chris horn's blog

Innovation Task Force - consultation meeting

2009-10-19T22:49:00.001+01:00

I flew back from Silicon Valley last night on the Aer Lingus redeye to make a consultation meeting this morning of the Innovation Taskforce at Government Buildings in Dublin. There were some ITLG folks on the flight, heading up to their event in Belfast on wednesday. The taskforce meeting started at 9.30am, but I arrived a little late straight from the airport just after 10am.

The Chairman Dermot McCarthy and Secretariat had organised today's meeting to "provide an opportunity for Taskforce members to engage with a range of stakeholders". Approximately half of the 28 members of the task force attended, including many of those based in Ireland.

The meeting opened with Dr Frank Devitt of NUI Maynooth, whose presentation I unfortunately completely missed due to my late arrival, but whom I understand stressed the need for coaching, mentoring, continuing professional development, and skills development of innovators and entrepreneurs. He was followed by Prof. Patrick Cunningham, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government, whose talk I reached late, and who gave an update on the State investment in R&D, including the possible effects of the recent economic downturn.

Brian Hayes of Citibank then gave an impassioned pitch for an innovation initiative in the Irish Financial Services sector. He was followed by Liam Donnelly of Teagasc, promoting the innovation agenda in the agrifoods and associated life sciences sectors. In turn, Pat Moylan, Chair of the Arts Council, gave an eloquent plea for continued State funding for the arts in the context of artistic contribution to the smart economy.

After Q&A, the Border, Midland and Western Regional Assembly, via Gerry Finn and Kieron Doyle, updated those present on the BMW Assembly agenda, urging a need to assist and nuture all firms, regardless of location, in particular sectors. Aidan Gough, of Intertrade Ireland updated us on the desirability of an all-Ireland approach. Then John Tierney, the Dublin City Manager, summarised the initiatives being taken across the four Dublin councils to co-operate on an innovation agenda for our only "international city".

After further Q&A and (sandwich) lunch, the presentations proceeded further with Barry McSweeney of the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources on the nature and background to the six specific technology actions being taken by Minister Ryan, which he (Barry) believed are helping internationally advertise and promote Ireland's innovation agenda. Colin Hunt, Chair of the Higher Education Strategy Group initiated by the Department of Education and Science then presented the current preliminary assessment by his group, which is examining the structures and operations of the entire third level sector, and which he hopes may finalise their work by December next. Jim Breslin, of the Department of Health and Children, presented the work of the Health Research Group, which is advising Government on appropriate research policy in his Department, and whose final report should be available to the public soon. Finally Adrian Devitt of Forfas summarised the work of the Green Economy High Level Action Group, who are also close to reaching conclusions and recommendations.

Overall, the day was clearly very diverse, but at least for me nevertheless interesting and relevant to the aspirations of our Innovation Taskforce. I found it very illuminating to understand the different perspectives and agendas of those who presented: frankly I personally did not always agree, particularly on what should be prioritised :-)

Concurrently to the "stakeholders" who presented today, the Taskforce members are cognisant of the numerous (now approximately 130) submitters to the Taskforce, many of whom - in my opinion - have offered very valuable ideas. Indeed, it was striking to me today just how few of those who presented today had actually made formal written presentations to us. I understand from the Secretariat that most (ie with the respective authors prior permission) of the submissions made to us will be publicly posted at the Taskforce's website soon.

The next plenary meeting of the Taskforce is later this month...

Slideset for "An Irish Smart Economy: Aspiration or Reality ?"

2009-10-17T02:18:00.000+01:00

COMREG have posted my powerpoint slideset from this talk last tuesday, here

An Irish Smart Economy: Aspiration or Reality ?

2009-10-13T15:49:00.002+01:00

The text below is from an invited talk I gave this morning to the COMREG (the Irish Communications Regulator) annual conference in Dublin.

It was deliberately a little provocative, to catalyse discussion in the audience.

Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley, is acknowledged as a source of inspiration for high technology. Amongst its spinouts its Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) claims are Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Cisco and Google.

In Ireland, there is some considerable discussion about the role of the Irish Universities can play in fostering the Irish Smart Economy, including in particular the impact of the investment in research and development, and specifically by the Irish State. The State Technology Foresight Fund which SFI currently administers was originally launched in 2000 by Minister Harney as a 560Meuro fund, now at some 635Meuro. The Irish State has invested much in Irish based R&D.

Let's take a closer look at Stanford. Its total operational budget for running the University for fiscal 2008-09 was 3.8Bn$. Of that, 26% came from endowment income and 28% was sponsored research. However the royalties from technology licensing were (just) 62.5M$ - about 1.6% of its operational budget. Their OTL, which has 30 staff, notes that on average it takes 10-15 years between an invention disclosure and any significant royalty income. They have 344 inventions which are paying some royalties, and only 36 of which generated each more than 100,000$; 3 of which generated over a 1m$ each. Cumulatively, since 1970, Stanford has earned 836M$ of royalties, and disposed of its equity holdings in spinout companies to the cumulative value of 364M$ - of which its stake in Google alone contributed 336M$.

Let's look at MIT. In 2008, the MIT Technology Licensing Office (TLO) reports that MIT had a 2.3Bn$ operating budget, of which 1.28Bn$ was sponsored research - about 55% of its income as compared to Stanford's 28%. Of the sponsored research, 85% came from the federal government, including for the Lincoln Laboratory for National Security research. However royalties in 2005 were only about 89M$, and cash from equity disposals in spinouts were just 4M$.

Let's look at TCD, now number 43 in the world university rankings. In 2008, the total operating income was 280M€, of which 71M€ was sponsored research - about 25% of its income. Of the sponsored research, according to the TCD Technology Transfer Office, 84% came from Government agencies and the EU. The total income from royalties in 2008 was €126,000, and cash from equity disposals was nil. 100K€ of the royalty income was for a patent filed in 1994 and licensed in 1998. There were 2 new spinouts, and a staff for most of the year of 7, in line with Enterprise Ireland's technology transfer initiative of a staff member for every 10M€ of research income.

So, compared to the tier one US universities, TCD has perhaps some way to go.

Let's consider some more data. Michael Hennigan, of Finfacts, reports:

"In the last three years, 25 spinout companies have emerged from publicly-funded research in Ireland from a total spend of €1,977m in the Higher Education sector, giving a yield of 1.26 spinouts per €100m. In 2009, the target for the national technology transfer system is 26 spinout companies from expected research expenditure of over €700m {source: trend in HERD expenditure, 1996 -2008 (current prices millions euro)}. This equates to a yield of over 3 spinouts per €100m. This is comparable to spinout activity in some of the world’s leading academic institutes:

Cambridge: 2 spinouts per €320m research income (Source: UK HESA HE BCI Survey 2007 & 2005 Unico Metrics Report) equates to a yield of 0.6 spinouts per €100m
Oxford: 7 spinouts per €263m research income (Source: UK HESA HE BCI Survey 2007 & 2005 Unico Metrics Report) equates to a yield of 2.7 spinouts per €100m
Imperial College London: €294m research income (Source: UK HESA HE BCI Survey 2007 & 2005 Unico Metrics Report ) equates to a yield of 3.7 spinouts per €100m
MIT: 20 spinouts per €896m research income (MIT Reports to the President 2007–2008 & MIT TLO Statistics for Fiscal Year 2008) equates to a yield of 2.2 per €100m"

SFI claims 8 spinout companies so far from its funded research, since 2002. As Michael noted above, Enterprise Ireland (EI), which is responsible for support of indigenous firms and has the overall remit for assisting the commercialisation of publicly funded research, says in the last three years, 25 spinout companies have emerged from publicly-funded research in Ireland.

In the period, 2009-2013, SFI expects to have 30 spinouts while EI is forecasting 26 in 2009

Let's look at some further data.

The population of Silicon Valley is about 2.5M, with an employment pool of about 1.4M. About 320,000 were directly employed in high technology in 2008, in approximately 5,500 firms (of which about 400 were foreign owned), so an average of about 50 jobs per company. A further 150,000 were employed in university and federally supported R&D, and about 50,000 in business infrastructure, including professional services firms, venture capital firms, commercial real estate and so on. So thats 320,000 direct jobs in high tech, and about 200,000 indirectly (including academic and federal R&D) - a ratio of about 1:0.625. Interestingly, only about 6% of households have broadband access exceeding 10 Mbps, compared to e.g. Los Angeles, San Diego or even Sacremento, where much high penetration rates pervail.

So, let's consider this data. If SFI enables university spinouts of 30 companies in the next five years, or Enterprise Ireland nurtures 100 such companies in the same timescales, and if these employ on average 100 people per company (twice as many as the Silicon Valley average, but let's be generous), that's 10,000 smart economy jobs from new spinouts. If every such commercial high technology job is matched by one in business infrastructure or R&D (and Silicon Valley has a ratio of about 1:0.625) then we'ld have double the number of smart economy jobs resulting from university spin-outs, of 20,000.

My colleague on the Taoiseach's Innovation Taskforce Burton Lee, of Stanford University, reported in our inaugural plenary meeting that from 1992 until 2001, 10,530 start up companies were backed by venture capital in the USA. Of these, 903 were academic spinouts - just 8%. So, maybe the good news is that perhaps we should only expect 8% of our venture backed smart companies to be academic spinouts from our higher education sector despite all our State investment in R&D in our academics, and instead 92% from within our smart industry sector itself. So, if Enterprise Ireland does really nurture 100 venture backed start ups from the academic sector, then might we expect a further 1,150 venture backed start-ups from outside of the academic sector ? That in turn would create 1,250 companies with say 125,000 directly employed.

If Ireland is going to build a smart economy which is going to be a sustainable foundation for employment and wealth for the nation, then either Ireland is going to have to do a significantly better job than the US universities and US federal funded research has done to create new companies and new employment in the USA; or a different approach is needed.

Can we do better than the economic efficiency of the Silicon Valley innovation system ? I suspect we would all agree that it would be wonderful just to match the productivity rates of the Valley. So, as well as getting to these standards set by the Valley, we also need to create many more smart economy companies, and many more smart economy jobs, than are currently in our Agency projections.

How are we going to create an inflection point ? Do we invest substantially more funds into academic based R&D ? Do we have the resources to create, as the TCD-UCD alliance proposed, 300 new smart companies ? Is 300 going to be enough - won't we need a 1,000 such companies or more ? Where are all the founders and CEOs and seasoned executives going to come from ? Are Irish innovators and entrepreneurs going to stay in Ireland to initiate their smart economy companies, or will they emigrate and found their companies elsewhere ? How are we going to retain the smart talent we have, and attract and retain even more from overseas ?

The starting point might be to understand why entrepreneurs and innovators, in general, start new firms in Silicon Valley. The basic philosophy of the Valley is that you build a company in order to sell it. While a company can pay you a salary, and maybe a cash bonus at the end of the year if things go well, the primary objective is to make it sufficiently valuable to be bought, and then receive payment for your shareholding. In 2007, there were 272 IPOs from high technology companies in the Valley. There were a further 291 acquisitions, with an average value of 120M$. Wealth creation in the Valley is primarily as a result of company exits, and not from salary and wages.

It is important to understand the culture there: you start a company to create wealth for yourself, your co-founders and your other shareholders. You start a company in order to be able to sell it and get rich. If your company fails, well, you learnt from the experience, and you go ahead and start your next one. And if your company is bought for a large sum of money, you still might start another one; or if not then at least become an angel investor for the next generation of innovators.

If Ireland is to become a world centre for innovation and one of the best smart economies, then it is important to understand why Irish innovators and entrepreneurs would want to stay here in Ireland, and why overseas innovators and entrepreneurs would want to start their companies here in Ireland: the basic reason is to get rich, by building a company to sell it.

This appears a different perspective than perhaps many of us, including I think many in our government agencies, have taken. Our enterprise policy has primarily been focussed on job creation, not wealth creation. Our enterprise focus has primarily been focussed on building companies to scale, rather than building companies to have them sold. Our enterprise policy has primarily been focussed on long term sustainability of companies, rather than rapid turn-over of human talent and investment.

It really is important to understand why company exits are such a catalyst in the Valley. Companies are deliberately built to be sold: investors, including venture capitalists, get a return on their money; founders and innovators make money, and re-invest either themselves or their money or both into the next technology wave; the management team's experience is re-cycled into the next series of start-ups; and managers are motivated to try their own luck themselves next time around by directly founding a start-up.

It is important too to understand why company exits create large companies in the Valley. Global leaders such as Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Google, Cisco and many others emerge because they are able to augment their core capabilities and markets with well selected acquisitions, typically on their door step in the Valley, which then add momentum. If there were no vibrant pool of young start-ups building the next technology wave, it would be far more difficult for global champions to emerge and survive.

Failure is expected. It is critical to fail early - if a particular business proposition is not working out, then in general it is wiser to close it down and try something else, rather than prolong the inevitable demise with additional funding. Failure is common, but so are retries: investors and management learn from mistakes and anxious to use this wisdom to become rich by trying again.

In Ireland, I have been surprised that our agencies do not routinely track the wealth created by our high technology companies. Arguably it is the most critical statistic. Sure, they track State investment; sure, they track employment numbers; sure, they track R&D spend; sure, they track taxes. But they apparently do not track wealth creation, and may even perhaps consider it politically incorrect to do so.

In a recent ad hoc study I conducted using twitter and the internet, I accumulated statistics on the wealth creation from Irish indigenous high technology exits since 2000. I have managed to track down 72 exits (in ICT and life-sciences), with an average value of 30Meuro, and an average life time of 10 years. I myself wonder whether 10 years of enormous effort leading to a 30Meuro exit is where we should be. Surely we should aspire to a more vibrant industry, with a shorter time to exit, and a higher exit valuation ?

So: I suggest the basic challenges we have in building a smart economy in Ireland are: we need many more smart start-ups each year; we need to attract overseas innovators alongside our own; we need to build companies to sell them; we need to avoid those initiatives, ideas and companies which would be difficult to exit; we need to shorten the timescales to exit, and so free up investment and experienced talent for another cycle; and we need to position Ireland as a place where considerable wealth can be, and has been, created.

What then should be the primary role of the Irish State in enterprise policy for the smart economy ? There is clearly a role for a smarter Government procurement policy, which many commentators have discussed. But in addition, I believe we should seek leverage. I am drawn by the story of Taiwan's Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation. TSMC began life as a research initiative within the Taiwanese government's publicly funded research institute, the Industrial Technology Research Institute. TSMC did not innovate new products, nor services: fundamentally it disrupted the global semiconductor industry by an innovation in process. It was spunoff from ITRI by the Taiwanese State and Philips (a 27.5% shareholder), as the world's first pureplay semiconductor foundry, whose business was solely to manufacture chips designed by other companies. The necessary R&D was how to carefully articulate designs for chips, so that third parties could specify them, and TSMC could manufacture them to specification. As a result, small teams of designers - elsewhere in the Taiwanese economy - emerged as new start-ups offering new own new chips (manufactured under subcontract by the partially State owned TSMC), and radically changed the global industry.

A smart economy implies smart State investment. The characteristics of the TSMC initiative were: to identify an opportunity to disrupt an established global industry; to co-invest in infrastructure, in a State controlled joint venture; as a result, to create a distinct new advantage for Taiwanese companies to rapidly innovate and quickly deliver new products, and thus capturing global market share. TSMC was not a "me-too" investment by the Taiwanese government, duplicating an infrastructure into Taiwan that was already available elsewhere: instead it was a world first, and enabled a new generation of Taiwanese companies to race ahead and capture a global market. TSMC fundamentally was an innovation in business process, not an innovation in product or service resulting from advanced R&D.

Which, and how many, of our State investments in R&D have the same potential ? Can we identify shared infrastructure, which the State could own under a JV arrangement and which, were it to be available in Ireland, would disrupt an entire global industry by enabling a cluster of Irish companies to rapidly innovate and quickly deliver new products, thus capturing the global market ?

Ladies and Gentlemen, if we are going to really build a smart economy in Ireland, our current trajectory isn't going to make it. We need to be much smarter, and create an inflection point in our thinking and in our execution. Then maybe one day Ireland really will have a vibrant high technology sector and its own Googles, Ciscos, Hewlett-Packards and Oracles..

