Innovation in Software

The more observant amongst you will have noticed a couple of things about this blog recently:

1. There have been very few updates in recent months
2. When I have updated it, I haven’t been talking much about innovation in software, which given the title is what you’d expect

Most of the cool little things I see out there I am now throwing out via Twitter, and as time is – now more than ever – a premium commodity for all of us, I don’t think it’s fair to keep on dumping my brain into the ether.

For 2010, Vagueware will get a new website (sneak peek the beta if you want) and a new, more “corporate” feel blog. The RSS feed you might be reading this through will move across to that new blog. It might be a little drier, but it will focus on what we’re actually up to over at Vagueware HQ a little more closely.

In addition, in the first quarter of 2010, I’ll be starting up several brand new blogs each with a specific focus. I have a wide range of interests when it comes to software, and I think each area deserves attention all by itself. It helps you as a reader to segment them more, and it helps me stay focused when I write – something this blog has suffered from.

Specifically, you can look out for blogs focusing on digital entrepreneurship, software development process and best practice, and a couple of other ideas I’ve been mulling over for a while. Each of those will be announced at the new blog, along with the product announcements (no, really!), planned for early 2010.

The experiments conducted here will continue in other channels – such as getting the community to pay for half my time for the first part of 2010 – and I can’t see me giving up blogging completely at all any time soon.

However, in essence, this is the last post for Innovation in Software for now. A message will appear on all pages stating this site is now here purely as an archive, and all comments will be turned off in one week. No need to unsubscribe from RSS – you will be moved magically over to the new blog feed soon. Thank you for your continued readership, and I hope that at some point since this blog started on September 1st 2006 , I’ve given you something to think about and/or enjoy.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I announced my rather confusing and eccentric plan to work for the community for cheap for a few months next year.

The response has been so-so. I still think it’s feasible, I just think the way I laid it out has confused a few people.

It looks like the most popular ideas are:

• Run a startup weekend
• Teach the basics of programming to at least 100 kids and/or unemployed people (the feasibility of this could be challenging)
• Run a “Skills Gap Camp” for Undergraduates

These and other ideas can get voted on here:

http://ideas.vagueware.com/pages/33882-pledge-ideas

I think by the end of this week we’ll be settling on the top few, and I’ll commit to offering up 30 full-time days over the next 3 calendar months to make them all happen (and cover all costs of doing so) providing the cash can be raised to cover those costs. Expect the can to be rattled sometime next week – I’m thinking about letting people pledge any amount, not just £60, we’ll see.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have something valuable to offer you: a big pot of bubbling time.

I’ll be frank with you about something nobody ever tells you about this industry when you get into it: every year during December and January work gets quiet for a bit. As a consequence, I get bored. Very, very bored.

I have spent the last few weeks banging the sales drum to try and stop the interminable coma that normally sets in, but once again everything looks quiet. That leaves me with a conundrum: what to do for the 8-10 very quiet weeks that are about to arrive.

I’ve thought through some options. There are some projects on the go based on Lean Product Development principles I’ve been ranting about, and that will occupy some of my time, but I thought I would propose an idea I’ve wanted to do for some time. It’s only now I feel it might actually come off.

In short, I’m prepared to offer 50% of my paid time to the local (Northern UK), digital sector community in return for a heavily discounted fee.

That time would be in addition to the time I already spend working on Fly The Coop, at events like GeekUp, replying to e-mails from people seeking advice on a whole host of matters, and generally championing the local sector.

