It’s better to be down here wishing you were up there, than up there wishing you were down here”. 

Today was a case in point. I’m getting close to the expiry of my currency and therefore the pressure is always on to get get up in the air and do some flying. My partner was coming with me so it seemed like a great opportunity. A quick check of the weather showed a nice strong wind coming straight down the runway but the forecast weather showed some temporary issues with gusting winds anytime during the day. I seemed “do-able” so we set off for the airfield.

When we arrived at the airfield several instructors were briefing other students (probably commercial students) and I decided to do another check of the weather. Again, the weather showed the wind straight down the runway but now the forecast was for gusting winds pretty much all day. What should I do.

Bearing in mind the adage above I decided that gust of 25kts would not be pleasant even if I was prepared to try it, especially not for my passenger. It didn’t really matter what the rest of the aviators in the club house were planning, this was a decision for me alone. I decided not to run the gauntlet of bad weather despite, night ratings and IMC ratings – they are my backup should things go wrong. I cancelled my booking and we packed up and went home. I’m glad we did because the weather as we drove the 30 minutes home, deteriorated, and stayed bad for the next hour at least.

I’m glad I’m down here, and I’ve booked the aircraft for another day.

Winter has definitely arrived today. I had to hunt out the cold remedies and that’s not an easy task in this house. So here I am, sat at my desk wondering what the day will throw at me and sipping a hot cold & flu remedy!

I was impressed last week when I sat down and watched a live broadcast from the Salesforce.com “CloudForce Live” event in London. Am I the only one that has been confused about the relevance of Twitter or am I just a typical IT dinosaur that can’t work out the point of it. I mean, let’s face it, why would I want to tell everyone in the world that I was “on the train to London“, or “being crushed by the most gargantuan person to get on the train this morning“? No-one in their right minds would put a sign outside their house saying “Hello everyone, I’m out”! That sort of invitation is plain stupid, and yet in twitter-land that happens every single day. Some tweets are the sort of thing that I’m not sure I want people to know; “I missed the train this morning“, “I got reprimanded for using my phone on the plane” – that last one is an admission that you have no regard for the safety of yourself and fellow travellers, I’m a pilot, I should know. It all seems so Twee! Ooh … I like that, an old English expression makes a comeback in the world of Tweeting. Are your tweets just Twee?!

Salesforce.com seem to have taken that next step in the world of Tweeting. The critical thing about Tweeting is the fact that you are alerted to status changes or events rather than just watching what other people are doing in some kind of voyeuristic manner. So now they have constructed an interface to their software that looks like Facebook but acts like Twitter. Instead of having “Friends” you can follow people (OK that’s nothing new), and you can follow other objects in the Salesforce.com world. That means that any object/event in your IT estate could become something you follow – now I get it! If I am working on a document in a virtual team I can follow that document and get updates when anyone changes that document. I can follow a helpdesk ticket and see that it is being followed through properly. I can follow the status of a server or an application and be alerted when anything changes. If we now add thresholds or allow a user to configure when to be alerted about stuff then it really becomes useful because I won’t get a Tweet-storm every time I open up my facebook -like dashboard.

Now it becomes really useful because I can take this off my Desktop/Laptop and onto my phone which goes with me everywhere. This makes us truly connected to the business in which we work – although I may regret this in time to come. Taken a step further I am then able to manage my piece of the business from any location as long as I have some form of telephone connection.

The next step is to see that eMail, as we now use it, is likely to become a thing of the past. How many emails today are really just instant messages or tweets? If we add to this the whole idea of presence and location then I think we must be getting close to something that releases us to manage the business we are in rather than constantly responding to emails.

Having said all of that, the real problem is that most of the applications and systems that we have out there are in no way geared up to work in this way. What we need is equivalent to a huge Events Network that will be able to manage trillions of events and we, as individuals, will subscribe to published events and corporations will do the same. Take the thorny issue of expenses for example. What if you never had to submit an expenses claim ever again? Every time you used your corporate card to pay for something, the event would be published and followed by the accounts department in your office. You would also validate the expense (that would be another event) and the funds would be dealt with as part of a twitter-like feed. I probably need to think this through a little more fully, but it sounds like it might work.