Engineers Ireland

2009-10-07T23:35:00.000+01:00

Just a short reminder that I'm running a parallel blog to diary my work this year as President of Engineers Ireland - quite busy and an awful lot going on ;-) Hope to put some more thoughts here in this blog when I eventually get a chance :-)

Innovation Taskforce - second plenary meeting

2009-09-25T20:59:00.008+01:00

We had our second plenary Innovation Taskforce meeting today in Government buildings, from 9.30am-5pm. I reported on the first here.

The meeting today was chaired by Dermot McCarthy (Secretary General Dept. of Taoiseach). No Minister, junior nor senior, attended on this occasion. The CEOs of Enterprise Ireland (Frank Ryan), the IDA (Barry O'Leary), SFI (Frank Gannon) all attended, together with the Chair of the HEA (Michael Kelly). The Secretary General of Dept Education and Science attended (Bridget McManus) but not the Secretary General of the Dept. Enterprise, Trade and Employment (Sean Gorman) who had attended the first meeting.

The meeting started with a summary of the outcome of the inaugural Global Irish Economic Forum at Farmleigh, last weekend, by Joe Hackett of the Dept. Foreign Affairs. A number of the Taskforce members had also attended, and were able to give some further colour to the meeting on what had transpired. I myself had been invited, but unfortunately could not attend due to family reasons. Overall, the forum had apparently been very upbeat in mood and atmosphere. A summary produced by the IMI of the outcomes of the parallel sessions on the friday afternoon was circulated, and a fuller report containing the outcome of the saturday discussions is in preparation.

The meeting then proceeded to the main agenda item and specifically presentations and discussions of the work to date of each of the four working groups. This took a number of hours. The general impression which I gained was that the first two working groups - WG1 on incentives, intellectual property and venture capital; and WG2 (of which I am a member) on commercialisation, technology transfer and convergence - are thinking very closely alike indeed, and in particular focussing on an innovator-centric approach. By innovator-centric, we mean that everything we consider (agency support and co-ordination, tax, R&D, intellectual property, angel investment and mentoring, venture capital funding, exit mechanisms, etc) must all be in the context of how to make innovators successful. By innovators, we include not just founder innovators for start-ups but also innovators within the multinationals operating in Ireland and indeed also within the public sector; and not just Irish resident, but also attracting innovators into the economy from overseas. By innovation, we include not just innovative new products for the global market, but also likewise innovative new services and business processes.

WG3 - on achieving the innovation island - is focussed primarily on marketing the nation, and included today a presentation by the IDA on their new branding campaign to promote Ireland, particularly for the USA market. WG4 - on the international innovation hub in Dublin - is at this time primarily focussed on the implementation of the TCD-UCD Innovation Alliance, although Dermot McCarthy noted that this should serve as a template for other similar initiatives nationwide.

We also had a short discussion about exemplar projects to illustrate Ireland as an innovation economy. Personally I very strongly feel that any such initiatives which are supported by any public investment should be focussed on maximal leverage for the Irish economy, so that clusters of new companies and initiatives can be catalysed for the global market, by smart, insightful and disruptive State intervention: we need to create inflection points for growth.

We had a short discussion about public engagement. To date, some 92 submissions have been received in response to our public invitation for suggestions and comments. Many of these contain some excellent, and thoughtfully articulated, suggestions. In addition there are a number of cognate taskforce initiatives being undertaken by the government, including for R&D by DETE; the green economy by both DETE & DCENR, and higher level education review by the DES. We are considering how we may further engage with these myriad stakeholders and submitters, possibly via one or more group meetings.

We also discussed how best to continue to engage with the public at large, through continued press and media interviews and opinion articles; and in due course nationwide, ideally apolitical, public dissemination. We are, naturally, particularly conscious to do so in a highly cost effective manner.

Our next meeting is at the end of October. The four working groups (WGs) are continuing their work, but also are being facilitated by the Secretariat to clarify on what we all agree on at this stage, and also on what we at this point do not yet have a common view. Equally, a table of contents for our final report (due in December) will be drawn up by collaboratively by the chairs of the WGs, and some initial drafting work begun, before we next meet.

Overall, I felt today was refreshing and honest, and I was actually encouraged by our progress despite the large size of the group. A tremendous amount of effort and time is being devoted by members of the task force, with a large number of meetings and discussions engaging a very wide audience at home and overseas. All of this work is being carried out pro bono, and I am heartened by the commitment of all despite the very challenging national circumstances.

Irish Technology Exits 2000-2009

2009-08-18T18:06:00.014+01:00

As part of the work for the Innovation Taskforce, I was interested to see a survey of all Irish technology related companies since the start of the decade.

I tweeted #itaskforce and asked whether anyone had seen one. Joe Drumgoole, a friend of long standing, was kind enough to share a list which he had put together, although his list is primarily ICT companies and excludes the life sciences. A few other people also kindly replied to my tweet with data for some specific companies.

The Irish Venture Capital Association have some excellent data on their web site on venture deals closed in Ireland, and update these on a quarterly basis since the start of 2008. Sadly however, they admitted to me this morning that the IVCA does not itself routinely collect exit data and valuations.

I have approached Enterprise Ireland to see whether they have comprehensive data, and are in discussions with them.

In the interim, I used Joe's data as a starting point and then did a web trawl myself. I also searched the CRO to find each company's start date, so that the age of the company at its exit could be found. My data and list are here as a .pdf file.

Please note that I have not included companies outside the Republic of Ireland (e.g. in Northern Ireland). Please also note that the exit valuations are in euro, not US dollars.

I included IPOs (chiefly UK AIM) as an exit event, although I admit that this is arguable since liquidity of the founders and investors may not always be achieved.

Please also note that some some companies have chosen not to disclose their exit valuation. In some cases I have been able to discover an "undisclosed" figure from other sources. But in some cases, I do not know the exit valuation, and have marked these accordingly. In working out an average exit valuation for any particular year, or for the entire period, I have normalised the "undisclosed" exits to the group average.

I fully admit my data may not be accurate. If you can supply any corrections, or additions, please tweet me @chrisjhorn. Also, I may get some additional data and/or corrections from Enterprise Ireland in due course..

Some top level statistics for you (if my maths and Excel are correct :-). In the period 2000-2009 my data shows there have been

72 exits
with a total value of 2,175M euro
which gives an average exit value of about 30M euro
and an average age of a company when it exits, of 10 years

Some graphs for you:
PS - I also have a list of Venture Capital deals in the Irish Technology Sector, on a quarterly basis since 2008, here as a .pdf file. This is largely from the IVCA data, although not exclusively.

Innovation Task Force - first meeting

2009-07-18T13:11:00.005+01:00

The first meeting of the Taoiseach's Innovation Taskforce took place yesterday at Government Buildings from 10am to about 4.30pm.

As has been noted elsewhere, the taskforce is relatively large. There are representatives of various Government agencies and Departments, and the presidents of TCD and UCD. In addition there are a number of individuals who collectively have personal experience in innovation, enterpreneurship, start-ups, multinationals, academia, and venture financing. The taskforce is chaired by Dermot McCarthy, Secretary General of the Department of the Taoiseach.

The meeting was opened by the Taoiseach, Junior Minister Lenihan, and Dermot McCarthy, confirming the terms of reference and duration of the taskforce. The Taoiseach then withdrew, but Minister Lenihan stayed for the full meeting. It was followed by a presentation by Sean Gorman, Secretary General of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, on a summary of the progress and results to date from the Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation, initiated in 2006, and issues which he perceives at this point. There then followed a joint presentation by Hugh Brady and John Hegarty, from TCD and UCD respectively, on the TCD-UCD Alliance and the aspirations for their Innovation Academy. Next there was a presentation from Burton Lee, from the European Entrepreneurship and Innovation programme at Stanford University, on his perspectives and observations on innovation in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe, as compared to the US and particularly to Silicon Valley. Finally the meeting concluded with assignment of work for the next plenary meeting of the taskforce in September.

The atmosphere was informal, participatory and collegiate. The line of questioning and dialogue was always professional, if sometimes tough.

During the concluding session, four working groups were identified. Further working groups may be needed in due course, and each working group may not be needed for the full term of the taskforce. Every member is assigned to one working group, but is free to participate in others should she or he wish.

The initial four working groups have been asked to submit a summary of their analyses and initial recommendations to the September plenary. The groups are:

Incentives, intellectual property and venture capital: identifying measures to increase innovation, commercialisation and entrepreneurship including changes to incentives, venture capital arrangements and intellectual property strategies. This group is chaired by Anna Scally, an IP expert at KPMG;

Commercialisation, technology transfer and converging technologies, including examining institutional structures for R&D funding delivery, how to maximise commercialisation of research, increase technology transfer and promote innovation in converging technologies: chaired by Mark O'Donovan, of Raglan Capital (and I am a member of this group);

Achieving the Innovation Island - how to position and promote Ireland as the innovation island including attracting entrepreneurs, FDI, international start-ups and private sector R&D investment: chaired by Bryan Mohally, of Johnson & Johnson;

International Innovation Development Hub (Dublin) - supporting the development of the TCD/UCD Alliance including identifying necessary supporting policy measures: chaired by Steven Collins (ex-Havok).

Several of us collectively promoted an open and proactive engagement with the innovation community, both Irish and internationally, and the general public at large. It is likely that a web site will be put in place soon [post script: the web site is operational as at end of July here; in addition the Twitter stream #itaskforce is also now active], which will include all presentations and submissions to the taskforce (including yesterdays). Further, each working group can invite submissions from interested parties, and also has the right via its Chairperson to co-opt additional individuals who can actively contribute to the work. Finally, each member of the taskforce can discuss, at the same time respecting a collegial work ethos and private confidences, the work of the taskforce with the public and media, as appropriate, to ensure the best possible outcome of the work.

I naturally invite any comments, suggestions and submissions via this blog (or directly to me) and will forward them into the taskforce as appropriate.

Astrologists call for less funding of the pure sciences and more funding for astrology

2009-07-07T19:28:00.007+01:00

As our economic recession deepens, leading astrologists are lobbying to have their profession revered by the Irish public and policy officials. Since astrologists have predicted 24 of the last 3 solar eclipses, they clearly could play a major role in influencing Irish enterprise strategy and policy.

In the light of some astrologists incorrect conjectures in 2008 that the Irish economy would have a soft landing from the global downturn, it has emerged that in fact a range of alternative predictions for the recovery or otherwise of the economy were actually made by their colleagues: a U-shaped recovery, a V-shaped recovery, an L-shaped stagnation, a W-shaped double bounce, an O-shaped Groundhog-day stasis, and an I-shaped off-the-cliff collapse. Astrology therefore clearly has the ability to predict any specific actual outcome.

Astrologists have dismissed as naive the insights of a colleague of Laurence J. Peter, a well known educationalist, who noted that "an astrologist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted today didn't happen yesterday".

In view of the importance of hindsight in identifying accurate astrological predictions, astrologists feel strongly that the Government should massively increase funding in the number of PhD students studying astrology. More astrologists implies many more predictions, and some minority of them will then almost certainly be correct. In fact, the more astrologists we can produce, the more predictions we can then make, and the more certainty we can have that astrology will correctly predict the future of the Irish economy. While not all graduating astrologists may actually get jobs in astrology, nevertheless the intellectual property generated by their myriad PhD theses could be of some value in the predictive arts. This in turn could help rebrand Ireland as the land of "saints, sages and savants" which would clearly in turn greatly increase foreign direct investment as multinationals flock here to understand what the future holds.

Some astrologists are apparently deeply concerned by the Government's current policy of fostering research in the pure sciences, engineering and mathematics. As a soft social science, astrology is clearly under threat from the more pure analytical approach which hard science can provide. Hard scientific approaches could damage the astrologists innovative speculations, and hinder the emergence of a smartly forecasted economy.

Investment in astrology would also help staunch the growing unemployment rates. State investment in astrology would clearly create jobs. "Astrology is extremely useful as a form of employment for astrologists" claimed John Kenneth Galbright.

His colleague and well known economist John Kenneth Galbraith strongly supports the role which astrology could play on our economic recovery: "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable".

Engineering Engineers

2009-07-03T16:13:00.002+01:00

Posted my talk this afternoon at the Engineering in Context symposium here.

Its main focus is the impact of the internet on education and teaching; and the role of mentoring and coaching by professional engineers to young engineers.

Engineers Ireland - new blog

2009-06-14T21:52:00.003+01:00

Just a note to say that I've started a new blog specifically devoted to the next 12 months as President of Engineers Ireland.

I'll keep this blog for musings, opinion pieces etc, of a more general nature....

Boxing above your weight

2009-06-09T19:18:00.003+01:00

I reproduce below an invited keynote talk which I gave this morning at a seminar organised the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre in University College Cork, on the general topic of entrepreneurship and start-ups.

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Exactly twenty years ago, American Airlines and Hewlett-Packard Corporation took an initiative in the global software industry to interconnect distributed software applications. The initiative rapidly gained momentum, with all major software suppliers - with the sole exception of Microsoft - quickly joining. Yet by 1996, a small company from Ireland, IONA Technologies, was a widely recognised world leading supplier of products to interconnect distributed software applications, ahead of such major vendors as IBM, Oracle, HP, Microsoft, Digital and Sun. As a result, IONA had major customer contracts with companies such as Motorola, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Lufthansa and Hong Kong Telecom. How can a relatively small player punch way above its weight ?

Sean Baker, Annrai O'Toole and I co-founded IONA in early 1991, as a spin out from the TCD Computer Science Department. We had been working together on how best to interconnect distributed software applications for over a decade, in part using collaborative research funding through pan European R&D programmes made available by the European Community in Brussels.

In forming a company, I fervently believe that it is so important to share the inevitable stress that results with business partners whom you mutually trust. There are times when you become excited and enthusiastic, and others when you become anxious and overwhelmed by the challenges ahead. Simultaneously, you are trying to relax with your social partner and your family. Carrying all these excitements and burdens from your business can be massively stressful, and the responsibility which you personally feel to your staff whom you have recruited, enthused and motivated and led is onerous.

I strongly advise that you should consider having a close business partner with whom you can share your concerns and excitement, and who will share theirs with you. Between you both, or all, balance will be established and the company kept on an even keel. But equally, I strongly advise not to mix your business partners and social partners: the stress of building a business should not destroy your social life, and you have to somehow keep a balance. Your business is a long term challenge, and if you cannot manage your emotional commitments for the long term, your social life will become damaged.

We started in 1991. A fact we were forced to accept early on, and after some wasted effort, was that we were not going to get very much external funding. Ireland at the time was in a recession. The Irish stock market was low; an Irish technology company, Memory Ireland, had just failed; and Guinness Peat Aviation had just had its international IPO pulled by its founder Tony Ryan. There were few venture capitalists in Ireland, and they were not very interested at all in technology companies. There was the Business Expansion Scheme, but investors wanted bricks and mortar, such as hotel extensions, not technology companies. The banks were not lending to most people, least of all technology companies. Enterprise Ireland did not yet exist. The IDA was focussed on foreign direct investment, and we in IONA were memorably accused of "not playing at Croker".

So, funding was not going to happen fast, if at all. Thus, based on our own initial personal investments of 1,000pounds each, we started our company. Our initial focus was consulting and contract work, doing anything profitable and manageable. We pushed the profits back into building our first innovative product, which we eventually launched over two years later in San Francisco, having grown by then to just under a dozen people based in Westland Row in central Dublin. We never had angel capital, nor venture capital.

Another fact which we accepted early in our project was that we would have to think global. The population of Ireland is just over 4 million people. The population of greater Birmingham in the UK is about the same. In my experience in the software industry, very few Irish organisations, least of all any of the numerous cogs and agencies of the Irish State sector, which in turn are so diligently overlooked by our Dail Public Accounts Committee, will buy anything at all unless it has first been absolutely proven elsewhere - well, preferably in the UK at least. The UK folks also do not buy anything very much nowadays unless there has been success elsewhere in Europe and with global brand name (usually as a result, US multinational) suppliers. In turn the EU, and Asia too, do not buy much without first talking to reference customers within the USA.

So, your first priority in the presence of little interest from potential customers in Ireland should, in general, be the USA. Since the US economy is so competitive, you can find early adopters there who will be prepared to purchase your products and services, precisely because if they do so, and if what you have is as good as you claim, then they will have a step advantage over their own competitors in their own market. You can find early adopters in the USA; in general in Ireland you can only find laggards after the mainstream has already adopted. The EU, to the extent that it is a common market at all, is a mainstream market, with relatively few early adopters.