With this additional time, I could take on one or more of a variety of projects:

• Do some research/development on behalf of the community
• Travel around as a kind of Northern “digital ambassador” promoting local firms and startups
• Work on some open-source software of particular benefit to the community
• Organise some community events
• Go and spend some extra time on circuit-rider activities helping local charities
• Write up some training materials or run workshops (with caveats: see below)
• Some of the ideas from the Geek Social Responsibility Page could be worked on more intensively
• Anything else you can think of by adding an idea in the special idea forum I’ve created for this

The appropriate skill set you can work with is:

• 15 years commercial software development experience
• About 3-4 years experience of providing training (I’m now a part-time lecturer to boot)
• A well-known community champion who could network on behalf of sponsors
• Ability to churn out research and reports, as well as pretty much any kind of written word you can imagine (heck, I’d try and write you a musical if you really wanted one)
• Lots of contacts across technology, finance, public sector and other fields

What’s more, I’m prepared to do a deal on costs: I will give my time to these projects for £200/day + VAT, which is considerably less than my clients pay for my time (ask them if you want). I feel I can afford to do this discount because it’s only half my time, and these projects will benefit the community at large and so I will be compensated for the loss of income via a warm feeling inside.

To summarise, I’m prepared to offer 30 days of my time over the next 3 months for a total of £6,000 + VAT for a community-orientated project or group of projects. This is for time only, so any material costs (such as travel, etc.) would need to be found too – I’ll work that angle once we get there.

Now, here’s where you get involved. I could just go and try and find one big sponsor and spend the next few months spending their money doing what they thought would be good for the community. I’d like to try something more creative and inclusive: I’d like to try and get 100 people or businesses to pledge £60 each (£69 including VAT) to these projects. In other words, I’d like to be the “employee” of you, a substantial number within the community for half my time for the next 3 months.

Some people/organisations may wish to pledge more, but I don’t feel that should give them more voting rights – the community will decide what the work consists of, not just a few with deeper pockets.

What do you get in return in addition to my time? Simply: your name/company name and logo or picture and link up as a sponsor; the ability to ask me to fetch you cups of tea from time to time; knowledge that your will is being done on behalf of the community; a subsequent warm, fuzzy glow inside that a small amount of your money has gone into benefiting the community.

This might seem a crazy idea, I know. If it doesn’t work, we’ll all have learned something I hope.

The first thing is for you to decide how you think I should spend that time, so:

1. Go to the Pledge ideas forum
2. Add ideas, or vote for other ideas
3. AND/OR fill in the pledge signup form so we can keep you updated as we move into the next stage
4. Once 100 people have expressed an interest and the ideas are getting more solid, I’ll set up a proper pledge at pledgebank.com and you can decide if you want to go ahead or not. We’ll contact you using the details below

If we don’t get the full pledge, we’ll revisit what the sticking point might be and take it from there. If there are several projects with lots of votes, time will be divided up between them, and you can always withdraw your pledge, it’s not a bind commitment (we’ll ask for cash down the line though).

There are however a few caveats:

1. I/Vagueware can’t do anything illegal, so please do not pledge if your idea is a bank robbery on behalf of GeekUp attendees.
2. Vagueware banks with the Co-operative Bank which places some ethical constraints on our business activities as a condition of us being able to bank with them (which I agree with). No arms trading or ideas involving animal testing, please.
3. Vagueware can’t go into breach of contract, so I can’t work on something competitive to an existing Vagueware client project, and some areas of training may be off-limits due to exclusivity guarantees. I don’t think this will be a problem, but if it is, I’ll say so as soon as the idea is mentioned
4. I get final say on whether I want to work on a project. If you suggest something I would loathe or is unworkable, I’ll let you know and you can choose to withdraw your pledge or not.

Feel free to discuss in the comments or elsewhere. You should soooo discuss this on Twitter and your own blog…

I await your thoughts and instructions. In the meantime some FAQs:

There is this project that needs some work, and…

OK, stop right there. Projects should ideally be discrete. If I need to go and convince somebody else to show me stuff or let me in behind the scenes because a mob has asked me to, this could get complex. We’ll need to negotiate. Ideally this should be completely blue-sky, blank, brand new projects. If you have an amazing idea that needs me to go in and “fix” something, I’ll look at it, but it’s probably – 90% of the time – going to be a bad, bad idea. I’m also not interested in helping people with projects they’ve messed up without a good reason – it causes political issues all over the place. If it’s a commercial project that needs fixing, it’s probably not even worth suggesting it.

