Engineering, Innovation and Business

Consultant is change agent for empowerment

2009-10-19T07:19:00.005+08:00

I am pleased to have undertaken a three month engagement, formally as a software engineering consultant, in fact acting as a change agent for empowerment. By the end of the engagement, as a leadership team we had certainly seen a marked improvement in performance and engagement. Most of the positive feedback I received was themed around mentoring, experience and knowledge.

The explicit services expected of my role were to deliver software process improvements, to identify the gaps between current and best practice, define team structure, roles, KPIs for the engineering team and individual team members, responsibilities and accountabilities. In reality, the team needed to lift their spirits and confidence, to acquire the necessary skills and knowledge (or at least start on that path), and to be empowered to do their jobs effectively.

Effective KPIs are extraordinarily difficult to construct for software teams and even more so for individual developers. There are very useful project metrics to track, for example, the total number of issues, the number of new and resolved issues. For individual developers, KPIs should not be used as a stick; rather as a tool to identify training and development opportunities.

Part of the role was to help with current projects so I acted as software team leader, demonstrating by my own actions and words the behaviours and outcomes expected of a professional software engineering team. We introduced effective tools and lightweight processes for requirements and test management, issue-tracking and task management. However, daily stand-up meetings immediately led to improved visibility of the status of work-in-progress and greater engagement by the team members.

It is relevant to acknowledge the importance of bringing the team up-to-speed on contemporary patterns and practices, technology and professional conduct. The 'bookends' of requirements and testing envelope the regular, daily work of software engineers who undertake coding and unit testing.

Introducing modern C++ and C# practice included training and coaching in STL containers and iterators, Boost smart pointers, const-correctness, C++ idiom, unit testing frameworks, and so on. The relevance of design patterns, architectural layering and interface contracts also needed to be introduced as practical tools in the professional toolkit.

Of overriding importance over all of these facets of any engagement is that the role of the consultant is to empower both staff and management. Some consultants have a tendency to behave as if they are management themselves instead of coaching the existing managers, thus empowering them to manage effectively and to lead by their own example.

Computer for the mobile professional

2009-10-17T11:41:00.005+08:00

I'm typing this article on my brand new Toshiba Mini NB200 netbook, keying it's brilliant, full-sized keyboard, viewing on an external, full-sized LCD monitor and using an external USB mouse. This is an effective combination which is starting to convince me that the new generation of netbooks are a viable desktop and laptop alternative for mobile professionals who require access to their own computer.

Its heart, in common with comparable machines, is a 1.66GHz Atom processor bolted on to 1GB of DDR2 RAM along with a 160GB hard disk and WiFi. This is just as powerful as the previous generation of laptops and I believe is sufficient for most daily tasks including email, reading and writing documents, and even casual software development.

For me, the keyboard, mouse pad, mouse buttons and screen were the most-important features which drew me to the Toshiba over excellent mini netbooks from Asus, who invented the genre, and HP who have previously set the standard.

Let's install Eclipse SDK 3.5 and see how we go. I have already installed my registered copy of WinZip (great bit of software) so unzip, start up the development environment for the so-called Galileo release, create a new Java project, debug and voila, "Hello there!"

Easy and fast, usable even on the built-in 10.1" screen. Likewise, OpenOffice (the excellent open source office package), Microsoft Office (the academic version used by my wife, a teacher), the usual web browsers, gmail and google docs all work extremely well on this modestly-priced and light-weight platform.

I had hoped to have built-in Bluetooth for wireless connection to keyboard, mouse and mobile-phone modem however the advertisements for some of our major retailers misleadingly imply the 00D model has Bluetooth by writing 'Toshiba Mini NB200/00D Netbook features the Intel® Atom™ 1.6Ghz processor, 1GB Ram, a 160GB Hard Drive, Built-in webcam, Bluetooth®, Wi-Fi, 10.1" screen and ...' and adding 'Bluetooth Enabled No' in the fine print of the specifications.

(I believe it's an accidental sin of omission. It seems the up-market 00P/00Q models do include Bluetooth but not the cheaper 00C/00D models. I have let them know and they promised me a cheap Bluetooth adapter and to fix the web page.)

What else? I am a consultant and part of the reason for me to have a fully-functional ultra-portable is to enable me to work on the run, whether in coffee shops which lack WiFi access, or offices with good internal network security, so I must be able to connect to Telstra's excellent Next G network using Nokia PC Suite. It would have been useful to have built-in Bluetooth so I wouldn't have to remember to carry an extra cable as well as the netbook, on top of my mobile phone I always have with me.

Connecting to the Next G network using Nokia PC Suite, over a USB cable, works flawlessly and the connection is very fast, often bettering my broadband connection speed. I only use my mobile phone as a modem for email, documents and web access using gmail, google docs and so on. Beware you will quickly hit your monthly download limit or run-up excessive charges if you start to download stuff off the net willie-nillie.

Which reminds me, earlier today I phoned Telstra about an SMS I received telling me I had used all 150MB of my monthly downloads. Last night I trialled using my mobile as a modem for the first time on the new netbook. After speaking to five different people and being on hold for ages, they spoke to a techie who said it was not possible for me to download 130MB in the 20 minutes I was connected!

I actually downloaded 7.5MB Firefox 3.5 in a few minutes - blazingly fast - much faster than my broadband connection was running last night. So they upgraded my data pack to 300MB and credited $19.95 to my account - I have to call next month to change it back again to my usual $10 per month data pack for 150MB.

To conclude, I have no hesitation in recommending you consider a netbook as an effective computing platform for the mobile professional. In addition, I can confidently assert that you can use your netbook with an external screen and mouse as a desktop and laptop alternative for all but the most demanding of tasks.

2020 Vision: WA

2009-07-30T21:24:00.010+08:00

Tonight I walked out of the AIM panel discussion sundowner 2020 Vision: WA – Great Place to be? Or What Happened? early because it was boring, the panelists were trite and poorly prepared. While I was there WA did not cop a mention and we may indeed ask, for what portended to be an excellent event, what happened?

Many years ago I read a story in I think Reader's Digest about a school principal who was interrupted by a student saying that he had the right to express his dissenting opinion. The principal replied that in his ignorance all the student had to contribute was his prejudice. The panelists managed to express several prejudices without an iota of evidence in support.

Let's introduce the panelists before we critically examine a few of the ideas they paraded as futurism in the guise of snappy sound bites. Facilitated by James Lush, presenter at 720ABC Perth, who did not make any effort to steer the discussion towards relevance, WA or otherwise, the panel comprised Craig Salt of Emotive Earth, Anni Macbeth, Futurist, Elizabeth Shaw of the Perth Youth Advisory Council and Peter Strachan, author of StockAnalysis.

The panelists were asked why it is important they are on the panel and their answers were as follows:

Macbeth - Futurist, about the future.
Salt - Sustainability, environment, making a buck.
Shaw - Diversity of ideas, advocate on behalf of young people.
Peter - Concerned citizen and former geologist - long time frame, need to get this ('the future') right; Gross National Happiness.

The panel were asked about the impact of the web and Macbeth spoke of virtual worlds improving the 3D world through access to knowledge ('knowledge is power') without any justification of how the range of tools she cited, from twitter to email, make this so.

She also said (I think) that some governments prevent access to the internet. I am unsure what she meant - if it is China she is alluding to then it would be simpler to just say so, and to explain the how/what of the impact; if not I have no idea what she was talking about.

Salt asserted that inevitably technology is part of the solution and he specifically mentioned hydrogen-powered cars. He replied to the query as to why these aren't commonly available by reciting the tired old cliche of a conspiracy to suppress the hydrogen economy, allegedly to bolster old-economy profits.

No mention that notwithstanding the discovery of new catalysts for the electrolysis of water it is incredibly energy expensive to produce hydrogen in the first place. In contrast to popular opinion, fuel-cell, hydrogen-powered cars are for the time being an impractical novelty, unless recharged by 'nuclear battery' - much as 'Pious' hybrids satirised by South Park are not so environmentally friendly as generally presumed.

After some misinformation sprouted about corporations allegedly colluding to prevent the wide-scale adoption of hydrogen-powered cars as part of a utopic hydrogen economy, the panelists proceeded to pan directors who pander to shareholder profits over the community and to encourage shareholder activism to remedy this unacceptable situation.

Strachan took the opportunity to paint Buffett or bankers (it was not clear) as acting to the benefit of shareholders over the wider community, relating him as saying you don't want to be reliant on the generosity of strangers, and bankers are pretty strange.

All of which I find very odd because Buffett, his fellow shareholders and their bankers are presumably all acting properly, in the case of Buffett and his colleagues as fiduciaries responsible for other people's investments. Speaking of our local corporations, the shareholders includes all of us by virtue of direct or indirect shareholdings through pension and superannuation funds.

Perhaps Shaw, a law graduate, could have mentioned the responsibility of directors to act in the best in interest of all shareholders, both current and future, and taken the time to explain the meaning of corporate social responsibility, corporate sustainability and the influence of other stakeholders, eg. staff, suppliers and customers; instead of raising the non-issue of the gen-Y contribution to the election of Obama.

Can someone do a little research and confirm if this fact is accurate or outweighed by the swing in the Republican states across all age groups towards change? Again, no analysis was forthcoming of the change to be wrought by an Obama administration, if any, over Bush-era policies.

This assertion was also contradicted by the overarching consensus of the panelists and hand-raising members of the audience that individuals, not governments, would be the agents for change. I find it very odd that even here, let alone the USA, it is conveniently forgotten that government is of the people, by the people, for the people.

Aside from the absence of discussion about the WA context, I was disappointed with the uninformed dismissal of future innovation and engineering as part of the solution to the problems they had raised. Entirely backward looking, the consensus was that the future is bad.

Strachan said he is negative about the future, citing a billion hungry people, impending shortages of oil, copper and other commodities, and asserting that we would need three earths to universally maintain an Australian standard of living.

Irresponsibly, he chooses not to cite statistics of increasing standards of living and decreasing poverty in BRIC and developing economies as a result of globalisation and free trade, and fails to provide any supporting evidence to the contrary.

It was disappointing to hear only trite sound bites, unsupported and unsupportable propositions, no evidence presented or cited, nil reference to history or precedent, nor to the positive impact of technology, innovation and engineering on improving global standards of living.

The reality is that solutions to future problems, themselves largely or even utterly unknown, probably have not yet been discovered. A friend and colleague of mine likes to say that the stone age did not end because they ran out of stones; likewise the oil age will not end because we run out of oil.

I wonder what problems, apart from the prospect of war with the fall of old empires and the realignment of power, were being pondered in the first decade of the 20th century and their relevance today?

International Institute of Women in Engineering

2009-06-24T21:02:00.004+08:00

One of my 4th year engineering students at Murdoch University, Sarah Corbin, has received sponsorship enabling her to attend the IIWE (International Institute of Women in Engineering) summer seminar in Paris, this July. Well done, Sarah!

For the pre-program preparation, they asked participants to research engineering practices in their own countries by talking to any engineers they might know. I am pleased that she asked me if I would do her a small favour and to give her my thoughts on the following questions regarding engineering in Australia.

The origins of its engineering traditions? We can cast a wide net to try and understand the origins of Aussie traditions in engineering. Personal achievement, immigration, mateship, European and Asian culture, national pride all have contributed to the maturity and respect with which Australian engineering capability is held.

The development of the Snowy River hydro power scheme is very well known, also locally the Perth-to-Kalgoorlie water pipeline; the leadership in mining practice and technology, including mining software (70% of which comes from Australia, mostly from Perth), and high technology where Australian work on radar with the British during WW2, and other scientific and engineering contributions in optical and radio astronomy.

These foundations contribute to the traditions of the engineers and firms that operate today.

The evolution of engineering as a discipline? In some ways Australia is a great leader, including construction, mining and high technology including solar cells, wide-area and wireless networking. In other ways, we focus on civil, power and mechanical engineering in our leading professional organisation, Engineers Australia, where advances in electronic, software and communications engineering are paid short shrift by comparison.

The emergence of professional and technical colleges is important but could do a lot more to support the basis of our technical disciplines rather than relying on, for example, professional associations and publications from the UK, Europe and USA.

How engineering is taught (theoretical or practical)? The teaching of engineering varies broadly and widely between institutions and disciplines. I think this is a good thing in principle because it prevents a monoculture from developing whereby a few dominant approaches would prevail over a diversity of ideas.

Some engineering courses emphasise the theoretical aspects in their teaching whereby others focus on practical applications, including laboratory and hands-on, but to my knowledge all courses strike a balance between these aspects. Similarly, I believe that it is desirable for some courses to emphasise the scientific and mathematical foundations, eg. physics, chemistry and biology, where others instead try to build a broader, general engineering basis somewhat like Oxford.

What type of engineering is done in their countries? Every kind of engineering possible is done in Australia, from civil, mining, oil&gas, power through to electronics, communications and nuclear. I think the traditions of Australian engineering lend themselves to encouraging the development of innovative solutions and exploration of the creative dimensions of engineering - every field or discipline of engineering is fair game.

What does society expect of its engineers? Both too much and too little. The occasional legal action against engineers may be reasonable, eg. based on negligence, or unreasonably based on ignorance of technical issues and the pedantic misapplication of standards and the law. The situation is improving as members of the legal profession have better knowledge of technology or themselves come from the engineering profession.

On the other hand, engineers do not always meet up with society's expectations for a worthwhile contribution to political debate on technical subjects, eg. infrastructure and nuclear power. However, I do not believe that engineers should lobby outside our areas of expertise.

The social status of an engineer? In Australia, engineers are generally highly regarded and our work is viewed in a positive light. For some reason, parents and the community do not perceive engineering as a career with the same status as medicine, law, business or architecture, for example, when I believe the earning potential, prospects and satisfaction are equal to or sometimes higher than the alternatives.

Professional office practices in their countries? Compared to the same professions I mention above, it us arguable that professional development, coaching and mentoring in the workplace are not paid sufficient attention in engineering as they should be.

Some organisations have professional development plans or graduate programs, and the better ones include a mentoring component, but we are lax when it comes to the equivalent of an internship, clerkship or equivalent for admission to professional practice.

In general, the engineering office environment is informal, collegial, sociable and fun.

Engineering ethics? It is desirable but not often mandatory for engineers to be members of their relevant professional association, often Engineers Australia, or to have chartered membership of this or an equivalent organisation in order to carry out duties with certain responsibilities.

One of the advantages of membership is explicit acceptance of the need to adhere to a professional code of ethics. Notwithstanding this, I believe that engineers of all stripes, members or otherwise, practice in Australia with the highest levels of ethical conduct in all aspects of their work.

It is virtually unheard of in Australia to hear about an ethical breach in professional conduct in regard to technical, financial or social aspects of engineering practice.

Sustainable energy as practiced in this region? Australia has a long history of research and deployment of sustainable energy solutions including photo-voltaic technology and solar heating, often for household water heating. Recently this has started to pick up pace with the Solar Cities program but we still arguably lag USA and Spain in this area.

Interesting developments of geothermal power have enormous potential to complement existing hydro power and an expanding network of wind farms. Smart grids and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) have the potential to revolutionise the demand-side towards more sustainable practices.

The Kimberley

2009-05-09T17:21:00.009+08:00

The Kimberley and the Pilbara regions of north Western Australia have beautiful, rugged, magical locations scattered with relatively few, wonderful, colourful and sweet people calling home far flung towns and outposts. I went to the north hoping to discover something of the people and the country: with this and more I returned, excited by the limitless opportunities in the north and the implications and possibilities for state development.

Over the past week I have had the most amazing adventure in the north of Western Australia, travelling in remote areas through the Pilbara and the Kimberley. As part of the referendum for daylight saving, I was privileged to be a Mobile Polling Place Manager covering a number of remote communities flung across the Great Sandy and Gibson Deserts, near Halls Creek and Fitzroy Crossing, and up the Gibb River Road.

The view from the original Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route is simply stunning.

The highlight for me was meeting and speaking with the wonderful people I met in the remote communities I visited at Punmu, Kunawarritju (near Well 33) and Kiwirrkurra in the northern Pilbara, and Balgo Hill, Ringers Soak, Yiyili, Mt Barnett, Mt House station and Imintji in the Kimberley. Note to anyone in a position of influence that Imintji can do with more money for necessary projects and another project officer would be helpful.

Yiyili is a disparate community with more than the usual share of problems including a multiplicity of small, unviable communities that should be merged into one, central township with shared services. Aside from this anomaly, due to the process whereby the system of grants favour small Aboriginal corporations, I saw plenty of evidence for close and loving family relationships. Mums and dads, their children and parents in the one community, sharing the happiness of a simple life absent the modern amenities we take for granted.

As mobile polling manager, I issued ballots at most of these locations when Ron, with whom I was travelling, moved on to other sites. I found the indigineous people to be warm and friendly, responsive to conversation and respect. At a couple of spots I kicked around a footy with some of the guys who were looking forward to attending sporting carnivals or travelling to play in matches.

Polling place in the great outdoors at Yihili community

This article is something like a collection of travel notes with a few yarns together with speculation and commentary on my part, rather than a proper travelogue. So let's get cracking with our flight out of Broome with my flying from the right hand seat in the Twin Comanche. We headed south east and Ron, the Returning Officer for the Kimberley, dropped me off at Punmu for my first time as a polling manager and my experience in a remote community. Ron flew on to another community while I undertook the poll and later returned to fetch me.

Ron with a bunch of the local kids making good use of the voting pencils at Kunawarritju, the community near Well 33.

We proceeded on to Well33 which we handled together and then Kiwirrkurra, near the Northern Territory border. A cute bunch of aboriginal children took a shine to the pencils and paper, drawing up a storm while listening to their favourite music on a cell phone.

The lack of economic, social and strategic viability of several remote communities is apparent on a (literally) flying visit. Locals and other visitors who know a heckuva lot more than I do about the social and historical context are happy when asked to make suggestions about opportunities in these communities.

The development of local businesses is a familiar and reasonable suggestion. From camels hunted for food and captured for sale to the Middle East, from whence they came, now suffering from disease, there is an enormous number of untamed beasts including horses and cattle, also domestic cattle, which can be raised and marketed in a sustainable way. Clearly substantial mentoring and business leadership will be needed but the locals are ready to take a grip on their own futures.

I have written elsewhere about the idea of a combined gas-water pipeline however there are a number of other viable options for opening up the north-west and mid-west of Western Australia to economic development. In addition to coastal and inland pipeline options, it has been suggested to redirect the Fitzroy River inland with a levee to fill the massive series of disconnected lakes into a contiguous river system flush with water to irrigate the Kimberley and the Pilbara.

State and federal governments must continue to improve the physical and social environments in remote communities by investing in infrastructure, continuing to improve health and educational outcomes, and directing greater leadership into those areas. At all leadership levels including executive, project and community officers, teachers and health workers, and other workers who contribute to community life, the most important resource is the people who put in their hearts and souls into improving the lives of the local inhabitants.

The strategic value of the remote communities increases as trade, tourism and transport grow in importance across the state. The Gibb River Road is a major tourist attraction giving the Imintji store significant importance for travellers; likewise for those exploring the Canning Stock Route, communities and stores at Well 33 and other stops are extremely important.

With the current absence of significant development in these remote areas many of the remote communities have a limited future and offer few if any employment options for the indigenous locals, beyond limited opportunities offered as part of the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP). While local business development will create jobs and enhance the economic and social sustainability of many communities, large-scale state development will make the strategic importance of these locations paramount.

An inland pipeline could entirely change the physical and metaphorical landscape, at the same time as demonstrating to ourselves and the rest of the world that we have the gumption and foresight to make some far-reaching decisions.

The scientific method

2009-05-09T16:09:00.005+08:00

The scientific method applies to climate science, too.

The main problem with Robert Manne's article Cheerleading for zealotry not in the public interest in The Weekend Australian of 25-26 April 2009, is that its misrepresents science as being inaccessible to the lay public and seems to dismiss scientific debate as a brand of politics.

Professor of politics Robert Mann may be but statistician he is not, parading the "tens of thousands of climate scientists" against "a few dozen scientists" he describes as "global warming pseudo sceptics" without a hint of irony. Notwithstanding unanswered questions about the integrity of the numbers, whether tens of thousands or merely hundreds of dissenters to the orthodox theory of global warming, is irrelevant.

Science is not a popularity contest. The assertions we make, our assumptions and methodology, must stand up to critical scrutiny in order to carry any weight. Anyone with an elementary education should be able to understand and bear witness to such an exposition if it is carried out clearly and free of unnecessary jargon. We can all understand and judge for ourselves the difference between good science and bad science.

According to the renowned physicist Richard Feynman, "a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

Climate science is more than just atmospheric science and other fields have much to contribute to our understanding of the complex phenomena that drive the Earth's climate. Our understanding cannot be deferred to an elite cliche of trusted authorities. Feynman exhorts his students to distrust authorities and to think for themselves. With climate science and science in general we have a responsibility to ignore dogma.

Throughout his career, Feynman was concerned about the inability to teach science properly in schools and critically reviewed many inadequate text books purporting to teach the subject. I wonder what he would have had to say about the quality of the science and public debate about global warming and climate change.

There is a formal relationship between personal and professional ethics, intellectual integrity and the way in which responsible members of society address public debate. The wonderful, historic speech by William Clifford to the London Metaphysical Society in 1876 deals with this very issue.

The great divide between Popper and Kuhn on the philosophical basis of contemporary science applies with a twist. The debate about the nature of the development of scientific truth is usually understood to evolve from the scientific community engaging in Popper's critical rationalism in execution of their research.

Kuhn believes that scientists work in a series of paradigms rather than actually following, as espoused by Popper, a falsificationist methodology. It appears that the greenhouse debate falls squarely into this camp as being an accepted theory, a paradigm of scientists that matches the zeitgeist - the spirit of the times.