So, in general to punch above your weight, you first need to have a few wins in the USA. Then the rest of the planet may believe you are a credible player.

An obvious consequence of thinking global is of course that your commercial offering must be sufficient competitive to play on a global stage. In larger markets than Ireland, such as the UK or France or Germany, some companies there have been able to build a strong domestic presence before, if indeed ever, considering international markets. This can be a dangerous strategy for a technology driven company: when you eventually "go over the top" you discover competitors elsewhere with similar products. Even worse, a foreign player with a similar offering may enter your own domestic "trench".

A paradox resulting from the small and open Irish economy is that Irish technology driven start-ups have to think globally first, not later; paradoxically this is an advantage, rather than weakness, since your offering must be sufficiently competitive "when war is declared". If it is not, you will quickly find out so and not waste further time, energy and investment, but instead revise your approach.

Timing is everything. If you are the first player in the market, the first to enter the ring, most people will you ignore you: you are puny, and they do no want to depend on a single small supplier. But if you are slow to enter the market, the winners in the market have already been established. You need to enter the market alongside other early entrants, but with an innovative offering, and catch and surf the wave as it builds.

And as you know, a leader is often last recognised at home. If you want to punch above your weight, you have to be seen at the same boxing venues as the big boys.

I distinguish between entrepreneurship, discovery, invention, and innovation. Scientists discover what already exists around us, and helps us understand how these things came to be.

Entrepreneurs create new businesses, often taking some personal financial risk to do so. But almost all entrepreneurs copy business models which others have already tried and tested elsewhere: there tends to be a "me-too" approach in which the entrepreneur realises an opportunity in a specific (usually local) market in which success from other similar markets can be duplicated. Rare are the entrepreneurs who bring entirely new offerings to the global marketplace.

Inventors devise new creations, but these may not necessarily be commercially attractive.

Innovators however start from a deep understanding of the current practices, business models, product offerings already in the marketplace, and then move on to consider how these could be challenged and improved. Innovation extends current systems in interesting new ways; but the starting point is always what is already in the market today.

Innovators spot gaps in the market. But, the critical question is then whether there is a market in the gap ? An insightful analysis results from asking whether practitioners and customers are dissatisfied with the current offerings on the market. Customer complaints are a wonderful source of market intelligence for innovators. A market will certainly exist in the gap in the market if existing customers can easily transition to a new offering. How easy will it be for the existing market to transition to your new innovation ? Can it be a natural transition, without requiring customers to extensively re-train ?

If you are going to punch way above your weight, make sure that the audience can adjust to your arrival on the scene.

One strategy to enter the global market is to consider whether you can exploit the international standards movement. In Europe, this approach has institutional support since the European Union is committed to harmonising the market as much as possible via common standards. You may as a result find support for your innovation from surprising quarters. Naturally you must conform to regulatory standards, but in most markets there are in addition industry standards, or de-facto ways of doing things. Furthermore, it is considerably easier to encourage the market to investigate your new offering if it already follows the usual norms of the market, rather than being a proprietary non standard approach. However doubters - a potential investor perhaps - will always be puzzled about how can you possibly introduce an innovative offering if it follows standards in the industry - surely standards inhibit innovation, and surely they prevent you from capturing your market through lock-in and a patented, protected approach ?

In my experience, market entry approaches which protect a new offering by making it proprietary hinder market adoption by customers. There is a potential tension: on the one hand barriers to entry, to prevent other suppliers competing with you; on the other, barriers to adoption, which slow down customer adoption. Are those barriers to entry which your potential investors are so keen about, also going to be barriers to adoption for your potential customers ? If so, re-think: ideally you need low barriers to adoption, and high barriers to entry (there is an obvious 2 by 2 graph here..).

Lowering barriers to adoption can of course support a strategy which disrupts the market. But the key point in a disruptive strategy is that you are disrupting the established suppliers and players in the marketplace, but not disrupting the customers. On the contrary, you want to ensure the transition to be as smooth as possible for the customers.

I used part of our story of IONA as a case study in strategic use of standards to build challenging barriers to entry and low barriers to adoption, at a seminar recently hosted by the National Standards Authority of Ireland.

If you are going to punch way above your weight, you probably should be seen to play by the rules of the game accepted by the audience (your customers), and not be a renegade threatening to break their system.

Apart from using standards, another strategy for market entry is what I call the BMW 1,3,5,7 approach. A new customer likes the look of BMWs, but can only afford a series 1. Later, she trades it in and buys a 3 series. As she becomes more senior, she buys a 5 series and maybe eventually even a 7 series. The series 1 is in some sense a trojan horse ultimately to a sale of a 7 series. As you reflect on your innovation, could it be tiered into an entry level edition, a mid range, and a top of range version ? These should all be compatible of course, with each subsequent edition adding value over the earlier ones.

Then, you should make the barrier to adoption for your entry level edition as low as possible, because you know you can afterwards "up-sell" some proportion of your customers to your more advanced offerings. In fact, get as many entry level editions out there as you possibly can, the more the better: each one of them is a qualified marketing lead for your more advanced offerings. It is noteworthy that some technology companies go as far as to in effect offer their entry level editions even for free: this is a strategy used by some software companies working with "open source" technology and who create up-selling opportunities as a result.

If you are going to punch way above your weight, distract your opposition with feints and light-weight plays, before hitting very hard with your heavy-weight blows.

So, you have considered barrier to adoption issues as you reflect on how your productise your innovation. But how can you, as a small team with an innovative new offering reach into and then lead the global market ? Even if you initially focus on the US market, how do you enter that market from a small country on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean, from the perspective of the USA, and almost certainly with limited financial resources ?

One approach is to license your innovation into established suppliers, exploiting their global channels and brand identity. You naturally may find yourself having to limit your licensing agreements to a small number of, or even just a single, established players since they may well not wish your innovation to end up in the hands of their competitors. You may well be able to play them off against each other, creating an auction situation: however in so doing, you are diminishing your value, since now all the established players will be aware of your new innovation. Thus if they are prevented from licensing it themselves and know a competitor is likely to have it, they will work to find a counter-offering to what you have created. I thus caution against being overly aggressive in orchestrating a bidding war.

If you have thought through a tiered bundling of your innovation - a BMW 1,3,5,7 approach - then in turn this creates the possibility of licensing just the entry level editions to your partners, reserving the higher valued editions to yourself. You can then use your partners as a profitable marketing engine, handing over to you highly qualified marketing leads who want to buy your more sophisticated offerings.

Alternatively, you may be able to structure your innovation as a chassis, and offer different derivative products based on the same platform. A Volkswagen Beetle, Golf and Audi TT share the same platform: from the manufacturing perspective, they are similar cars. Can you offer a derivative product to different players in the market ? Can you achieve economies of scale, as a small company, by extending your core offering with simple customisations and veneers of what underneath is actually the same technology ?

If you are going to punch way above your weight, in whose interests is it going to be for you to be successful ? How can you align your interests with theirs ?

In addition to, or as an alternative to, licensing to established players, you may consider entering the global market directly. It can be difficult to get established players to take your innovation seriously, and perhaps not worth their effort to license from you, bake into their product portfolio, globally brief their own sales and marketing teams, and educate the market about what you created. It can also take a considerable time, and considerable negotiation to get a licensing deal in place. It can also take considerable time to begin to see license revenues accruing back to you, unless you can perhaps negotiate a "pre-pay" agreement.

Even if your ultimate objective is to use licensing to third parties as your central "go to market" strategy, it may thus make sense to reach over established players and enter directly into the market yourself. Rather than "pushing" your innovation at the major players, you can instead "pump prime" the market for them and create "pull" from the market for what you are offering. In turn, the established players may become more interested in your innovation, and become interested in licensing from you.

The key is to reduce the barrier to adoption, and make it as easy as possible for customers to adopt your offering. A tiered offering makes sense, particularly if your entry level edition can easily be adopted by the market. It makes a lot of sense to offer trial evaluations of your product, allowing a potential customer to "kick the tyres" before fully committing.

It may even be possible to offer your entry level edition without having a physical sales presence: in IONA we sold from Dublin into the USA for some considerable time before we opened a permanent presence. With free phone numbers - 1800 numbers for example - email, skype, twitter and so on it becomes possible to serve a market without a physical presence, provided your price points are reasonable. It is important though to be always available to help customers and prospects: this means staffing your office to take account of the time zones.

It is important to ensure that your offering is sufficiently well productised that it will work well "out of the box". This is of course critical for trial evaluations of your offering: your offering is being tried out, neither you nor your staff are physically on site with the potential customer, and your prospective customer will have limited time. If your product does not "wow" the prospective customer within the first ten minutes or so of it being taken out its box, you've probably lost the opportunity. Your offering must thus be very straight forward to use, and obvious in its advantages over to whatever the prospective customer is already accustomed.

If you are going to punch way above your weight, you can psyche out your opposition with absolutely awesome initial impressions.

So, you have managed to pump prime the market and sell some of your entry level editions, by a variety of strategies. You have a customer base, and word is spreading. Some customers want to buy more, and you need to scale your organisation. Some customers want to buy more, but their finance department and company executives are asking for details of your finances, particularly your balance sheet. If they are going to use your offering as part of their own important business initiatives, what confidence can you give them from your balance sheet that you will still be around in a few years time ?

You really do now need some external investment. You need to become a credible supplier, one that not only has great innovation, but is financially stable because it is well backed.

Of course, by now some of the venture capital firms may be waking up to the fact that you are beginning to be noticed by the industry. If you are lucky, perhaps the Irish state support agencies wake up too, and even though they have little enough money themselves, they are interested in investing in prospects with momentum. So, deals are there to be done.

However, before courting the VC community and the State agencies, there are other funding options. If you can find an industry partner to invest in your company, then you may end up with a better position. An industry partner may be one of your existing customers, who wants a stronger relationship with you. It may be a channel partner, a major reseller or distributor. Or it may be a major brand name multinational player in the global industry, who is already licensing, or is interested in licensing, aspects of your technology.

The advantage of an industry partner investing in your company is the instant credibility their brand name brings to you in the market place, and in my view ahead of VC funds or nurturing by the Irish State. An industry partner can also bring you further channel access, a deep knowledge of the global market and industry, and considerable strength to your Board of Directors. On the other hand, choosing an industry partner as an investor clearly aligns you strategically with that player, and makes it far harder to work and partner with their own competitors. There are therefore tradeoffs, but I would urge you to carefully consider whether the endorsement of an industry player may enable you to box further above your weight than investment from non-aligned investors such as VCs.

A further factor which you should consider is the timescales of, and likely exit events for, your investor. In general, a industry player who invests in a small company will do so for much more than just the pure financial return on investment motives of a VC, and will do so with a more flexible timescale than the typical 5 or 7 year terms of a VC fund. An industry player may therefore be a more benevolent investor, provided there is a clear understanding of the business relationship and expectation involved.

A trade investor need not necessarily limit your exit options. While clearly there is a possibility in due course of selling your entire company to your industry investor, other exits may be possible, particularly if these are negotiated in principle at the time of the investment by your trade player. In the case of IONA, Sun Microsystems invested 600KUS$ in December 1993. In February 1997, they sold their investment at our IPO, for over 60MUS$.

If you are going to punch way above your weight, then think beyond the obvious promoters: how can you add to the strategy of an established champion ?

The biggest challenge in punching above your weight will inevitably not be analysing and deciding on your business strategy and various tactics, but in building and growing your team. I have already stated that I feel it critical to share the responsibility of leadership with one or two close business partners. However in addition, as your organisation grows from a dozen people, to fifty people, and to a hundred and more, how is it to be structured and operated ? As you build your operations not only to be in Ireland, but open overseas front office and indeed back offices, what is the reporting structure to be ? As you move from employing people in Ireland, to a multi-cultural multi-lingual multi-location team, how do you ensure everyone knows what they are supposed to do ? It was not too bad managing one or two enquiries a day when you were small - will your company be as professionally responsive to its customers and prospects once you have over 200 people in several locations ? How do you preserve your company values and culture ? How do you ensure that you are no longer reliant on one or two heroes and "goalkeepers" in the company to handle exceptional events, and are no longer vulnerable to any specific individual leaving your organisation to work elsewhere, or even for the competition ?

Working and defining your strategy is fun. But putting it into practice can be difficult, although it should also be fun. The key, I believe, is ensuring that everyone knows the part they play and the importance which you place on them specifically in the organisation as a whole.

As I implied at the outset, the most fundamental challenge you face in building your company is finding and retaining the right people. Your business partners and your staff are the foundation for punching way above your weight, and executing the strategy which you devise.

Engineers Ireland: my start to my Presidential Year

2009-05-29T08:26:00.004+01:00

I was approached by John McGowan, former President of Engineers Ireland, back in 2007 and asked "Chris I know you're very busy right now, but what will you be doing in two years time ?". So, I signed up to be put into the pipeline of Presidents for Engineers Ireland, and last night my twelve months started. Martin Lowery (ex IDA and Coilte) will take over from me this time next year, with PJ Rudden (MC O'Sullivan, Bord Gais and now RPS) takes over from Martin in two years time.

I attach below the inaugural speech which I gave last night at the headquarters of Engineers Ireland. Apologies for the length! The main points are:

Thanking my colleagues.
Innovation now being Ireland's highest strategic priority: in my view, innovation is rather different from invention, and is also not limited to scientific and technology discovery.
Regret that the national transition year scheme appears to be being diminished, since it will reduce discovery, innovation and team work with our young people.
Engineers Ireland to take an initiative on the teaching of higher level mathematics, applied mathematics and pure sciences in our schools.
Increasing Engineers Ireland's recent initiatives to assist unemployed Members.
Opening up Engineers Ireland to a much broader membership:

Opening up full membership of Engineers Ireland to ordinary bachelors degree (level 7) graduates of accredited engineering courses, in addition to honours bachelor degree (level 8) as at present;
Opening up full membership of Engineers Ireland to level 7 and level 8 graduates from "cognate" courses in mathematics and sciences, provided that the individual is in practice working in an engineering discipline.

Chartered Engineering status for graduates from 2013 will require masters (level 9) education, or demonstrated experience equivalent to masters level.
Encouraging and frankly expecting most, if not all, faculty members of universities and institutes of technology to become Members of Engineers Ireland, and ideally Chartered Engineers.
Engineering is an altruistic profession, serving society. Engineers have a duty to articulate concerns about the safety, health and welfare of society
Engineers in Ireland today have concerns over infrastructure issues relating to water, broadband, roads maintenance, and strategic vulnerability of national electricity supplies and grid, amongst other issues.
Activities in Ireland in any engineering discipline - such as civil, mechanical, electrical, bio-medical, software, petrochemical... - which impact, or could impact, the safety, health and welfare of individuals or society should be regulated so that approval is required by a Chartered Engineer. Engineers Ireland will push for regulation, and may in the short term initiate a voluntary disclosure and public register of projects which have been duly approved.
Ireland has suffered severely from governance failures in various sectors. Engineers Ireland already has a strong code of ethics. There is currently no national embracing legislation for good faith reporting. Members who in good faith report concerns about their employer or client, or even another Member, concerning the safety, health and welfare of individuals or society, and who subsequently feel inadequate action was taken or even worse that they were sanctioned, can bring this to the attention of Engineers Ireland which will if necessary defend such a Member.

The full text follows:

“Distinguished Guests, Fellow Members of Engineers Ireland, Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends,

I want to sincerely thank you for choosing me as your President for 2009-2010. It is an extraordinary honour. I give you my commitment to represent this great Institution to the very best of my ability.

I would like to thank our outgoing President Jim Browne for the example which he has set for me, and for the leadership he has given throughout the past twelve months. Jim focused his Presidential year on Engineers Ireland driving the "move up the value chain" for our economy, and promoting the career opportunities for young engineers in our society. Jim provided insightful leadership at both our Executive and Council meetings, as well as having an extraordinary personal commitment to being available to our Membership, our Regions and Societies, and to representing Engineers Ireland overseas, whilst all the time carrying the heavy responsibility of leading NUI Galway. Jim, you have set me a very challenging level to try and attain.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my fellow members of the Officer Board, namely Jack Golden, Martin Lowery and John Power for the wonderful work which they have done for Engineers Ireland and the contribution they continue to make to our institution. I warmly welcome PJ Rudden as incoming Junior Vice President. I would also like to single out John Power, and his decisive commitment and sheer determination; this was John’s second full year as Director General of Engineers Ireland, and I very much look forward to working closely with him in the twelve months ahead.