Why would I trust you? Is this a ruse/scam or something?

Vagueware Ltd has been trading for nearly 4 years, and we have never had a problem with trust. I personally am well-known locally in parts of the tech/digital sector in the North of the UK, and I don’t want to trash my reputation. If you don’t know, you might have to take it on trust that I’m not going to run off with your cash, but to further put your mind at rest, you will be able to pay in instalments and get regular progress updates if you wish. Further, I can’t actually touch the cash until the work it corresponds to has been completed – to do so would basically be illegal (or at the very least would upset my accountant and other advisers).

Can I pledge less than £60? I’m skint but want to support this!

If lots of people pledge less, we need more people or the time that’s paid for has to come down to reflect that, but yes, email me and we’ll talk about it.

I am a multinational corporation who wishes to abuse this project for my own nefarious means. Where do I sign up?

If you want to pledge more that’s fine, but realise that one pledge is one vote in terms of how I spend my time, no matter how big the pledge is. If you’re cool with that, email me and let’s talk.

Can we just gang together and pay you to do something stupid?

No. I get final refusal on all project proposals, and will only do things that have a clear benefit to the community either in a broad sense or specifically the digital community. My time is scarce, please consider using it for a greater good.

Hey I’ve got a question you haven’t answered!

Leave it in the comments, and I’ll address it.

For a couple of years now, I’ve been fascinated by the possibilities of a field known as Augmented Reality. In a nutshell, AR allows a digital device to “overlay” digital information onto the physical world. This is quite cool stuff. Watch:

So, that’s nice and everything. We can take a digital device, and through the multitude of sensory input, we can start to use it as a viewfinder. We can even start coming up with zany ways of manipulating the image we’re seeing, which people with very little expertise are starting to play with:

What’s intrigued me though, is can we find more interesting ways to interact with the device. It’s great that I can point my iPhone at a piece of paper with a special block printed on it, and a wind farm comes out, or I can point it at the environment I’m stood in and get extra information that isn’t otherwise easily found. What else can I do? Well, thanks to the same technologies developed for those applications I can suddenly create a virtual reality headset (either to augment my environment or to travel to another distant one):

Again, pretty and interesting and opens all sorts of possibilities. But how much further can we go? I have no doubt we’re just seeing the early adopter stuff here, and that with time lots more interesting applications will become available utilising these technologies. Watch that space carefully.

One of the issues raised by this technology though, is our addiction to it and the fact we become chained to the device. All of us have suffered that weird syndrome that happens when out with friends and suddenly all of you in a group are staring at small boxes of plastic and metal, interacting with virtual worlds rather than the one you’re physically in. If we start to augment reality through this technology, do we lose something about the sense of place and interaction with the real physical World? Do we start to become machines ourselves?

Thankfully, a rather interesting prospect is on the horizon. Even better, it’s open source and achievable with cheapish hardware. It might take a moment for this to “click” with you, but this will likely be the most valuable 10 minutes you’ll spend this year on understanding the future of human interfaces with technology in the next few years. Trust me. If you haven’t clicked that link, do so before going on, or if you want to skip the background and just see it in action, here’s a demo clip with cheesy music for you:

The idea that the device disappears is not all that new – we have seen devices getting smaller and denser for years with that goal in mind – but the way this has been done fascinates me. This technology once developed a little more into something more consumable eradicates the need for a high-end smartphone, multi-touch technology like the $40,000 Microsoft Surface, portable media players, the lot.

What you need: a camera, a projector, a data connection and a pair of headphones, all plugged into something that can understand all of them. Right now, the hardware looks cumbersome, but that’s just a hardware engineering problem: there are already smaller projection devices and cameras coming to market that will make this technology nearly invisible when worn.