While nobody seriously denies that environmental action is needed in order to make the most of our limited natural resources and to preserve these resources, and indeed the livability of our planet for future generations, it is a stretch to assume that such a belief applies to all aspects of our human interaction with the planet.

A while back cold fusion was a similarly controversial issue, if less enduring in the media. In summary, most of the early studies into cold fusion are widely believed to be cases of scientific fraud or just poor science; there isn't any reliable evidence for cold fusion as a viable energy source; current physics cannot explain cold fusion but funded research continues nevertheless.

In these cases reputations have been tarnished or destroyed but the record has largely been set straight and it is equally certain that the climate debate will eventually return to normality. Some people will continue to believe there is some kind of global conspiracy to suppress their own favourite, nonscientific idea but in truth it is highly unlikely to be the case.

Conspiracy theories aside, we should examine our moral and ethical position stand on this kind of issue. Is it proper for someone to promote a theory they believe to be for the greater good when they know that theory to be flawed? How about if they hold a reasonable belief in the theory without proper justification?

In the former case, there is scientific fraud and a kind of personal conceit that beggars belief. In the latter case, we again have the same sort of intellectual laziness that William Clifford railed against. Public trust in the scientific establishment has always been one that ebbs and flows, increasing trust and respect as people become more educated and declining when seeming advances lead, in war for example, to widespread unhappiness and distress.

For example, the hockey stick graph - smoothing the Medieval Warm Period - that has so badly humiliated many right-minded members of the IPCC and damaged its standing features prominently in An Inconvenient Truth and even more so in the public consciousness. Such distortions and convenient mistruths to push one line of thinking are quite damaging to trust and serve to close down alternate lines of enquiry.

Manne states a basic truth that "those of us who are not trained scientists are in no position to make independent judgements on the fundamental scientific issues for ourselves" because we lack the training to assess the relevance of a specific theory in a narrow, scientific speciality. On the other hand, it is manifestly untrue to assert that we cannot be part of the scientific process. It in incumbent on scientists to communicate their work and on science writers, among others, to report on their findings.

Science is not concerned with rhetoric and philosophical debate but with the development of theories that are consistent with the observed facts, making predictions and conducting repeatable experiments based on the application of those theories. A theory that explains the observations may be consistent but it is insufficient unless it is falsifiable insofar as is can be used to make testable predictions.

There is no us-and-them in science, the stakes are not about winners and losers in public debate. Instead, scientific theory becomes generally accepted because it has been communicated widely and scientists grow in confidence in its application. When facts are discovered that are contrary to the predictions of the theory then either the theory is modified or it is discarded altogether and replaced with an alternative theory that does fit the facts.

Accepted theory is incontrovertible because one cannot deny observed facts and the consistency of the theory with these facts. At least, this is usually the case with science unless it becomes a circus or merely a parade of unsubstantiated ideas. The body of knowledge is not being added to nor our understanding abetted by the pronouncement of speculative new theories in an attempt to explain anomalies with the current theory.

The Ptolemaic system of perfect spheres, with the arbitrary addition of epicycles in order to explain the apparent retrograde motion of the planets, held sway for 1000 years because Ptolemy was held in such high regard as an authority. It was not until the Copernican heliocentric cosmology, with the later support of Galileo's observations of the phases of Venus, that the Earth was finally displaced from the centre of the universe.

This week I read in the media of the ozone hole over Antarctica negating the effect of ocean warming and leading to a counter-intuitive increase in ice volumes; other articles highlight anecdotal evidence for increases in ice mass and pack ice over a period of several decades. While the effect of the ozone layer on Antarctic ice mass is a plausible hypothesis it will only become a theory once it has been validated by modelling and when it is supported by empirical data.

Surely we can do better than this to stimulate and encourage public debate on this important subject and a range of other issues. The truth based on a rational, scientific approach is the minimum the public deserves on the issue of climate change.

ASWEC 2009

2009-04-17T22:17:00.016+08:00

Due to other commitments, I attended only the final day of ASWEC 2009 on the Gold Coast having accepted an invitation to participate in a panel discussion on The Future of ASWEC. One highlight for me was catching up with old friends and making a few new ones.

Another was hearing Neville Holmes innervating keynote talk about The Prehistory and the Future of Agility, where he raised a number of issues and recommendations about elevating software engineering from its current state of practice to that similar to other professional engineering disciplines.

Neville Holmes has a long and distinguished record in the computer industry in Australia but I happen to know him from his remarkably lucid and insightful column written for Computer. I am grateful for the many clarifications and additional references that Neville has provided so I can improve this article. (Remaining errors are, of course, my own.) He started off by saying that he didn't know much about agile and found the Agile Manifesto of interest but "it was the Values that got me; they were the values we (IBM systems engineers) held back in the '50s and '60s."

Neville told several anecdotes (and had to restrain himself from telling several more) including about IBM Melbourne which had a service bureau of punch card machinery some years ago, all hardware programming by plug panels. There was a secret one in Defence Signals that being parallel and fast was used through the 70s. They later moved to Fitzroy Street, St Kilda when they got stored program computers that for the first time has separation between program and hardware reflected in a physical separation between programmers and operators.

Programming is a talent thing, some people can do it, some people can't. Ford Motor company ran courses to teach people to program and found that a program aptitude test was a very reliable indicator. They hired B-/A people, not A+ because they tend to disrupt. The A+ were reported to be poor team workers; I guess they'd be the best extreme programmers in today's terminology.

This was run by personnel "before management became inhuman." A chap from Personnel went around Ford setting the test. He sat the test himself and was one of the people selected. [My comment there was a jibe at the renaming of Personnel as Human Resources which seems to me to have authorised the treatment of people as resources rather than people.]

Management, "stupid idiots" put programmers and analysts in separate rooms; system analysts talk to users, programmers only to analysts. Much as mechanical engineers learn about bulldozers and other equipment, and when I did electrical engineering I experienced electrical and mechanical, eg. boilers, to gain enough awareness to be able to supervise technicians who carry out detailed design tasks.

We should put programmers in technical college and technical school. Salesmen dealt with management but the problem was managers didn't know what they wanted; managers didn't know what everyone else was doing. Using butcher paper and texta pens, carry out workshops with managers to work out what they do, over two days.

They work in isolated departments in hierarchical organisations where managers don't know what workers do. Wrote a program to produce a 6-12 month delivery schedule for ordering sheet metal, subassemblies and parts at Broadmeadows. The workers wanted to check the calculations! Instead they should have been interacting with suppliers.

Big projects don't work because they take a long time and may be out-of-date by the time they are delivered. The problem with projects is that they focus on software instead of data which is more important, "the data doughnut in the software hole," to enable adding components, interfaces to data.(*)

Embedded systems are "pretty damn hopeless, really" - for example, modern sewing machine has an "absolutely bloody shocking" user interface. The human machine interface, cognitive science and how people work, is more important than how machines work.

Professionals and the secondary profession; we have to understand data ("technician") from other professions, eg. medicine. Do combined/dual degrees in profession, and data or information engineering. Universities need to plan, probably easiest in the Melbourne model, because programmers "cannot hop around from field to field and expect to be successful" in each one.

The traditional staff, line and service model has been reincarnated as minders, grinders and finders. The "weird things that happen in government departments" because data processing departments became empires and centres of power. In Canberra, Malcolm Fraser split Treasury, who got the computing equipment, from Finance, who had the right to use it.

(*) Neville tells me (in private correspondence),

My reference was to an old popular song "As you go through life make this your goal: watch the donut and not the hole" (e.g. see www.skypilotclub.com/interview.html) from "Sometimes a Great Notion" (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sometimes_a_Great_Notion_(novel)) and I guess I assumed that readers and the ASWEC audience would make the connection of the title of my original essay (see eprints.utas.edu.au/1130).

Neville taught the chap how to use spreadsheets to support his work arranging the Premiers Conference using a spreadsheet for planning on typewriter terminals (before spreadsheets were supposedly invented).

We used to have a saying in IBM: "If you solve problems you breed albatrosses" (referring to Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner").

Neville says he was "banned from three departments for trying to enable users" and they reduced the dispatching priority to below that of batch whereby the slow response time meant it could only be used on weekends or after hours. [The ban was not directly related to my work at the Department of Finance, and it was not an official ban; local IBM management was asked to take me off those accounts by the DP sections of those departments. - Neville]

The tragedy of the recent walk in Blue Mountains where information from David Iredale about his position was ignored and not passed onto rescuers and police because it didn't match the computer program and training. People aren't thinking and want the computers to do this for them.(**)

Small business machines from IBM System 32, 36 and finally the wonderful System 38 had RPG (Report Program Generator) that used template programming. A sheet for each file; input/output files and processing files, "much easier than Cobol. Cobol, as you might know, is not very good at all."

Macro systems were very good in the 60s, stealthy development in IBM to develop assembly code for testing before the hardware was ready. A macro system so user to "write programs" and professionals added macros and kept them up to date.

The presentation is written in HTML because "I can control it instead of it controlling me" (i.e. PowerPoint). Empower users, "to hell with management" because management is interested in strategies and this is tactical.

The challenge: using technicians "focus on this language (eg. Java)" course called Professional Computing, learn five different languages (interpreters, eg, python, SQL). For programming, go to technical college; for data engineering, work in partnership with other professions. Look to enable users, not to take it away from them.

(**) My main point at this stage was that computers are used to avoid responsibility (eprints.utas.edu.au/2765).

A question was asked about teaching web development, concurrency, etc; the answer was better frameworks. To a question about analysis, design and coding activities; the answer is looking for close teamwork between engineers and technicians, "love agile iterations." Question about enabling the users but not ceding too much control as to "bring down the system"; answer is teamwork, not to isolate the users in spite of "mad dogs and other kinds of weirdos."

Responsibilities of engineers in data not software; look at users, community, code of ethics. Raise the stakes for software engineering, "should be much higher." To a question about what to teach in university degree; answer was content is not that important so long as you get the right mindset, the first job does a lot more in determining career.

After a break, the panel members spoke about the future of ASWEC, questions were asked of the audience, discussion ensued and the consensus was that ASWEC is basically alright the way it is. Overall ASWEC has a very good structure, albeit there are aspects that I would change, and any change could have unintended consequences. However the landscape is changing so there may not be any other choice than to accommodate some change in order for ASWEC to prosper.

My preamble to discussion:

Rugby first - I am happy to be in Queensland and pleased to say the Western Force beat the Queensland Reds a fortnight ago; I am not happy the Hurricanes beat us a week later.

The greatest strength of ASWEC is the co-location of academics involved in research and teaching with industry practitioners. However, for an engineering discipline which relies upon industrial practice for its existence there is too little 'meeting of minds.'

Software engineering practice must be informed by strong scientific underpinnings, including computer science and mathematics. Dijkstra and Parnas among others provided the foundations of this discipline decades ago but industry practice is lax and even academic memories are short.

Our assessments of planned, formal and agile methods are a case in point. The agile approach is fine for programming in the small but large-scale engineering projects in defence, utilities and government, enterprises and resource industries cannot be served by a simplistic approach.

With cheerful conceit we collectively forget lessons learned and continue to reinvent the same 'innovations' - as David Parnas reminded us in his keynote address at ASWEC in Brisbane four years ago.

At ASWEC in Sydney three years, Julian Edwards of Object Consulting remarked in his keynote that after inadequate requirements, the absence of architecture is the biggest cause of project failure. However I see scant attention being paid to architectural frameworks.

I believe that with appropriate analysis, any complex set of requirements can be partitioned into systems and subsystems; the software components then can be developed in an agile fashion.

Julie Blake from Object Mentor, in her ASWEC industry award paper, 'Gathering the Right Requirements,' two years ago in Melbourne advised 'matching the process to the project.' Too many practitioners dismiss the reality that requirements engineering, architecture and test frameworks are vital to the success of non-trivial projects and complex systems.

The report Challenges of Complex IT Projects by the British Computer Society and The Royal Academy of Engineering goes straight to the point of the many problems that beset complex IT projects:

"There is a broad reluctance to accept that complex IT projects have many similarities with major engineering projects and would benefit from greater application of well established engineering and project management procedures. For example, the importance of risk management is poorly understood and the significance of systems architecture is not appreciated."

There are bundles of issues in industry that need to be resolved to enable the success of large-scale distributed and concurrent computing.

As Ian Sommerville pointed out in his keynote at last years ASWEC in Perth, construction by configuration and integration of third-party and legacy systems pose significant, open research questions. He suggested that Australia could take leadership in this area and why not?

Such a research program would by necessity be of a longer time frame than industry desires for project delivery. However, strategic IT initiatives include programs of work that span several years so a realignment of expectations may not be out of the question.

The greatest weakness of ASWEC is lack of strong engagement with a cross section of industry. Our challenge is to attract their sustained participation in future conferences by becoming more relevant to the problems they face.

The future of ASWEC will reflect the future of software engineering in this country. If we blur our focus towards programming then ASWEC will flounder without a clear audience. If stakeholders in ASWEC build a vision for software engineering then industry will benefit and the conference will flourish.

Comments from the panel members covered a range of opinions and perceptions about ASWEC in relation to their own priorities:

How does Agile fit into the complex systems development life-cycle.
Interdisciplinary teams, eg. safety and security; professionalisation, including conferences.
Better value for DMO to have co-location.
ASWEC is a serious research conference in SE - not only that, it's more.
It's a broad conference, SE is a broad discipline, SWEBOK has broad knowledge areas.
Academics and industry - must be serious research to bring academics out of "ivory tower."
ASWEC is increasingly international.
Lack of students - not selling benefits of SE adequately.
Agile is good but please, please don't allow it/use it as an excuse for lack of discipline.
ASWEC covers whole range of activities, the breadth of engineering.
ERA (Excellence in Research Australia) - journals and conference ranked in international standing; ASWEC and other Australian conferences ranked B but unis only fund A or A+ ranking.
"Love, passion and time" in terms of organisation.
Caution changing and impact of changes.
"ASWEC, it's better than nothing." Where would we be?
Venue for Australasian scholars; nursery for new researchers.
SE journals and funding? Engineering has difficulty in general with funding (eg. ARC) compared to science disciplines.

The DMO (Defence Materiel Organisation) which has a vision to "become the leading engineering and project management organisation," is sponsoring the formation of the Improving Software and Systems Engineering Conference (ISSEC) . The vision of ISSEC is a "commitment to the advancement of integrating and improving systems and software engineering best practice for the engineering profession and industry."

Gas water pipeline

2009-04-13T16:05:00.002+08:00

It has been suggested to me that I should do the hard yards to research and write up a proposal for a combined gas-water pipeline from the Kimberley-Pilbara to the south west of Western Australia, to complement the existing Dampier to Bunbury natural gas pipeline and at the same time to realise the long-held dream of piping water from the Kimberley to Perth.

Some cursory research has demonstrated to me that the engineering aspects of such a venture are certainly surmountable because pipeline engineers have accumulated enormous experience in pumping solid-liquid slurry and multi-phase gas and fluids through pipelines over long distances.

Slurry pumps and pipelines are often used to transport minerals and other solids from a mine to a processing site. Flow assurance and flow optimisation in multiphase oil-gas-water tie lines and export pipelines are important issues in offshore oil and gas, especially subsea processing. In either case, technical issues to do with basic metallurgy, fabrication and corrosion protection are significant but not insurmountable.

Ongoing interest in a water pipeline and recently escalated interest in gas pipeline security stemming from the Apache gas explosion on Varanus Island support the development of a business case. This would lead to funding of a design study in order to establish the feasibility and cost of a combined gas-water pipeline as a solution to gas energy and water security in this state.

Fundamental priorities in a downturn

2009-03-05T22:49:00.005+09:00

How prepared are you to meet the challenges ahead? This was the question posed at the AIM Professional Development Sundowner on Thur 26 Feb presented at the Leadership Centre by Mark Gibson and Melanie Grohovaz, both Associate Directors (Corporate Advisory & Restructuring) PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The essential message is to avoid thinking it's all gloom and doom and to avoid making quick, short-term decisions and strategies that may be detrimental in the long term. The goal is to visit strategies to ensure short-term survival and long-term prosperity. 10 fundamental priorities framework is not just a treasury issue - it's an all of business issue.

Individual circumstances will apply.
Take a closer look to understand your business and its key drivers (past and going forward).
Competitive analysis - understand your market and customers.
Knee-jerk reactions with short-term solutions can cost the business in the long term, eg. redundancies.
Are you agile and confident? Act decisively, take tough decisions early.
Operational agility and efficiency will allow business to adapt quickly.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for business leaders is to balance short-term survival with long-term success. Secure your financial sustainability:

Cash management should be priority - "cash is king."
No cash leads to inability to pay debts and insolvency.
Go back to fundamentals of cash management.
Consider other sources of cash such as disposal of surplus assets.

Focus on what really matters:

Products and customers create value.
Research and development.
Customers must remain #1 priority.
Focus on existing customers over new, short-term customers.
Determine the most-valuable customers.
Review investment projects that can be stopped or deferred.

Manage your cost base:

Focus on enhancing operational performance and eliminating waste.
Make targeted cost reductions. Knee-jerk cuts have negative impact on staff morale and customer sentiment. Streamline processes. Consider outsourcing and shared services options.

Analyse and act:

Look at management information systems. Need timely and relevant information - financial and non-financial.
Consider appropriate KPIs and reporting templates that add value to your business.
Consider fewer, more-pertinent KPIs.
Evaluate performance against targets.

Plan for success:

Plan for different scenarios.
Define success for your business.
Forecasting is essential in the present economic climate, not a luxury.
Be flexible and have foresight to enable you to be agile and act quickly.
Model a variety of financial, operational and workforce scenarios that reflect the potential impact on your business. Include adverse scenarios.
The best businesses continually forecast.

Retain the best people - reassure and value your people:

Tell them they are values, monetary rewards and retention incentives.
The organisation has a great future.
Face-to-face, preferably one-to-one, with the best employees.
Opportunities to secure new talent and refresh your talent pool.
Great organisations are always on the lookout for the best talent.

Keep your stakeholders onside:

Include shareholders, lenders, investors, key suppliers, customers, employees, &etc.
Stakeholder management is crucial.
Communication is key - should be open and regular.
Ensure you know and understand stakeholder expectations. Avoid surprises; stakeholders like to be informed.

Look for opportunities:

Take advantage of the opportunities.
Look at what your competitors are doing. Strong businesses can capitalise on their positions in a downturn.
Have an eye for the future - smart companies take opportunity not only to cut costs and headcount but also to 'think the unthinkable' - blank sheet of paper. How do you want to do business?
Innovate and invest in new projects - effective and aligned with your strategies.
Move from growth dynamic to sustainable profitability.

An ongoing problem is posed by managers promoted in boom times who become indecisive or cease to make decisions in a downturn. As I wrote way back in 2006 (People, People) :

Deming, best known for his association with post-war quality management and improvement in Japan, says that the worker is not the problem, rather it is management that is the problem. It is up to management to enable and empower his staff.

Presumably due to lack of confidence, competence - the absence of self-belief - and maybe some reticence to make any decision that might put them offside with their own manager. Wherein we approach the essence of leadership which is a topic for another day.

Subsea Technology Innovation for the Australian Oil and Gas Business

2009-02-23T21:35:00.010+09:00

Betsy Donaghey, Senior Vice President, Browse Development, Woodside Energy Ltd, is an engaging speaker who scattered amusing anecdotes between the sober points she made in assessment of the trends and future needs of the oil and gas business in Australia.

[In my usual style, I mix first and third person, quoting and paraphrasing the speaker to preserve the speakers intent and to improve readability. Usually it is clear from the context who's words you are reading; if not, I put editorial remarks in square brackets.]

She graduated from Texas A&M with a Master in Operations Research followed by 25 years experience in the oil and gas industry - having entered the industry at 4 yo ["haha"]. Perth is ideal for the first [subsea technology] conference - to live and work in a place with a growing oil and gas industry, and raise your families live in Perth; if you want to shop on Sundays, go somewhere else [more laughter - inside joke where Perth outlaws Sunday trading, sigh].

We need more reliable equipment, cheaper equipment, greater ease of moving across vendors equipment, greater capacity in operating flexibility. Woodside has the goal to be one of the world's leading producers of LNG by 2015, primarily the NW Shelf. The goal is backed by delivering projects - oil and gas projects, of course Pluto LNG project (Sunrise and Browse).

Karratha Gas Plant, North West Shelf Venture, Western Australia (courtesy of Woodside Energy Ltd).

Lovely - I'm so proud of my company... what is the relevance to this conference? Subsea technology (Cossack Pioneer in 1995 has subsea wells) - 7 projects have offshore components, 6 have subsea components, 50% subsea production, Pluto entirely dependent on subsea wells for production.

Says something for confidence of company and skills and engineers, some at this conference:

Multiphase pumps with fibre optic controls.
Depths of more than 500m.
Choose subsea - safety drivers - move people away from well heads.
Lower cost, greater flexibility.

We expect to earn greater than $1 billion revenue from business unit entirely dependent on subsea technology. We are positive subsea technology, achievements will continue. Browse and future developments are highly likely to use subsea technology, but not necessarily so, and "dry well" remains an option.

Browse LNG first discovery in 1971 sign-posted development challenges for the field which is more than 400km offshore from Broome, largely in deep water 800m, some shallow (under coral reef), a world-class resource. Progress of technology and strong LNG markets gives a reasonably clear choice between:

"Dry tree unit" - reduced well workover and rework cost, use carbon steel pipeline, ease to use and fix.
"Subsea wells" - safety, flexibility, location, vertical and deviated wells.