Take security as well. I think the aim should be to distance security from the centre and take it to the edge of the corporate network, nearer to the user in fact. An event can be published by anyone, but to receive information about that event you need to subscribe to it, in twitter terms, you need to follow it. The responsibility then lies with the publisher to validate whether the subscribe request is granted and they can revoke that permission any time they like. That seems like a much better model to me than locking everything down to the extent that we do, incurring significant cost in the process.

Seems like we still have a long way to go in this corporate environment to get to the type of systems that will support this type of use. So, I suppose, in the meantime, “Sat at my desk drinking a cold remedy and blogging” will have to do.

IT Services organisations struggle to deliver  in an agile manner and get blamed by their customers for a lack of ability to roll out anything in less than a six month window. If that customer is a government department then the whole thing becomes exponentially more complicated. The constraints that get imposed on you begin to become completely self defeating and in some cases I preside over a situation where security considerations have wiped out any chance of a solution. If they don’t disable the process, they insist on measures that create duplicate and triplicate systems to allow for different security domains. When I worked with the defense industry I was in an environment where each person had two desktops. One on a secure network, the other on a less secure network. Never the two would meet, but I did manage to extract data from one system and migrate it to the less secure system.

If security isn’t cramping your style, then the commercials will. Customers will complain that the supplier is slow and immovable whereas, in reality, they are fulfilling their contract to the letter because if they don’t the financial penalties are astronomical. No-one wants to take the risk! The commercial vehicles that most service providers are working under currently are constructed in such a way as to ensure that the supplier will be completely risk averse. There is no way to circumvent it. I did work with one UK Government Department where we agreed to roll out a solution, get a “feel” for the volumetrics and performance and then frame a service level agreement that encapsulated what we thought was achievable based on the trial. Now that was innovative. Can I get anyone to accept that if we cut corners there are risks that need to be mitigated? Can you imagine the disbelief if I suggested that we stand up a solution that might bring the whole IT infrastructure to its knees – maybe?

Most Systems Integrators could create a solution and have it running on the live estate within weeks, but their contracts preclude them from doing so. If everyone was prepared to take a grown up view of the risks and take some joint ownership of the risks then maybe, just maybe we could get something done. I liked Jeffrey Phillips blog – Timeless Innovation – we can’t continue trying to be Innovative if we are shackled by the Golden Chains of contractual obligation. Those chains need to be broken.

The people I have met in the public sector are generally trying to do their best for the people of this country even if sometimes they are prevented from doing so successfully by various blockages and boundaries. It is true that the Private Sector only focuses on the financial rewards, but the problem is that both sectors are dependant upon each other. Call it the “Yin and Yang” of the community. The problem comes when the Public Sector wants to achieve something and the Private Sector is looking for the financial benefit. Those of us that work in the Private Sector will insist on seeing a robust business case to get on and do something … doesn’t sound great but it really makes sure that we don’t waste cash.

I think the key in all of these things is to recognise the drivers on each side of the fence. A supplier is not going to do something for nothing and I have seen favours being asked for time and time again until major suppliers just refuse to do business. This is bad for the whole business – there needs to be some priority attached to the activities and an alignment with the Business Imperatives and Principles. That’s what Enterprise Architecture is all about – how do we ensure that what we are doing is driving us to a better place rather than a “nice” place.

Hmmm … I quite like being in the middle of what is happening in one of the largest government departments in the UK. I also like being outside of it – at the moment.

We all prefer that personal touch but the Spreadsheet Monkeys have stripped cost out of just about every part of business so that we all get to deal with “intelligent” machines and systems. Around the corner from where I live there is an old fashioned Do-it-yourself (DIY) shop where you go in and you can only buy goods from a salesperson behind the counter. A question such as “I’m trying to do xyz, have you got something I can use?” is usually met with “Of course, you need an abc”. You can’t get that from the national and international chain stores. No-one knows nowadays how to do it.

Anyway … why do we give these Spreadsheet Monkeys so much power. Look at the current economic crisis! Tell me, who engineered that? I bet it was someone trying to save a penny or two on some spreadsheet.

OK … I’m done. Had to get that out of my system.

I had been looking at a device that would cost almost £650 and I was prepared to spend that sort of money, but when I submitted the order to several vendors I discovered that the device could not be sold because of legal reasons that I am not going to go into here. However, the solution was based on the HP iPAQ 314 SatNav device which I discovered I could get for £130 from Amazon in the UK. As I already had £30 of vouchers on my account I was able to buy the device for just under £100 and with a 4″ touch sensitive screen it was a great purchase even as a SatNav which my partner particularly finds useful.