What you can do with it: anything a camera, mp3 player, iPhone, desktop PC, laptop, mobile phone, projector, surface table, AR application, in fact anything you can do with any digital device, all in one go. And all of it with the device being near invisible.

What you use it with: ordinary pieces of paper, walls, tables, your hands, the objects and people around you. Instead of staring at pieces of plastic, suddenly you are encouraged to look up at the World.

When something interesting happens you don’t fumble around, open a shutter, focus, click, crop, tag and post. You just make a shape with your hands, and there’s your photo. When you want a flight-time update you don’t fumble, open an app, type, click, read: you just look at your boarding pass. You’re in a bookshop and you wonder if the book in your hands is any good so you fumble, type (or perhaps photo the barcode), click and read, perhaps clicking around a few stores on a small screen. With this, you just hold the book. That’s it.

You might think this is sci-fi, that nobody would ever use all of this or that the “back-end” needed would be too bulky. I would disagree. I would say it’s one of the most interesting developments in technology this decade. I will be watching for the release of the source code due soon with some interest. Pranav’s site is a good place to keep your ear to the ground.

For the last two years, the digital sector has been a minor miracle in the wider economy. Whilst everybody else was fretting over bank collapses and credit crunches, the software sector has held firm.

Services companies (like Vagueware), have seen revenue growth as people seek efficiency gains, more streamlined processes supported by software and ways to leverage data in more creative ways. Product companies have ridden the wave of efficiency gains as people upgrade to compete. Together, we’re probably the only areas still recruiting and holding firm. The recession is something we’ve been sheltered from for the most part.

No more.

This morning Adobe – creators of the cornerstone software of many a web outfit in Photoshop, et al – announced they’re shedding 680 employees, a total of 9% of their workforce in order to “align costs with its 2010 operating plan and budget [...] and the realities of the business environment”.

So that’s 9% from one of the industry top dogs. Ouch. Maybe they were heavy, and it was time to restructure, but that’s one big kick in the stomach for a sector that’s been strong whilst all else flails.

Add into the mix EA’s 1500-job cull and things start to look grimmer still.

One phrase springs to mind: buckle up.

Almost 18 months ago, I had a little bit of a rant about the lack of vision in the industry. A taste:

I have a problem with “the vision thing” in the industry at the moment. I don’t know where we’re going, or why. The technology – and our insight on how it can be applied – available to us has the ability to change the World, and instead we’re producing pointless crap and obsessing over details of page animations as if they alone will save the World.

If I hear one more wannabe-startup tell me that they plan to change the World and get rich off the back of social networking I will scream. If I see one more aggressive pitch for a site that a teenager could put together in a weekend under the guise of it being “World leading” I will hurt somebody. If I’m asked just one more time to give a quote to develop a site “a bit like eBay but with a social graph” I’m going to quit and go and be a farmer or something.

The response I got from that article was interesting. One reader suggested they had quit their job after thinking through some of the points I made. Mostly people suggested I needed a good lie down, that I was burning out.

We’re now a year and a half in, and I still feel that way sometimes. In that time, iPhone and Android app markets have grown beyond recognition, fewer startups are trying to build up to a point of acquisition quickly by simply AJAX-ifying calendars or todo lists, and the “Web 2.0 craze” seems to have settled down. We’re slowly – but surely – starting to settle down to real work.

We’re still a fair few miles away from where we could be, though. We still are spending too much time as an industry obsessed with entertainment than helping to effect change in some of the biggest problems we face as a society.

However, I’m curious: since writing that article, this blog has picked up thousands of new regular readers, people to whom the Vision Thing is a brand new concept. I’d be interested in hearing what some of you think a year and a half down the line. Are the problems still there? Have I outlived my stay in the sector and it’s time to go and buy that farm? Leave your thoughts below, I’d love to hear them.