It is possible we will go with dry tree, subsea wells or combination of both. The wider Australian industry required high availability and reliability - important for oil wells, essential for LNG. Need to reduce workover and intervention costs, and among others, improved flow lines and subsea processing. When you discuss improvements, saving - please remember, I want them now. ["hehe"]

Betsy's talk gives me confidence that we are on the right track with ACOSP to fill a gap between academic development and industry deployment. With systems that are currently available for deployment in the oil and gas industry, and even with product development programs, we are seeing retrograde outcomes that ignore standards, prevent interoperability and are contrary to goals of lower-cost, flexible deployments with higher reliability being sought by Betsy and her peers.

The goal of ACOSP is to facilitate and lead an industry technology development program that focuses on selected gaps in capability in order to stimulate industry cooperation and innovation, standards development and adherence, to foster an awareness of risk assessment and mitigation. Some of our local academic and industry players are about obscuring these wider benefits in favour of selfish outcomes but it is important to keep an eye on the wider economic benefits that will accrue to WA with the development of a viable, local subsea technology sector.

The status quo among some local operators, contractors and vendors is contrary to cooperation, the development of beneficial industry and technology clusters however a shift in mindset and approach is sorely needed for the industry to meet the ambitious targets described by Betsy.

Subsea Technical Conference 2009

2009-02-22T21:31:00.009+09:00

There is much more to say later but for now, congratulations to everyone involved in the First Annual Subsea Technical Conference (2009) held at the Perth Convention Exhibition Centre (PCEC) from 17-19 February, concurrently with the hugely successful Australian Oil and Gas (AOG) Conference.

The Chair of the Perth branch of the SUT, Martyn Witton, welcomed everyone to First Annual SUT Conference, "Thanks for coming." In his introductory remarks, Martyn noted that subsea production will be the primary method with the percentage of income from subsea coming to 80% - requiring systems, long distance, subsea processing, pressure boosting - new and different technologies.

Reliability needs to be demonstrated; developing people and skills, and applying new technology. SUT spreads technology widely, economic benefit, applying technology, growing need for engineers, largest proportion in south east Asian and Indian subcontinent.

Outside the continental shelf and exclusive economic zones, 3500' depth, systems, local and global networks, specialist technologies, continue to support reliance on hydrocarbons as energy source until replacement comes along, also renewable energy. About being in Perth, generating subsea technology, talk and listen to people, research centres like ACOSP and CMST. Acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land, the elders, past present and future traditions that they hold. Thanks to the organising committee and sponsors.

The SUT is an international body actively promoting the development, dissemination and exchange of ideas, information and technology related to the underwater environment.

Thanks to David Brooks, President of SUT. Welcome to the Hon. Peter Collier, the Minister for Energy, Training for the Premier who is in Japan, and Helen Liddell, British High Commissioner to Australia. The Minister noted the NW Shelf and that more than luck is needed to establish ourselves as hub for the petroleum industry. The deep waters off the coast of WA, requiring subsea development technology to reduce production costs.

Woodside Browse, Chevron LNG, BHP and others are utilising subsea for 40% of Australian production rising to 80%. WA is base for Australian offshore oil and gas industry and will remain central - sometimes hope the east coast will remember that. Noting there are workshops on reliability, commercialisation of technology... officially open the Perth Subsea Technology Conference.

Over the course of the conference it became clear that while there is an incredible capability there are sometimes impenetrable barriers to cooperative development in the exploitation of new technologies that are sorely needed. The barriers are not only based on conservative business assumptions but also the tyranny of distance from another colony whereas some of the American companies operating in WA, for example, merely operate under instruction from afar - uninterested in local innovation.

The global housing bubble?

2009-02-03T15:28:00.015+09:00

One paragraph in an article entitled World in Reaction in The Weekend Australian January 31-February 1 2009 by Michael Stutchbury contains a few of the wrong and self-contradictory ideas held about the causes of the global financial crisis in so few words that it presents a good opportunity for me to point them out and to suggest an alternative view.

The article makes rather odd reading because several of the quotes and ideas which are represented to the reader are worthy of fuller and properly-reasoned treatment, especially about the direction of the US in respect of the apparent strengthening of support for the spectre of protectionism. Aside from the dissonance forced upon the reader by the recitation of material, and blithely made claims including that "the old Davos consensus failed to recognise that financial markets are not always self correcting and are prone to bubbles," the words I am particularly troubled by are as follows:

This [the world economy] came undone because the excess Chinese savings pumped up the American housing bubble, facilitated by the new era of financial products. Financial engineering allowed the movement of Chinese peasants from the rice paddies to the city factories to finance home loans for poor Americans. The trouble came when the borrowers couldn't service the debt. The securitised mortgage products had hidden the dud loans. That broke trust in the banking system, an essential element of a market economy.

Let's analyse the fallacies of these statements in three parts:

"Chinese savings pumped up the American housing bubble" is obviously untrue. The nexus between the funding of expenditure on imports by Chinese purchased of American bonds and the price of housing is tenuous at best. The US economy is strong because it is a diversified and efficient economy that reaps the most financial benefits of globalisation, both exporting premium goods and services and importing low inflation. The American housing bubble is no different to that in the UK, Spain, Australia or Hong Kong who do not benefit from Chinese savings propping up their economies.
"Financial engineering allowed the movement of Chinese peasants from the rice paddies to the city factories to finance home loans for poor Americans" provides a second stanza of the same mantra with "home loans for the poor" in place of "housing bubble [for the rich]." Which is it, or is it somehow both? Low-income, owner-occupied housing is entirely distinct from aspirational middle income owner-occupiers climbing the "ladder of opportunity" and upper income earners purchasing investment properties.(*) I note that predatory lending is abhorrent and has an awful impact on those caught in its net so should be prosecuted vigorously by the authorities.
"The trouble came when the borrowers couldn't service the debt. The securitised mortgage products had hidden the dud loans. That broke trust in the banking system, an essential element of a market economy." Okay, I mostly agree with this point; but I'm really not sure about broken trust except for between the banks. I note that the banking system as a whole is secure in the US even as parts have fallen over (likewise in the UK and Europe), in contrast to the Australian banking system which is well-capitalised and profitable. The causes of the breakdown in inter-bank lending and resultant slowdown in commercial and general loans are at the root of the current underlying problems.

(*) Notably from the Australian perspective, the property market in the US bubbled along even in the absence of the financial benefits of negative gearing available to Australian tax payers, posing another conundrum for Australian policy makers seeking to decouple first-home ownership from rent-seekers and those seeking capital gains in the property market.

Credit tightening during the down slope in the economic cycle (i.e. recession) is normal and expected which gives a glimmer of silver lining to the billowing clouds of gloom. The positives are the repricing of asset values to realistic levels (as asset price speculation is dampened), the reduction in the cost of labour and resources (due to the relaxation of production capacity constraints), lower interest rates and disinflation (i.e. a decline in inflation - so long as deflation can be avoided), which together should soften the economic landing and give a platform for sustained growth during the ensuing upswing.

None of this offsets the personal dislocation of those workers, and their families, who have been displaced in the workplace whether by being made redundant, or being asked to reduce working hours or take a cut in income. The goal of targeted economic stimulus should be to minimise the effects and duration of the economic downturn so as to avoid stimulating cost and wage inflation during the return to economic growth. With a little courage, governments, enterprises and individuals can benefit from counter-cyclical investment in a slowing economy and at the same time help to pull up the economy in order to hasten a return to economic growth and full employment.

I am surprised there is so little commentary in the media about the Glass-Steagall Act being repealed (in 1999) and more importantly the repudiation of the reforms that were enshrined in these pieces of legislation in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the most relevant being the effective separation of commercial and investment banking. I do not know if this is a good or a bad thing overall but the erstwhile reason was to rebuild lost trust in a stable banking system.

Many commentators appear to have rediscovered the role of directors in managing financial and non-financial risks, eg. reputational risk, of the companies they manage, albeit largely by delegation of specific responsibilities to a chief executive officer and his nominees. The major part of the remaining, non-delegated role of directors is specifically to consider and approve strategy, as proposed by management, and to oversee risk primarily through the Audit and Risk Committee that is a subcommittee of the board of directors.

It is equally surprising that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has got little airplay in the context of the current crisis; hastily enacted after the last crisis, it is no surprise that it has made no real difference to the risks prevalent then and now. There is something to be said for avoiding black-letter law for principle-based reporting standards as exemplified by International Financial Reporting Standards as adopted by Australia and on the way on the US. The right regulation is desirable instead of over-regulation in order not to dampen entrepreneurial risk taking and innovation which provide the most benefit to the economy in the long term.

A quick comment on the article as a whole is warranted because while many of the ideas in the article are sound, in my opinion the combination of quotations from respected sources together with 'editorial' remarks is misleading in an insidious way that conveys the selected quotations and the authors conclusions as reliable beyond their merit.

Reporting from Davos, the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is quoted as one bookend to the sentence, "The epicentre of this crisis is the US, the heart of global financial capitalism," cutely contrasting the pseudo-free society and markets of the main entity of the formerly socialist Soviet Union with their capitalist nemesis. The other bookend is this unattributed quote, "If there are no people in Wal-Mart to buy your product, what is your export strategy?" referring to export-led growth of developing nations as a result of globalisation.

This meandering is partially saved by the wonderful line that, "It's been the greatest poverty reduction program in human history," in reference to the "triumph of global capitalism in absorbing the population masses of China, India and Brazil." Kevin Rudd would do well to remember this in light of his recent disparaging remarks about the last 30 years of global development.

After posing as a fiscal conservative before the last Federal election, if he is not careful Rudd's current foray into fiscal adventurism could set Australia up for a period of prolonged stagnation and low growth instead of heralding another sustained period of growing economic prosperity.

National Broadband Network

2008-12-16T15:54:00.008+09:00

Lots of nonsense continues to be written and said about the Australian government tender process for the National Broadband Network (NBN) and the supposed merits of excluding Telstra from the bidding process, allegedly having submitted a non-conforming bid.

Be that as it may, let the government exclude Telstra and instead fund a separate, capital-city only network to be built by one of the other bidders. At the same time, allow Telstra to build their own national network, presumably coast-to-coast including major regional areas.

For all its problems, the current network coverage of Telstra is far superior to any of its competitors outside of the capital cities. It is impossible for anyone to build a network with broadband access to 98% of the population without subsidies. Either cross-subsidies inside the network provider, where city dwellers pay more to subsidise our country cousins, or government subsidies to maintain equalisation of prices.

The idea has been raised by several commentators, the socialist commentariat in particular, that Telstra should be prevented from building a competitive network to compete with whom ever is the winner of the current bid. Notwithstanding the fact that such a ludicrous, anti-competitive suggestion could be made on the grounds of consumer benefit is the silliness of begrudging the success of the shareholders who own the mostly-privatised entity.

Does this behaviour evince some kind of juvenile spite towards the management and shareholders of Telstra? The current management team is, by definition, subject to change. The shareholders, on the other hand, see the value of their investment further diminished (not to mention the diminution in value of shares held by the Future Fund, the largest shareholder in Telstra) by government intervention in what should be a free market for communications services.

Let the new network providers charge their fair price, presumably undercutting Telstra in areas of high population since their "national network" will be limited to those areas where they (or anyone else) can deploy at low cost and still earn a high marginal return on their investment. It is to be expected that Telstra will meet this price point in some centres, providing strong competition, and will also offer the benefits of a truly-integrated national network for premium customers, including business and government.

Completely putting aside what applications(*) and economic benefits,(**) if any, will flow from the 100+ megabit per second bandwidth that will be usable for homes and small businesses to connect to the Internet, let them build their NBNs and allow the market to decide which way customers will run.

It is another story altogether to consider how much the national capability in telecommunications has been diminished by the relegation of Australia's Telecom, a formidable research and development organisation, to just another utility company known as Telstra.

The growth of directory and media services does not make up for the national loss of innovation and competency in the telecommunications space formerly held by Telstra Research Laboratories, now only partially filled by exceptional organisations like WATRI.

(*) Yes, I know about eHealth application and I am aware of the nebulous future expectations to be delivered by the digital economy. Please define for me what you expect to to be the majority of uses.
(**) Please explain how an increase in network bandwidth improves productivity by: 1) increasing production per person; 2) improving return on capital or investment; or 3) by minimising input costs per unit production.

Innovation in Marine Technology

2008-12-03T21:20:00.009+09:00

Nigel Gee, Innovator-in-Residence at the Centre for Marine Science and Technology (CMST) , Curtin University gave a very interesting talk about marine innovation focusing on his specialty of naval architecture which stimulated a vigorous discussion about innovation in general.

He spoke about the original Norwegian innovation in producing the modern catamaran, with 1000 of similar type worldwide, followed by more-recent Australian innovation in wave piercing multi-hull by Incat in Tasmania, having created a whole new market with at least 150 vessels, mostly from Australia. The West Australian company, Austal, has continued the winning trend with the first advanced trimarans to enter the car-carrying ferry market and is on its way towards a major US defence contract for the new littoral combat ship, described as an all-aluminum, new generation, high speed warship.

Nigel emphasised that aesthetics and the nexus between science and the arts have a major part to play in vessel design and by way of example showed a fairly traditional ferry design designed by his firm in comparison to another design of a sleek, modern-looking type with similar performance and capacity, asking which one would we prefer. Form follows function is the typical refrain of engineers (including yours truly) but Nigel decries this approach for one that encompasses both aspects and may benefit the marine industry and the wider community.

The differences between the approaches of industry and acadame towards innovation were represented in a table with the usual points, profit, control and intellectual property on the industry side; research, sharing and publication on the other. The questions of regulation, government intervention and funding were raised along with the telling point that studies point towards a deficit of collaboration (citing an ECU PhD) . I assert that WA has not developed the industry clusters one would expect where on one hand, a number of companies dominate their global industry (eg. mining software) and others have potential opportunities to do so (eg. subsea acoustics, telemetry and control systems).

Nigel made the point that while the US has fallen by the wayside in respect of innovation in naval architecture, whereby it lacks a domestic capability for designing and building high-speed catamarans for commercial and defence applications, they are leaders in scientific innovation. For example, he cites the example of a physicist who says they can improve performance by x% will find themselves showered with funds. There are lessons to be learned from this experience with regard to industry innovation on one side of the ledger (witness the decline of the US automobile industry, for example) and on the other side, industrial sustainability led by scientific innovation spurred on by a high concentration of well-funded, world-leading research institutions (Scripps, San Diego being one among many).

I said that we recognise the innovation success of marine, offshore oil and gas, structural engineering and asked about the relevance of system engineering in the context of of algorithm development and signal processing for acoustics applications, as applied to submarine detection and tracking, mapping and survey for the oil and gas industry. Nigel deferred this question to Dr Jim Klaker, the Director of the Centre, who spoke about their ongoing work in acoustics in the context of defense and our marine environment.

Questions and discussion raised several nefarious issues of government intervention where many seem to agree - with me being a vocal dissenter. For instance, government regulation, legislation and targets for emissions, carbon sequestration, auto and other industries. I see no place for governments to try and pick winners, throwing money at arbitrary areas of interest. Competition and motivation within an industry context are part of the solution whereby companies and individuals take responsibility for funding and risk sharing.

It was suggested by someone in small or medium enterprise, and supported by another, both in technology development companies, that universities tend to saddle commercial arrangements with bureaucracy and seek to capture a share of intellectual property. I suggest that a client can pay for a service if they wish to retain the intellectual property and to accept that research leading to publication is a reasonable outcome of publically-funded research. It is unreasonable to expect something for nothing and a contractual arrangement can guarantee exclusivity if required; however this is inappropriate for an open-ended research question.

Yours truly suggested that industry clusters are rare and this fact reflects poorly on outcomes from industry collaborations in general and cooperative research centres (CRCs) in particular. The review of CRCs is timely and complements the Cutler Report that grew from the National Innovation Review. The question here is one of scale whereby large-scale research and innovative development cannot occur in a piecemeal fashion through individuals and organisations acting alone.

Another issue related to scale is specialist training provided by universities and industry. The expected shortage in naval architects and engineers for Austal and defence projects, including the next-generation submarine, is a continuing concern which parallels the endemic shortage of systems and software engineers, especially those with solid backgrounds in acoustic signal processing.

Informal discussion afterwards over drinks and nibbles provided an enjoyable networking opportunity with a wide cross-section of workers primarily involved in naval architecture and marine engineering. Certainly it is of great benefit to us to have Nigel spend time in Perth to inject some enthusiasm and global perspective into our local environment. Dynamic it might be, with greater participation in science and engineering than elsewhere, but much more can be done to foster innovation in science and engineering applications.

ACOSP Seminar at UWA

2008-10-11T22:45:00.003+08:00

SEMINAR:

PROPOSAL FOR AN AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR OCEANIC SIGNAL PROCESSING (ACOSP)

Dr Daniel BERINSON BE PhD MIEAust MIEEE AFAIM GAICD

And

Mr Christopher SKINNER BSc(Eng) MEngSc MIET MIEAust MACS CPEng, Captain RAN (rtd)

Where:

UWA Business School, Social Sciences South Building room 2233

When:

Friday 17 October at 10am

Summary:

Propagation of acoustic and other signals in the oceanic water body is subject to significant absorption and non-uniform transmission with directional and dispersive effects.

Nevertheless the selective employment of acoustic and electromagnetic signals for communications and measurement has been developed to a high degree in many application domains.

What has now become possible is the aggregation of many signal sources and channels to form arrays, grids and networks to achieve system outcomes that were not previously possible.

This talk will describe the genesis of a proposal to explore these new opportunities for signal processing in the oceanic environment for scientific, industrial and national security purposes.

The talk will also provide a modest insight into the processes being considered for the start of the centre and offers a case study of how such a start-up body can proceed.

Biographical information:

Dr Berinson is Managing Director of Systec Engineering Pty Ltd and consults in software and systems architecture. He earned his degree in Electronic Engineering and PhD in Physics from UWA, and has broad experience in software engineering, defence and enterprise systems.

Captain Skinner served 30 years in the RAN as a weapon and electrical engineer and subsequently in industry in project engineering and general management roles. In 2006 he received the inaugural Maritime Advancement Australia award for work relating to submarine science, engineering and industry.

Contact:

Dr Daniel Berinson +61 4 0888 0278 daniel at systec.com.au

Defence White Paper 2008 Public Consultation

2008-09-02T21:39:00.009+08:00

The Community Consultation Panel was convened in the Gallipoli Room, Anzac House, Perth earlier this evening by the Chair Mr Stephen Loosley and Deputy Chair Mr Arthur Sinodinos AO, the complement of the Panel having as its members Rear Admiral Simon Harrington AM RAN (Rtd); The Hon. Peter Collins AM QC and Professor Tanya Monro.

After the Panels introduction and video, including the prologue by the Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon, the Panel members were rewarded with a variety of interesting verbal submissions on topics ranging from the value of the Caribou light tactical aircraft, fuel and transport security; importance of the contribution of the Reserves; civil-military cooperation (special interest of Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Support, Dr Mike Kelly); clarification of the Aegis system as a 360 degree radar system (sans delay due to rotation) in answer to a question about anti-satellite missile systems and Australia's planned capability; recognition that adhoc platform-centric approach to the networked battlefield should change to a holistic, networked process for bringing capability to the ADF; suggestion to purchase of STOL F35 jump jet for increased capability (reprising a retired chief of air force).

The meeting was not all beer and skittles with several people eloquently and passionately voicing their dissent at the very premise of spending on an armed military, including Senator Jo Valentine who made the eminently supportable suggestion to create an 'Earth Defence Force.' Also raised was the importance of training for people on peace-keeping missions in conflict resolution, mediation and restorative justice; we were reminded by another than the Reserve brings civilian skills that regular army may not have, including commanders on Operation Anode who are also teachers.

In spite of the relatively sparse, local turnout (maybe 30 people attended, I didn't count) there was a heartening presence of concerned public who voiced views that ranged from strongly antiwar to concern for civilian casualties and returning veterans. In unambiguous terms, we were told of the pointlessness of war and heartbreaking loss of life, against the benefits of greater participation in peace-keeping and humanitarian missions, with a greater focus on the human element in contrast to the increasing expenditure on high technology weapons systems. People for nuclear disarmament WA were represented, suggesting a halt to foreign uranium sales.

There is so much to agree with that I did so publicly, against my intuition to speak in support of those clearly opposed to the status quo in the defence establishment. The debate reinforced in my mind the value of our democracy and the ability to be heard by those in positions of influence, even if the conversation was between such a small group that could hardly be representative of the wider community.

Let's relate the comments of a certain engineer and physics PhD who advocated for the extraordinary capability of WA defence industry, academic and research organisations. He spoke in the context of defence core business and science, remarking on the erosion of Australia's strategic leadership in submarine warfare due to the increasing number of submarines in the region.

He recommended the exploitation of WA capability in acoustics and systems to develop networked anti-submarine warfare capability, in the absence of the old Navy Research Lab, and to fund in Western Australia a Centre of Excellence in Oceanic Signal Processing to further this aim, with wider goals the surveying and exploitation of natural resources - the focus on acoustics signal processing, scientific and algorithm research and development.(*)

With the Collins class fleet base and longest state coast line, WA has a central role in the design and development of the next generation submarine. Also mentioned the Australian Marine Complex and Common user Facility, whereby refits, eg. Collins class by ASC in their modern facility, and visiting foreign vessels, contribute to followup work involving high technology and stimulating local R&D.

I followed up with my familiar refrain (to those who know me at all) of the need to encourage the creation of appropriate tertiary education and training in software and systems engineering, and software and systems architecture; relevant to a wide range of industries aside from defence, eg. utilities, rail and aerospace where high reliability, high integrity systems are required.

(*) Keep your eye on the website for progress or please email me directly to comment, make suggestions or be involved.

Innovation and Complex IT Projects

2008-07-19T22:43:00.015+08:00

The recent troubles in DPI with the TRELIS system are symptomatic of the approach that is usually taken to the development of complex IT projects. However we should not be too quick to blame the key stakeholders who led the development of this project on behalf of the customer proxy, the government, who represented the true customer being ourselves, the people of Western Australia.