Today we say goodbye to past president Jack Golden. Jack made an outstanding contribution to the work of Engineers Ireland, particularly in developing our sense of leadership as Engineers. Jack oversaw the transition of Director General from Kevin Kiernan to John Power in September 2007. Jack also saw the momentum behind Continued Professional Development build towards 100 accredited companies: in fact under Jim's leadership, we have now reached 112 organisations, with IT Carlow recently accredited and being our first third level organisation to do so. As Jack noted in his Presidential Address, the ability of individual Engineers to develop leadership skills as part of their Continuing Professional Development, combined with the ability to innovate and develop technical solutions, singles out Engineering as a major contributor to ensuring the sustainability of this planet, and to improving the well-being and prosperity of our society. Jack - thank you for your tremendous contribution. We will miss your insightful advice and calm determination - as well as your humour.

I take up this Presidency at a very interesting time for Engineering in Ireland. Our country has up until the recent past been the envy of many of our overseas colleagues as our Celtic Tiger economy surged ahead. Now however we are facing the most serious challenge to our economy, and to a sustainable prosperity, since the foundation of the State.

Since the 1960s, Ireland has chosen international trade as its key national focus, ultimately making our country one of the most openly traded economies in the world. However since 2004, we have changed some of our emphasis to domestic demand, driven by cheap debt financing in the Euro zone. Although our construction industry has underpinned our recent economic growth until just a few months ago, it has largely focused on domestic opportunity, in publicly funded infrastructure, commercial property and domestic housing. In my view our construction industry now needs to more proactively consider export growth while retaining appropriate domestic capacity, using the skills we have gained at home to bring new techniques, processes and skills to the global market.

Our pharmaceutical, medical device and information&communications technology industries have been underpinned by foreign direct investment, and are of course export oriented. However in our multinationals and indigenous firms, we need to be more proactive in supporting and nurturing innovation with the global market as our clear objective measure of success. Our private sector investment community, both institutional and high net worth individuals, have recently largely been focused on domestic construction and overseas property speculation, rather than investment in innovative projects with potential for the global market. Our innovators, whether start-ups or spin-outs, have found it challenging to raise their necessary funds.

A sustained emphasis on innovation for the global market should be our highest national priority. Innovation need not only be as a result of scientific and technology research, but also arise from insights in process improvement and service delivery, and in many different sectors of our economy. Innovation for the global market will yield sustainable employment. The alternative, of instead focussing upon job creation as our highest priority and ahead of innovation, is susceptible to employment only for short term, and at risk from the subsequent migration of those jobs to more advantageous foreign locations.

Ireland has benefited from our foresight of low corporation tax. It is now by no means certain that corporation tax advantages can continue to be a primary catalyst to jobs in Ireland, with pressure from both our European colleagues and from national employment priorities within the USA. While using corporation tax to our advantage for as long as possible, it is clear we need to move on and to emphasise a replacement to our strategy of tax competition: in my view, that should be innovation for the global market.

Our scientists discover what already exists in the world around us. Our entrepreneurs build businesses, sometimes taking personal fiscal risk, but often mitigating that risk by adopting business models which are already proven elsewhere. Inventors yield new ideas which did not previously exist. However, innovation lays the strongest foundation for export driven success. Innovators put new ideas into practice, bringing new products, new services and new business models to the global market. Innovation must be our highest national priority.

In Engineers Ireland, we already celebrate the most Innovative Company of the Year, the most Innovative Engineer and the most Innovative Student of the year.

Innovation is now absolutely critical to our future prosperity. It is important that we nurture an innovative culture in young adults. I am therefore disappointed to learn that our Department of Education and Science is reputedly reducing support for the transition year. The transition year has evolved to become one key opportunity for young adults to experiment and innovate in group, rather than in just individual, settings. I believe that Ireland will be poorer for this decision.

Last week, I had the honour of awarding the Engineers Ireland annual award for Science, Engineering and Technology Awareness to Jim Cooke. Jim is a teacher at Synge St CBS, and has had a remarkable record of wins, both overall and by category, by his students in the BT Young Scientists exhibition, especially those from the transition year. Indeed, Jim has just returned from Nevada where Andrei Triffo, this year's individual winner for his project "Infinite Sums of Zeta Functions and other Dirichlet Series" has just been placed third worldwide. However, in his acceptance speech, Jim noted the diminishing availability of honours leaving certificate mathematics, applied mathematics and physics at many of our inner city schools and indeed nationwide. Honours teaching in these subjects must continue to be prerequisites for professional engineering, and during my Presidential Year I expect Engineers Ireland to take an initiative in this regard.

As well as encouraging more young people to chose Engineering as a career, I believe it vital that we provide every reasonable assistance to any of our Members who face professional challenges. In addition to our Benevolent Fund, and to our encouragement for Continued Professional Development, we are currently unusually faced with the demise of employment prospects for some of our Members especially in the construction sector. During my Presidential Year, I expect that Engineers Ireland will continue to take initiatives to assist unemployed Members, up to and including the possibility of mid-career retraining as Engineers for those sectors which in fact have shortages of engineering professionals, such as for example Mechanical, Electrical and Software Engineers.

In Engineers Ireland, in my view, we have had a rather inflexible and rigorous position in insisting that only graduates from accredited undergraduate degree courses in Engineering may become Members. During my Presidential Year and in fact imminently, I fully expect that Engineers Ireland will offer the full benefits of membership not only to level 7 as well as level 8 university graduates from accredited Engineering courses, but also to level 7 and 8 graduates from cognate undergraduate courses in the physical sciences and mathematics, whose careers now in practical terms position them as Engineers.

Concurrently, Engineers Ireland took a decision in May 2007 that those aspiring to Chartered Engineering status in Ireland from 2013 will not only require professional experience and an interview, as is currently our practice, but also to achieve level 9 (that is Masters level) from an accredited course, or to show competence equivalent to a level 9 standard. This in turn will bring us into alignment with concurrent changes in our peer professional engineering organisations overseas.

Our changes to membership - opening it up to level 7 engineers, and to level 7 and 8 cognate graduates - and our changes to the requirements for Chartered Engineering status - level 9 from 2013 - all present Engineers Ireland with an obligation to further engage with our Universities and Institutes of Technology. During my Presidential Year, I expect a concerted encouragement to ensure that our student Engineers are instructed by faculty staff who are themselves Members of Engineers Ireland, and ideally Chartered Engineers.

Those of us who have chosen Engineering as a profession, whatever our primary degrees, are devoting our careers to service to the public. Our Continued Professional Development programme assists us to maintain current with changes in our vocation. The Engineering profession is altruistic and conscious of its responsibility to society at large. It is important therefore that Engineers articulately voice any concerns to the public.

At this time, Ireland is facing a number of strategic challenges not just to our economy, but also to our infrastructure. The media and the public at large recognise that the quality of our water supplies, and indeed our sea bathing water, is not only impacting our tourist industry, but also the health and welfare of our society. Coastal erosion together with rising sea levels, and changes to our flood plains, are of some media and public concern. A world class national pervasive broadband service is sorely absent, and is commented upon. The National Roads Authority this week have raised concerns about the maintenance of our road infrastructure, including our expensively developed new motorway and dual carriageway network. In addition to these challenges, there are others which perhaps have not yet widely reached public attention. For example, a national strategy for energy security, in the face of our increasing dependency on natural gas and wind together with the retirement of elderly plants, should be a national concern, particularly when investment capital for wind farms is increasingly difficult to obtain, and the controversy at the Corrib gas field project continues. The Commission for Energy Regulation routinely publishes on its web site our national electricity generating capacity versus our consumption, yet few members of the public or media seem to observe the risk of "brown-outs" from these figures. If "brown-outs" were ever to occur then, as an example of one consequence, our Industrial Development Authority and Enterprise Ireland may overnight became dangerously wounded by international perceptions.

In some other jurisdictions, any works which may impact the safety, health and welfare of individuals or the society at large must by law be duly vetted by professional engineers - whether such works be civil, mechanical, electrical, electronic, pharmaceutical, software or indeed of any engineering discipline. In Ireland at this time, no such legislation exists and yet it surely must be in the interest of Irish society that all technology works are professionally evaluated and approved. Regulation of the the Engineering profession in Ireland is, in my view, an urgent issue but I admit one that may not be fully achievable in the limited term of a single year as your President. During my Presidential year, I do nevertheless expect that we will make progress in this regard, including a voluntary disclosure and register of those works, in any engineering discipline, which have been vetted by a Chartered Engineer.

Engineers Ireland has a strong Code of Ethics, which is published on our web site. Unfortunately in Ireland, we have learnt of malpractice and ill judgement in other sectors - for example, in our health care, in our financial institutions, and in both our local and national administrations. The 2006 Lourdes Hospital Report identified a reluctance for professional staff to report malpractice from a colleague in the medical profession. The CEO of one of our major banks has recently publicly apologised to one of his internal auditors who had reputedly been threatened by his employer. We have read of woeful corporate governance at some of our most important commercial organisations, and of regular waste of public funds investigated by the Dail Public Accounts Committee.

Our Government in recent years has introduced some legislation protecting good faith reporting, but on a case by case basis limited at this time to governing child abuse, consumer protection, some competitive issues, ethics in public office and for the Garda Siochana. The Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform is reportedly considering an overall national safeguard framework but has yet to present its deliberations to the Dail and Seanad.

In Engineers Ireland, while protecting the legitimate interests of his or her employer and clients, each of our Members will not, above all else, engage in any activity which he or she knows, or has reasonable grounds for believing, is likely to result in a serious detriment to person or persons. If one of our Members has such concerns and in good faith has brought them to the attention of his employer or client without appropriate response, then he or she can bring it to the attention of Engineers Ireland. Furthermore if an Engineer becomes aware, or has reasonable grounds for believing, that another Member of Engineers Ireland is engaging in conduct or has engaged in conduct which is in breach of our Code of Ethics, and is likely to result in a serious detriment to any person or persons, then he or she is likewise expected to bring this other Member to the attention of the Institution.

Engineers serve the public with very high standards for the safety, health and welfare of society. Engineers Ireland ensures that these standards are maintained. I fully expect that during my Presidential Year, the high ethics of our altruistic profession of Engineering will be maintained. Engineers Ireland will where necessary defend any of its Members who, in good faith, report concerns relating from any engineering works in any sector of engineering for the safety, health and welfare of society, and then are subsequently threatened with sanction.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I sincerely am awed by the trust which Engineers Ireland have put on me as your President for the next twelve months. So much has already been achieved by Jim Browne and our other Past Presidents. I have extraordinary high standards to try to sustain. There is still much to be done, and I sincerely look forward to serving the Profession with humility and dedication."

Ireland must remember

2009-05-23T17:15:00.003+01:00

Earlier this month, the Pope Benedict XVI visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. He said the suffering of Holocaust victims must never be denied, belittled or forgotten. As a child, Pope Benedict grew up in Nazi Germany, and joined the Hitler Youth as was expected of young people at the time. The role of some of the Christian Churches in Germany and in their occupied territories during the Second World War in the holocaust has always been a painful and shameful memory.

In 2008, I visited Rwanda and blogged about my trip. On my first morning, I visited the Kigali Memorial Centre and was particularly saddened by the stories and personal tragedies which children suffered. Some of their testimonies and memories, with photographs, clothing, tools used for maiming and murder, and other mementos are there for us to absorb and to try to understand. The Centre also has a section on genocides which have occurred elsewhere in the world, including those during the Second World War.

This week in Ireland, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was published, receiving widespread international coverage as well as domestic revulsion.

Ireland now is trying to reconcile its international image of generosity and altruism with the fact that Ireland maintained a deliberate, considered, systematic, State and Church collaborative, sustained abuse of its most vulnerable children. Those who carried out these crimes against children were in many cases actively protected against punishment. Not only were children in care violated in the grossest ways, in some cases these same children were equally appallingly treated by those outside their immediate carers, by visitors and when temporarily away from their places of care and on work placement or on holidays with volunteers.

It was slavery. It was torture.

Some of the abused statements are summarised by the Irish Times today.

Sadly, there is now much debate currently in Ireland over to what extent there is an obligation by the Roman Catholic Church and its orders, versus by the Irish State and its taxpayers, for the financial compensation to those who have survived.

As I reflect on what has happened this week, I wonder whether it would now be appropriate for the Irish State and the Roman Catholic Church to together construct a respectful and thoughtful Memorial Centre and permanent exhibition to the victims of child abuse.

I envisage the testimonies of the children, photographs, instruments, statements by adults from various organisations of the State and of the Church, and the history of what has happened all being sensitively presented, with the active agreement of those who have survived. Perhaps too such a Memorial could also respectfully recall the victims of systematic child abuse elsewhere in the world, placing what happened in Ireland in an international context.

I believe that a Memorial Centre for Child Abuse would be one way in which Ireland, and the Roman Catholic Church, may be able to say sorry to our victims, and perhaps help prevent such events from re-occurring in Ireland or indeed anywhere else.

"What I got [in Daingean] was I got a searing pain, I will never forget it in all my life, never. The first of it was the shock. It was shock first of all. Then the second one I got and it wasn’t across my buttocks, it wasn’t across my buttocks, it was right between my buttocks with this strap. I don’t know where they got these straps from but it was specially designed for this, it wasn’t a belt. When they say you got a strap, it wasn’t a like a trouser strap, it was a specially made strap. It was very thick and it was about that length (indicating) and it was shaped for gripping with the hand for hitting you with. The way they used to hit you was they used to hit you between the buttocks and pull it up (indicating). The reason he had the other Brother there was to stop you going forward. He used to put his foot on the back of your shoulder, on the back of your neck and your shoulders. He would put his foot there and hold you so that when you got hit with the strap you couldn’t jump forward with the belt. That strap sometimes, they were expert with it, if he wanted that could come around and hit you in the testicles. If ever you got hit in the testicles, that gives you cramp in your stomach, you double up, you couldn’t even move. I passed out."

One victim summarising his experience in Daingean, paragraph 15.105.

Jim Cooke: a quiet Irish hero

2009-05-23T13:48:00.005+01:00

I attended the third annual conference Science, Engineering Communications and Outreach conference earlier this week at Engineers Ireland. As incoming President of EI next week, I had the privilege of presenting the annual award for Science, Engineering and Technology Awareness to Jim Cooke.

I had not met Jim before, but had heard of his remarkable work. Jim has been a physics and mathematics teacher at the Christian Brothers School in Synge Street, in Dublin city centre, for over 40 years. He also reintroduced the teaching of Applied Mathematics at the school, after it had been absent from the school curriculum for a very long time.

Jim has had an extraordinary success at the BT Young Scientists Exhibition. Two of his students have been outright individual winners: Andrei Triffo last January, for his project "Infinite Sums of Zeta Functions and other Dirichlet Series"; and Ronan Larkin in 2004 for "Generalised Continued Fractions". Jim has also coached two runner-ups, and numerous category winners over the years. Jim had in fact just returned with Andrei from the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Nevada, where Andrei had won third place worldwide in his category.

If you are not aware of the Young Scientists Exhibition, it is important to realise that the projects are fully undertaken by the students themselves, with their teachers guiding and coaching. The students are interviewed at length, particularly those being considered for awards, by a panel of judges, and in depth about their projects. Jim has therefore been able to consistently teach his students with a very high standard of mathematics in a way which the students manifestly fully understand and comprehend the principles involved. He has clearly been a really inspirational teacher.

It is not only sad, but also of very great concern, that the teaching of mathematics and of the pure sciences at the honours level in the secondary schools across Ireland has diminished in recent years. A number of schools, both in the inner city areas and also in some cases outside of the major urban areas, are reputedly no longer offering honours level mathematics to their students, citing government cutbacks, lack of capacity and in some cases lack of interest. In response, I have personally heard from civil servants at our Department of Education and Science that they believe the various teachers' unions are to blame.