For various reasons I’ve decided to change the comments system on this blog to use Disqus. That means there is much more social media cohesion within the comments, and hopefully we’re going to be able to have a better 2-way discussion here.

Let’s get started: It seems twitter traffic might be peaking right now. So, I posit that all people who have access to the Internet today who want a twitter account (or indeed any other social media account), has one. There are few new users who are likely to sign up. Therefore the only growth available for such sites, is new Internet markets where access is limited (e.g. Africa). Discuss.

About two years ago, job adverts started appearing in the industry that had interesting phrases in them: Ruby on Rails Rockstar; Ajax Master; Software Architect Ninja.

Eyebrows were raised. Was this just another example of the industry’s machismo playing out? Were we witnessing the next generation of kids coming up through the industry and rejecting the corporate ties of traditional job titles? Did HR really expect their latest technology recruit to play to stadiums, or attack enemies silently in the middle of the night?

What these companies were actually trying to say was “we need somebody self-motivated, dedicated to their craft, and who can take a lead in front of our audience (composed of customers, investors and employees)”.

Alas, the whole meme was misunderstood, those recruited into such roles were ridiculed, and adverts stopped trying to feel like they were recruiting heroes from Manga comics or NME.

However, we still need that mindset all over this industry. I’d go as far as to say it needs to become the default. We just need to cut out the hyperness and stop drenching the industry in irrelevant masculinity.

Let me explain what I mean by “that mindset” in more detail. Most of you will be familiar, but I think it’s worth recapping:

• Self-motived

  Anybody can learn how to write code, or fix a server. The difference between the majority of people in the industry today and the ones we want to see more of is how they learn, not what they learn. Some years ago I was working in a public sector gig where I had a couple of different people working under me. The difference between how they thought about their work was considerable. If I asked the first person to do something, the response might be “I’ve never done that before, so I’m going to need a few minutes to work it out, Google around, work out what I’m doing, spot the drawbacks, OK?”. Brilliant. The other guy would simply stop at “I’ve not been trained to do that. You need to send me on a training course”.

  There is no room in this industry for people with the second mindset any more. Rockstars don’t normally go to music school. Yes, training courses can be valuable, but unless you’re the kind of person who teaches themselves constantly, you’re not suited to this industry.

• Dedicated to their craft

  A craft you say? Better believe it. Most of us are taking a blank piece of framework and sculpting it into a finished product. “Rockstars” care about aesthetics, tools, even to some extent materials (or at least in the Ruby world we do). Software people should have ideals of craftsmanship, even when they’re pretending to be engineers.

  However, not everybody is dedicated to their craft. Many will not go to a conference unless somebody else is paying. Most do not re-factor their code to make it better in every way possible. 98% will never attempt to help other developers improve their code without an assumption of compensation. The really great people in this sector have the mannerisms and dedication of the minority, mannerisms we need to see become the norm.

  I’m not suggesting hair-shirts or years of religious solitude here, just an interest in the industry that seeps a little bit from time to time out of normal work hours and uses up some of their spare time and cash because the interest is genuine.

• Taking a lead

  I’ve met and worked with many “back-room mindset” developers. I once worked in a “pit” of developers and engineers at a household-name firm where team members were told to go home, have a bath, and come back tomorrow with clean clothes without any holes in them. To the uninitiated, this sounds disgusting (and to be fair, the pit did have a ‘funkiness’ about it), but in years gone by this was what small development teams were like. Guys who were in the back room, never asked for an opinion, never brought into management meetings, and who liked it that way. An invitation to a meeting was often met with a sneer by many of the people I worked with back in the late 1990s.

  Those attitudes are now (thankfully) disappearing. If you are the kind of developer who never wants to talk to the customer or management, you are useless in this industry. You’re dead wood. Sorry, but you need to realise that 80% of development is about communication, and good developers are the ones who lead that communication. Taking the lead is what we do. We are sculpting the future of organisations and job roles, we don’t get to sit in the cupboard and meekly accept specification documents handed down to us by non-developers any more.