I want to try and shed some light on the real-life complexities, problems, conundrums and deficiencies that tend to lead large, complex, costly and highly-politicised projects off track almost from the very start and offer some solutions provided by experts in this field. More importantly and in a broader context, I want to explore how the development of complex IT projects and associated software relates the state of our cultural, intellectual and creative capital in our state of Western Australia.

The problems that have been experienced on TRELIS and other large, complex IT software systems development in government are very similar to those often experienced in commercial organisations. This point leads us to conclude that such challenges are not due to government department culture but are due to more-general causes.

I say challenges rather than failures deliberately because these kinds of projects are seldom failures and are often unsung, large-scale successes. TRELIS may indeed be one of these because the system does work, generally speaking, in spite of the Auditor General finding, "Poor specification of business requirements and software development problems resulted in TRELIS being two years behind schedule when it went ‘live’ on 6 July 2004, " (*ag).

Granted there are problems but any "first" is going to experience these - such is the nature of new development of any kind. The fact that, "An approved business case for TRELIS could not be located" is irrelevant because the system upgrade was necessary and the fact that, "Funding for TRELIS was provided on an incremental basis rather than total funding to match the requirements of the project and the level of project management, oversight and quality control were inadequate for a project of this size" is heavily misleading.

The requirements were incomplete because it is not possible to know them prior to the project undertaking requirements analysis, a first cut of which is produced at the start of the project but the process of requirements discovery and elaboration of hidden and misunderstood requirements is ongoing throughout the lifetime of the project, declining as the project reaches completion.

Without complete requirements (as noted, impossible to produce for most systems) estimation and hence budgeting and funding cannot be perfectly accurate. For projects of this scale of magnitude and complexity to go over budget and over time is not only defensible it is to be expected. But we can do better.

The book Waltzing with Bears by DeMarco and Lister is about managing risk on software projects and is one of several easy-to-read management guides about project management and estimation that go beyond the meaningless practice of tabulating fixed estimates for each task in the work breakdown structure at the start of the project and then pretending these reflect delivery expectations when in reality they are merely guesses and nothing more.

The title of Death March by Ed Yourdon says much in itself and talks about the symptoms of pathological management that is reasonably prevalent in the software industry, at the same time presenting practical solutions to dealing with these circumstances. The Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, or SWEBOK, is not well known to many practitioners. Both traditional and contemporary approaches to software project management, from Rational Unified Process to Agile approaches that include Scrum, Extreme Programming and Feature Driven Development, are often ignored or misunderstood in their application.

The report entitled Challenges of Complex IT Projects jointly authored by the British Computer Society and The Royal Society of Engineering goes straight to the point of the many problems that beset complex IT projects. As I note in a submission to the National Innovation Review, "there is a broad reluctance to accept that complex IT projects have many similarities with major engineering projects and would benefit from greater application of well established engineering and project management procedures. For example, the importance of risk management is poorly understood and the significance of systems architecture is not appreciated."

The report goes on to point the general direction that needs to be taken in order to remedy the situation facing organisations which undertake complex IT projects. Two key recommendations are: 1) There is an urgent need to promote the adoption of best practice amongst IT practitioners and their customers; and 2) Basic research into complexity and associated issues is required to enable the effective development of complex, globally distributed systems.

In Perth, perhaps a reflection of the pioneering approach taken by the explorers of Western Australia, and reflected in many wonderful technology success stories that are little known but should be much celebrated, cultural change towards openness to innovation and willingness to change is rare. Companies such as FormSys, Maptek, QPSX, ERG, Asgard, Sanford Securities, JDV, L3-Nautronix and many others have each had their measure of success in their respective application areas.

There is so much opportunity in mining and resources, communications, defence, utilities, government and enterprise IT systems development where Perth companies can carve out an outstanding niche for themselves or join the list of national and global leaders. For example, strong and capable leadership is needed for us to to take advantage of benefits that could accrue to our state due to all six of the Collins class submarine fleet being based here, the incredible development of industry at Australian Marine Complex and Technology Park, to support research and development work in subsea engineering, communications, other marine, acoustic and defence technologies.

The current and future benefits of the iVec supercomputing centre, the global radio astronomy project known as the Square Kilometre Array or SKA that is looking more likely to be based in our state, continuing massive investments in the mining and resources, associated infrastructure, knowledge base and information technologies are potentially enormous and could leave an unparalleled legacy as a benefit of the extended boom we have experienced in mining and resources.

Beyond the boom, the development of advanced Information and Communications Technologies, known collectively as ICT, will underwrite the future growth and well-being of Western Australia where Rabbitnomics dictates that mining alone will not. Earlier this year, I was privileged to be a part of the Australian Software Engineering Conference that was held for the first time in Perth in the 20 year history of the conference. Having finally started to build the bridges, it is vital that business development extend to the commercial exploitation of the creative capital we have in abundance in the fields of ICT in our state.

As part of a much-needed debate about the cultural face of Perth, the abundance of creative capital and deficit of innovation, FORM brought Charles Landry to our city, who wrote that, "A great city must be much more than wealthy. It must have a culture rich in passion, compassion, art and innovation."(*cl) FORM and the debate over creative capital, culture and ideas was naturally dominated by architects, psychologists, artists and politicians, with little input from scientists, engineers and other technologists.

It is quite natural that social scientists and others focused on cultural and social issues should frame and dominate the debate about the composition and geography of Perth, its relationship to our beautiful surrounds, and our place in the environment as members of a community. However those across the Maginot Line that fortifies the supposed partition of social from physical sciences have a role to play. The physical sciences, engineering and technological arts have a closer relationship with their artistic and literary brethren in commerce, law and design than many realise.

Creativity is rife throughout scientific endeavours of discovery and complements the rigours of design. It is just so that structural engineers and software engineers share the terminology of requirements engineering, specification, design and concreting or concretion, in the former case the pouring of concrete foundations and more elaborate vertical structures in order to satisfy the architectural blueprints, and in the latter case of software the artifact written by a coder to implement the software design.

In both cases, the term architect is used appropriately to describe the role of the designer who conceptualises what is to be built. The term software architect was borrowed into the field of software engineering by a body of workers who constructed software design patterns based on the work of Christopher Alexander, a famous architect known for his theories of design and in particular his seminal book on planning called A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction.

In the software engineering community, the seminal book on design patterns is Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software which follows the same pattern templates or scripts as laid down by Alexander. The parallels are obvious and I use this as one example of the close, even symbiotic, relationship between concepts and their practical realisation in fields as diverse as architecture and software development.

Likewise, similar arguments can be applied across the full spectrum of creative undertakings by physicists, biologists, mathematicians and engineers of all stripes who mix the spark of creativity with their foundational sciences and practical technologies in order that an innovative outcome shall emerge.

It has been suggested at various times that our state and our universities should specialise narrowly in fields that are central to or that support the mining and resources industry, in order to leverage our competitive advantage in this area due to the ample resources gifted by nature. However I contend that such a view is short-sighted and counter productive because the wider society would suffer as a consequence.

Besides, we need to embrace a strategy that takes us beyond the boom and we know that knowledge industries including ICT, biotech, subsea, marine and defence present some of the best opportunities for succeeding in a crowded, global marketplace for products and ideas.

(*ag) http://www.audit.wa.gov.au/reports/report2006_01.html
(*cl) http://www.thewest.com.au/default.aspx?MenuID=77&ContentID=23433

The Collins Class Submarine Story

2008-07-15T11:24:00.010+08:00

The authors Peter Yule and Derek Woolner do a great job overall of conveying the wonderful engineering achievement that is the Collins class submarine project. Their exposition provides an exquisite history and overview of various aspects of the history of the Australian submarine force and at the same time a sometimes frustrating overview of various aspects the development of the Collins class submarine project.

In the Introduction, the University of Melbourne historian Peter Yule sets out his own terms of reference, stating that the aim of the book is simply to tell the story, using the methods of a historian, leaving the lessons to be discovered by the readers for themselves, avoiding military jargon and using material from interviews and documents, that is, primary sources. Peter's co-author, Derek Woolner is a military analyst at Australian National University who carried out the documentary research and wrote several chapters of the book himself.

I very much enjoyed reading the history of Australian submarines from 1925 when orders were placed for the British-built O-class submarines, Oxley and Otway through the lengthy period of time when the Oberon-class submarines proved to be excellent after their delivery in the 1970s through to sublimely successful upgrades of their weapons systems. The Submarine Warfare Systems Centre upgraded and modernised the combat systems to integrate firing of torpedoes and missiles and unlike American submarines, the Oberons could fire multiple Harpoon missiles towards a target via different tracks. An amazing technical achievement due to the centre's success stemming from "the combination of engineers, programmers and submariners in an environment that challenged and drew the best from each."

The chapters about the project definition, tenders and contract negotiations whet the appetite for the sorts of project issues that will arise later on. Recognise the years of preparatory studies required for any project of such enormous complexity that is difficult for most people to comprehend. Personally, I found quite interesting some of the comments about grudging acceptance of the contract monitoring and control system over the American cost and schedule system and would have liked to know more. Anyone involved in defence projects would appreciate the importance of requirements engineering, preliminary design reviews and prototyping and would also realise these techniques fail to mitigate all risks that later emerged, especially in the failed combat system development and the unexpected noise signature that later took the project by surprise.

The greater intrigue and interest in the book was around the formation of bid teams and the unexpected win by the Australian Submarine Corporation comprising the Kockums design over the German rival and the over-ambitious requirements and timetable for the combat system as contracted to Rockwell. We discover that Rockwell never had any hope of delivering on the requirements for a distributed system with stringent data and information processing constraints using the technology of the day. Without access to the systems architecture, the detailed design and rationale for the decisions that were made by the development team and the conclusions of the review team I can only wonder if this were actually so or whether tantalising success for Rockwell and the Australian integrator Computer Sciences Corporation could have been achieved.

The great unsung successes were in the development of world-leading steel alloy with better performance (eg. explosion bulge testing) and welding techniques that led to a rework rate one-tenth that of comparable submarine projects. Complementing the exemplary construction of the hull and superstructure of the submarine is the unique and world-leading integrated ship control and monitoring system that was developed by Wormald in Australia, in concert with Saab, before its demise as a leading systems engineering and software development firm at the hands of corporate predators. The fly-by-wire system allows a small crew to control the entire submarine and its operation from several automated workstations.

During trials the dive performance was exactly as predicted and the autopilot known as Sven could control the vessel more precisely than a human operator. After some vacillating, the political decision was made to replace the functional but limited combat system on Collins and Farncomb, and later the basis of the augmentation program that was installed on Dechaineux and Sheean, with an off-the-shelf product from Raytheon. The noise problems were improved by altering the shape of the bow sonar dome to the extent that at low running speeds these are the quietest submarines in the world.

I was employed at Nautronix and was working as a signal processing analyst for the Synthetic Aperture Processing System that was deployed by Thistle Island in the Spencer Gulf offshore Port Lincoln in South Australia. Nautronix, now owned by L3, is a world leader in underwater acoustics for positioning, communications and ranging applications. It was my privilege to take the initial theoretical work and to develop the signal processing algorithms and much of the software that was used for acquiring and processing the noise signature of the Collins during its initial ranging; then to undertake the laborious task of processing the data acquired during ranging and personally writing much of the report that was presented in sextuplicate to the Navy.

The politics are naturally relevant for a huge defence project but I do not hold in high regard the remarks made by the authors around the politics of decisions made by the newly-installed Minister for Industry in the first Howard government, John Moore, and Minister for Defence Ian McLachlan. On the one hand, after an independent review a new leadership team was appointed expressly to finish the project but the authors note that without strong support the project could easily have been abandoned. Most of the issues raised in the report were already known but the most important first step was "to get people out of the trenches and back working together" after the breakdown in relationships between ASC, Kockums, the project office and the Navy.

On the other hand, the authors state that the change of government in 1996 led to the abandonment of any industry policy, returning to focus on the bilateral relationship on America, the "enthusiastic adoption of the role as America's 'deputy Sheriff'" and shift towards "enthusiastic participation in American foreign policy adventures." This material, absent footnotes, fails to cite any sources and presumably reflects the political and strategic defence biases of the authors. Clearly deviating from the stated aim to tell the history of the Collins class, these few sentences detract little from an otherwise excellently-written exposition of an amazing story.

For anybody with an interest in the Australian defence forces and in particular for those involved in the defence industry, especially in complex systems and software development, The Collins Class Submarine Story is a must-read and a valuable addition to your book shelf. For others, the lessons for project governance and ownership by its sponsors, the social and historical divisions between the surface fleet and submarine fleet arms of the navy, make a fascinating rendition of issues faced by members of development teams undertaking software and systems integration projects across a wide variety of industries.

Is Technology Change Management an Oxymoron?

2008-05-31T12:49:00.006+08:00

Is there such a thing as technology change management that contrasts with change management in any other area? Yes, I believe there is partly because the risks and opportunities of technology are often misunderstood, undersold or oversold (or both).

Also, the discomfort that managers feel about science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in general adds to their discomfort in supporting and encouraging technology change. (Psychological projection of the manager with limited technical literacy or currency to their staff that they feel uncomfortable with the mooted change.)

By change I mean positive improvements in the technology space, for example, adoption of web interfaces in place of 3270 terminals, today de rigueur in most organisations but a great leap of faith just a few years ago. Perhaps SOA is in the same position today with some caveats I will return to shortly.

The problem of reinvention in the fields of technology and IT is a continuing cause for concern because we all know that the same story can only be spun so many times. He who cries wolf, in this context, will have trouble funding the same kind of project the n-th time around.

For anyone who has been involved in championing the adoption of new technology you will already appreciate that socialisation and process issues are of far greater importance and impact on the organisation and members of the organisation than the technology itself.

While a smaller or greater proportion of stakeholders might embrace the adoption of new technology it is uncertain that such success will follow unless a concommitant effort is made to update business processes to support the new technology.

To the title of this post, is technology change management an oxymoron? More often than not I have observed managers and technical leaders paying lip-service to change over an extraordinarily long period of time, say 3-5 years, when the experience of those who have been successful informs us that change can and should be on shorter time frames.

For example, we will change the way we build applications, with user stories the foundation of agile development, we may be told. But no unit testing or continuous integration is needed at this stage because we don't want to make too many changes at once. Project management has enough problems coping with the new time-keeping system so they don't have to write requirements any more.

We will write our own user stories (or use cases or functional requirements, take your pick) because the customer or end user is unavailable. Have you seen the Dilbert cartoon where the developer asks the business rep what the software is supposed to do? The developer is told to design the software and then to describe what is does.

There is a lot of common sense in agile development that is matched by almost as much whining about the purported failings of earlier approaches. In another post I will examine how agile approaches match up with the seminal Waterfall method from its original publication in 1970, including iterative development, customer involvement, and early testing.

The big difference is that when we are talking about agile development we are usually referring to toy systems compared to those in defence and space that Royce was working on. Modern project management practice, including software, should have evolved from such successes as the space program, defence missile, telecoms and various other successes.

Dare we be so conceited as to pretend a few rules of thumb are adequate? Parnas gives a solid argument for pretending to have a process game even if real-life pragmatism rules out a perfect score.

National Innovation Review

2008-05-18T08:53:00.003+08:00

The background and my reasons for making a submission to the National Innovation Review go back quite some time and are informed by a number of personal experiences.

The most important factor is the vacuum of skills in software and systems engineering where one is unlikely to find practitioners who are confident outside of a narrow field of expertise. Over-specialisation and, ironically, dual degrees have played into this scenario because in both cases graduates are limited in their breadth of technical exposure at university.

The general absence or inadequacy of postgraduate mentoring and coaching means that professional development is stymied compared with other professions. Finally, my continuing frustration with endless repetition of bland and unimaginative solutions, like rote answers to a test, at conferences and meetings.

Innovation and Practise in Software and Systems Engineering

Summary

The purpose of this submission is to focus attention on software and systems engineering as it relates to defence, telecommunications, utilities and other industries that rely on safety, integrity and reliable systems; however similar issues arise in enterprise computing that I mention in an addendum. The poor understanding among many engineers, computer scientists and specialists in software and systems engineering makes for many difficulties in building a case for innovation and improving the state of practise in these closely-related fields.

The first step needed to remedy the situation involves redefining software engineering as a subclass or speciality of systems engineering which is itself reasonably well understood by most engineering practitioners and poorly understood by others not working intimately in the field; or at the very least clarifying the relationship between these two disciplines. The second step is to construct an integrated, elite software and systems engineering programme to address the critical shortage of practitioners in these fields, including requirements engineering, test, verification and validation, software and systems architecture, detailed design, and issues of construction, configuration, packaging, deployment and maintenance throughout the whole software and systems development life-cycle.

I also draw attention to the need to focus on fundamental programming, technologies and practices that are essential to software engineering, especially safety-critical and reliable systems, in addition to those aspects that characterise the field as systems engineering.

Barriers to innovation in software and systems engineering

The primary reason to emphasise the barriers to innovation is that the same issues affect the daily and evolutionary practise in the field of software and systems engineering. The reasons for poor on-time delivery, poorly-met requirements and unmet customer expectations for software projects involve the same factors that detract from proper performance during project execution. Project, programme and strategic management are relevant but are on the periphery of the issues that I am highlighting in this submission: Aside from management issues per se, the relevant issues are those in commercial practise and academic presentation of the subject matter.

Issues in defence, industry and academia

The critical shortage of experienced software and systems engineers is in defence where the worsening shortage of specialist skills in requirements and test specification, system design and construction will continue to have an increasingly negative impact on project delivery. The general absence of undergraduate and postgraduate engineering courses that specialise in defence systems is perhaps understandable because the sector, while influential, is small relative to the pool of potential employers for university graduates.

The objectives of defence, industry in general and the academic community are intertwined when we consider the need to reasonably match the supply of graduates to the demand for qualified personnel in industry. The demand for graduates in the defence sector is fed by government and procurement policy while the demand by industry in general is cyclical with the economy. Notably the resources boom has skewed talent entering and leaving university towards the mining and resources industry arguably to the detriment of other industries.

An obvious part of the solution is an upwards adjustment in wages to encourage school leavers to enter the relevant university courses and for graduates to join defence and other industries where there is a shortage of graduates to fill the places. Over time, the bigger problem is the combination of the decline in experienced personnel in these industries as well as the tendency for short-term goals to steer many school leavers towards vocational training and employment when they are well suited towards a university education.

The flow-on effect of experienced practitioners leaving the field is that the level and quality of postgraduate mentoring and coaching in the workplace will decline. Anecdotally, there is evidence to suggest that computing and engineering graduates already have fewer career pathways and mentoring opportunities than their peers in other professions, for example, lawyers serving as articled clerks expect their work to be closely reviewed and marked with red ink by senior associates and partners; and doctors serving their internship and residency are supervised and driven by registrars to improve their clinical knowledge and to excel in its application.

One aspect of these professions currently lacking and that is being developed in software engineering is that of licensing beyond the automatic membership of professional societies granted by virtue of graduating from an accredited institution. Beyond licensing and registration of professionals, a shift in mindset and approach is needed to elevate the level of on-the-job postgraduate professional development of graduates in software and systems engineering.

Supporting R&D and commercial innovation

Among the wide variety of research and innovation undertaken by research institutions and other companies, much of it intellectually or commercially valuable, there is significant R&D undertaken by industry that tends towards being conservative, mundane and uninformed; matched by university-based research that is irrelevant, derivative and uninformed. In itself this claim is irrefutable and we should accept that a few gems of research outcomes are the valuable result of a large amount of money, time and effort invested in research and associated infrastructure.

However we must make greater effort to redirect some resources towards research programmes that are relevant and industrial R&D that addresses known and real problems. In either case, the opportunity for academic research to be informed by outstanding problems in industry and commercial realms is a challenge to take up because of the strict demarcation lines between industry practitioners and academics. It is equally true that many academics will not be welcomed with open arms into the world of commerce just as industry practitioners (with or without a PhD) are looked upon with suspicion when trying to access research funding channels.

As General co-Chair of ASWEC 2008 (Australian Software Engineering Conference), held recently in Perth for the first time in its twenty year history, the relevance and importance of communication between academia and industry was highlighted by the intense participation of both sectors. ASWEC is very rare conference insofar as it encourages mixing between academics, policy makers, teachers and researchers, and practicing engineers, programmers, managers and others in industry. Software engineering is a practice-based discipline and as such it is difficult to imagine software engineering as an academic discipline divorced from its commercial application. This sort of communication, other such forums and cooperative research and development centres need to be encouraged, nourished and supported in order for this field to flourish.

The way software engineering is taught

The various computer science and software engineering degrees taught at our Australian universities appear to be solidly based and founded on a sound scientific and engineering basis. However, some of the content and manner in which these courses are taught, particularly at the postgraduate level where I have heard several disturbing anecdotes of extremely poor course structure and content, needs to be addressed immediately in order to arrest the anecdotal decline in quality of graduates and the very real long-term decline in the number of school leavers entering computer science, engineering and science courses in general.

Part of the attraction of professions such as accounting, law and medicine are the high standards of quality expected of their members, for example, the respect attributed to holders of Chartered Accounting and Certified Practising Accountant qualifications. In many undergraduate, and more so at postgraduate, schools the restricted intake of elite students entering into a period of high-quality education matched by personal challenges to meet the high standards that are expected increases the real and perceived value of the qualification, for example, MBA. I recommend the creation of elite schools that can meet the expectations of quality and guarantees of employment and career development expected of the best schools in the other professions and some engineering disciplines.

State of practise in software and systems engineering

Systems engineering as a discipline

The discipline of systems engineering includes requirements engineering, architecture development and evolution, systems decomposition, modelling and synthesis of the problem domain and selecting one of many viable solutions as a pragmatic approach to solving the problem and meeting the customer's requirements. Verification of the build and construction process, including traceability of design and implementation artifacts (eg. software modules, packages and applications) to the requirements specification, is a precursor to validation of the solution against the customer's need.