It was wonderful therefore to meet Jim, and to find somebody who clearly has achieved exceptional standards and inspiration in his students, in what may have been very challenging circumstances. Jim, in his acceptance speech, was calm, quiet and perhaps a little awed and surprised that he had been so honoured. He also expressed some concerns for the future of the teaching of Mathematics, which I share and which I hope Engineers Ireland can play a role in addressing.

Jim, you are an outstanding representative of your profession and I trust your colleagues nationwide can take heart and warmth from your career and your accomplishments. I wish you well in your imminent retirement and you will remain one of the quiet heros not only for so many people who went to CBS Synge St., but also for Ireland.

Will the real You please identify yourself ?

2009-05-16T14:50:00.004+01:00

It's election time again in Ireland folks, and so roll up and vote for your favourite European MP, local county councillor and, if you're lucky, by-election TD.

It can be a tough choice. Unless you really know somebody well, you don't really know their values, their ethics and their objectives. Is the candidate whom you see arguing in a heated TV interview or debate really like that in real life ? Does that manifesto really reflect the candidate's beliefs ? Is that opinion piece really what that politician thinks ?

Social networks provide political candidates with yet further channels to reach the electorate. Despite the popularity of Facebook, Bebo, Twitter and others here in Ireland, remarkably few of the Irish politicians appear to have embraced the medium. Obama set the gold standard during the US Presidential campaign. But for me, the challenge of the internet is confirming the authenticity of what is presented.

Impersonation and fooling the public is a popular theme in the movies for a very long time. The Prisoner of Zenda presents a mere commoner to impersonate his distant relative and the true would-be king when the latter is kidnapped before his coronation. The Great Impersonation provides a complicated web of intrigue. Kagemusha tells the story of a mere thief posing as a deceased Japanese warlord.

For the Irish public, and I suspect elsewhere, ghost-writing of articles and opinions on behalf of politicians is not uncommon. I have little doubt that a political candidate may argue that given the pressure of work, it makes sense to have someone else - especially a PR specialist - to spin a particular issue in favour of the chosen position of the candidate. With the advent of some political blogs from Irish politicians - including in one or two cases blogs which have only very recently suddenly popped up in the run up to the imminent elections - no doubt the temptation is there to sub-contract the authorship and content of the blog to an appropriately supportive ghost-blogger. Social networking contributions may equally be vulnerable to ghost-submitters working on behalf of a particular candidate.

It therefore is often challenging to read a political blog, or a political social network entry, or a political tweet, and know that whatever is said is actually said by the attributed politician. Perhaps some may feel that my observation is irrelevant: as long as the content is accurately ghost-written to reflect a candidate's true position, and their character and their personality, does it matter ? Maybe I am old fashioned, but actually I believe yes it does matter: if something is written by a named author, then I - naively - expect that that author actually wrote the piece. I am also naturally very happy to read something written on behalf of a politician by some third party who is not a ghost, but openly declares their authorship.

If ghost-contributions on the internet are supposed to be acceptable to the public, then is impersonation also acceptable ?

We laugh when we see comical impersonations of politicians: Tina Fey's impersonation of Sarah Palin comes to mind. But is it OK to laugh when a politician's views are impersonated in a tweet or blog or social network contribution ? If it is OK to be fooled by a ghost writer acting on behalf of a politician, then is it also OK to be fooled by a troll writer undermining a politician ?

Remarkably few of the Irish politicians and candidates have a web presence. Irish politicians and candidates are therefore vulnerable to having their web identity obtained by someone else. It would be all too easy for a well known politician to apparently start not only blogging, but to start socially commenting and tweeting. It is a particular risk for senior politicians, since their views are widely followed including by international media. And if some of the media are lazy in verifying web sources, such as a wikipedia quote from the deceased Maurice Jarre which in fact was invented from UCD student Shane Fitzgerald, then surely our senior politicians are very vulnerable indeed ?

The is of course the law of defamation. But a week can be a very long time in politics, and a defamatory comment (or tweet or blog or social comment) incorrectly attributed to a politician could cause significant political damage, even if the real author was eventually tracked down after lengthy forensic work, possibly over international boundaries, and perhaps ultimately brought to court in some jurisdiction. The political cat would be out of the bag well before then, and the political damage well caused before the author was found.

What if a (apparent) senior politician started tweeting on what "really" was said at important meetings ? Like when Mary Coughlan and Willie O'Dea went to Michael Dell ? Or what Brian Lenihan said about the prospects of an early general election to international bond investors ? Or what Brian Cowen said to Angela Merkel in Berlin on the Lisbon Treaty ?

The web, and particularly the social web, is a wonderful opportunity for politicians to reach out in a very sincere way to the electorate. But it is also potentially a very dangerous tool by which a politician could be severely undermined by opponents or even by naive cynics.

I believe that politicians ignore the web at an extreme peril. They should go out of their way to claim their identities on the web as a matter of urgency, and be brave enough to then use it honestly and ethically to the electorate.

Computer History Museum - Capturing our Innovation

2009-04-15T21:07:00.005+01:00

Computers are designed, at least at the high level, by people. Computers thus in turn reflect human intellect - innovation but also copying, sheer brilliance but also blind shortcomings. Like any engineering discipline, there is much to be learnt not just about technology but also about psychology and sociology by examining the design of computers.

If you are at all interested in computing, you really should visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California.

The museum is hosted in what used to be a Silicon Graphics building, just off route 101, and in fact in which I recall I had several business meetings a decade ago. Now in the foyer is one of two magnificent working reproductions of Babbage's Difference Engine - the other is in the Science Museum, London. Every hour or so, two curators give an enthralling demonstration of how the machine operates, the mechanics and the arithmetic behind it, to calculate values of arbitrary polynomial equations.

But the main part of the museum is a warehouse at the back. I experienced sheer exuberance and absolute awe by the wealth of history laid out in row after row after row. The Z3 of Konrad Zuse - a German civil engineer - is there, the world's first programmable electromagnetic computer built in 1941 at the height of the second world war using 2,400 telephone relays. The 40 rack, each 8' high, 18,000 vacuum tube ENIAC from 1946, which had to be physically reconfigured for each program "load". Gene Amdhal's PhD project, the 1955 WISC - complete with bullet holes (don't ask!). The SAGE real time air defence system from 1955, with the first ever graphical user interface. The bet-your-company IBM 360 - the first machine I used. The NASA Apollo guidance computer which Neil Armstrong had to override just before the Tranquility touchdown in 1969. The wonderful Dec PDP-8, and then -11, upon which I spent many a happy hour. The first 10MFLOP machine, the CDC6600. The IMP, the original backbone of the predecessor of the internet, and on which packet-switching was first built. The first ever computer for the kitchen - the H316 - a wonderfully funny folly. The first hobbyist machine Altair 8800 for which Bill Gates and Paul Allen produced Altair BASIC. Seymour Cray's extraordinary and aesthetic CRAY-1, -2 and -3: using cable as delay lines! The actual very first Apple-1, in a wooden box, built by Steve Wozniak in 1976. They're all there: mercury delay lines, core memories, vacuum tubes, first silicon transistors, first silicon chips, first use of gallium arsenide, huge magnetic disks, first robot arms, first computer mice, it is just so extraordinary, inspiring, and provocative.

I was recently interviewed for a podcast about my huge enjoyment of Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" - IMHO one of the very great books of the computer industry, and written by a lay reader for ordinary mere mortals. I was therefore delighted to see a Data General Eclipse and Digital VAX 11/780 amongst the exhibits, no doubt carefully placed to glare at each other across the aisle.

Sadly though, the museum feels, to me at least, like a cemetery. The entire warehouse has a distinctive smell of stale electronics, and all the exhibits are morbid artifacts, frozen and lifeless in their dusty racks and dull cabinets. Each of them yearns to be powered up just one more time, strains to feel the surge of bits pulsing through its accumulators, registers, de-multiplexers, decoders, caches, and yes switches and lamps.

On my visit, I stayed well after the curator had announced closing time, and managed to corner him. Surely each of these wonderful machines could be powered up again ? Even if the electronics in some cases were now no longer safe and thus a fire risk, why not simulate their operation by judiciously hiding a microprocessor in the background somewhere to cycle through lamp and circuit sequences and bring some of the thrill of these machines back again ? He responded that although this had been considered, there are apparently strongly held views by the trustees that such sorcery would detract from the raw stature of the exhibits, and perhaps demean their creators. In a way perhaps, I do understand: these magnificent wonders and follies of the most innovative and creative industry mankind has ever known now lay sadly but peacefully at rest for ever.

One of the core tenets of the Science Gallery, which I currently chair, is to bring science and technology to life by having researchers and innovators in the flesh present to discuss and explain their work to curious members of the public. A science museum is interesting, and it can be fun to try out experiments yourself. But the Gallery is different: the scientists and engineers are there in front of you, and in many cases can do the experiments alongside with (or even on!) you.

It would be wonderful to have all those inspirational architects and engineers behind the incredible machines in the Computer History Museum rightfully and deservedly proudly present when one visits. Sadly I guess, this is unlikely to ever happen. Perhaps at best there can be video interviews available to try and explain the sheer excitement behind the innovations they each made. Each one of them a master of the particular universe of virtual reality that they had uniquely created.

Whatever about trying to explain the creativity and discoveries made by computer engineers to the public, how on earth would one do it for software ? Yes, I am aware of the interest group on software at the Computer History Museum itself. But could there ever be a Software History Museum, what would it inspirationally show and how would it operate ?

Its perhaps conceivable to consider a Museum, or Gallery, of the history of computer games. Perhaps also of the evolution of graphical user interfaces. But a history, an exhibit, of software in general ?

I think the real story to be told about the history of software is not about programming languages themselves - Fortran, Simula-67, Forth, Lisp, C, Basic, Prolog, Perl, Ruby and so on. Rather it is about the evolution of programming itself: the development of data structures, the unfolding of functional as well as declarative thinking, the interplay between data and logic, introspection, aspect orientation, and so forth. Very best of all, I strongly believe that this story needs to be told plainly and simply so that the world at large can understand and appreciate how software has been evolved as we learn to reflect and begin to understand how we ourselves think and reason and learn.

I can recall after commons (the formal evening meal at my alma mater) having a heated conversation with a Professor of Genetics and various humanities students over coffee. I was the sole technologist. I fervently explained that just as there can be incredible beauty in literature and music, there too can also be extraordinary beauty in the structure of software, these artifacts of the soul and mind. However, it took a trained intellect to understand this. I was of course ridiculed, and left feeling battered and appropriately flamed. But perhaps one day, some truly gifted people will produce a software appreciation, through which mere mortals can too see the wonder, exuberance and awe of great software creations.

Social Newsworking - reflections on the future of newspapers

2009-04-06T15:17:00.004+01:00

A couple of weeks ago on the last Saturday of March, the Irish Times, a popular broadsheet here in Ireland, included a full paper reproduction of the 4 pages of its very first edition, from 150 years ago and launched on the 28th March 1859. It is a fascinating read, not least because the entire front page is given over to advertisements. I also found the style of writing captivating - archaic but nevertheless highly articulate. The editorial contains the opening paragraph:

"The appearance of another Journal in the field on Irish politics demands a brief explanation from its projectors. It will be asked - Where is the room for this new competitor for public favour ? Is there any definite set of opinions which is not already represented in the Irish Press ? From the silly Radicalism of the Phoenix Club to the dense Toryism of the Orange lodge, what doctrine lacks an exponent, what party an organ ? If no deficiency be felt, is the multiplication of newspapers a good, per se, that the proprietors of the Irish Times think fit to add one voice more the existing Babel ?"

The editor, Laurence Knox - who personally signed the inaugural edition - goes on to justify the appearance of the new newspaper as a voice independent of politics or partisismship. Reminiscent of Deng's famous assertion a century later - "No matter if it is a white cat or a black cat; as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat" - Knox goes on to assert "Every year sees a larger and larger proportion of our population indifferent to the manoeuvres of faction...They are anxious for good government, but care little in whose hands the government may be placed".

The contemporary Irish Times commentator Fintan O'Toole recently wrote an excellent assessment of the then national context in which the Irish Times was launched. He believes that Knox's aspirations were perhaps a heroic denial of the political climate, but that from the lengthy perspective of 150 years later, Knox was perhaps not as naive as first imagined.

Ironically the same issue of the Irish Times (on 28th March 2009) also contained a topical assessment of the newspaper industry, from the paper's America based correspondent Denis Staunton. He discussed Maryland's Senator Ben Cardin's initiative to use tax policy to try and save what is left of the US newspaper industry. Cardin is of the view that it is in the US national interest, for good governance and for democracy, that at least some newspapers survive.

Devoting the entire front page to advertising may have worked well in 1859, but with advertising revenue now under immense pressure and readers migrating to free global news sources on the internet, something has to change. Web based newspaper subscriptions in general have not been particularly successful. Web based advertising is a challenging model for newspapers, in the face of Google.

What can be the future of the Irish Times, and newspapers like it ? Perhaps tongue in cheek, last January I responded to a request from the Irish Times for some crystal ball gazing - what was the company to watch in 2009 - by identifying the Irish Times itself! Will the Irish Times, and newspapers worldwide like it, survive in its current form by January 2010 ?

In my view, there are three major aspects of the essential content of a newspaper: reporting, investigation, and commentary.

The role of reporting news and events would seem well fulfilled by the density of the web itself. Timely notification of events can be reported almost by anyone: the use of Twitter by Jim Hanran, an ordinary member of the public, to first report on the crash landing of US Airways 1549 in the Hudson is an obvious example. What therefore does the traditional news reporter bring to the web ? The general answer should surely be honesty: readers are generally attracted to reputable reporting, despite occasional reporters such as The News York Times' Jayson Blair. Honesty on the web is always difficult to certify, but other web based systems leverage reputable participation - eBay auctions come to mind, perhaps also Wikipedia's consensus mechanism. However honest and reputable reporting on the web certainly is not the sole domain of newspaper reporters.

What about investigative reporting ? Most democracies can point to occasions when an investigative reporter brought malpractice to light. The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's exposure of the Watergate scandal is possiby the most renowned. Here in Ireland we still mourn the Sunday Independent's Veronica Guerin, assassinated for her investigative reporting of drug trafficking.

Investigative reporting surely serves the public good. Will our democracies come under threat if there is no longer a business model for newspapers to exploit, and thus no money for investigative reporting ? This thinking seems to overlook the integrity of most members of the public: ethical employees can be appalled by what they see in their organisations, and can and do speak out. Sherron Watkins at Enron blew the whistle on her employer's malpractice. In Ireland, James Gogarty's whistleblowing led to the Mahon tribunal to investigate payments to corrupt politicians. With the internet, whistleblowers can quickly bring concerns to global public attention - India now has several public web sites (eg corruption in india, and whistleblowers) devoted to whistleblowing, particularly following the murder of Sri Satyendra Dubey. Democracy and accountability is probably best supported by well considered whistleblowing processes, which both protect a valid whistleblower but also protect an organisation from inaccurate allegations. Democracy need not rely on the finances of newspapers to underwrite investigative reporters.

Commentary, opinion and analysis is perhaps where great newspapers add most value, separate the significant from the trivial, and correlate patterns to extract observations. But there appears no inherent reason why articulate observation should just be the preserve of a newspaper: the online community and bloggers can equally serve society at large.

Clay Shirky recently blogged that the current business model of newspapers seems doomed, and replacement models have yet - if ever - to appear. Jeff Jarvis argued back in 2005 that saving newspapers is not the same as saving newspaper jobs. Perhaps it really is time to confront the unthinkable: the newspaper, as we know it, may be doomed.

Does the internet really signify the demise of the newspaper ?

Most newspapers do serve the public good. Senator Ben Cardin's Newspaper Revitalisation Act would enable US newspapers, if they so chose, to become not-for-profit organisations, thus benefitting from tax exempt advertising and subscription revenue. Members of the public could make tax deductible contributions to their favourite newspapers. I understand that public service broadcasting is similarly tax exempt in the US. Using the tax code in this way may be an approach, but I do wonder how effective newspapers may be able to operate if they come to rely on regular voluntary donations from their reading public to cover their costs of distribution and of professional staffing.

Are there any other different business models for those online newspapers which do serve the public good ? In Ireland, we have a national license which every TV set owner is supposed to pay to the Government, which in turn is used to support public service broadcasting. Could there be an online tax for public service newspapers ? Perhaps a Government could impose a tax on all internet service providers nationally, since they represent the national access points by the public to the internet: then directly, or via a neutral third party agency - use the money collected to allocate to online public service newspapers. An interesting thought perhaps, but I'm unsure the economics would really work: would internet users really accept what would amount to a personal daily tax of several euros just to support online newspapers ?