There are more traits out there that we need to collectively foster, each of us at a personal level. This is just a starting point, this is what I thought of when people mentioned “Rockstar” developers. We just need a new name for it, something that doesn’t have all the connotations of “rockstar”, “ninja” or “master”. “Crafter” could work, but is too folksy for most people.

If the industry doesn’t start seeing these traits more in the kids coming up out of college, we’re going to struggle. The massive teams of old are dead. Small, focused development teams filled with people who think about their work the right way are the future. How do we foster these people?

Michael Arrington appears to be drunk. Or at least, he’s suggesting he is the kind of person who would wear a Life Recorder, which my casual talking-to-people-down-the-pub research about a year ago shows only drunk people seem to think is a good idea. Arrington though thinks they’re the wristwatch of the 21st century:

Imagine a small device that you wear on a necklace that takes photos every few seconds of whatever is around you, and records sound all day long. It has GPS and the ability to wirelessly upload the data to the cloud, where everything is date/time and geo stamped and the sound files are automatically transcribed and indexed. Photos of people, of course, would be automatically identified and tagged as well.Imagine an entire lifetime recorded and searchable. Imagine if you could scroll and search through the lives of your ancestors.

Would you wear that device? I think I would. [...]

Lost. The. Plot.

In his poll, just under a thousand people agree, but they haven’t thought this through. The people you meet may not wish your conversations to be recorded and many may not want to be photographed. You will not have the time to spend browsing through what happened last week because you have this week to live. They will be an extra device to manage, charge, and maintain. They will record things you will want to forget. They will mess up your social life as people actively reject and or object to your presence. They will mark you out as a self-absorbed prick.

Yes, there will be startups touting them and selling quite a few. I’m sure some people will buy them and annoy their friends with them. The narcissistic types in society will love them. A few celebrities might even buy them and have them regularly throw snippets to twitter. But they will be ultimately be considered a fad as people realise that they are more of an intrusion into their lives than an assistant.

Within military circles they might prove popular, and the police have been trialling “helmet cams” for years. Beyond those niches though, these things are an absolute waste of time and money.

Who on earth else is going to want these things beyond the self-obsessed?

Source: Wikipedia

Somaliland is an autonomous region that is probably very much like your pre-conceived notions. Its 3.5 million people have struggled through warfare (many suffer post-traumatic stress disorder), the economy is “in early stages of development” and it has suffered greatly to gain recognised independence.

Few people know of its existence, fewer still care about its future. But we should. The Horn of Africa has seen great misery and human suffering over recent decades, and whilst it is a country that has many faults including widespread corruption, it is at least a better attempt at democratic, peaceful governance than anywhere else nearby.

Alas, the entire country is now at risk, thanks to a technical “solution” to a problem that never really was.

The current edition of Private Eye has in its column “From Our Own Correspondent” a story from Hargeisa that should make all involved ashamed of themselves. Emphasis throughout is mine:

Somalialand is the only place in the Horn of Africa that is democratic, stable and tolerant. Yet because of misplaced fears of the mushrooming of micro-states, we remain unrecognised by the international community, 18 years after declaring our independence. As a result the world keeps us at arm’s length and has instead forced on us consultants so greedy and inept that the very peace we now enjoy is under threat.

Elections in an impoverished, nomadic society are never easy, but our record of closely contested polls compares pretty well with our neighbours [Somalia, Ethiopia, et al]. Our friends faraway nevertheless thought that what we really needed was a state of the art biometric finger printing and facial recognition system to compile a voter’s roll. But an operation of such complexity – not to mention the $10m funding – could not possibly be trusted to us natives.

[...]

Alas, this model [...] has somewhat underperformed. Presidential elections have been postponed four times now and are 18 months late, and now we have the prospect of civil war as our politicians cannot agree on a way forward.”