Sometimes a solution is constructed from scratch however in general a number of existing, reusable components and third-party, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components need to be integrated into cohesive system as part of the solution. The process of decomposing and assigning requirements to subsystems and later integrating each of those subsystems is the essence of systems engineering. Essentially the same description applies to the software engineering processes involving the analysis and design of a software solution for nontrivial systems. The distinguishing feature of nontrivial systems (colloquially known as "complex systems") is that the project team is necessarily composed of people with skills in various disciplines, design and construction takes a significant amount of time, and the delivered system needs to be supported for a significant period of time, often measured in decades for defence and some commercial systems.

The general absence of specialist undergraduate and postgraduate engineering courses that specialise in safety and reliable systems continues to surprise however courses tend to be specialised by discipline or industry. Focused delivery of material as elective units to a core degree in engineering or computing would seem suitable at an undergraduate level, or postgraduate courses that build on the generalist and formative knowledge base that is the foundation of an undergraduate degree. In academia and industry it is rare to find individuals with sufficient knowledge in control systems, digital signal processing or systems analysis as well as a strong enough foundation in computer science or software engineering that they can competently and confidently deliver systems that require this sort of mix of skill sets.

Platforms, frameworks and languages are important

A firm grasp of language-based implementation idioms by software engineers is crucial for the development of high-quality software systems in the sense of the -ilities, for example, portability, maintainability, understandability and reuseability. In addition to these qualities the non-functional requirements to be met often include performance and reliability that require an intimacy between the implementation language and the deployment platform.

For the development of distributed, real-time, mission-critical software and computing infrastructure it is essential that the underlying platform and programming language are considerations during analysis and design phases through to in-service deployment. Less-demanding problem domains have weaker constraints where the business requirements can probably be realised by any number of possible implementations however this is not the case with the subset of critical applications we are referring to here.

Importance of C++, STL, Corba/IIOP, ACE, Boost for teaching and systems development

Well beyond C with classes, C++ is the quintessential system-programming language, offering a rich toolkit of implementation idioms that can be exploited by experienced programmers in addition to a simple programming model that can be used by novices. The facilities of object-oriented programming, generic programming and functional programming enable C++ to be a first-class language for building Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) and in unsurpassed in this role by any other language. The C++ features of extension by derivation coupled with operator overloading enables new types to be defined that operate in the same way as built-in types.

The Standard Template Library (STL) is a rich, contract-based set of iterators, containers and algorithms that enables well-defined behaviour on template (generic) types and through extension achieved via traits (template specifications) without adhoc language extensions for run-time type introspection. As powerful and general-purpose as are languages like Ada, Java and C# they cannot replace C++ in defence, telecoms and control systems, on scales from embedded systems to supercomputing.

While C++ has a solid standard-based definition since 1998 and has facilities provided by ACE and Boost libraries, for example, other languages that are its competitors (and some allege its superior) have required numerous language extensions in order to add basic facilities that mirror C++ features, usually weakly, which are part of the core language. For example, generics and templates in Ada, Java and C# are less powerful than C++ templates; and containers provided by STL have poor cousins in Ada generics, Java and C#.NET container libraries.

C++ and Corba/IIOP (Internet Inter-ORB Protocol) are the premier software and integration standards in use across the majority of systems today even though EJB/IIOP (Enterprise Java Beans) and various .NET Channel bindings to Corba/IIOP are not so well known. The increasingly popular, though limited, Java and C# programming languages, while they are eminently suitable for business programming, are unsuitable for many application domains in embedded, real-time, control, safety-critical and reliable systems.

Importance of Spark and Ada in teaching and developing reliable systems

Ada in widely used in defence, NASA and avionics where mission-critical systems are deployed, for example, embedded systems in the Boeing 777 and 787 run Ada code because the systems require highly-reliable, mission-critical software. Ada allows developers to prove security properties about programs, for instance, the ability to prove that a variable is not altered while it is being used through the program; and Ada supports comprehensive static analysis for dissecting the program flow to ensure correct behaviour.

SPARK is a high-level programming language and toolset designed by Praxis High Integrity Systems for writing software for high integrity applications. In their words, "SPARK gives confidence in the correctness of code – it is verifiable. Early detection and prevention of defects reduces the cost of verification and validation. SPARK is a very portable language and has minimal run-time system requirements. SPARK is used on safety-critical systems, primarily in the Aerospace, Defence, Rail and Security industries. It is suitable for use wherever there is a desire to produce high-quality software which behaves in a predictable manner."

As a teaching aid in software engineering, a research tool in universities and other institutions, and as an implementation language for many applications in the Australian context, Ada and SPARK are suitable languages for safety and high reliability and their use should be encouraged where appropriate.

Research and teaching recommendation

I strongly recommend the continued teaching of C++ and the allied technologies of STL, ACE, Boost and Corba at our universities. The Adaptive Communication Environment (ACE) is a highly-regarded object-oriented network programming toolkit used for writing sophisticated concurrent, parallel, and distributed applications. Systems built upon ACE are widely deployed across many problem domains and industries including telecommunications, defence, aerospace and finance. In addition, I recommend that we create specific programmes for research and teaching of Spark and Ada.

We should have programmes of research supporting the development of advanced systems built on these technologies otherwise we continue to run the risk of falling further behind, both technologically and economically, as a nation in this area. A concerted effort is desperately needed to create and fund one or more centres of expertise to develop the required skills and drive the research programme in addition to the broad-scale evolution in the content and structure of teaching and practice.

Recognising that Java and C# are already in widespread use and it is likely their continued growth will lead them to dominate wide-scale software development in the future it is important to study these languages. However, C++ in particular must continue to be taught to undergraduates so it can be satisfactorily deployed in industry.

Enterprise Systems Development

There are many reasons to extend good practise to Java/J2EE, EJB/IIOP, C#.NET and SOA systems in the enterprise systems space. The same lessons that apply to good software and systems engineering in general naturally apply also to enterprise systems development however there is much less attention paid to rigour this field by academics and industry participants. Most enterprise software development involves integration of COTS systems using various integration technologies, including EJB/IIOP and service-oriented architecture (SOA), with custom applications written in a range of technologies including Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and C# on the .NET platform.

Prof. Ian Sommerville, one of the worlds eminent leaders in software engineering (author of the leading text book and himself known as the "Father of Software Engineering") emphasised in his keynote talk at ASWEC 2008 that enterprise software includes health and medical systems, defence and logistics systems, aerospace systems and airspace management, in addition to the mission-critical applications for corporations including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and many other systems. He said that the direction in which enterprises are heading includes construction by configuration and integration of COTS components so it is important for research programmes to be created in these areas.

One problem is that the time frames of enterprise systems development span many months or years for a strategic programme of work and these time frame do not fit the normal academic time frame for publication. As already pointed out, it is essential that such efforts include experienced industry practitioners however their involvement depends upon commercial and R&D funding that is very difficult to access, in addition to the need to break down the notional barriers between academia and industry.

The report entitled The Challenges of Complex IT Projects by the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society states, "there is a broad reluctance to accept that complex IT projects have many similarities with major engineering projects and would benefit from greater application of well established engineering and project management procedures. For example, the importance of risk management is poorly understood and the significance of systems architecture is not appreciated."

The report goes on to paint the general direction that needs to be taken in order to remedy the situation facing organisations which undertake complex IT projects. Two key recommendations are: 1) There is an urgent need to promote the adoption of best practice amongst IT practitioners and their customers; and 2) Basic research into complexity and associated issues is required to enable the effective development of complex, globally distributed systems. The discussion and recommendations in this report are strongly relevant and applicable in the Australian context.

ICT WA 2007

2007-10-27T20:36:00.000+08:00

The conference on Friday 12 October at Technology Park Function Centre was a great success with excellent speakers complemented by worthwhile networking between the diverse, individual participants - much as a reflection of the diversity of the IT industry in WA. The formal opening by the Chair of ICTICC, Valerie Maxville was followed by the opening address by The Hon Francis M Logan MLA, The Minister for Resources, Industry and Enterprise.

In addition to Fran, we were joined by Dr Judy Edwards MLA, Member for Maylands, in a great demonstration of support from the government. I was privileged to be able to speak with Judy about several issues and was gratified to find that she was happy to talk to me about ICT and wider industry issues and has a solid understanding of the subject matter.

The keynote speakers were Vince Troth, GM of Optus in Western Australia who deferred to Dean Smith, GM of Government Affairs to elaborate on the OPEL Joint Venture under Broadband Connect; and Dr Nick Archibald, Executive Vice-Chairman and CEO of Geoinformatics Exploration, who spoke about the ICT challenges in mineral exploration.

The Chair, Valerie Maxville, first spoke of the whole ICT Week which sought to emphasis the ICT WA brand. The week kicked off with the eWaste Collection event 'bring out your dead' computers and other ICT equipment, that doubled expectations in an initiative on environmental commitment. The Women in ICT and Engineering luncheon that was playfully and meaningfully entitled, 'Lack of Women or an Excess of Men? Strategies for Cultural Change,' was a sell-out event, where Jaye Radisich, MLA spoke about similar challenges she has faced in the political arena.

The WA DIG 24-hour gaming event and expo held at the Perth Convention Exhibition Centre showed a range of diverse careers in ICT apart from programming. The ICT WA Portal is under development and will offer information on careers, education and career prospects. Valerie welcomed input into development of the portal, intended to sell ICT WA. She also raised the issue of career and training and strategies for combatting the skills shortage; combined approach of industry, government, education and community organisations.

Francis Logan told an anecdote from the time he was studying economics at Sydney Uni and spoke with Laurie Carmichael, famed union militant of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU). He was a visionary, into model railway collecting, roses and classical music (we promise not to tell anyone), who was ahead of his time in foreseeing the use of computers for organisation and communication.

Fran (as he is known by all and sundry) welcomed the Hon Dr Judy Edwards, Member for Maylands, then spoke about the inquiry, ICT Industry Development Strategy and the earlier Enabling Future Prosperity (2004 by Clive Brown), where his government had implemented 34 of 42 recommendations by March 2006 at $60M cost. This included the creation of ICT ICC (convener of this conference), a great initiative, allowing the ICT industry in WA to speak as 'one group with one collective voice.'

The launch of Project Connect on 27 Sept 2006 supported by the WA Branch of ICN (Chamber of Commerce and Industry), to identify opportunities in government and industry and advising registered companies of those opportunities (www.ictwa.com.au). The WA ICT Capability Directory, currently with 153 companies registered, promotes the WA ICT industry. The ACS Foundation scholarships for under-privileged groups are a point of pride, supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, financially disadvantaged, regional and academically gifted. AIIA development of business skills for entrepreneurs programme; iVEC funding including the APAC conference (this week); 4 Oct Open Source Symposium.

The establishment of Interzone, the third-largest gaming and digital content developer in the USA, in WA. The SKA (Square Kilometre Array) will need massive computing power. The Statewide Broadband Network to link all of government. Tech Park (where this conference is hosted) is a critical part of growing ICT industry in WA. 'Beyond the Boom' - ICT, Marine, Biofuels and Renewables, Biotech expect infrastructure investment of $22B over the coming years. Australian Marine Complex (AMC) - $300M. WA Institute of Medical Research (Prof. Fiona Stanley).

AMC - modular shipbuilding, oil and gas, process facilities, crainage, dry dock to 13,000t ships. Plan to assume control of Department of Agriculture land ~20ha - expect master plan around xmas or early next year - to transform facilities, town centre, shops, apartments. To make Tech Park a dynamic place to work, live, entertain and to be entertained, to showcase WA ICT - the state's largest cluster.

Document Format Wars

2007-09-05T22:14:00.000+08:00

Microsoft has proposed to fast track its Open Office XML (OOXML) definition for documents produced in Office 2007 as an ECMA and ISO standard. Their intention is to capture the XML schema that defines the structure of Office 2007 documents including backward-compatible binary components that provide support for documents produced by earlier versions of the office product. These binary component definitions are specific to Microsoft products and are not capable of being produced with or without the OOXML definition.

The Open Document Format (ODF) for Office Applications (OpenDocument) is supported and promulgated by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and is enthusiastically supported by a growing band of followers. The reason for the strong following and broad-based support is that ODF is a well-designed and open definition that can be implemented by any party without the need for any additional information apart from that in other open definitions and international standards, like Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

OOXML, on the other hand, replicates the equivalent behaviour of numerous open format definitions and existing international standards. Among many others individuals, I submitted technical objections to my national standards body (Standards Australia) of the proposed standard on the basis that OOXML is a long and overly complicated definition of a document format that can only be implemented in full by Microsoft.

To: michael standards.au
cc: daniel systec
Subject: DRAFT INTERNATIONAL STANDARD ISO/IEC 29500, Information technology ?
Office Open XML file formats.

Dear Michael,

I humbly submit a few comments about the proposed DRAFT INTERNATIONAL STANDARD ISO/IEC 29500, Information technology ? Office Open XML file formats.

Please contact me if I can be of any further assistance.

Regards,
Daniel
--
Daniel M. Berinson BE PhD MIEAust MIEEE AFAIM GAICD
Managing Director, Systems and Software Architect
Systec Engineering Pty Ltd and Systec IT
daniel@systec.com.au
040 888 0278 (m)

Template for comments and observations

Date: Due to Standards Australia by COB 21 Aug 2007

Document: DRAFT INTERNATIONAL STANDARD ISO/IEC 29500
Information technology — Office Open XML file formats

1	2	(3)	4	5	(6)	(7)
MB¹	Clause No./ Subclause No./ Annex (e.g. 3.1)	Paragraph/ Figure/Table/Note (e.g. Table 1)	Type of com-ment²	Comment (justification for change)	Proposed change	Observations on each comment submitted

AU	1	ge	The document is overly long (over 6,000 pages) and complicated to be an effective specification for implementers.	Shorten the document for this standard by either: 1) partition the supporting material into several other standard proposals; or 2) amend with reference to appropriate standards.
AU	1	te	The document refers indirectly to binary implementation details that are not part of this proposed standard nor are they part of other existing or proposed standards.	Delete references to binary materials and delete references to other materials that are not part of an existing or proposed standard.
AU	2.15.1.28	te	Conflicts with ISO 10118-3 and W3C XML-ENC by defining nonstandard hashing and cryptographic algorithms (likely to be insecure).	Amend with reference to standards that specify hashing and cryptographic algorithms that are know to be secure.
AU	2.15.3.6	te	Example (one of many) of implementer being required to clone unspecified behaviour.	Specify explicitly the required behaviour; otherwise delete references to unspecified behaviour.
AU	2.18.52	te	Conflicts with ISO 639 by requiring the use of a fixed list of numeric language codes rather than the already existing set provided by ISO 639.	Amend with reference to appropriate standard.
AU	2.18.105	te	Refers to nonstandard twips.	Amend with reference to standard units.
AU	3.17.4.1	te	Conflicts with the Gregorian calendar in the calculation of dates by requiring spreadsheet implementations to incorrectly treat the year 1900 as a leap year.	Amend to conform with Gregorian calendar.
AU	4.4	te	Conflicts with W3C SMIL by defining nonstandard multimedia features.	Amend to conform with appropriate standard.
AU	5.1.10.45	te	Example (one of many) of inconsistent and poorly named XML elements.	Revise XML element names and type design (i.e. well-designed complex and simple types).
AU	5.1.12.42	te	Refers to nonstandard English Metric Units (EMU).	Amend with reference to standard units.
AU	6.2.3.17	te	Refers to Windows Metafiles or Enhanced Metafiles instead of using ISO/IEC 8632 or W3C SVG.	Amend with reference to appropriate standards; otherwise delete references to proprietary materials.
AU	6.2.3.23	te	Refers to Microsoft namespace (urn:schemas.microsoft.com:office:office).	Amend to appropriate open namespace.
AU	7.1	te	Conflicts with W3C MathML by defining nonstandard format for mathematical expressions.	Amend with reference to appropriate standard.
AU	8.6.2	te	Conflicts with W3C SVG by requiring support for VML drawing format (not a standard).	Amend with reference to appropriate standard.

1 MB = Member body (enter the ISO 3166 two-letter country code, e.g. CN for China; comments from the ISO/CS editing unit are identified by **)

2 Type of comment: ge = general te = technical ed = editorial

NOTE Columns 1, 2, 4, 5 are compulsory.

page 1 of 2

ISO electronic balloting commenting template/version 2001-10

Grokdoc has pages of contacts, objections and Microsoft's history of dirty tricks in opposing development that supports open standards to the detriment of proprietary standards. As it turned out, the fast-track proposal failed the vote so the final outcome has been deferred - however this state-of-affairs is a cop-out due to the late elevation of formerly uninterested national standards organisations from observer to participating (voting) member status. I regret to say that even Standards Australia abstained, as an unfortunate example of bureaucratic nonperformance.

Worse still is that the problem has not gone away since the fallout from the debacle is that standards work in the relevant working group has ground to a halt. The situation is an embarrassing debacle the blame for which we can lay at the feet of Microsoft and many other organisations that are either corrupt, naive or inept.

Strategic Engineering Management

2007-08-07T18:45:00.000+08:00

It's about time I start serious planning for the course I have been privileged to be invited to lecture the Strategic Engineering Management component of a fourth year course in the Electrical, Energy and Process Engineering School at Murdoch University. The engineering course deliver a strong, cross-disciplinary foundation followed by instrumentation and control, industrial computer systems, renewable energy and electrical power specialisations.

There is a cluster of concepts and practices that form the core of strategic management as a transferable discipline and set of skills that can be applied across a wide range of enterprises. The material I wish to present and the way I present it is very much shaped by my personal experience as a contractor and consultant, practitioner and researcher, practicing, speaking and publishing in the technical side of software and systems engineering and engineering management, leadership and strategy.

I credit the Australian Institute of Management (AIM), the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) and the Company Directors Course (CDC) that I have completed to diploma level for contributing to my understanding of management, leadership and strategy (encouraged by my father); in addition to my long-standing memberships of the Institution of Engineers Australia (IEAust), Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and IEEE Computer Society that have added much to my foundation technical background of my undergraduate degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and postgraduate studies in Physics and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Western Australia.

The AICD CDC was for me a master class with some of the top executives and directors in Perth attending and just a handful of independent and small-company directors like myself. For many of the senior attendees I am quite sure that much of the material was well known and perfectly well understood by them beforehand however I like to think they gained something from the interaction with the presenters, each and expert in the subject-matter they presented during the week of full-time, intensive tutorials, case studies and discussion.

The management structure of organisations is key to understanding the role played by managers in formulating and executing strategy. The board of directors (BOD) of an organisation are tasked in Australia by the Corporations Act to act with due diligence and in good faith for the best interest of the members, usually understood to be the shareholders. The BOD will often take a different approach in startup and some high technology companies however in most mature organisations they will appoint management and delegate certain authorities to that management. Usually this is done via a managing director (MD) or chief executive officer (CEO) who is formally appointed as a staff member who also sits on the BOD as an executive director by virtue of his employment contract (as distinct from other directors who are appointed by the members-shareholders).

The key roles of the MD or CEO include the appointment of other managers and staff, the formulation and execution of strategy, the institution of processes and systems to manage the organisation and organisational risks, the negotiation, authorisation and signoff of contractual and other agreements, the preparation of reports and oversight of the day-to-day running of the organisation. At the same time, the BOD may retain certain authorities including the right to approve the appointment or dismissal of certain senior managers, for example the chief financial officer (CFO) or chief information officer (CIO) among others, the right to contribute to, vary or accept the strategy put forward by the CEO, the right to speak with senior officers of the organisation, the right to approve or deny contracts or agreements above a certain monetary limit or other conditions, the right to receive and ask questions about reports on business operations, the management and mitigation of business risks including both financial and nonfinancial risks.

Which brings us to engineering management, human resources, technology and the management of innovation which define the focal point of our discussion on strategic engineering management. In most management text books and reference guides the management of innovation and technology gets a relatively cursory treatment whereas human resources is rightly regarded as a central facet of management and leadership. Our focus here should be on the management of engineering and technology, the people aspects of innovation in regard to strategic management while acknowledging and reflecting on the close and - relationship between strategic management and project management in this sphere.

It is useful to consider intellectual property, business secrets, patents, copyright, trademarks and design registrations over processes and documents that give a business the edge, so-called core competencies that distinguish one company that excels in its fields of excellence from its relatively mediocre competitors. The knowledge portfolio of an organisation and the management of that knowledge is paramount to the mature organisation retaining its competitive advantage. Knowledge management includes metadata descriptions and the capture of process definitions and guides, best practice quality systems (ISO 9000, six-sigma, CMMI, and so on) and extends to the development of an innovative culture where the best and brightest are attracted and retained by the employer of choice who provides a culture of excellence in an exceptional workplace environment.

Patents are legally-sanctioned, restricted monopolies over the innovative process characterised by the description and statement of claims in the patent application. More to be said here, including perhaps some of my own experiences in the preparation of patent documentation for third parties and considerations for high-technology, software and other engineering companies.

Steven Covey's Eighth Habit otherwise widely and long known, if misunderstood, as encouraging entrepreneurial employees, technical advocates and potential leaders to find their voice, to speak and and be heard by the organisation. The culture shift that is required by management to encourage and stimulate such an innovative culture can be a great challenge for traditional leaders to inculcate in their colleagues and for the forward-looking leader to persist in propagating through their organisation. As W. Edwards Dening, the doyen of Japanese post-war statistical quality control, has emphasised that, "The problem is at the top; management is the problem," insofar as aspirational leadership has to come from the top while recognising that business transformation is part of everybody's job.