Some have given thought to a micropayment model for individual newspaper contributions. This would presumably operate something akin to iTunes: individual newspaper articles could be disaggregated - like tracks from a music CD - and made individually readable and paid for. But a musical track is a marketing teaser to promote itself: if you hear a piece of music and like it, you'll want to hear it again (and perhaps again and again) and so may be tempted to buy it from an online store. A newspaper article is typically by contrast a singular experience: having read it, you are unlikely in most cases to seek to read that particular article again.

As I reflected on the demise of the newspaper, I also reminded myself that a newspaper is a mirror held up to reflect society and the world to the eyes of its readership. It informs its readers about what is happening, and tells them something about themselves and their community, in the terms and ways to which they relate. If newspapers were to disappear due to the impact of the internet on their business model, what could be done on the internet to replace these lost mirrors on society and the world ?

In a newspaper, a selected few contribute articles and news, with feedback from ordinary members of the public filtered through the letters to the editor page. In the internet world, everyone can openly contribute. We can read posts and comments and blogs and emails and tweets from anyone. We can use Google to try and find interesting items, but even then it is easy to get lost in the morass, and perhaps miss what we ourselves find particularly interesting and significant. The specific newspapers we buy by contrast in general do a good job in only presenting articles which we ourselves find interesting and significant, filtering out the mundane, and presenting information and comment which in general match our own particular ethos and values. Any online replacement of a newspaper is going to have to do something similar.

In my view, wiki technology already provides the basis. A wiki is a web site in which not only can anyone read its content, but anyone can also edit the content, as result of Ward Cunningham's work in the 1990. At first this sounds extraordinary - what prevents somebody from editing accurate content and defacing it ? In fact, the answer is nothing, and defacement happens - however, the wiki keeps a record of who edited what, and what was the previous version (and the previous version to that and so on). Anarchists and political pundits can quickly be identified by the community of like-minded readers, isolated from the wiki so that the wiki refuses to accept any further edits from these rogues, and the maverick changes made by these fraudsters are quickly unwound.

The consequence is that the community of bona-fide contributors work together to make the wiki better and better, capturing the best inputs from everyone, and discarding the weaker edits. The system becomes Darwinian - in the view of a specific community, the best survives for that community, and the weakest is dropped. A wiki thus captures the "wisdom of a crowd" - the collective wisdom of a particular community of readers and contributors.

Social networking sites - such as Facebook, LinkedIn and others facilitate loosely coupled communities to evolve. Communities of people with common interests can quickly emerge.

Is it not possible to think of online newspapers evolving to become social newsworking ? A (potentially large) group of people with common interests and ethos could share their reflections on society and the world at large using technology derived from the current generation of wiki support and of social networking. Different social newsworks would of course emerge, reflecting the diverse opinions across societies. Each social newswork would combine - as today's paper based newspapers do - reporting of news and events, including of an investigative nature, with analysis and comment. But unlike a newspaper of today, a social newswork can reflect the wisdom of an entire community of like-minded individuals, rather than just of its editor, its staff and its contributors to its letters pages.

Social newsworking as a concept is not novel. Apart from user contributed newsites such as Reddit and Digg, one of the most interesting from the my perspective is Newsvine. Anyone can write articles, and discuss items submitted by anyone, including by professional journalists, but unlike a wiki cannot update in place previously submitted text. But in my view and as I understand it, Newsvine just aggregates and links articles together, but does not merge and synthesise. Some newspapers - such as The Washington Post and The New York Times - also actively link to internet articles outside of their own web site, and thus attempt to aggregate: but there is no merge and synthesis.

Wikinews is another social newsworking site, and does allow users to edit and update the text of others, just as for Wikipedia encyclopedia entries. However Wikinews itself aspires to offer a neutral perspective, and to be even handed.

My own view is that social newsworking can only succeed if each site in fact does not try to be even handed and neutral, but instead biased towards the ethos and philosophy of its community! Misinformation and sensationalism arguably thrive on sites such as Digg and Reddit because anyone can post, and anyone or small group can contrive to vote specific postings up or down the popularity charts. On the other hand, wiki technology could be used by a group of like minded individuals to ensure that only postings which match their ethos survive the evolutionary editing process. Rather than trying to be all things to all people and thus neutral - such as wikinews - it is probably more pragmatic to instead focus a social newsworking site around a community of like minded people who can reinforce their particular beliefs. After all, in my view, that's what our current newspapers already try to do.

A social newsworking site can of course be a free service to its community. However, an online community of like minded souls is more likely to be a successful opportunity for targeted advertisements, which raises the possibility of an effective and focussed business model. Perhaps the advertisements themselves could even become wiki based, and thus allow the content of an advertisement itself to be updated and edited by the community of its consumers. A social newsworking site could, in my view, have a viable business model if so desired, despite competition from majors such as Google or even Craigslist.

Laurence Knox, the first editor of the Irish Times, saw in 1859 - perhaps pretentiously - that his newspaper would represent a particular section of Irish society, distinguishing itself from others sets of opinions already available in the Irish press, and perhaps severely limiting his market (!):

"On intention, in short, is to make the Irish Times a first rate Irish newspaper, complete in its details, sagacious and consistent in its policy, and faithfully reflecting the opinions of the most independent, intelligent, and truly progressive portion of Irish society."

Social newsworking has the intriguing possibility to combine focussed audiences with a wider democratic reflection on the presentation and analysis of news, than can today's newspapers which are hampered by advertising based and subscription business models and in almost all cases, their shareholder returns to their owners.

Using standards as business development strategy

2009-03-25T17:47:00.003Z

The text below is from an invited keynote talk I gave this morning to a seminar on innovation organised by the NSAI, the Irish national standards coordinating body.

I talked about how in the formative days of IONA, we used the OMG as a vehicle for promoting our technologies and products, and how critical our participation in a standards initiative was for our company.

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Exactly twenty years ago, American Airlines and Hewlett-Packard Corporation took an initiative to develop new standards in the global software industry to interconnect distributed software applications. The initiative rapidly gained momentum, with all major software suppliers - with the sole exception of Microsoft - quickly joining. Yet by 1996, a small company from Ireland, IONA Technologies, was a widely recognised world leading - arguably the world leading - implementor and vendor of these new standards, ahead of such major vendors as IBM, Oracle, HP, Microsoft, Digital and Sun. As a result, IONA had major customer contracts with companies such as Motorola, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Lufthansa and Hong Kong Telecom. How on earth did that all happen ?

Sean Baker, Annrai O'Toole and I co-founded IONA in early 1991, as a spin out from the TCD Computer Science Department. We had been working together on how best to interconnect distributed software applications for over a decade, in part using collaborative research funding through pan European R&D programmes made available by the European Community in Brussels. When in 1989, American Airlines and HP took their initiative which led to the formation of the new standards organisation, the Object Management Group, we followed the developments with interest. One of the first actions taken by the OMG was to issue a world wide call for proposals for technologies which could underpin the new standards. As a direct result of our participation in the European R&D programmes, the three of us started attending the OMG meetings to track the development and discussions about the definition of the new standards.

One of the interesting consequences of the culture of the global software industry is the frankness and openness of talented software engineers. Many experienced software engineers are quite prepared to exchange professional views on particular technologies and products, and even - perhaps especially - those upon which they themselves have worked or are currently working. Simply by engaging and discussing with such individuals who work for software vendors, a perspective can often be reached on the status of strategic initiatives being taken by their employers. Equally, the concerns and priorities for new technology adoption by large end user customers can often be discerned by chatting with experienced software professionals working for such organisations.

By our regular attendance at OMG meetings, we reasonably quickly came to a number of conclusions by late 1990. First, our research work over the prior decade was as advanced as anything that we could perceive amongst the teams working within the world's leading software vendors. Second, those major software vendors who had publicly committed to the OMG were in fact several years away from releasing commercial implementations of the OMG standards, for various reasons. Third, the customers who would use the OMG standards were very keen to have product quality implementations as soon as possible, so as to solve specific business challenges they faced in their operations and markets.

By the summer of 1993, we released one of the first implementations in the world of the new OMG standards, at a major global tradeshow hosted by the OMG in San Francisco. As a direct result of that show, we gained our first commercial customer, SAIC, a major US systems integrator. By early 1994, we had been chosen by Motorola against competition from HP and others, as a key foundational product underpinning the entire ground control systems for their 4B$ Iridium global satellite telephony system. By 1995, we were chosen by Boeing against competition from IBM and others, as a key foundation for the complete re-building of almost all the software systems for the manufacture and assembly of all Boeing airliners, across 18 factories in the USA. By 1997, we completed the fifth largest IPO in the history of the Nasdaq exchange on the basis of our diversified blue chip global customer base, rapid revenue expansion and track record of 24 quarters of profitable growth.

What lessons are there from the IONA experience, particularly as regards Irish companies, and particularly as regards the role of standards ?

I have already alluded to one lesson: working within standards organisations can give you very valuable market intelligence about the strategy and status of your competitors, and of your potential customers.

Clearly, for IONA, standards were an absolutely critical catalyst. A new company can chose to play the standards game, or instead develop its own proprietary non-standard technology. Some companies, such as Tibco and one of our competitors, chose the proprietary route. Proprietary strategies are workable, and help insulate and define intellectual property of an organisation: on the other hand substantial effort is needed in marketing a proprietary technology in the face of standards, including convincing potential customers that re-training their technical staff on a proprietary technology is nevertheless worth the effort.

We chose the standards route. But with standards at the core of your strategy, how do you build intellectual property and barriers to entry against your competitors ?

One important direct consequence of playing the standards game was that our marketing strategy and necessary budget both became much less challenging. The OMG, and major global vendors, were already investing heavily in promoting the OMG standards. Qualification of sales leads became trivial: if the prospect already had an interest in the OMG standards, then we had an interesting offering for them. If the prospect had little or no interest in the OMG standards, we qualified them out of our prospects pipeline. Furthermore, simply by attending OMG events - standards meetings, seminars and trade shows - we had a pool of qualified prospective customers immediately in front of us.

There are two complementary approaches to playing the standards game as a vendor. The first is to ensure that your product conforms to a specific standard. In my view, this is a "me-too" approach: your product conforms to the standard, as most likely do your competitors' products. Conformance to the standard becomes merely just one hurdle for your product value proposition: you will only beat your competition if your product then implements the standard in some sense "better" than anyone else - faster, smaller, lower cost, whatever.

The second approach is to establish, or to play a very strong industry lead in establishing, a new standard. In this way, your own product becomes one of the very first, if not the first, implementation of the new standard. If there are customers out there interested in the potential of the new standard - those attending the standards events and tradeshows and seminars - you can then quickly gain momentum over your competitors who have yet to ship a standards conformant product. Further, your potential customers become more comfortable in working with you as a relatively small supplier and early market entrant, since they know the more established vendors in due course will bring out their own implementations of the standard. However this is not a danger to your business but an opportunity: get a toe hold in a customer account, and show how good your company, your team and your products are.

We took both approaches. We had a very good implementation - both from the technical perspective and business proposition - indeed of the emerging standards; and also we also took a very strong lead in helping evolve the standards. Because we had early adopters - customers who started using our product because it was an early implementation of a new emerging standards - we were able to directly influence the standards with a number of key feedbacks and proposed modifications to improve the standards based on pragmatic field experience. In turn this meant that some competitors who had yet to ship a product implementing the standards, either eventually shipped product which did not implement the latest version of the standards, or delayed their product ship dates while they busily re-engineered their work to chase a set of evolving standards. Furthermore, we encouraged our customers to contribute to the debate: by having customers actually turn up themselves at the OMG standards meetings, OMG began to accelerate the switch from a vendor driven push for a new set of standards, to a customer driven pull, whilst all the time keeping IONA at a focal point. Thus in turn created further obstacles and challenges for our competitors racing to stay current with the latest influences on the evolving standards.

Let me attempt to summarise for you. You can play the proprietary game, and face the marketing challenge of finding customers prepared to invest in non standard products. Or, you can play the standards game, gain market insights and quickly find interested customers. You have then to play the standards game better than your competitors, either by a "better" implementation or by using your technology to define a new standard, or just possibly both. Innovating and building a new standard around that innovation creates an interesting opportunity for you and simultaneously a dilemma for your competitors, as they try to catch up with the adoption of the standard in the market by your customers.

Our experience in IONA shows that it is possible to build a global technology player out of Ireland. Standards were an absolutely critical part of our strategy. I very much welcome the NSAI's excellent guide on good practice in innovation and product development. To paraphrase: yes, Ireland can.

TCD-UCD Innovation Partnership: a cottage industry perhaps ?

2009-03-13T20:18:00.005Z

The Times Higher Education/QS World University Rankings, published in last October, showed Trinity College Dublin breaking into the global top 50 universities, ranked at 49 - up from 53. TCD became the first Irish third-level institution to make it into the elite global top-50 group. The rankings also delivered very good news for University College Dublin (UCD), now ranked 108 worldwide, and up from 177 last year.

Last wednesday, both universities announced an intention to further enhance their world class positioning, by integrating together their fourth level (ie postgraduate) activities, and merging the activities of their respective technology licensing offices into a single unit. The text of the press release is here.

The most significant aspect of the announcement, in my view, is the focus on innovation as an equal core part of their mission as universities alongside both research and education. They have set themselves an ambitious target of creating at least 300 new companies of scale, and of high value, by 2019. They will jointly offer new facilities for pre-competitive research and design, prototyping and process innovation - to help harness and commercialise new ideas, knowledge and inventions. They also promise to prioritise the establishment of a wider support framework of educational, legal, financial, technical, management and marketing capabilities and support needed to set good new business ideas on their way.

I strongly believe that an overall national policy objective should primarily be fostering dynamic young companies based in Ireland. While I believe that foreign multinational investments into Ireland have served us extremely well over the last forty years or so, I fervently believe that sustainable wealth and employment should be based on a vigorous breeding ground of young companies. Perhaps in the past, there has been an over-dependence on relatively rapid creation of employment by major multinational investment, and a sense that our indigenous companies were "not playing at Croker". There was a sense perhaps that the multinationals were the "A" team, and the indigenous technology companies were just a "cottage industry".

In fact, I think that's absolutely right: the indigenous technology sector in Ireland has been pretty much a cottage industry, and long may it continue to be so. We need many many more "cottages". In my view, the indigenous technology sector in Silicon Valley is also in effect a cottage industry. A vibrant community of innovative small companies, each with a relatively short life-cycle, but with re-cycling of its engineers and business leaders, is actually the foundation of Silicon Valley.

If the TCD-UCD partnership is to succeed, I believe it should do so by creating many small innovative companies. I hope most of them don't last too long: a few years each, and certainly less than a decade each. Most of these companies should exit and be bought out, and then both the human capital and financial capital re-cycled into replacement new ventures. By re-cycling, competence, expertise, wisdom, capability, and wealth are all nurtured and grown. A few of these companies may perhaps emerge to become global champions, but fostering global champions should not in itself, in my view, be a primary national strategy. Rather global champions are a by-product of a successful innovation environment.

Its perhaps ironic that an Irish Green Party Minister is in Silicon Valley this week and currently positioning Ireland as the potential Silicon Valley of Europe: I wonder does he agree with me that re-cycling (not of materials, but of human and fiscal capital) is at the core of the Valley's success.

Technology advances, and so a company founded on one exciting new technical development has only a limited window in time to be successful: it - the people and the capital behind it - should then move on. A company which overgrows itself can find itself limited in its strategic options: too small to be a sustainable global top ten player, but too big to be easily acquired.

Stating that our national technology enterprise policy should be akin to a vibrant cottage industry is probably heresy to some! But I believe that it is precisely because of the large number of small, relatively short lived, companies in Silicon Valley that giants of the Valley like HP, Oracle, Google, eBay and Cisco have emerged. These larger companies have emerged for a number of reasons: there are bounteous estate of dynamic young companies to acquire; R&D can be augmented by acquisition; emerging markets can be pump-primed by dynamic young start ups; experienced human capital can be sourced who have lived through at least one successful business expansion; and seed and investment capital can demonstrably work.

