John W Lewis

Category: software

  • Software innovation management: reboot required?

    Why is innovation so difficult in the software industry? In an interesting take on Google and its innovation, or lack of it, Robert Scoble provides an insight into Google’s manifestation of a very important issue for all organisations: their management of innovation. Much of his explanation and diagnosis rings true. However, many of the proposed remedies,…

  • Is “IT” “in denial”?!

    This is probably true, but who really cares?

  • Less is more!

    There seems to be an upsurge of interest in the philosophy of “less is more”. A couple of recent articles about product design, in general and in a specific case, address relevant aspects of this phenomenon. What do we know? On one level, we tend to question: how can “less” be “more”? We know it…

  • Social communication is with us

    The technology of communication devices, systems, services  has changed over the years. There have been telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and a variety of others. The characteristics of each technology have dictated the behavioural model of the systems and the services available to users. With the advent of the internet, systems have tended to emulate traditional…

  • A better Java programming course?

    Questions, questions! What would a better training course be like? In what ways would it differ? For whom would it be better? How would we know that it is better? What would we measure? Better for learners and providers In general, whatever you are learning, all of these questions might be important to you. To…

  • Version inversion!

    What happened? I have a license to a software product which ran satisfactorily, but now fails to run on a newly released version of the operating system. Surely, unless facilities in the operating system have been withdrawn or there is a fault in the operating system: this is a fault in the product?

  • Social relationship management

    So Twitter and LinkedIn are interconnecting. What is the background to this and where is it leading? Twitter Twitter seems to have caught many people’s mindshare because it is fundamentally different from most other services; its asymmetric “follower” relationship is more complex and flexible than simple connections on LinkedIn or friends on Facebook. Other services…

  • Learning and social networks

    My interest in learning, and in the ways in which we can enable it, makes conversations like this really interesting. This is my (very rapidly composed) take on it. I write it here because my intended comment in that conversation grew in size so fast that, before I could get it out, it seemed to…

  • Architectural advice

    O’Reilly are publishing a new book “97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know”. This caught my attention for a variety of reasons. One is an interest in trying to get to the bottom of what the issues commonly labelled as “software architecture” are really all about! Another reason is that there are a couple of…

  • “Training”, “learning” or both?

    Are “training” and “learning” different names for the same activity. No: the difference in meaning is deeper than that. And the difference has important implications for what we do and the value that we place on it.