HBR Spotlight, March 2007, Leading Clever People by Rob Goffee (london.edu) and Gareth Jones (london.edu) points out that clever people want to work without artificial impediments being put in the way of their way. Their perception of management is shaped by the efficacy with which they can acquire the resources they need to get the job done without undue process constraints or other rules getting in their way. While their focus is on getting the work done in their technical areas of expertise it is paramount that management listens to the concerns and learns from the though leaders in their organisations. Whether by instituting formal or informal forums, ensuring they are informed of various nontechnical issues of relevance, invited to key meetings, and so on, it is important to get input and buy-in from them.

There are a raft of other issues that may be peripherally considered part of strategic management or rightly outside the direct scope but certainly within the consideration of general management. Doubtless there is significant overlap between general, operational, strategic, project and change management. Change management - people, process, technology - applicable to all scales of business, enterprises, industries. The organisational objectives set out in the charter or constitution; default constitution or statement of specific objectives, esp. nonprofit organisation, clubs and associations that may have specific and often narrowly-focused objects.

Risk management is complementary to strategic and project management; whereby reputational risk may be considered at the top of the list of risks to be managed; including mandatory compliance with relevant legislation and regulation - exp. Companies Act, Trade Practices Act (TPA), Occupation Health and Safety (OH&S); ASIC and state consumer affairs, business registration and licensing; ASX Governance Principles for list public companies.

The culture of an organisation permeates every layer of management, divisional and work groups - safety culture in utilities and miners; corporate values and organisational culture from directors and executive, throughout all tiers, from the top-down. Risk management; processes, systems; education, monitoring and sanctions; business, financial and reputational risks; corporate social responsibility (CSR) and triple bottom line. Governance - corporate, financial and IT; annual agenda, audit plan for finance, IT and systems. Strategy assessment: integrity model (CASFA), horizons model.

Financial considerations: NPV and payback period, risk-free interest rate, cost of deferral 6 delays, opportunity cost and organisation potential.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EABOK

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_cluster relevance to local tech parks, Aust Marine Complex, gaming/iVec and Uni courses. More to be said on this matter.

Case Studies:

new and existing businesses - like business and marketting plan but not the same (subset or overlap?)
new city; new winery; new product; new process; new plant
infrastructure work (eg. Subiaco and East Perth redevelopment authorities; LandCorp); public/private partnerships (PPP) and risk sharing; new or shared mining infrustructure
controversy over Fortesque access to BHP rail infrastructure
issues and planning; energy-efficient bauxite/alumina, nickel and low/high grade iron processing (haematite/magnetite)
ore crushing, fines, magnet separation, pelletising; copper and lead processing
coal gassification, carbon sequestration, alternative energy, wind (leader), solar, geothermal
nuclear, environment impact, policy risk, uranium mining and processing policies; government regulation, Environmental Protection Authority (EPA)
Woodside Pluto on Burrup, Aboriginal art destruction and relocation
Japanese LNG gas prices, Chinese contract, spot versus long-term contract; price of energy
trading carbon credits, carbon caps and cost of capital, relocation of plant to lower regulated countries
climate-change greenhouse warming science, IPCC and hockey stick controversy; CO2 capture
SCADA/PLC upgrades; OPC and open-source == proprietary, sole source and multivendor; platform security and robustness
evolving relationship of control systems and IT (eg. Western Power, Water Corp)
BHP Billiton value proposition for mooted merger with Rio Tinto
Western Power proposed Eneabba to Moonyoonooka 330 kV transmission line

Software Engineering For Plant Control

2007-06-23T16:04:00.002+08:00

The IICA (Institute of Instrumentation, Control and Automation) hosted the IT4PC symposium on IT for Plant Control last Wednesday and I was privileged to be invited, speaking first up about Software Engineering for Plant Control.

Thomas Fox from WA Water Corporation spoke about SCADA System Management after me. Following a break for morning tea Greg Belcher from Honeywell Australia spoke about Securing your Control Systems in a Windows World; followed by Bob Erickson of Matrikon Australia talking about Practical OPC Applications for your plant. After lunch, Vincent Tsang of Dimension Data gave in introductory talk called Networking 101 and Jeff Alexander gave a general talk about Microsoft's Perspective for your Critical System. We had a stimulating Panel Discussion and afternoon tea before the symposium closed.

Having never before given a talk on this subject matter to this kind of audience I worked quite hard beforehand with the conference organisers to hone my presentation so that it would be of interest to the target audience. To my delight I received some great feedback about the relevance of the systematic approach taken in software and systems engineering to the practice of control systems engineering, the design and implementation of plant controls. My original background is in electronic engineering, control systems and communications so I felt an immediate affinity with my audience and was already familiar with the problem domain.

This talk allowed me to explore more deeply some of the processes that contribute to quality outcomes in systems design in the context of plant control and how some of the usual work practices can be improved. My approach resonated with at least a portion of the audience because I received immediate feedback in direct questions and afterwards in discussion including potentially several invitations to consult with attending organisations. One question pointedly asked about security issues and I confessed to skirting issues related to HMI(*), SCADA(*), security and DR(*) in deference to other speakers who, as it turned out, covered relevant aspects of these topics very competently.

The scale of the Water Corporation's network across the state of Western Australia is breathtaking; over 200 towns serviced, several major and many secondary water and waste water treatment plants. The plan to extend the current SCADA network to the entire service area and all plant is an enormously complex exercise. Of the budgetted capital spend to average $1B per annum over the next 20 years some $40M+ per annum will be spent on control and IT systems. The innovative control centres being built to supervise the network and work with major SCADA suppliers ABB and Serck on these upgrades is impressive, as reported by Thomas Fox. I will avoid going into details about security except to pass comment that Water Corp is a world leader and as a result was invited to represent Australia at the Idaho conference organised by the US Department of Homeland Security. The talk by Greg Belcher about Honeywell's integrated security and plant control systems offered quite a few insights into the complexity of the planning process and the richness of the integrated solution provided by vendors such as Honeywell.

The talk about OPC(*), was interesting insofar as a standard is emerging to replace the mutiplicity of FieldBus-type communications protocols that are prevalent in current plant deployment of DCS(*) and PLC(*) systems. There are several problems with OPC: 1) It is based on OLE(*), that is based on COM(*) and DCOM(*); 2) Complex set of open connectivity standards that are slowly emerging from the shadow of Microsoft; 3) uses many ports, like DCOM; 4) security issues; 5) performance issues; 6) not comprehensive; 7) not unified standard but it is getting there with OPC Unified Architecture. The networking talk and the evangelical presentation from Microsoft may have filled in a few gaps in knowledge for the less-IT aware members of the audience, primarily of control systems engineers and others involved in plant control.

Some of the most interesting discussion of the day centred around issues and breaking down barriers between plant control engineers and IT practitioners. While the high-level objectives of the organisation may be common to both groups their own distinct subgoals often seem to lead a lack of cohesion and alignment in achieving those shared objectives. The willingness of members of both groups to cooperate and to communicate efectively is sometimes uncertain however with management support the reality is that engineers can crossover from one discipline to the other. As with any change process it is possible to make progress but only if senior management buys in and is supportive; often plant control lacks a seat or even a voice at the executive table.

(*) Glossary of Terms:
COM = Common Object Model; Microsoft's component model based on DCS-RPC
DCOM = Distributed COM; Microsoft's distributed component model based on DCS-RPC
DCS = Distributed Control System; for networking PLCs
DCS-RPC = Distributed Computer Systems-Remote Procedure Call (not to be confused with control DCS)
DR = Disaster Recovery; practices for recovering from system failures
HMI = Human Machine Interface; the front end for SCADA and DCS.
OLE = Object Linking and Embedding; Microsoft's document embedding model
PID = Proportional-Integral-Differential loop controller
PLC = Programmable Logic Controller; often includes PID regulator
SCADA = Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition; step up in abstraction from DCS.

Board or Committee?

2007-05-21T19:09:00.000+08:00

Today I was asked when does a committee become a board? I answered that usually when an unincorporated body, perhaps a partnership or a club, decides to become a company or an incorporated nonprofit organisation then the committee is now a board of directors. No matter what they are called, directors, commissioners, trustees - however a trustee relationship is another thing again with even more onerous obligations - the group of people who manage or appoint the management to an organisation that is formed under the state Associations Incorporation Act or federal Corporations Act are its directors.

It is always a good idea for a prospective director to do proper due diligence on the organisation, its other directors and management. The new appointee should expect a letter of appointment setting out their duties, responsibilities and obligations as well as rights as a director and member of the board, in addition to undertaking an adequate form of induction as to how to carry out their new function as a board member. Remember that the organisation has systems and process, delegations to the general manager or a chief executive, retained board rights, perhaps subcommittees and be bound by relevant laws in addition to those relevant for all boards. The acts concerning occupation health and safety, the Trade Practices Act and the Corporations Act are relevant to directors in virtually any sphere. How about directors of nonprofit organisations?

There is in fact very little difference insofar as directors are bound to act in good faith and with due diligence, for a proper purpose and in the interests of the members, without personal gain from inside information and while avoiding real, and declaring perceived, conflicts of interest. That seems a lot of responsibilities; how about rights? Directors have the right to view minutes of board meetings for which they were directors, whether present or not; and each director is entitled to seek independent legal advice. The scale and access to such rights should usually be clearly set out in the letter of appointment. Directors usually cannot be dismissed except by a general meeting; they can of course resign. What about when the directors are acting in a volunteer capacity as appointees of other member organisations?

As before, nothing really changes. Directors are bound to act in the best interest of all members and not just the organisations that appointed them to the board. Usually the only directors that can be dismissed other than by an AGM are executive directors who are usually dismissed from the board when they contract if employment is terminated. For appointees from member organisations the appointment and replacement of directors should be clearly spelled out. What if an individual director chooses to act in the best interests of the organisation that appointed him instead of in the best interests of all of the member organisations?

The entity that appointed the person as director can be taken to be a shadow director that is directing the organisation of which it is a member. The director can personally be liable to civil sanctions for not acting in good faith for all the members. The appointed director and the shadow director, being the organisation that appointed him, may be liable for obligations entered into by the organisation for which they are acting as directors. For example, if the organisation becomes insolvent at a time when it can no longer reasonably meet its debt obligations because one or other of the members withdrew guarantees to meet those debts then the shadow directors can find themselves obligated if their actions, seeking to benefit the organisation that appointed them rather than the members as a whole, brought about this situation.

The question of who is the party to take the action against the directors is generally answered as the company itself being the proper plaintiff. The sands continue to drift towards more traditional civil action as if a tort against the responsible directors for failing in their duty of care, essentially being negligent as opposed to being diligent, rather than the gnashing of teeth needed to direct the company to take, in practice to fund, action against its own directors.

Software Engineering Course Design

2007-05-13T21:14:00.001+08:00

The media and other commentators are finally coming to grips with the fact that secondary science and mathematics education in Australian middle schools is failing to adequately prepare students for senior high school let alone university. Teachers and curriculum designers have watched dumbfounded as the system they participate in has continued to decline in quality under the combined pressures from adventurous educational administrators influenced by progressive reformers without much respect for the history of science and mathematics, the community they claim to serve, and little common sense.

An article in The Australian points out that middle school education in Queensland is pre-Newtonian insofar as middle school science is taught almost in an almost purely descriptive fashion absent the analytical approach founded by Newton, lacking the modern scientific approach of Bacon. Let alone Einstein's physics of the twentieth century with the generalisation of Maxwell's work unifying electromagnetism to the invariance of electromechanics in inertial and non-inertial frames. Advances in chemistry since Mendeleev codified the periodic table of the elements, the development of quantum mechanics being the foundational theory for chemistry and influencing every area of modern science.

From an engineering perspective many of the most important developments in control and communication systems, mathematics, information theory and computing occurred in the pre and post first and second world war periods. Developments in Bertrand Russell's codification of mathematics and Godel's counter theory on incompleteness, Shannon's information theory, the practical developments in mechanics and radio theory as a result of military advances in radar, ballistics, coding and code-breaking, Turing's work on computability and von Neumann giving us the essentials of our modern computer architectures.

The accreditation of university degrees is predicated on meeting a number of requirements including adequate coverage and rigour in course content. The measure in software engineering accreditation, the metric against which the technical content of such degrees are assessed is comparison against standardised bodies of knowledge, for instance, the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) - assessed against the SWEBOK Guide. Many professional areas of practice are assessed against standardised knowledge including accounting, law, medicine and we may even consider aviation pilot training and building trades like plumbing, carpentry and electrical trades.

The distinguishing feature for university degrees in science and engineering is the necessary emphasis on the foundational bases in mathematics and the sciences. The tension between these foundations and the practical knowledge bases is not replicated in any of the other fields. Competent engineering practitioners need to be educated in mathematics and relevant sciences in addition to being well versed in the necessary methods and practices associated with the body of knowledge for the profession.

Each area of engineering practice has its own knowledge base, customs and traditions. Clearly mechanical, civil and electrical engineering are significantly different in usual practice even if we recognise that each shares foundations in maths and physics, statics, dynamics, mechanics, thermodynamics, and so on. For instance, civil and structural engineers are interested in loadings on structures with some interest in mechanical elements that are of greater interest to mechanical engineers who utilise electrical instrumentation and power systems that may be of primary concern to electrical engineers - all related but distinct fields.

There is a close relationship between software and systems engineering. Both are involved with complexity of requirements, analytical rigour as far as is necessary, significant design and associated documentation. When one speaks of external interfaces as a facet of requirements alongside user interface, functional and nonfunctional requirements software and systems become interchangeable. Most nontrivial systems employ software components and most nontrivial software systems interact with non-software components. Where does one discipline begin and the other one end?

Ethics and IT Governance

2007-05-07T07:52:00.000+08:00

The concept of IT governance is foreign to most software developers and IT practitioners. The situation has to be altered because officers inside IT and IS departments have the same governance and compliance obligations as their brethren, the corporate and administrative officers.

That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.
- William JH Boetcker

I was looking for a hook to start this article when the above quote showed up in and it tickled my ethical bone. Boetcker phrased the sentiment in terms of self respect that I understand to include intellectual and professional integrity, being the ethical responsibility to carry out our roles in an effective fashion and by definition to operate within our areas of knowledge and ability.

Company directors and executives in Australia know this responsibility well from the Corporations Act that imbues them with the obligation to act in good faith, without conflict of interest, with due diligence and for a proper purpose. The due diligence condition has been repeated tested and in practice is similar to negligence. As an issue of compliance, it is arguable that officers of a company must be sufficiently well informed and to have processes in place, training and sanctions to enact such policies. The usual business outcomes and operations give meaning to proper purpose. Conflict of interest resonates with our common sense. What does in good faith mean? To whom does this obligation fall?

Good faith is difficult to ascertain but may include behaving in the fashion that a reasonable person would have in factually similar circumstances, nominally an objective test. In another article I explore in a feather-weight fashion the ethical obligations of forming an opinion and acting in an ethical fashion - in this article I wish to address the same issue a little more seriously and with particular attention to IT governance and the obligations of officers and practitioners in an area that is often a technical minefield. As a result, it is even more important that the technical practitioners in IT and IS make every attempt to properly inform their superiors in their organisations so that the decision makers can make properly informed decisions.

In areas of general management, marketing and human resources it is far more likely that the responsible executives are reasonably versed in the applicable knowledge space so the obligation for their staff to keep them informed, while it exists, nevertheless exerts less pressure. However in IT and IS it is incumbent on the technical practitioners to make their knowledge available in an appropriately summarised form to the responsible officers because those executives cannot access the information they need without this kind of assistance.

The responsibility to put into place the processes to support such a system of communication and reporting is, of course, the responsibility of the directors and officers, the executives that managed the enterprise. Departmental general managers cannot shirk their obligation to remain accountable for their departments performance and their responsibility to put in place compliance systems to support these functions.

Certainly these are well understood in finance and accounting, where the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) may oversee internal and external audit programmes that report to the Risk, Audit and Compliance committees of the Board of Directors. The equivalent functions for the IT and IS departments have similar outcomes but the internal audit function will be the semantically equivalent series of reviews that are held of documents, designs, code and test as part of the software development life cycle.

The conclusion we must reach is that document reviews, peer reviews of designs and code are an obligatory part of the governance and compliance obligations that need to be met by organisations that depends on these functions. Part of assessing and managing financial, reputation and business risk is clearly within the sphere of IT and IS and should be deemed to the relevant department. The software development processes of design and code reviews, document reviews and testing and a natural part of the risk and compliance culture of enterprises where the relevant officers and their subordinates need to be educated of this fact.

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) has this obligation and the people who report to him are required to provide sufficient information for him to adequately perform this function. To do so is to act in an ethical fashion and to retain ones self respect.

UWA reviewing course structures

2007-04-22T23:59:00.000+08:00

The University of Western Australia is undertaking a comprehensive review of course structures across all teaching areas. The Vice-Chancellor encourages graduates to get involved in the Course Structures Review process and give them the benefit of our insights.

Professor Alan Robson
Vice-Chancellor
The University of Western Australia

Dear Prof. Robson,

I entered UWA in 1987, graduated from with a BE in Electronic Engineering and finally completed my PhD - with some challenges due to my cross-disciplinary approach - in Physics and Mechanical Engineering. In addition to Engineers Australia and IEEE, I am an associate fellow of the AIM and a graduate of the AICD Company Directors Course.

My professional work focus has shifted from electronic and systems engineering, where I primarily worked in defence, underwater acoustics and controls, to software engineering and enterprise IT (see http://systecit.com) - much of my work is in strategy, process and change management. Recently I was invited to join the Engineering Advisory Committee (EIAC) of Murdoch University; I am leading the charge to bring the Australian Software Engineering Conference to Perth for the first time in 2008, sitting on the EA ITEE Panel and the board of ICTICC.

I do not intend to address the entire course structure review instead focussing on science, mathematics and engineering:

The wide diversity and fragmentation of courses is a problem in understanding for prospective entrants, prospective employers of graduates and contributes directly to declining course quality.
Recommendation: Reduce the number of engineering disciplines and reintroduce common first and first/second years for all degrees.
Recommendation: Teach subjects in their primary department or faculty of knowledge instead of the degree course. For example, reverse the shift of mathematics, physics and business courses into engineering and instead ensure they are taught, as quality and general courses, by experts in mathematics, physics and business - not by engineering specialists.
Secondary recommendation: Adopt a common, undergraduate degree structure like Melbourne University and other world-class universities abroad - substantially the same as the Bologna Process or Melbourne Model with variation to account for local traditions.
Issue of combined degrees missing essential elements of either or both of the component degrees, including the cohort experience of law, medicine and engineering students; fundamental, advanced and specialise units from first and final or honours years.
Recommendation: Reshape dual degrees to be primary degrees plus secondary major or minor to ensure the primary study is at the same or higher standard than the standard degree. (Note that I believe dual degrees are great marketting for universities and graduates alike but have little value otherwise.)
Recommendation to either: 1) Mandate core science and mathematics units across all science and engineering curricula; or 2) Create a stream that allows core and advanced science units (eg. physics, chemistry) to be taken by science and engineering majors.
Research, postgraduate studies orientation should be an option for all advanced students who show the right aptitude and abilities. The previous recommendation on core science and mathematics units will enable this potential to be reached. (It is embarrassing to meet graduates, even more so postgraduates, who lack foundational knowledge and problem solving abilities in their notional fields of expertise or profession.)
The creation of professional PhDs or doctorates is fraught with problems of perception and equivalence vis-a-via research and problem solving versus advanced professional standing. "Dr" versus "Mr" for prestige or public perception - some medical specialists revert to the latter. (The administration of PhDs is of personal interest since I struggled in the political rather than technical environment for my degree; others simply drop out.)

The declining intake into university computer science, engineering - especially systems and software engineering - and the quality of the graduates is of national concern. The structure and content of relevant university degrees, entry requirements and pathways into courses are important factors that have to be considered.

If I can be of further assistance please do not hesitate to contact me.

Regards,
Daniel
--
Daniel M. Berinson BE PhD MIEAust MIEEE AFAIM GAICD
Managing Director, Systems and Software Architect
Systec Engineering Pty Ltd and Systec IT

daniel at systec.com.au
040 888 0278 (m)

GO3

2007-03-31T13:20:00.001+08:00

The opening address for GO3 by Francis Logan, MLA - Minister for Energy, Resource, Industry and Enterprise - set the upbeat and positive tone for the day by announcing $1B in funding over a decade to bring fast, fibre broadband to every home in Western Australia. On top of half million dollars in support provided by the government for Interzone Games to set up a studio in Perth, Western Australia. Interzone Entertainment COO, Robert Spencer noted that Interzone are hiring - seeking recruits to staff the 300-strong complement for their Perth studio. I only attended the first day of the three day conference and expo and give my heartiest congratulations to the organisers, presenters, attendees, government and other supporters for putting on such a great event and also for their wonderful job in promoting Perth as a site for Interzone and others in the games industry.

The morning sessions had Keita Lida, Director of Content Management, APAC, giving an interesting an involving talk about Nvidias hardware GPU developments in the context of games history - he is a notable games historian - and future developments, followed by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, founder of Q Entertainment Inc, recognised as one of the top New Media Producers and Innovators by the Producers Guild of America. On the technology front, Keita Lida made a persuasive argument for the strengths of the ongoing and growing PC game market due to the continuing technology upgrades available to PCs that are deferred until the next hardware cycle in consoles like the Xbox360 and PS3. I am somewhat unconvinced by his conclusion that PC game titles are as good or superior to console games because such an argument mostly negates the reason for the tight platform integration and advanced features in consoles, including multiple cores and specialised functionality. Albeit part of his role to evangelise the energing Nvidia SLI technology that enables scaleable graphics, physics and AI performance by employing multiple graphics cards.

