and some risk taking activity. The trend is what is known as tribalism. Tribalism is a naturally occurring phenomena around groups because at heart, people want to belong to something. However, in the corporate environment, it can be very disruptive.

Like everything, there are two sides to this behavior. Loyalty to a group is necessary prerequisite to achieve team results. However, when taken to the extreme, we see destructive results where group A is better than group B because they are [idiots|slackers|pick your reason]. In a certain sense, it’s natural. In real performance terms, it’s deadly.

Dr. Ann McGee-Cooper is a respected voice in a movement called “servant leadership” writes about corporate tribalism in the following article. I differ with Dr. McGee-Cooper on competition as being a “bad” thing, but I do think there are several excellent points raised in this work.

First, this behavior is driven from a fear or scarcity mentality. Let’s be real, Sun has been a rough place to work over the past few years as the company has reduced in size from $18B/year and 45,000 employees to our current $11B/year and 30,000 employees. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a 33% reduction, 1 in 3, or our colleagues no longer in our community. The source of the fear and scarcity mentality is clear.

Second, people want to “belong.” Try as we may, we are at core thinking animals. If we look at examples in nature or of what we might term primitive human societies, the worst thing that can happen to an individual is expulsion from the group. No longer having an association with a community we value. As much as I despise reality TV, a great example of this is the TV show Survivor where the weak are voted off the island.

Finally, the key issue from my perspective is why we do what we do and how we can improve the situation for Sun as a group. This has to do with striving for a shared endstate or dream. If you ever wondered why I continue (and will continue) to start with the Sun vision, mission, strategy, and cause, it has to do with our shared sense of endstate and mission. If we all understand first what Sun, not CNS, not Services, not Software, is striving to achieve, we stand a better chance of behaving in a consistent manner where we can collaborate across natural workgroups to achieve the desired results.

I truly believe the following statement:

“We have met the enemy and they are us.” – Walt Kelly “Pogo” comic strip from the 1960’s

With our core mission in CNS directly linked to Sun’s success, our resourcing, the executive support and visibility, with the passion and commitment I’ve seen inside CNS, we’re poised to make a large impact for Sun. Let’s please approach our work with the view that we’re all on the same page, engineering or offerings, CNS or Services, Software or Marketing. We’re all trying to achieve the same end goal, create customer value that results in strong financial performance. This is the way out of the downward spiral and it requires a certain amount of faith to make it so. I ask you to please examine your behavior, keep conflict about the issues, do your job and trust others to do theirs, trust that we will make changes that lead to accountability and performance. Together, we can and will make a difference and see success.

At the signing of the American Declaration of Independence in the 1770s, Benjamin Franklin is credited with saying:

“We must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately.”