One danger inherent in the TCD-UCD announcement is the public perception that innovation is primarily the outcome of University led research. Ordinary mere mortals - not the elite fourth level and PhD types - might not expected to produce new companies of value. There is a further danger that there may be a public perception that a major - no, the major - reason for tax payers funding the universities is precisely to create new companies and new employment.

On the contrary, I believe that in principal anyone can be innovative. In my view, the primary source for innovation is intelligent insight into a market opportunity. Thus innovation is primarily (not solely of course) led by market intelligence: a deep understanding of a market opportunity that in general leads to an evolution from where the market already is today, rather than a complete revolution. In general, revolutionary new ideas take considerable marketing investment and muscle to become successful; incremental step forwards from what the market already understands are in general easier to introduce and commercialise.

Being successful in the global marketplace requires a careful holistic orchestration of various activities: market and opportunity analysis; technology assembly and integration; field testing and early, reference, customers; go-to-market capability and channel reach; funding; and leadership. I refer to this orchestration as an "innovation score", in the same sense that a musical score synchronises concurrent orchestral activities into an overall harmonious effect.

The technology underpinning innovation need not always be developed in Ireland: innovation scoring requires technology assembly and integration, identifying and selecting the correct technologies, regardless of their global origin. Tax payer funded Irish based science may as a result not be exploited in Ireland: equally, successful young Irish companies should not limit their source of technology to Irish based science. Most of all, a successful innovation may simply bring together pieces of technology which already exist, but which have never been put together before in such an innovative way.

At a recent event in the Science Gallery, a composite map of the world was shown at night. It clearly shows the industrialised world against the darkness of the third world.

The presenters, the Lebone group (pronounced "le-bone-nay"), met as undergraduate engineers at Harvard University. They observed that the coupling of two existing technologies - microbial fuel cells and standard high efficient light emitting devices (LEDs) - could provide light in rural Africa. The same technology can also be used to re-charge mobile phones. Their product is used by simply inserting two wires into rotting compost or dung, and the microbes bio-electrochemically generate small amounts of direct current which is then used to power highly efficient LEDs, or to re-charge mobiles. The product has been field-tested in Tanzania over several months, and the project is now supported by the World Bank.

This example shows how an innovative, pragmatic solution was derived by understanding a market problem (off-the-grid power generation throughout much of the third world), identifying existing technologies (microbial fuel cells and new generation LEDs) invented and researched elsewhere, bringing these technologies together into a new product, field testing and then initiating a new business venture. The successful innovation score did not require extensive scientific research to be carried out by the innovators.

Technology can come from latent and unexploited intellectual property within major corporations. As just one example, Hewlett Packard has just closed their second global call for their Innovation Research Programme, in which they requested proposals from innovators outside of HP anywhere on the planet, to license specific intellectual property from HP in areas such as analytics, cloud computing, intelligent infrastructure, digital commercial print and so on. This enables HP to test new emerging technology markets via young dynamic partner companies.

In the current global economic climate, it is not unusual for major corporations to in effect out-source their R&D. Acquiring young companies who are each proving that a new innovation is successful in an early stage market, but which do not have the global channel reach, may be a less expensive way to enhance their product portfolio and innovate, than funding internal R&D and product teams. As a further consequence, internal R&D and product development teams have increasing difficulty getting internal budget, increasing the possibility of spin-outs from the corporation, and increasing the possibility of licensing intellectual property out of the corporation. HP has completed 116 acquisitions in its life time: it is now actively licensing intellectual property out of HP.

An insightful understanding of the current state of a market can come from emerging global industry standards, particularly when there is end user pull. IONA Technologies was successful precisely because we personally participated in such an initiative. For a time IONA was able finesse the global industry by using global end user feedback and experience of IONA products to improve these standards, creating global industry leadership and a "catch-up" game for other global vendors.

I've probably written enough in this blog article. In summary, I very much welcome the TCD-UCD link up, and fervently hope that it results in more commercial research being attracted. But I also fervently hope that we can create a small company culture, with reasonably frequent re-cycling of human and financial capital, and from which a small number of larger companies may eventually emerge. I also fervently hope that we can foster "innovation scores" in which anyone with insight, skill and sheer determination can build a great company, whether or not they happened to gain a PhD from UCD-TCD (or anywhere else).

Dr. Robert Fung, Chair of UNICEF Hong Kong

2009-03-11T17:53:00.004Z

One of the easiest people to meet if you ever attended an annual UNICEF conference of the fund raising National Committees somewhere on the planet, was Dr. Robert Fung. This wonderful gentle unassuming man, with his positive and tireless warmth after a lengthy day of endless presentations and discussions, was everyone's friend. If this was your very first annual conference, Robert would be sure to approach you, introduce himself and crack a wry joke with a gentle smile, all the time making you feel as if you - like he - had been part of the UNICEF family for years. Robert loved his work with children, he loved people, he loved his work as an accomplished paediatrician (having degrees from both Harvard and McGill), he loved his work as a successful businessman, he loved Hong Kong, and he loved his work with UNICEF. He reached out to everyone, and quietly understood the functioning of the UNICEF machine. If you felt lost in the scale of UNICEF's operations around the planet, UNICEF's awful acronyms, UNICEF's extensive programmes, UNICEF's subtle machinations, and UNICEF's global organisation, Robert, with his wonderful mop of silver hair and warm face stood out, and he'ld give you a great big hello. You now belonged to the UNICEF international family.

Robert sadly passed away peacefully in Hong Kong last friday. He founded UNICEF's fund raising operations in Hong Kong in the mid 1980's, and was its Chairman until his untimely death. He devoted so much of his time and energy to raising the profile of UNICEF amongst the people of Hong Kong, including the business community and of course the regional government. His was the public face of UNICEF in Hong Kong, a well known fatherly figure working endlessly for children.

Farewell, Robert: I didn't know you well, but I knew you enough to know that you improved the lives of so many children, and their mothers, and meant so much to so many people. Your passing will be mourned not just in Hong Kong but across the world.

Educators and Technologists: how can we best change Ireland ?

2009-03-05T13:36:00.002Z

The text below is an invited talk that I gave this morning to a symposium organised by the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals - the heads of primary and secondary (high) schools of Ireland, and their deputies.

My goal was to encourage the teaching profession in Ireland to seize the initiative, and help themselves to help their colleagues. In these very challenging fiscal times in Ireland, it seems clear to me that our Department of Education and Science will not have the fiscal capability to lead, and so leadership must be bottom-up, indigenous and community based - which, in my mind, is at the core of the ethos of the internet.

If you are a technologist yourself, please forgive my poetic license below in categorising some web sites and technologies - I am trying to explain essential characteristics in laymens', non-technical, terms.

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"The ancient Masters didn't try to educate the people, but patiently taught them to not-know. When they think they know the answers, people are difficult to guide. When they know that they don't know, people can then find their way"--- from Lao Tzu's "Tao Te Ching" - the Book of the Way.

Teaching is about not-knowing. Educating is about fostering self-awareness. Learning is about finding.

Being an educator is one of the most privileged professions. In knowing herself, an educator imprints on the next generation a way to understand themselves and thus to find their way.

I went to Newpark Comprehensive in Blackrock, finishing in 1974. John Harris, who introduced the Transition year project to Ireland, was my Mathematics teacher throughout my time in secondary school. Derek West likewise taught me in English classes for six years. Dr John de Courcy Ireland taught me History, and also French. I was so fortunate to have many further fine teachers - Derek Langran, Chris Sealy, Roy Rohu, Bob Weatherill and many others. And I believe in every case, all those years ago, I viewed each of these teachers as a prime source of information and knowledge. They knew, and I didn't.

Today, I think many of us accept that the situation has irrevocably changed. Teachers are of course still fine people, but many students no longer accept their teachers as the prime source of information and knowledge. The internet, and in particular Google, is now the primary way to find out and learn. Wikipedia - an online encyclopedia, to which I will later return - is a chief reference and authority. Twitter - an online headline broadcast service - is a rapid access to what's happening. Facebook and Bebo - online social communities - are a quick way to find and share what's cool. Youtube - an online video clip service - is a quick way to humour. iTunes - an online music and "podcasting" service - is a quick way to music and interesting interviews.

Ten years ago, I used to worry about the 'digital divide' -- that the wealthy had access to the internet, and those of limited means did not. I remember the Ennis Information Age project in which we asked ourselves what would happen if an entire community was trained on how to use a PC and had access to the internet. Over the last decade I believe that, in Ireland at least, there is considerably greater uptake and affordable access to the internet, compared to some of those countries I have experienced through my work with UNICEF. There are of course still digitally impoverished communities in Ireland, but the situation is improving. The convergence of mobile phone technology with broadband internet access, is a further catalyst.

Now I worry, maybe unnecessarily, about the digital divide of the generations. Most of us know how to book an airline seat online. Most of us know how to send an email, or access our bank account. But how many of us know how to upload a video to Youtube, or to make a podcast, or how to contribute to the wisdom of the crowd ? Meanwhile, for the younger generation there is no divide between virtual reality and the real world: for them this would be an unnecessary and unnatural distinction, and for them the internet is an intrinsic part of the real world as much as the telephone, the radio or even the weather.

Therefore today, what role should a teacher and educator now play ? It's now clear to many students that their teachers don't know as much about their chosen subject as Google does. It's also clear to many students that traditional classroom teaching isn't particularly interesting or stimulating. Instead, on the internet, you can quickly browse from headline to headline, quickly learn, quickly find out what's happening, quickly participate and quickly share with your friends and community. It's not that today's students have attention deficit, and are incapable of absorption or focus: on the contrary, they immerse themselves deeply - for hours sometimes - in what they find interesting, such as specific games and challenges. The difference today is that students have found a way - the internet - to so much more easily quickly find out what is really interesting, and to rapidly filter out and discard what is mundane.

So, as educators and technologists, what should we do ? How together can we change Ireland ?

One thing we must of course continue to do is to challenge students' understanding - the old "compare and contrast" technique which Derek West drummed into me. No single source of information should be taken as definitive, including Wikipedia. How easy it is today for example to instantly compare the front pages of the Irish Times and the Irish Independent, but also for example the Sydney Morning Herald, the South China Morning Post and the Los Angeles Times!

One thing I personally strongly believe that we cannot do, is wait and expect our Government and the apparatus of the State to help us. From where we stand today, it is pretty clear that the State has a rapidly diminishing capability to invest in education. With a ballooning national budget deficit, the worst thing we can now do is to fold our arms, sit back, and wait for some fiscally impotent Minister of Education to put together some study on what on earth should be done; then perhaps sometime put a computer and broadband link in front of every single student in every classroom; ensure that there is support and maintenance for all those machines; and put all of our educators through continued professional education on computer use. Ladies and Gentlemen, from where I stand, this just isn't going to happen anytime soon.

So, we have two challenges: (1) how to get all of our professional teachers conversant and confident with the latest internet technologies; (2) even if we achieve the first challenge, how do we make teaching relevant in today's internet world where the teacher in general knows little and Google knows everything ? Let me address both challenges with the same solution.

One of the key points about the internet is that it is self-creating and self-sustaining. It is bottom-up, a community phenomenon. In the early days of the internet, you could connect your computer for free to the mesh of computers already in the network, but only if you were then prepared to let others - even strangers - use your computer to in turn connect theirs into the mesh. The world wide web came about by a bunch of physicists devising their own way to better share their scientific results, and then sharing their new way with anyone else interested. The ethos of the internet is sharing, "bottom-up". So let me talk to you about the technology underpinning wikipedia.

Perhaps some of you have a jaundiced view of wikipedia. It has replaced the Encyclopedia Britannica - which my parents encouraged me to consult in Blackrock library as the definitive source of knowledge. But some educators, and I do understand, question its accuracy and are concerned that students may place an unnecessary over-reliance on its authority. We should always compare and contrast.

But allow me to distinguish between wikipedia - the web site - and a wiki - the technology on which wikipedia is based. Wikipedia is but one example of a wiki, and there are many others. The basic technology of a wiki is free - zero cost - as result of Ward Cunningham's work in the 1990s. A wiki is a web site in which not only can anyone read its content, but anyone can also edit the content. At first this sounds extraordinary - what prevents somebody from editing accurate content and defacing it ? In fact, the answer is nothing, and defacement happens - however, the wiki keeps a record of who edited what, and what was the previous version (and the previous version to that and so on). Anarchists and political pundits can quickly be identified by the community of readers, isolated from the wiki so that the wiki refuses to accept any further edits from these rogues, and the maverick changes made by these fraudsters are quickly unwound.

The consequence is that the community of bona-fide contributors work together to make the wiki better and better, capturing the best inputs from everyone, and discarding the weaker edits. The system becomes Darwinian - the best survives, the weakest is dropped. A wiki thus captures the "wisdom of the crowd" - the collective wisdom of a community of readers and contributors.

If you Google on the topic of wikis and teaching, you will see some articles about how some teachers elsewhere in the world (I couldn't find any from Ireland) are experimenting with the use of wikis within the classroom, to encourage a class of students to work together on group projects. We can of course adopt this idea here in Ireland, but I have a broader suggestion to make to you.

Ladies and Gentlemen, you are a community. Your professional teaching colleagues are another larger community, to which you also belong. Why not use wiki technology to address the two challenges - digital confidence amongst your community, and enhanced teaching ?

I do make the assumption that the vast majority of you and your teaching colleagues already have access to the internet (not necessarily in your schools but at home or elsewhere), and know the rudimentaries for example on how to book an airline ticket online. To contribute to, or to just read, a wiki you do not need needlessly complicated tools like Microsoft Word or Powerpoint or some such. Instead, you use any internet browser: editting is done using the browser itself and very simple controls. In fact, by examining a wiki, you can quickly see how other contributors have achieved the layout and presentation of the wiki, and simply copy their styling. If you know how to start a computer, connect to the internet and launch an internet browser, then you really need only learn very little more to be able to read and to contribute to a wiki.

I then envisage a new wiki (not Wikipedia!) created by some of you and your teaching colleagues which starts to capture the wisdom inherent in the national community of teachers in Ireland on how to get the best out of the internet, and out of internet trends (such as podcasting..), for teaching students in Irish schools. Such a wiki would then potentially help every teacher in Ireland. I envisage another new wiki that some of you, and/or some of your teaching colleagues, create on experiences, and best practice, of engaging classroom experiences in Irish schools. Such a wiki would then further help every teacher in Ireland.

I envisage another wiki, created by some of your mathematics teachers, on each topic within the Higher Level Leaving Certificate Mathematics syllabus, not only explaining each such topic but illustrating it from real world examples from applications in society and science as to how that particular mathematical technique can be beneficially used. I envisage another wiki, created by some of our Irish history teaching colleagues, on each topic within the Junior Certificate History syllabus, not only laying out each such topic but explaining its consequences on Irish society and culture.

I envisage many wikis, one for each syllabus in Irish schools, through which both experienced and neophyte teachers alike of that syllabus can share with each other nationwide the best ideas and experiences.

Ladies and Gentlemen, my proposition to you is that in todays fiscal environment, it is unrealistic to expect much help anymore from the State. Instead there is a huge wealth of competence and wisdom within your own community, and it really would not take very much for you to work together to help all of your interests.

In the business world of global companies, such as IONA was, great emphasis is placed on team work, and ensuring that every member of a global organisation contributes to and benefits from the collective wisdom of the staff: domain experts share their knowledge and skills so as the whole company benefits. The commercial world for which we are preparing the vast bulk of our young people is one in which team work abounds. In the world of education, perhaps the current fiscal position of our State can be a catalyst for change, an impetus to encourage sharing amongst education professionals what is the very best.

A wiki is a community self-help tool. Best of all, a wiki can be created by anyone, by any small group of like-minded professionals, at any time. It does not require a mandate from a Government, a Minister, a Trade Union, or even the NAPD! It is a "bottom-up" tool, deep from within the community itself. A wiki can just emerge pretty much overnight, and regardless of any national agenda and policy: it just needs bona fide like-minded professionals.

Be wary of educating people, but instead teach them to not-know and hence to find out. When people think they already know the answers, they become difficult to guide. When people know that they don't know, they can find their way. One of the best ways is to ask and share with others. That is what the internet is all about.

Here Be Dragons.

2009-02-13T15:21:00.003Z

Let me tell you a scary fairy tale.

