Matt Deacon's digestive blog : Software+Service

Implications for the Future of IT

Matt Deacon — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:59:00 GMT

I went over to Essex University the other week to give the 1^st year and post-grad computer science students a lecture that focused on something I called “IT Mega-trends” in the afternoon I held a workshop to discuss what implications these trends might have on the students.

We split them into 4 groups each to focus on one of the following topics of population, jobs, education and information along with a set of statistics relating to each topic.

“If you’re 1 in a million in china then there are 1,300 just like you”

“Today’s learner will on average have 10-14 jobs by the age 38”

“Top 10 in-demand jobs by 2010 did not exist in 2004”

“At the start of a 3 year degree half of 1^st year material will be out of date by the end of the course”

“40 exabytes (4x10¹⁹) of unique new information will be generated this year”

These statistics were meant to act as a disturber to make the students uneasy about their potential futures and included facts such as:

At the end we came back together and drew a mind-map from their output. Iain Langdon, their lecturer re-ran the workshop later in the with some other students from the university and pulled together the following combined mind-map.

I was worried initially that the students wouldn’t engage but to be honest I was struck by how much of what we talked about they were already aware of and that they readily accept that a “career is not for life” that they will be expected to retrain and deal with enormous “rates of change”and what they learn now is really the skills of “learning how to learn”. “Life long learning” was a key phrase that struck in my mind.

I felt pretty good about things on the whole when I left. This wasn’t the ugly mob of disgruntled coders that I’d been expecting to greet a bloke from Microsoft but people who understand much more about the life we are moving towards than I had really given credit to.

[Click image to enlarge]

TechED 08 Announcements

Matt Deacon — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:12:00 GMT

Well it’s been a while since I was last at TechEd. IT was 1998 in fact, in Nice, but enough said of that! So here I am as a speaker this time! Who let him in I can hear you say. However, enough of all that. I guess by the time you read this all the announcements during Soma’s keynote will be old hat to most by now but here are the ones that sparked my imagination.

MSDN goes Web 2.0 and user generated content with the introduction of a promised two-way wiki!

Patterns & Practices will start delivering Blueprint Software + Services building block patterns.

The Ms Sync Framework CTP will introduce key support around offline and peer 2 peer networking.

VS08 split screen working between the browser design surface and the underlying HTML code.

Ajax enablement of ASP.NET controls looks pretty compelling (as long as you stay within the limits of the control I’d imagine).

Popfly explorer supporting search and publishing between ASP and Popfly

Software + Services Architect Forum

Matt Deacon — Wed, 30 May 2007 18:44:00 GMT

Slide decks are now (finally available) from the recent S+S Architect Forum we held at UK Microsoft Campus.

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/events/postevents.aspx

The Ox, The Jam Jar and the Architect

Matt Deacon — Fri, 18 May 2007 15:37:00 GMT

Back in 1906 at the age of 84, Francis Galton came across an Ox weighing competition at the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. The fair goers were asked to guess the weight of the Ox after it was slaughtered and dressed with the nearest guess winning a prize. Galton, always wanting to demonstrate that the political process was flawed and that people in general are not terribly smart asked if he could take away the individual guesses to analyse them. On averaging the combined results he was amazed to find that the average of the crowd was 1197lbs just a mere 1lb away from the actual weight of 1198lbs and in so doing he had provided amongst the first evidence that the collective intelligence of the crowd is often significantly better than that of the smartest individuals among them.

This formed the first chapter of “Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki and it and the rest of the book for that matter got my mind racing and, on the 15^th May I got my chance having organised the latest UK Architect Forum that would focus on “Software and Services”.

Neither having an Ox to hand nor the willingness to slaughter one I presented the audience with a jam jar filled with one penny coins. I provided each person with a pen and post-it note with a prize to incentivise them to make their best guess.

Of 107 guesses, 2 provided their name but no guess, 1 provided a guess with no name and 2 guesses were ignored as they we way off target at 4700 and 4500. We had 2 winners who hit the nail firmly on the head at 421 but most impressive of all was that the group average as a whole came out at 419, just 2p away from the actual amount.

For those statisticians amongst you here is the distribution curve and corresponding data:

Range	Guesses
100	6
200	20
300	21
400	16
500	13
600	7
700	6
800	4
900	3
1000	4
1100	2
1200	0
1300	1
1400	1
1500	0
1600	1