Then I went on the hunt for some software. I now have two alternatives. I purchased the electronic version of the CAA maps for Northern England (1:500000) and that software has the capability to be installed on a SatNav device.

My investigations led me to Pocket FMS Foundation. These people sell an annual subscription to their software including monthly upgrades for €150. The software installs on your home computer and hooks up to internet to download all the maps and weather data you couls possibly imagine. I had to reduce the amount of data that it loaded because it covered significantly more than I really needed for the flying I do.

Setting up the SatNav was a breeze. From the menu system I configured an SD Memory card with the software. I say I “configured” it, by that I mean that I selected the menu option and then did as I was told from there on out. The final step was to insert the memory card into the SatNav and press the reset button. Pocket FMS then started up all by itself and the rest was handled by large buttons on the touch sensitive screen. I can plan my flight on the computer and then everything gets transferred to the memory card – weather information, maps, my specific aircraft etc.

One of the other really great things is that it creates a log of where you have been by creating a “Breadcrumb” file. This file is really just a log of all the position fixes, but someone on the PocketFMS website has provided a neat utility that enables the conversion of the file to a Google Earth KML file. That means I can load the flight into Google Earth and see a plot of where I flew including the height I flew at. It also has a neat feature of logging your take-off and landing times based on a reaching or dropping below a preset speed respectively.

The other thing that I find helpful is that as the mapping software is designed in layers, you can choose which layers to see on the map at any one time. You have two maps to choose from whilst in flight and you can set the layers up differently for each map. When you are flying south, guess what, the names are all still right way up as well!! How awesome is that! So many systems I’ve seen are just map images and therefore go upside down when you are flying south. I can even tell the system to exclude information such as airspaces that are x-feet above or below me which removes some of the irrelevant clutter while I am flying.

So … for £225 (approx) I got myself a really awesome GPS system for in the air. You might be able to access this Google Earth KML file and see what the outcome is.

Have fun Flying.

At the same time, and possibly driving this trend, is a counter balance that is attempting to ensure that what gets delivered to the end user is exactly what they asked for and so the methodologies have become increasingly more complex and lengthy. This has led to project timescales lengthening and the consequent knock-on effect of a mismatch between what is delivered and what was requested. Service providers in every walk of life are seen as being slow and pedantic because they are measured by the final outcome and its fitness for purpose. Users, on the other hand, are used to the current trend in web-based technologies to be able to create web pages, customise their portal interfaces and order goods online in seconds. The contrasts are marked, obvious and confusing.

Architecture – Enterprise Architecture as well – is suffering the same dilemma. On the one hand, we, as IT architects, need to be able to stand in between the business and the delivery arm of a project and assure everyone that the results of the activity will be fit for purpose and meet the needs of the supplier and the end user. On the other, providing that level of assurance doesn’t happen overnight and I am sure that we are all aware of the problems that have been created in the past by missing some vital piece of information.

The challenge is to build an assurance model that is both thorough and agile. My gut feeling on this is that this can be achieved with a high degree of success and a certain amount of discipline. It comes down to a couple of key, simple to implement ideas;

1. The need for Patterns and old fashioned building blocks and
2. The need for checklists and record keeping.

Once we have an Enterprise Architecture Framework in place (aka Reference Architecture) and then build on top of that a culture that assures each project based on a checklist of criteria, then we are getting to the point of implementing something that can be “light touch”, “Agile” but thorough. The Checklists will ensure that we quickly zero in on where the real issues are within a solution design. If that is divided up into Business, Information, Application and Infrastructure Layers then various reviews can look at each section and key Architects can be involved in discussing and reviewing the solution based on the exceptions.

The Checklist approach is part of the Extreme Architecture Assurance model and is designed so that the review can “learn” from previous mistakes and also can track each project and provide relevant metrics. It “learns” because when a mistake is made, the checklist can be updated to ensure that the problem doesn’t happen again. The checklist is also made up of simple answers which means that they can be logged on a database to report on how compliant each solution is.

Clearly this is a simplified view but is based on the 80:20 rule. 80% of the architectural issues in projects can be surfaced by a methodology that takes up 20% of the current architectural effort. We all know that it is that last 20% of effort “where there be dragons”!