It’s a stable country that has a reasonable record on electoral fraud prevention. Who then thought that an advanced biometric system was what this country needed?

I’ve left out from the Private Eye piece the criticisms of how NGO Interpeace are (mis-?) handling this, how Britain and the US are washing their hands of it, and the details of who is blaming who, but the error was there at the start: they placed the country’s future in a technology system that wasn’t needed. No doubt it was profitable for somebody.

This is a country with a GDP per head of $226 – the vast majority of the population are living on less than $1 per day. $10 million could have helped address woeful statistics such as only 25% of Somaliland adults are literate, and just 17% of children go to school. The funding could have even helped the 72% of the population without access to clean water get some new wells.

But it gets worse.

The nomadic culture that dominates Somaliland (any two citizens can work out how they are related by sharing their names and clans), is culturally sensitive to finger-printing. That of course makes a biometric database a fatally flawed model. The problem they are attempting to address – that people from neighbouring countries could vote – has been “solved” with a system that introduces new problems, that means not even all of those entitled to vote want to necessarily register.

To cap it all off, the people who went about delivering the system didn’t just do a bad job at implementation, but a thoroughly awful one. According to some sources on the ground:

The current voter list is neither accurate nor can it form the basis of a fair and transparent election. The only alternative is to go ahead with the election without voter lists.
Interpeace stated in a controversial and a very contradictory press release dated July 25, 2009:

“The Voter Registration system was seriously abused during its implementation, with widespread corruption and systematic fraud, resulting in the failure to record the fingerprints of more than half of all registrants. In other cases, over 150 registrations were made with a single fingerprint at the same registration centre, or through photographs instead of in person.”

Say what? There are voters walking around with 150 polling cards, and others who got registered without ever actually turning up? That sounds like the kind of thing the project was meant to protect against. But the systems can spot all that and deal with duplicate registrations, right? Well, according to another source close to the action:

IT Professionals advised the hardware of the server should be upgraded and software to be reexamined to be fit to handle database of 4 million voters in Somaliland. The testing phase must include plan for next 20 years according to population growth rate.

They called for upgrade of both hardware and Software including the operation system, which should have latest security and performance tuning patches. The hardware upgrade should include Hard Disk, RAM and the Processor. They highlighted that majority of the data captured in the server are not in text [but in] binary format like picture and fingerprint, which needs massive storage area. RAM and Processor helps the server to boot and run quickly particularly during filtering the duplicates. [sic throughout]

Failures then, include:

1. The whole project has several fatally flawed assumptions under-pinning core choices
2. The money could have been put to more effective use elsewhere
3. The software was designed incorrectly and therefore its output is unreliable and can’t be trusted
4. The server infrastructure is under-equipped and under-managed so now they need to add more storage, more memory and increase processing power (and by the sounds of it, whack on a few service pack upgrades).

These are all failures we see in IT projects on a regular basis. If this were a new ERM or accounts platform we’d sit around the board room table, gravely shake our heads, talk about “lessons learned”, and put it all down as a bad job. We’d move on, avoiding the compulsion to try and “fix it” due to our own notions of “sunk cost”. This is in essence, like thousands of IT projects that have happened over the last few decades.

Except in this case, the consequences are more serious: the country now faces civil war.

As you go about your daily work rolling out technology to your clients and customers, you may not think that your potential failure to deliver will result in human fatality. However it will have consequences.

Iit’s important we think carefully as our industry takes a greater hold on the workings of civilisation and shapes ever more its potential, about what our lust for automation and control can do to lives if we fail to live up to expectations. Somaliland is an extreme – but sobering – example.

As an early supporter of NO2ID and long-term member of Liberty, Amnesty International, and others, I have heard enough stories about technology tampering with elections that even as an advocate of the power of software to improve society, I am perfectly happy that my native democracy requires nothing more than pieces of paper and some pencils to conduct an election. I sincerely hope that somebody decides it’s good enough for Somaliland too, before it’s too late.