The talk by Tetsuya Mizuguchi was a timely followup to the Metamorphosis of Melbourne event run a short time ago by Form as part of the Creative Capital series. I was enthused about his entertaining the relationships between different modes and media in the creation of his game play, an epiphany that led to his current thought-leader role in the genre due to his sophisticated approach to multimode games, following earlier successes for SEGA like Rally Championship and the wonderfully immersive Manx TT Superbike game that physically involves the game player. It was particularly interesting to hear the relationship between the vivid colour of Kandinsky's art work, painted to Jazz and other music, the colourful and pleasurable immersion of techno rave parties and the gloriously retro Senorama as motivating elements for his fabulously fun dance game Space Channel 5 through Rez, who flies through space rhythmically destroying targets with arresting gameplay, and Lumines an addictive, hip and stylistic musical puzzler, that both combine the elements of colour, music and vibration in a visual, auditory and stimulatory feast. In terms of innovation and creativity, Tetsuya Mizuguchi's talk called Inspiration led Creativity was an inspirational case study to a rapt audience.

After lunch, John De Margheriti, CEO BigWorld and John Passfield, Pandemic Studios gave interesting talks on, respectively, the Future direction of MMOGs and Destroying all humans around the world, alluding to their refreshingly retro-alien, kill-humans, fun-take on 1950's USA and its translation into a (apparently surprisingly) successful title in Japan. The BigWorld Technology solution provides a mature middleware platform for developers of Massively Multiplayer Online Games that is fast becoming the industry standard. John De Margheriti gave some interesting advice on industry directions by citing some of the trends and market differences evident between, for instance, Western markets compared to China and India. China is a gigantic, largly online market that favours server session management for first-person, shooter-type games, having less emphasis on the quest-oriented MMOGs that dominate the USA and Europe, while India has an enormous base of lowered-powered machines that are largely used to play the computer equivalent of the national obsession leading to a 20 million strong installed base of the computer game of Cricket.

John Passfield's talk about translating Destroy All Humans! or DAH into a Japanese release. DAH is a wonderfully subversive game based on an Alien named Crypto who kills humans with his amazing array of weaponry - in particular the anal probe that causes human heads to explode so Crypto can collect the DNA remnants of his race from the human brain stem that is emitted in a gooey mess of cerebral material and fluids. The Japanese market required this to be changed to a life gem being provided for the player rather than brain parts after the same, screaming, running escape after being anally probed. The 1950s references to McCarthyism among others do not translate well across cultural lines and were changed to largely equivalent Japanese pop cultural references, for example, Godzilla, along with a full language translation, while retaining the essential features of the game unchanged. The issues with translation, a huge task involving 6000 lines of text and large amounts of character speech, are of syntax, semantics and contextual meaning - reminding me of the issues surrounding translations of word play in Douglas Hofstadter's GEB.

I got to hear Harvey Smith, studio creative director at Midway Studios-Austin, talk entitled The Imago Effect: Avatar Psychology before I had to leave. The issues of character projection from the player to the avatar, the development and meaning of the sense of self during immersive gameplay, and cultural issues affecting game and character design, point of view (i.e. first person, moving camera; text choice menus), well-defined versus undefined characterisation - formed the theme of his talk. The talk covered a broad spectrum of ideas that range from the historical development of such features as hair, mouth, noise and eye on Mr Potato, in early and current computer games in almost identical fashion. An intriguing example he used was a line to a Russian private named Vasili in Call of Duty who was told he should throw a potato down range instead of an expensive grenade, as part of scenic and character development.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to chat with Masaya Matsuura and John Passfield about project and software engineering management issues in games development. Also to engage Tetsuya Mizuguchi briefly in coversation after lunch when I had spoken with an architect about the similar confluence of creative sources that stimulate our own work in architectural and software design. There was a large contingent of students, recent graduates and game-industry hopefuls in attendance - giving hope for building the mass and scale needed to supported a proper games, serious games (eg. simulation and training) and supercomputing industries that tend to pop up together in clusters as witnessed in Brisbane and Melbourne that are already so very successful in this space. Another contact I must followup is an Asian training organisation about opportunities for collaboration between universites and companies that seek to train or employ game developers and designers, or to outsource studio work.

Metamorphosis of Melbourne

2007-03-18T12:26:00.000+09:00

Perth is at a crossroads for making decisions for its future. The Creative Capital initiative run by Lynda Dorrington and the Form team, heartily acknowledged, has had speakers in this series including Al Gore on climate change, Charles Landry on the city, Opher Yom-Tov on the innovative approach taken by IDEO - this event has Jeff Kennett talking about Melbourne and how Perth can be transformed into an attractive, sustainable and livable city. Thanks credited to Department of Industry and Resources, Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Rio Tinto WA Future Fund.

Jeff Kennett started off by saying rather modestly that his period in government ended many years ago and is largely irrelevant in the modern world. Upon election inherited a basket case with $32B in state debt the approach taken was from fundamentals - self confidence, preparation and courage to execute. Leadership and management are often underrated but were needed to lift a dispirited, run down community. The most important things are confidence, who and where we are, to be upbeat and look after our health. Pursuing money does not equate or equal quality of life.

Jeff noted that he spent a long time in opposition - not necessarily a prerequisite for good government but it couldn't be avoided - his lively and humorous bringing more laughter to the audience. In politics you have to surround yourself with good people from the private and public sectors because it is easy to lose touch with reality outside of parliament. He noted it is important to move quickly after election and in his case they made the decision to move on all fronts at once - economy, education, health, planning, building. Decisions can be misunderstood by many to provide rewards very quickly:

Reduced number of departments from thirty down to eight.
Removed senior public servants after first cabinet meeting - before lunch then more after lunch.
Reduced the number of public servants by thirty thousand.
Give hope by working on the little things, not just the big things: Major events program including the Grand Prix - borrowed from Adelaide - to signify the state is on the way back - things are happening.

Major projects that will have impact in 50-100 years time: The Docklands project - run down, derelict buildings to thriving will take another 20 years to complete - turning Melbourne around from looking inwards to looking out to the sea. Require from the Planning Minister that every project needs to be decided within two weeks - use power of private sector.

Cultural program: Old city architecture updated with younger city architecture in last 20 years; owners had been allowed to run down buildings; $1B capital program for museums, convention centre, library, glass dome, Federation Square - even as borrowed $1B to shrink workforce. Architectural competition for each project - all approved - trust the experts.

Better control of taxi system which was run down, dirty, poor English, lack of knowledge of major events, pink uniforms, no smoking, no eating, higher education - pink got people talking - yellow is international colour for taxis. Government generally - everything is possible - good times around you, confident to deliver positive impact. Most radical series of reforms of any government in Australia:

New government members and parliamentary colleagues.
Try to explain, don't give in.
Otherwise will not be able to complete reform program.

Dramatic turnaround in 3-4 years. Property tax $100 per household to signify that we are all in this together; all junk bond status; two years later the tax came out - measure of success. Five fingers of leadership:

Clearly understand good - not left/right but common sense.
Strategy to achieve goals.
People to help deliver strategy.
Consistency of policy - commercial life, politics and own home - public pressure grew in first two years - cannot succumb.
Reward - demostrate to community, actually delivering results - tax off, building and cultural centre.

One example of change - bring about change very quickly. Give Perth a greater sense of purpose and activity. Comes here for work and football and thinks of Perth as missing community - what other reasons for coming to Perth? Does perth have a heart? A heart beat? I am sure it does but it is hard to find. Open, pristine, almost constipated - not being critical - don't have a vibrance of Melbourne or Sydney, or even Adelaide. Give the city of Perth a greater reason for being. There doesn't seem to be a champion for Perth - Perth City Council, State Government - need a champion and for Perth to be good at something, a point of difference. Too much interference and bureaucracy - great deal of cost and frustration. Access to river.

How many of you from Melbourne? Most of you (laughter). Geelong - Deakin moved to other side of lake - water, boardwalk of actibity, cafes and restaurants. Use water - Convention Centre is ugliest thing I've seen in years - drawing more laughter. Active sports program - major events program - architecture - form of art - sculptures. Freeway - art - gateway to Melbourne - cheese sticks. Wonderful cultural city, huge range of eateries and sporting events. Points of difference in area of education - good at gas, open pit - difference to schools over east. Colin put up water pipeline - I've been on National Water Plan since 1996. Exciting - bring country and city together - enthusiasm, will eventually happen. My mother died and could not cancel magazine subscription due to privacy act - squeezing us all together - she just can't do it (laughter). Expensive - I don't know the final cost, I don't think Clin knows either (laughter) - $3B will seem cheap in 10 years.

I don't want to say too much about Sydney but it's a backwater after 10 years of labour government. Cannot wait to do common sense thing - Perth either changes or stays the same and gets old quickly. Go to Melbourne - Grand Prix, sport, eat, drink - visit your children. Questions.

Reorganise local government from 109 Perth metro councils and 150 in state - councillors with no skills and no training? Changed in a flash - no flashing over here (laughter) - from 211 councils - sacked them all, administrators three or so - down to 72 - new government only changed on boundary so must have been pretty good. Gough Whitlam, Neville Wran were the greatest reformers. Recognise that rural coucils cover large areas but City council is too small - should include Burswood [no comment on split into Perth, Vincent and Cambridge; current Belmont and Victoria Park boundary issues]. Increasing Commonwealth Goverment infleuence and taxation - states have lots of money to cover their mistakes. In 50 years, three tiers of government might be slightly different.

Rural - health, education, cultural centres - close a school is bigger issue to small community - country feels it more. Major events program helps city more, rural feels left out - strong capital, strong state. Farmer from small town outside Mildura asked for Grand Prix - no support, no race track. Do something different? Budgetted for $6M surplus - election promises would have spent some of $1B surplus (informal from Treasury) in priority areas that needed it.

Jeff does not regrest outcome of election - would have been nice to have one more term to lock in reform. Proud to have served in office - left state with high confidence. Teach children about change - one door closes, another opens. Chairman of Beyond Blue - older people don't handle changes well and become terribly depressed when leave jobs or sacked. Work for Beyond Blue more important that anything he did in politics. Challenging and provocative talk - bottle of wine, something we do as well or better than Victoria. I like you positive thinking, Ian!

The focus on this talk and the wonderfully insightful writings of Charles Landry in The West Australian is on the physical and psychological geography of Perth city. My personal interest extends beyond these concepts and, by extension, the cultural and social life of the city - as important as they are - to the technologically creative and innovative.

It is without surprise that I read the ANZ is uninterested in divesting itself of the 34% stake it holds in E*Trade - the foundation of its online stockbroking facilities - to IWL. I suspect many would be surprised that IWL, based in Melbourne, is the owner of Sanford Securities and JDV, formerly part of Hartley Poynton, that provide the NAB and Westpac online stockbroking sites. Both of these companies were founded in Perth and, along with companies like ERG, Austal Ships, CCK Treasury, Asgard - part of the fifth pillar St Georges Bank, formerly Sealcorp and still based in Perth - are a few high profile outcomes of the terrific innovative spirit in the West.

The continued development of Bentley Technology Park, the Australian Marine Complex in Henderson and similar initiatives are essential for Perth to finally achieve the numbers of participants and scale of development required for the formation of industry clusters that are locally absent. It would be a great shame, and an enormous leap backwards, for Perth to focus its higher education on mining and related technologies - as has been suggested by some misinformed groups - since mathematics, physics, engineering and computing are fundamental to all of these endeavours and provide necessary and essential support for those industries. My fondest hope is for the primary, secondary, post-secondary and tertiary sectors to collectively pick up their socks and to concentrate on being among the best on the world in mathematics and science studies and research. The Australian Marine Complex, companies like Austal Ships and Nautronix, partnering with General Dynamics and purchased by L3 respectively, are remarkable local entities that together with Tenix, Raytheon, Thales and others should be the foundation of a world-class cluster centered on the Australian Marine Complex and other complex industries in the Kwinana area - like Gladstone, Queensland; Wollongong and Newcastle in NSW.

The sciences and the arts are largely indistinguishable to insiders who practice across accepted discipline boundaries and offend the norms accepted by outsiders. The intrinsic beauty of mathematics is much like the ethereal and haunting notes of a Bach cantata that reached to the heavens, each level of abstraction, each voice of the canon, building higher and higher in an ascending crescendo of voices. The design of engineering and computing systems, process control and instumentation are likewise deeply layered and complex arrangements composed by the practitioners in the respective fields. It would be shame to turn further inward at this juncture when the proper path is to embrace and extend or strengths across mining and resources, controls and instrumentation, defence, marine and other systems.

Rugby Foundations

2007-02-20T07:49:00.000+09:00

For a few years I have been talking about getting back involved in rugby as a player or as a coach. Since I stopped playing team sports at university about 15 years ago I have been increasingly running for exercise, sometimes cycling and often exercising in the gym. A couple of years ago I got a personal trainer to get my fitness up to scratch and do some boxing at the same time. It worked for my fitness but not my playing confidence. I have not gone back to playing and when a ball hits the tip of my fingers, as it did at the park with dogs and wife in attendance, six weeks later it still has not healed properly.

When I was playing it took two or three weeks. As I discovered at Rugby Foundations on the weekend, my tackling confidence and ability in uncontested, kneeling scrums, for coaching technique you see, is maybe as good as than 13-14 year olds also in attendance. The memories of being twisted and wheeled in the scrum, unavoidable when playing hooker in seniors, even the humble, lower grades, came flooding back with a shock. And a day later, my shoulder and neck hurts, my groin strain has returned, muscles I had forgotten ache, yet I did run 6 km at the gym on Friday and am probably stronger than I have ever been.

The coaching of technique is far advanced over my earlier experience. I learned more about basic skills in a day with Brendan and Anthony, coaching and refereeing managers of Rugby WA, than in my entire playing days. When I played at high school and at university, we were neither taught how to tackle, ruck, maul or throw properly. Only slightly tongue in cheek, it may not have helped much because the techniques then used were not very good.

The emphasis on early-stage learning or skill, progressing through drills and finally to autonomous learning is familiar with anyone involved in teaching or coaching in other fields. In Karate, the fundamental punches and kicks are taught through Kihon, repetitive sequences are drilled in one and three-step attack-defence patterns and in longer patterns called Kata, leading to Kumite, where the individual exhibits autonomy in free fighting. Piaget's early stages of cognitive development, B.F. Skinner's precision learning and positive reinforcement, individual attainment, individualism and existentialism. The choice becomes our own and learning is an active process.

Each of the key areas covered in the foundation course was in turn demonstrated from a coaching and referee perspective. Repetition is a great way to learn and physical sports, practiced on the field, give a feeling of achievement even if only for the kinesthetic learning through repetition. As a foundation course leading onto accreditation in either or both of coaching and refereeing I throughly enjoyed myself. The camaraderie between former players and juniors was there even through the age and experience gap. Shared experience tends to draw like-minded people together in spite of other differences.

I experienced an epiphany of sorts insofar as I now consider refereeing as a possibility. Before the course I could not reconcile the thought of managing the game of rugby under pressure from players, coaches and spectators with my enjoyment of the game. Through his knowledge and enthusiasm, Anthony O'Shea has demonstrated otherwise and I have an inkling to referee, thankless job though it is.

Both coach and referee are filling management roles at different times for the same goal. The coach is in a preparatory, strategic and tactical position of shaping his players, team for each game, the season and for individual development of the players. The referee is either in the background or in the spotlight, continually under pressure to make decisions, often with limited information, and a responsibility to preserve the contest and continuity of the game under his direction, the integrity of the game of rugby in general, and the safety and well-being of the players involved.

It may be wonderful to be involved in any sport as a player or spectator but it is something special to give something back to other players, the community and the game they play in heaven.

ASWEC 2008 Perth Bid

2007-01-10T22:40:00.001+09:00

Perth, Western Australia is a wonderful place to live and has so much to offer but sometimes the laid-back attitude starts to grate a little. Here, over east and abroad there is a tendency to overplay the small town card. So remote and so far from wherever the speaker thinks is somwehere important. The failures are accepted and the successes downplayed. A corollary of the tall-poppy syndrome, perhaps: We had better not stand up tall in case someone knocks off my flower petals. Bond winning the Americas Cup in 1984. The inglorious fall of WA Inc. at the end of the decade. In many ways, think of the positive economic and intellectual exuberance Austin, Texas and you won't be too far wide of the mark.

I have never abided by such talk (not for long, anyway) and negativity. Perth is the Australian and even the world leader in several areas of software and technology. Not to mention being the epicentre of the current mining boom. The economic opportunity that will guarantee prosperity for a generation. Supported by rapid growth in India and China it is assured that WA will continue to earn premium prices for iron ore and liquified natural gas, among other resources, being exported in staggering quantities by BHP, Rio Tinto, Woodside and attracting newcomers from mainland China into iron ore, much as Japan a generation ago, witness Mitsui as a major investor, in addition to recent homegrown startups like Fortesque.

Perth houses centres of excellence in oil and gas for Woodside and major shareholder Shell, is a centre for expertise in mining software with companies like Maptek, and mining simulation with Immersive Technologies. Clough Engineering is respected in engineering throughout the region along with a raft of other service companies. In this sector, software and IT pays second fiddle in a supporting role and as an economic multiplier and enabling technology for mining, oil and gas, resources, processing, logistics.

Less well known and hardly ackowledged is that for a significant while Perth housed the companies that built two (or three?) of the four major banks online web sites and provided their initial forays into internet stockbroking. JDV, formerly part of Hartley Poynton stockbrokers and now part of IWL, Sanford Securities an impressive startup, now also in the IWL stable, our largest funds manager Asgard, formerly Sealcorp and now part of the fifth banking pillar, St Georges Bank, along with homegrown technology for the Perth-based headoffice of BankWest, part of Bank of Scotland, and the brilliant CCK Treasury, the mixed treasure ERG, Perpetual Trustees and others on St Georges Terrace or Colin Street. Such a wealth of software riches from these companies puts paid to the notion that Perth is behind in respect of development. Quite the contrary, it appears that Perth is an Australian and world leader in several of these areas. If you are not convinced, do a little research of your own because I have other areas to discuss besides resources and finance.

Defence, ship building, telecommunications, physics, medicine, other science and engineering disciplines abound in Perth. As an exercise, you can read about the Nobel prize in medicine awarded to University of Western Australia researchers Barry Marshall and Robyn Warren for their work discovering Helicobacter Pylori. You can read about Austal Ships and their world leading trimaran ferries at over 100m length; partnership with General Dynamics for the USA next generation littoral combat ship. Raytheon and Thales, formerly ADI-Transfield, have offices here and among local companies L-3 Nautronix, until recently the last, remaining listed company standing from the second-board of the 1980s, privatised and then sold to defence conglomerate L-3; should lead to greater exposure to world markets for its amazing, unique and world-leading technologies in underwater communications and acoustic ranging.

The high probability of the square kilometre array, the world's largest radio telescope, and its associated supercomputing facility, being built in Western Australia. Gravitational wave observatory at Gingin, low phase noise sapphire clock (i.e. accurate over short time intervals), leading audio and acoustic technologies, control systems, electronics, airport weather stations, wireless communications at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute, QPSX founded by the same leaders who invented the wide-area bus and protocols used worldwide in TCP/IP and ATM networks. World-class talent, innovation and leadership in science, engineering and business.

It is time that an international IEEE conference in software engineering came to Perth. The Australian Software Engineering Conference is a joint conference of Engineers Australia and the Australian Computer Society that publishes IEEE proceedings and attracts a significant international participation as a consequence. I am passionate that ASWEC should come to Perth after spending the past twenty years in the east and I am working diligently to make this opportunity a reality. Perth and surrounds has so much to offer conference attendees in return.

Independence of Thought

2006-12-06T22:36:00.001+09:00

The practical matter of developing independence of thought as young people take each step from childhood development, through adolescence and adulthood is fairly well understood as a process, to my mind roughly parallelling Jean Piaget's preoperational through concrete and formal operational stages of development.

Our education system is largely constructed around the pedagogical concepts of direct instruction and precision teaching derived from B.F. Skinner's ideas on educational philosophy. Skirting the controvery altogether, if at all possible is this ever-sensitive subject, the fabric of our educational institutions at all levels are strongly influenced by his teachings.

Is it contestable that most people learn well and many excel in teaching environments where the material is specifically tailored for the level and outcome?

The digression into philosophy of education in this article is a metaphor, analogy or perhaps allegory for advanced teaching, work place and life-long learning. It is generally accepted that children pass through several stages of congnitive development before achieving the ability to construct abstract thoughts.

It is not widely held that individuals actively choose to learn and accept taught outcomes even if nowadays the teachers themselves readily focus on the student-centred classroom and associated pedagogical methods. The recognition that students are active participants in learning rather than empty vessels to be be filled with knowledge edges upon the existentialist notion that the individual not only can but rather must make his own choices.

In everyday terms, primary school is the opportunity for the young pupil to be taught fundamentals, secondary school provides the maturing student the chance to learn higher-level concepts, tertiary education continues the growth path, capping off the formal educational portion for most people with the chance to collaboratively work with peers and thought leaders on advanced techniques and even the creation of new theories.

The quality of primary and secondary education has come into question in Australia quite recently and seems to have followed earlier trends in the UK and the USA. The current debate centres around two problem areas that has been perceived by politicians and the community as in need of reform. The first issue relates to the quality of teachers, the treatment of teaching as a profession including proper remuneration. The second issue is the controversy over the adoption of Outcomes Based Education (OBE) where achievement levels replace conventional teaching methods and objective assessment based on grades.

Part of the the problem is that many graduates do not have the opportunity, by reason of limited opportunity, to build on this foundational learning, whether the formal learning component extended to secondary or tertiary level at undergraduate or postgraduate levels.

While much can be done to improve the presentation and substance of undergraduate education there is much circumstantial evidence to suggest that the outcomes are positive in some subject areas if not in others. By and large, most tertiary graduates in professional areas such as law, medicine and teaching successfully transition into the workplace.