Many of the tools that assist teams like mine to capture ideas are designed to do precisely that – capture an idea. The concept of an idea carries with it that sense that someone has managed to come up with a potential solution to a problem. For some people that is where they have an issue. I’ve heard people say that there are things wrong with the way we do “this” or can’t we do “that” better, but if you asked them how something could be improved then they would probably struggle to come up with an answer.

In my world the problem is the key thing. Give me a problem and I can get a team of boffins (Okay, Geeks) to work on a solution and design something that fixes the problem. Think about it … It’s a bit like a doctors surgery or an agony column in a newspaper or magazine. You don’t go to the doctor, generally, because you know what the solution is. You go because there is a problem and you want a solution. Our Innovation programmes need to focus on capturing problems and then assembling the right teams to generate a solution or an idea. Then, and only then, does the idea get tracked through an Innovation programme.

What we really need is a “Dear Madge” column <grin>

I’m thinking of the usual theatrical concept of a farce. Take a situation that starts out relatively simply and then gradually develops into the most complicated set of circumstances that you can imagine. Innovation should be seen in the same light. Take the germ of an idea and then through playing verbally with that idea with other people it begins to evolve and gain a life of its own. As it grows and develops it becomes something far more useful and refined.

It is rather like the musical concept of “Jamming”. Start out with a standard three chord riff and then give each member of the group the opportunity to do a solo. Get each member of the team to expand upon the initial “theme” (rather like Elgar’s Enigma Variations) and develop the musical idea. Eventually the theme will grow to maturity and there may even be material there that could form a coherent piece of music.

Jamming for Innovation is the same concept – take a group of people either in a room or with a collaboration site and allow them to play with the ideas that they have and expand upon each idea. Allow the wild and whacky – encourage it even – as it generates the offshoot ideas that may also develop into something worthwhile. It is fun to do and can develop into a culture for an organisation.

The plan was to fly from Blackpool, start track over Inskip and then head off to Clitheroe. From Clitheroe, turning to Lonf Preston and then to Kendal, returning to the VSP (Visual Reporting Point) overhead Fleetwood and back again.

The following map shows my planned and actual route!

 View Map

The flight was hampered by the fact that I needed to achieve a certain height (around 3000′) to enable me to be legally clear of objects on the ground and the terrain generally. As the cloud base was coming in lower than I had anticipated, I decided that it wasn’t a good idea to reduce my height even though it looked as though I could make it with height to spare. “Plan the flight and fly the plan!”.

Having identified the M6 as I flew over it, I decided that I could still work my way up to Kendal and a quick check on the map showed that I had sufficient height to be clear of any nearby objects. The trip to Kendal was a little turbulent but allowed me to get there safely and in good time. I then tried to follow the track that I would have been on had I flown the original plan, turned towards Kendal and decided that I would try and follow the plan agian back to Blackpool.

Turning at Kendal, the next challenge was the late afternoon sun that was really low in the sky. As I started to cross Morecambe Bay I became concerned that the cloud base was closing in on me again and that I had to maintain greater than 2000′ altitiude to avoid the restricted area over and around Heysham Power Station. At this point I decided that another diversion would be wise and headed back inland where I could see gaps in the cloud cover allowing me to maintain height and avoid the power station.

Once on a westward track towards Fleetwood, Blackpool Radar asked me to divert north to maintain separation with a 737 that was leaving Blackpool Airport. I was asked to Squawk 0425  and then some minutes later given the clearance to return to my original track.

I started heading south and reported “west abeam VRP Fleetwood for rejoin” and was handed back to Blackpool ATC (aka Blackpool Tower) where I was asked to squawk 7000 again.

With the BUMFICHH checks out of the way, I set the aircraft up in landing configuration (once I had reported being “west abeam the big tower” aka Blackpool Tower (not ATC)) and then turned in on finals.

This was the first time I had flown this particular aircraft “solo” and I was quite surprised at how difficult it was to get it to descend. Once I had the right indicated airspeed it still seemed to be floating quite happily at the set height, so I reduced the engine power further than I would normally have done.

The landing was nice and smooth and I left Runway 10 at Taxiway Delta, crossed Runway 25 and then using Taxiway Charlie, headed back to the flying club.

A very pleasant flight – but must try my little navigation exercise again!