To the credit of these institutions and the employers of graduates from those institutions, there remains a broad and deep range of nonprofessional subject areas in science and arts, such as physics and anthropology, whose graduates contribute to the well-being of society, albeit many of whom take up professions and whose qualifications are highly regarded.

The undergraduate degree structure in Australian universities is based on the student selecting a range of units in science, arts or a prescribed study course, for example, medicine or law, for which core units are mandatory delections. Postgraduate degrees may follow an honours degree, or equivalent, to four years study inclusive of a research-oriented thesis.

The degree structure varies widely elsewhere but the profound experience of the leading British universities of Oxford and Cambridge where one reads for a degree, and the USA where professional studies are undertaken as postgraduate degrees after an undergraduate degree. I strain to identify advantages of these systems over the Australian one beyond the development of independence but perhaps that is enough.

It serves no purpose to pretend that undergaduate degrees, both those that are general in nature and those oriented towards professional practice, are anything more than they are. Certainly they offer great learning opportunities but the level of discourse and quality of teaching outside of the premier institutions is merely ordinary. The degree is a stepping stone to the work place, a diploma that demonstrates commitment and academic achievement.

The professions are distinguished by their traditions, codes of ethics, professional associations and standards or practice. As a rule, they offer mentoring in the workplace in the form of internships for medical graduates, articled clerk for lawyers, chartered year for accountants, or some other professional year before admission to the ranks of the profession. The lowest rank.

One of the key tenets of professional or chartered membership of professional associations is to make a commitment to continuing professional education. This should not be an onerous obligation on most individuals but rather an extension of their choice to enter the profession and part of this personal commitment to life-long learning.

ASX Corporate Governance

2006-12-02T10:29:00.000+08:00

The nexus between professional integrity and personal ethics is fundamental to the confidence that the general public has in dealing with professionals. For example, the trust that we have in being well treated by the family doctor, solicitor or accountant. Nowhere has that trust been in question more than in the shaken confidence of the the average person in our public companies.

The measure of activity taken in reinforcement of corporate governance principles is justified for reasons of public confidence in our institutions, including the venerable Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), albeit itself a public company. The improvement in performance seen by companies that conscientiously adopt corporate social responsibility (CSR), among other principles, is a more prosaic if pragmatic reason.

On Wednesday 20 November I attended an event hosted by the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) on ASX Corporate Governance. The guest speaker was Eric Mayne, Chair ASX Corporate Governance Council among his roles at the ASX, and formerly Managing Partner at Mallesons Stephen Jaques. The room at the Hyatt Regency, Perth was the same one where I participated in the AICD Company Directors course a year ago, earning my stripes as a professional director with P-plates and a decade of experience.

Steven Cole, partner of Allens Arthur Robinson and State Councillor of AICD (WA Division), introduced the session and speaker by starting with the observation that Australia has a highly regarded system of governance and, notwithstanding a few high-profile failures like HIH, remains a nonprescriptive environment rather than adopting a legislative approach like Sarbanes-Oxley. It if ain't broke then you don't need to regulate it.

The approach is basically to comply with the principles and to disclose the relevant information or not to disclose, taking an if not, why not approach if you are not complying with a full disclosure statement in the annual report. The principles were drafted and adopted in 2003 with the intention of a review being held after three years in 2006. The objectives of the review are to remove regulatory overlap between ASX rules and Companies Act, refinement and consistency of terminology across the rules and removal of ambiguity.

The AICD has provided a blog with information and inviting feedback.

After a brief overview of the issues, the format adopted was as a fireside chat so the audience can be voyeurs of the ensuing discussion. Eric Mayne comes from a background as regulator, consultant and practitioner giving healthy view points. He began with a polite comment about the five hour flight giving him plenty of time to catch up on his reading.

The tension between the small and big ends of town. Steven Cole earlier mentioned from BHP down to West Perth mining companies. The principles have been about 30% redrafted.

Steven Cole noted that the higher level principles are easier to read however the guidance notes rate as more difficult to read and follow. Eric Mayne asked if people are happy with the level of prescription, or should we pull back from current stance. Innocent question, is it a higher workload on monitoring compliance with 10 (or 8) high level principles and 28 (or 27) guidance?

ASX has carried out three levels of review:

Listed Companies - From 85% compliance in the first year to 92% in the second year.
Listed Trusts - Increased level of if not, why not reporting, similar (~2% lower) but less disclosure in spirit of the principle, encouraged to increase compliance.
Encourage thinking about issues, companies to change culture themselves - not via ASX rules.

Disclosure and transparency are the cornerstones of the ASX as a market and brand. If continuous disclosure is not seen the practice is to pick up the phone and speak to the companies.

A key change is to reorient the focus from best practice to good practice, recognising there is not only one way of doing things and encouraging alternative ways, for example, exception reporting by smaller companies.

Plain English drafting and consistent terminology. P2 definition of independence clarified to relationships that affect independent status. Alignment of committee recommendations for risk and audit, remuneration and nomination committees, with independent chair and directors. Audit committee expertise becomes relevant qualifications and experience not financial experience.

P3 prohibits hedging of unvested options and disclosure to company of hedging of vested options. P7 deals with recognition and management of risk. The establishment of a risk profile, risk management policies to cover material business risks that includes financial and other material business or nonfinancial risks. CEO/CFO signoff on financial statements P7.2 and CEO signoff other material business risks P7.3.

The consultation period closes 9 Feb 2007 with revised principles commencing 1 July 2007. Feedback on regulatory burden and the cost of regulatory burden would be useful data from corporate sector.

They were considering two sets of guidelines for smaller and big ends of town, like main and secondary boards in the past. Survey of small-to-medium listed company sector shows some require assistance eg. audit but no push for separate system of principles of corporate governance.

Q. Smaller companies lots of if not, why not; third-parties do not focus on explanation, ignore adequacy and mark down, tick box mentality.

A. Structure of revised principles help - commentary guide. Cosmetic preparation may be of assistance to companies, ticked box for complied might help.

Q. Intelligent and competent directors are more important than independent directors. Crooks will still act like crooks.

A. Training on obligations, availability of legal advice. Gerry Harvey model of governance. Training more important than independence. AICD Company Directors Course.

Risk management in P7 followed by disclosure with respect to corporate social responsibility (CSR) versus future outlook. May be disclosing a competitive advantage that you currently enjoy. It is too early to impose even if 90% of corporate websites discose CSR, so what continues to happen here and internationally. Section 299A obliged to report on prospects and forecasts to enable shareholders to make informed decisions. Rule 10 remuneration - dilution or associated party transactions makes a difference to discolsure.

The relevance to companies of all sizes is fairly obvious when viewed through the prism of professional levels of expectation in practice. There is no obvious reason why the quality of work output, reporting or disclosure should be significantly different between small or large companies.

Our education system is truly lacking if the executive tier of management is incapable of preparing adequate writtern reports. The quantity of disclosure should be shaped and coloured by relevance to the organisation. It is pointless to pretend to disclose on issues of little or no relevance whatsover.

There is a saying among pilots that there are old pilots and there are bold pilots but there are no old, bold pilots. The same kind of filtering process happens in every arena so that it is rare for the executive bad apple to remain in the executive barrel.

Another healthy piece of advice for smaller operators again borrowed from the pilot fraternity is that private pilots should take a professional approach to their flying just as their commercial brethren.

How far to take this analogy that I have stretched already to a tight band. The Companies Act requires that directors have a duty to exercise care and diligence, to act in good faith, honestly and for a proper purpose. The concept of professionalism among pilots is called airmanship.

Every business man, no matter how large or how small is his enterprise, should carry out his duties with the highest levels of integrity and professionalism just as a pilot, whether a humble private pilot or airline transport pilot, should carry out his duties with the highest levels of airmanship. There is no plausible reason to excuse doing otherwise.

Finding Your Voice

2006-11-26T16:59:00.000+08:00

The imperative to find your voice and to exercise independence in thinking is demonstrative of mature, adult thinking. While browsing through Steven Covey's excellent The Eighth Habit I was reminded of so much that has happened in my humble career and even more so by that which has not come to pass for others. Since my early childhood education until now I have never understood why some people choose to excel and others not to. To borrow from Covey, some of my peers have found their own voices but others have not. As a result, those who have not done so continue to miss out on the opportunity to achieve their potential.

My wife reminds me that as a teacher it is part of her role, if not her primary task, to help her students each find his or her individual voice in the classroom. Teaching primary school is the place to build the foundation for a lifetime of learning. Every subject demands an understanding of the material and of the student the ability to express the knowledge through demonstration of skills in, for example, reading and writing, spelling and grammar, arithmetic, and algebra, spatial perception and geometry, geography and map reading, and so on.

In any school it is important, perhaps even more so in the multicultural school where she teaches, for the students to be able to speak of and among themselves, to their peers beyond the classroom, to their parents, their teachers and as budding members of the greater community. In other words, to discover themselves and their place in society and to find their voice.

Almost without fail I believe the ultimate reason many individuals fail to capitalise on their opportunities in the workplace is that the organisations where they begin their careers and the managers for whom they work have failed in their duty to mentor their young employees. The very same organisations suffer through lack of initiative and the absence of pervasive and courageous risk taking because the managers have failed to be leaders and their charges within the organisation have not found their voices.

The pedagogical conundrum whereby an approach using direct instruction based on B. F. Skinner may evaporate the curiosity of the young student or an alternative of Maria Montessori, where children are considered competent users of auto-didactic materials, similar to the child-centred constructivism of Jean Piaget, where the failure to offer clear guidance for his little philosophers may be like the absence of a guide stick for a growing plant. It is necessary but not sufficient to provide intellectual nourishment to those who are learning.

Teachers in the classroom and mentors in the workplace are facilitators of learning. The removal of barriers, the provision of resources and opening the eyes of their respective charges to opportunity requires leadership borne of confidence and self knowledge. Half-hearted reticence, ill-considered ideas and knowledge only half known by the teacher or manager is a recipe to dissuade the enjoyment and pursuit of learning, achievement and scholarship.

One of the proximate causes of the failure to provide leadership is the axiomatic condemnation in some quarters of the socratic method, for example, whereby questions are asked in order to challenge the other. The notion that self-worth is determined not be correctness, self awareness and knowledge but some arbitrary sense of self esteem is the antithesis of learning and itself condemns many students to lifetimes of mediocrity.

Steve Fuller in Kuhn versus Popper: the Struggle for the Soul of Science speaks of the Kierkegaardian concept that Karl Jaspers terms anxiety towards the unknown that a child feels during the learning process of growing up. In my experience this is akin to the uncertainty that young adults feel when moving from their first role or job and onto the next.

The first software package, the first accounting system, the first theory of management sticks as the preferred one even if better alternative are found by later experience, in a strange twist on imprinting, described by Konrad Lorentz to David Attenborough and related in Life on Air, as the attachment that young nestling retain for their parents when fully fledged. Whereas a young fledgling bird could be fooled into imprinting to a cameraman in place of its actual parents it seems that young software engineers can be fooled into tacit acceptance of certain technologies or platforms in place of apparently superior approaches.

This approach-imprinting seems to apply in most fields and is reinforced by the acceptance that to succeed in the workplace it is easier to go with the flow and the accept the status quo rather than to propose alternative, superior view points. It is easier to accede to the extant practices and to do as one is told rather than to intelligently and respectfully question habits that are ingrained. The courage and conviction to speak out and go against the grain takes more than just the knowledge but also the voice to do so.

I have always immersed myself in reading and bookshops provide me with a ready supply of material to support my habit. I was standing in the book shop, browsing, reading of science, mathematics, architecture and other random subjects when I picked up Steven Covey's recent book. In my cursory reading of Covey's The Eighth Habit, I had an epiphany that crystallised my own musings about the path to be traversed personally and professionally in order to step out of a mindset of success and into a reality of excellence. The negative mindset is typified by a story that goes something like this:

When ever she cooks a pot roast the lady of the house always cuts a slice of meat from the end of the piece of meat and throws it away. Eventually my curiosity got the better of me so I asked about the significance of the practice. "I don't know but my mother always did it so I do too." Of course this only piqued my curiosity further so I contacted the lady's mother and asked why she cuts the meat this way. Slightly embarrassed she asked the grandmother to be rewarded with the reply that "It's the only way it fits into my pot."

A colleague recalls a similar story of his one-time workplace. This company works in high technology and has a brace of highly-qualified, experienced and technically competent software engineers. He suggested to the software engineers that they should amend one specific practice and change the design for reasons that he gives clearly and reasonably in technical and common terms they can easily understand.

The others decline with the reason that the process says to do this and that and they proceed to defend the current practice with vigour. He explained to them that the reasons he himself personally introduced the practice, and indeed wrote the long-past dated document, no longer apply. My colleague has found his voice but some of the others only parrot what they hear rather than speak with their own voices.

Find your voice and help others to find theirs.

Philanthropy, Innovation & Higher Education

2006-11-21T16:46:00.000+08:00

The title and many of the ideas in this posting are credited to The Hon. Julie Bishop MP, Minister for Education, Science and Training and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Women's Issues. Julie Bishop is a cabinet minister in the government of John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia and on this occasion was as invited speaker at the AICC(WA)'s Curtin Zernike Dell Innovation Series 2006 with events partner The West Australian.

This being the first AICC event that I had attended I was suitably impressed by the quality of organisation, the introduction and thank you by the various speakers that framed lunch and the main event, Julie Bishop's talk. My reasons for attending are very good ones: I have an interest in technology and innovation from a business perspective, and in higher education from a professional view of giving back to the community that has given me so much more than a career.

The timing of this talk melds with my recent invitation onto the Engineering Industry Advisory Committee (EIAC) of Murdoch University. The discussion about philanthropy in higher education and the importance of lower-school and secondary education also struck deep chords with me. It was also my pleasure to meet up with some old friends and make some new acquaintances.

Prof. Jeanette Hackett, Vice Chancellor, Curtin University of Technology made the introductory remarks and painted the picture of an extraordinarily successful local university, of particular interest to myself, having five streams of engineering and having strong Information and Communications Technology (ICT) that is closely associated with Technology Park. Tellingly, Prof. Hackett notes that at $10B per annum higher education is Australia's fourth largest export industry and is fundamentally important as a contributor to the social and cultural capital of society.

The Hon. Julie Bishop opened with a little joke about a recent presentation to cabinet that felt a bit like having 17 education ministers in this country. She identified several critical capabilities to compete:

Global engagement. International collaboration, partnerships with India, China and France are in place and identified US, UK, Israel and Singapore as others where attention should be paid.
Quality of research. The Research Quality Framework (RQF) has been proposed as a world leading initiative in international benchmarking of the quality and impact of research.
Leading edge, high calibre infrastructure. National Infrastructure Strategy.
Astronomy is an area of Australian excellence. $20M has been earmarked on new tech demonstrator. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) needs open space, no noise and Western Australia is ideal (shortlisted with South Africa). $2B international, collaborative project.
Diversity in higher education. 37 public, comprehensive universities need to change as standing still is no longer good enough. End of Dawkins mediocrity.
Primary and secondary education standards. Teaching as a profession needs teachers to be highly regarded and valued, paid on performance and great teachers should be treasured.
Connections and pathways between universities and industry, eg. CRC (Cooperative Research Centres) or mingling, estimated to have contributed over $1B to the economy.
Backing Australia's Ability has an extra $8.3B towards science and innovation over eight years (about $1B this financial year).
Development and retention of skills.
OECD cash not accrual basis distorts real government spending increase if 25% over 10 years.

Business and education funding, one way through philanthropy towards revenue of higher education.

Alumni networks where, for example, USA about $100B contributes about 20% of total funding compared to 2% in Australia.
Contribute to excellence not to core funding.
Almost 1M people at university.
David Murray, Chair of Future Fund, encourages culture of philanthropy.
Ian Thorpe Foundation is a charitable trust funding schools in remote locations, eg. south of Katherine, Northern Territory, run by Jeff McMullan formerly of 60 Minutes.
Honoured to award Certificates of Attendance to students between the ages of 5 and 13 years old for attending school for the first time.

Julie Bishop closed the formal speech with the words that education is the building block how a cohesive and productive society is founded.

Several questions from the audience elicited replies that are gems and memorable in themselves:

Changes in university funding in 1974 as part of the Whitlam reforms made one mistake, among many, to provide university funding but not for the states to cede control, a historical quirk that leads, for instance, to state audit of federal funding.
Small research projects are poorly supported under current regime, answering a question about possibly missing funding an innovative and successful tinnitus project she confidently spoke of Helicobacter Pylori and our local Nobel prize winners unconventional research.
Noted that NH&MRC and ARC grants are exempted from RQF.
Disastrous implementation of OBE is one reason to reform education system.
Need a strong public education system.
Reward teachers working in disadvantaged areas.

The highly regarded founder and Executive Chairman of Azure Capital John Poynton, who has held appointments to the ASX and Reserve Bank of Australia, in formerly thanking Julie Bishop remarked on her passion for the gig, having embraced public service at the highest level after Harvard Business School. In reference to our universities, he exhorts us that as alumni or as individuals to give back to those institutions.

I enjoyed the coverage and depth of Julie Bishop's considered words as invited speaker about what are effectively impediments in our education system that detract from innovation and economic performance. The closing words ring true that there are issues in education of concern to all of us that need leadership and our active participation to set right.

TransformaITonal Management

2006-11-07T21:37:00.000+08:00

In my experience working with management of several organisation to institute change in IT processes they usually get it backwards. Hence my deliberate misspelling of transformational to clumsily insert IT into the word.

For instance, the first step usually taken when an unacceptable number of failures are reported in production software is to institute an increasingly onerous bug fixing and tracking system. The second step is to mandate a tougher testing and acceptance regime. The third step, if they haven't yet given up on the idea of writing higher quality software, is to examine the software development process in toto. If there is one at all.

Even among those who accept the commonly held truth that most bugs are introduced early in the development cycle it is rare for managers to put their best efforts into the area where they have the highest chance of success. Rather than fix the problem at its source, easy enough to identify by a simple Pareto or root-cause analysis, they will persevere with the option perceived to be the lowest-cost path with the quickest return.

The last place they look is the most obvious. Usually the barriers origin is at the boundary of the project development centre of the organisation. Poor leadership and lack of accountability leads to placement of blame with those least able to ameliorate the situation.

The steps in any project development are well understood. The strategic outlook dictates feasibility and sustainability issues relevant to projects. For each project, can it be funded and can the project outcome be sustained? By definition, projects are fixed-term endeavours with fixed resources that aim to deliver a product.

Short-term thinking easily leads project management to focus on their own risk management to the detriment of the organisation. It is easy for a project to lack focus on its requirements, to skimp on design, cobble together an implementation and deliver an inferior product on time and under budget to testing and production.

Leaving testing and support to wear the incremental cost of rectifying errors that should not have occurred in the first place. Imposing a long-tail liability on the organisation to maintain a substandard product where the project should have delivered an outcome requiring little or no recurring support and maintenance.

The solution partly involves formal processes and quality standards. I propose a quality tax. Maybe call it VVT for the Verification Validation Tax payable out of the project budget for failing to meet it obligations to verify against build process and to satisfy the users' needs.

Like a carbon tax for users of fossil fuels the goal is to encourage behavioural change.

People, People

2006-11-02T23:03:00.000+08:00

The most important resource in any organisation is its people. Everywhere we find people we find social and professional politics. Achieving the appropriate balance is a great challenge.

Recognise that high achievers may choose to participate in these interactions or ignore them. The rest of the staff may be a victim of these machinations but almost certainly they will not be able to control it.

William Edwards Deming, best known for his association with post-war quality management and improvement in Japan, says that the worker is not the problem, rather it is management that is the problem. It is up to management to enable and empower his staff.

Ricardo Semler says something similar in Maverick insofar as managers should build processes that make their own jobs redundant while empowering staff within their circles of responsibility.

Remember that the most important resource in your organisation is your people. Nurture your staff and prosper. Ignore staff or treat them with less than the respect they deserve and expect underperformance or organisation failure.

Sustainability of your organisation depends on retaining existing staff, encouraging and supporting their professional development, and attracting high-calibre people.

The Profession of Software Engineering

2006-10-29T12:07:00.000+08:00

There is a titanic shift underway, unnoticed by most participants and observers in the field, where software development is rapidly moving from a trade to a profession.

Whereas in the past it has been acceptable for anybody who can put together a rudimentary program to call themselves a programmer the days where the whole community can accept this have almost passed. For most of the history of the computing field the only way to join the club of programmers was to be initiated in a sort-of apprenticeship (*) or to be almost-entirely self taught.

Today such an approach is no longer acceptable in some jurisdictions and it is to be expected the standards and registration will be required to undertake unsupervised, professional practice in the same way as the other professions are organised.

Witness accounting and the legal profession, for example, where there are several paths to entry however each culminates in a professional registration and has the requirement for continuing professsional development in order to retain this registration and hence right to practice. The Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge has some discussion as to the rationale for this approach, as do professional bodies like the IEEE Computing Society.

(*) More in another post about my own apprenticeship into software engineering and where my professional standing and ethics lies in this debate.

The Art of Writing

2006-10-29T11:37:00.000+08:00

The Art of Writing is not something that comes naturally to me but over the years I have come to enjoying writing more and more. All sorts of writing. From writing creatively in school, technical writing during my undergraduate and postgraduate years, and during my years of working. More often I find that I need to express myself in the written word for formal documentation, preparation for oral and written presentation to a variety of audiences. And on a variety of subjects.

My background is in science and engineering. A decade and a half of working on software and systems engineering has led me towards strategy and leadership. Today I am more involved in team building, strategy development and change management. As well as software architecture. Business development. Coaching and mentoring in software design. Strategic alignment. Professional ethics. Intellectual Integrity. The consideration of facts, what-ifs and beyond all else the people involved in every organisation. I think I have something to say and having procrastinated to this point, now is the time for me to get started.