As you know, dragons are fierce fire breathing creatures which torment ordinary people like you and I. There are also ferocious dragon-eat-dragon fights. However a fact you mightn't know about dragons is that they burn kerosene to make their hot odorous breaths, and they convert water in their bodies to make this kerosene. And now and again they temporarily lend water to their friends to help them make even more kerosene.

In this story, sometimes ordinary people, and rich people, place bets on which will be the best and fiercest dragons. To keep things fair for these punters (the people who place these bets), the dragons get regular check ups so that everyone knows how fit they are.

Anyway, about six months ago, a particularly nasty dragon is nearing his annual veterinary check up. However, he is short of kerosene, and is too weak to make much more. So, what does he do ? He borrows some water from some friendly dragons far far away, and then lends this water to one of his neighbourly dragon friends who lives beside him.

His friend however isn't in too good a shape either. So his friend in turn passes the water to one of his babies, who is fit and healthy. The baby dragon produces some kerosene, and gives it all back to the horrible nasty dragon.

The nasty dragon then goes immediately for his annual check up, and the veterinarian is astonished: the nasty dragon is even fitter than he was last year, and has lots and lots and lots of kerosene. So the nasty dragon goes and tells all the punters the good news, and the punters say what a good nasty dragon he is.

But then his dragon friend goes and tells the sleepy Dragon Supervisor that his baby had produced some kerosene using water passed from the nasty dragon, and gave the kerosene back to the nasty dragon. However the sleepy Dragon Supervisor doesn't seem to care that nasty dragon could no longer produce his own kerosene, and that he had to get one of his friend's babies to do it with some borrowed water. Nor does he seem to care that the nasty dragon didn't tell the punters that that was what had really happened. Nor does he seem to care that the dragons are working together rather than competing with each other in the dragon-eat-dragon fights.

At the same time that all this is going on, the Minister for Dragons is getting a bit concerned that all of his six dragons in his land are getting a bit out of shape. So he calls in an International Dragon Inspector and pays him to do an extensive investigation and then report back

The International Dragon Inspector duly does his work, and comes back with a 720 page report on the six dragons in the land. The particularly nasty dragon has 120 pages written about him. In those 120 pages, the International Dragon Inspector notes that nasty dragon isn't as fit as he seems; that he didn't really produce all that kerosene himself, and got his friend's baby to do it for him. If the ordinary and rich punters ever found what really had happened, they might be very angry indeed.

The mandarins at the Minister for Dragons get the Inspector's report. They note with alarm what the Inspector found out about what the nasty dragon and his dragon friend got up to, and tell the dozy Dragon Supervisor. But the dozy Dragon Supervisor says he already knew since the nasty dragon friend had already owned up about it, and he goes back to sleep.

The Minister for Dragons gets the report. However he finds 720 pages boring and doesn't read it all. Even though he knows the nasty dragon is particularly horrible, he doesn't bother reading all the 120 pages about the nasty dragon. His mandarins tell him he should read particular pages and paragraphs which they have underlined, but they don't ask him to read all the bad stuff on the nasty dragon -- even though they are alarmed by what nasty dragon and his friend got up to together and told the Dragon Supervisor so.

The Minister for Dragons later says he was told about all the risks and concerns arising from his six dragons, but deceiving the punters in the way in which the nasty dragon and his friend did so was not one of those risks.

In a way perhaps the Minister of Dragons isn't really at fault here. After all, he really is a complete novice at looking after dragons, and only a few months ago used to have the job of looking after nice little children instead.

One day though, the national parliament and the national newspapers and the TV stations get to hear about what the nasty dragon and his friend got up to together. But even they don't seem to be particularly worried that the ordinary and rich punters were deliberately deceived. Instead they get concerned that the Minister of Dragons is now going to give some of the dragons a big lake from which to drink loads and loads of water.

Meanwhile, the punters far far away, and the dragons far far away, get very concerned. They get very concerned about the nasty dragon and his friend and what else they perhaps might have got up to together. They get very concerned that the sleepy Dragon Supervisor doesn't seem to care about punters being deceived. They get very concerned that the mandarins don't share their worries with their own Minister. They get concerned that if deceiving them that the nasty dragon wasn't as fit as he appeared, wasn't sufficiently serious to be flagged as a risk in the report, then what what more serious risks could there possibly be ? And they get particularly concerned that the Minister of Dragons doesn't seem to read reports which he himself asked for, and doesn't seem worry too much about looking after the interests of the punters.

Then the Minister of Dragons calls in the stable staff of the nasty dragon's friend and says: "Gee boys and girls, you people in particular have been very very naughty in allowing your dragon and its baby to change water into kerosene for the nasty dragon, and then give this kerosene back to the nasty dragon, so allowing the nasty dragon to deceive the punters. Don't you think that you were all wrong ?"

I hope you liked my little fairy story.

I had the privilege and responsibility for many years of being CEO and Chairman of a publicly quoted company subject to the USA SEC and Nasdaq rules, including more recently Sarbanes-Oxley obligations. Governance and shareholder communication were always very high on the agenda.

I hope that things in real life are never the same as fairy stories, are they ?

Core skills, not "up skills"

2009-01-30T09:52:00.001Z

There's some considerable debate here in Ireland about the need to "up skill" our economy, in the light of loss of jobs to lower cost economies. I however contend that there is not so much a need to "up skill", but to "core skill" - to get back to fundamentals and thus ensure that we have a solid foundation of lifetime skills.

One of the key attractions which as a nation have used to attract and retain our comparatively high levels of foreign direct investment in Ireland has been the availability of a talented, well educated and technically oriented workforce. If we in Ireland aspire to build a future for our own young people as a leading nation for innovation; with high value services; succeeding as a knowledge-fuelled economy; having good, stable and well paid jobs; and with the ability to afford high quality social support for the weaker members of our society, then education in core intellectual skills are inextricably intertwined with our future.

Our young people should be able to reason, to deduce and derive, to correlate and spot patterns, to explore and to be inquisitive, and to be articulate and confident. In my humble view, these are more life centric skills than learning facts and perspectives by rote: knowing something off by heart, but not understanding why, why not, and so what. Skills taught in schools should be for life. There are many things which can be learnt during adulthood, but some skills which are difficult to learn without a solid foundation during the teens and 20s.

Without these skills, we will have little to offer the 21st century global economy. If our young people are weak in core skills, many of them may not find well paid careers in Ireland nor overseas: these jobs will go to other nationals in other economies.

In my view, and I admit as an elderly grey traditionalist, mathematics is a critical catalyst to careful reasoning and deduction. Mathematics is too vast to be learnt by rote and instead requires insightful thinking and intellectual clarity. Taught well, it enables core intellectual skills for life. It also makes learning easier, not just for mathematics, but many other subjects, since understanding comes from reasoning, rather than learning by rote.

The decline in the Irish attainment of mathematics and core sciences has been gradual. It has perhaps gone unnoticed by many, but major employers across a range of business sectors of strategic importance to Ireland are seriously concerned to see substantial decreases in the number of our students taking technology courses, and in particular the fall off in those taking mathematics. If we all aspire to build a future for our young people as outlined above, then competence in mathematics is a cornerstone. Competence in mathematics underpins not just engineering and the physical sciences, but also sectors such as alternative energy and green systems, financial services, medical research, and cross disciplinary areas such as bio-engineering. For so many areas of our potential national prosperity and quality of society, competence in mathematics is critical.

With further government budget cuts imminent, there is a very serious risk that teaching in mathematics and the core sciences will dramatically suffer further. This is especially so at secondary school (high school, in Ireland) level, since these subjects are perceived as resource intensive and difficult to teach. The Principals of eleven secondary schools of one Irish county have recently jointly written an open letter to all the parents of all their students stating that in view of Government cutbacks, they may no longer be in a position to teach honours mathematics and sciences at all in their schools. There is further anecdotal evidence of schools consciously cutting their teaching programmes in areas which are nevertheless critical to the future of our nation, as their way of meeting newly imposed budgetary constraints.

Incredibly, almost 20% of our schools no longer offer honours mathematics to their students. In 2007, only 14% of Irish university applicants to honours degrees had achieved honours mathematics capability in school.

It is also widely accepted that several factors need to be urgently and collectively addressed to resolve this issue: the professional development and inspiration of mathematics teachers; the teaching and examination methods of honours Mathematics; and other implicit disincentives to students such as points, grading and curriculum factors.

Points, in particular, deserve mention. In Ireland, we have a highly unfortunate and ill-conceived national system of awarding points in our school examinations for grades obtained, regardless of the intellectual difficulty of any particular subject. Earning points by studying honours mathematics is widely projected as overly difficult when equivalent points could be earned for less effort elsewhere. Students are in some cases explicitly advised by some teachers and advisers to take a cluster of subjects which together may overlap in content and collectively make points accumulation easier, regardless of career aspirations. Students who score particularly high totals of points, are under considerable pressure to undertake university degrees which require high numbers of points to apply, regardless of their career aspirations: "don't waste your points". University courses with limited places (due to resource constraints) usually require high levels of points. Courses which offer wonderful career opportunities do not necessarily require extremely high points, and high scoring students usually as a result do not take them.

Examinations are ill constructed. Substantial question choice enables teachers to omit major sections of a course syllabus, thus focussing students on a more limited syllabus which is likely to be sufficient to earn examination points. I'm aware of university professors aghast that some first year university students, ostensibly with high numbers of points, arrive into technology degree courses without any knowledge, for example, of trigonometry: some teachers omit trigonometry from their teaching, correctly believing that high points can still be achieved by filtering out questions during an examination.

In my view, our economy can no longer afford to be impartial in the content of its educational services. Some topics available at our schools can be learnt at any stage in life: others are much more difficult to do so.

Teachers should be encouraged to foster reasoning, deduction, derivation, correlation, exploration and curiosity, intellectual clarity and insight, fluency and confidence. Mathematics and the core sciences are clear catalysts. Teachers who achieve consistent success in their students in these subjects should not only be acclaimed but also receive fiscal reward - if this cannot be done through Government pay, it may be possible to do via industry sponsored competitions. Teachers whose own core skills are weak should be offered re-skilling and professional development. Considerably more use should be made of the web - including podcasts and vidcasts to complement the music on students' personal players - to cultivate dynamic, current, interesting course material: social free educational networking can compensate to some extent weaknesses in any specific teacher in a particular school.

Our country needs to get back to basics: core skills taught well, rather than nebulous "up skills". Mathematics and the core sciences are one critical foundation.

Dell Ireland

2009-01-09T19:36:00.007Z

Dell finally announced yesterday that they are winding up their manufacturing operations in Limerick, and instead focussing their European manufacturing investments in Lodz, Poland.

Dell has been a major employer in Ireland, responsible for 5% of GNP according to one estimate. The immediate loss of jobs in the Limerick plant will be 1,900; and with estimates of consequences for a further 1,500 jobs which in firms which directly supply the plant, and a further 7,000 jobs in other industries at risk.

Although the demise of Dell's manufacturing was not a surprise, I was frankly surprised and disappointed by aspects of the way the announcement was made. Dell quite rightly insisted that they would tell their own staff first before anyone else. However I believe it was unprofessional and pusillanimous of Michael Dell, the Dell CEO, not to make the announcement in person himself in Limerick in front of his own staff. He instead sent his VP Operations, EMEA. Michael has been the beneficiary not only of professional work by his own manufacturing staff in Limerick, but also personally of the plaudits by the local community on his several visits to Limerick over the years, not least an honorary degree from the University of Limerick. He was a gentleman enough to receive these accolades, but not man enough to deliver his savage news in person to his own staff.

I was also astonished that the Minister for the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment (DETE) and co-incidently also the Tanaiste (Vice Prime Minister), Mary Coughlan chose not to appear in person in Limerick. Instead she relied on the local Limerick Minister, the Minister of Defence Willie O'Dea, to be present. In my recollection, previous Ministers of DETE have usually been on hand at the times of major job losses. In fact, as a result of her absence and residence in Dublin Mary Coughlan may have sent the Irish public a not so subtle message: maybe she does not support Willie O'Dea in Limerick and his statements about the future prospects with Dell.

Mary Coughlan is apparently due to travel with the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen to Japan next week to lead a trade delegation from the Irish business community. The timing of this trip could probably not be worse relative to the Dell announcement and the general poor economic condition. One can only hope that Brian Cowen and Mary Coughlan will return to Ireland with very major significant positive news of substantial Japanese investment and business contracts: presumably that is why they are still travelling despite the rapidly deteriorating domestic economic situation and the anxious Irish public.

I said in my opening statement above "finally announced". I think there was a strong fear for some time - maybe even two years or longer - that Dell would stop its Irish manufacturing sooner or later. That being said, I personally do believe the stated Dell corporate position that the decision was only made within the last week, despite some Irish media accusations to the contrary. In a public company, such major announcements are generally material, from the legal perspective, to the public investor community. Public announcement of a major decision thus usually follows immediately after the decision itself: otherwise there is a danger of leaks and the strong possibility of criminal "insider trading". The actual decision was therefore in fact almost certainly only made very recently.

Nevertheless, there was indeed a fear and suspicion for some considerable time that Dell would stop its Irish manufacturing. It is surprising therefore that our Government appears to have poorly handled the announcement. There was plenty of time to prepare a well considered contingency plan, and immediately initiate it. Indeed, I suspect that such a plan was almost certainly prepared by agencies such as the IDA, Forfas and Enterprise Ireland - they are staffed by competent professionals. Perhaps the apparent mismanagement of the consequences of the announcement by the Cabinet and Ministers is symptomatic of a much deeper issue: the Cabinet is overcome by the tsunami of bad economic news, does not know what agencies and advisors to work with or even trust, and is frankly paralysed and frozen in the headlights of the media and of public anxiety.

A senior civil servant today commented to me that it is amazing to consider the turn around in Prime Minister Brown's performance and public perception in the UK. From a period just last July, when he faced a back benchers revolt and the opposition leader David Cameron looked to be the inevitable victor, Brown has executed a stunning turnaround and is now neck and neck with Cameron, if not ahead.

Prime Minister Brown is performing. He is taking visible and urgent actions and steps, and has set out a direction to lead his people...

Looking ahead here in Ireland, it is very clear that we cannot rely on manufacturing activities to sustain our economy. We do have very valuable operations continuing here, not least in IBM, Intel, Apple and HP. The challenge is whether we can nurture our own cohort of Irish companies to leverage such multinationals as a global distribution channel. Are there products and services which we can supply to these companies regardless of where they happen to currently position their own manufacturing operations (hopefully yes in Ireland, but not guaranteed to continue to be so) ? What new products and services can we build, offer, license to them that add value regardless of where they happen to have their operations ?

The answers of course include both new innovations and more efficiently produced current products and services. But amongst the answers is also the strong possibility of building businesses by sublicensing results from the multinationals themselves, with early and nascent markets - I wrote about this in an earlier article.

Our enterprise strategy must evolve - quickly - in Ireland. We need to focus increasingly hard on innovation in Ireland, and building our own companies by exploiting the opportunities which the presence of the multinationals here create.

The doomsday is that Ireland deteriorates to become a domestically traded services economy: services sold within Ireland to support the goods and services we import.

We do not need to "up-skill" so much as "core-skill". "Upskilling" is nice political camouflage, but frankly a shallow aspiration. We instead need to ensure that we have a strong foundation in the core skills - not the "up" skills whatever they are - which are necessary for innovation, insight, and the development of a true indigenous enterprise culture.

Commenting on this blog

2009-01-05T13:27:00.002Z

I moderate incoming comments onto this blog, to filter out auto-generated spam and adverts etc.

However, a reader yesterday posted me a comment which I have also chosen not to publish in its present form. It criticises a company with which I am not and have not been directly connected, although I do know some of the staff therein. Because the reader has chosen to be anonymous, rather than publicly stating his or her name, I've chosen not to publish the remarks.

I've no way of replying to the reader who sent in this comment, other than by this public blog entry: so, if you do wish to comment on entries in my blog, please do let me publish your name...

Innovation

2009-01-05T13:22:00.003Z

A few weeks ago I posted a link to an article which I had written for the Irish Times Innovation monthly magazine.

I'm becoming an occasional columnist for it, and another article appears here in today's edition. The spelling mistake in the title of the online version is their mistake, not mine!

Happy New Year , and thanks for watching my blog..

Accident and Emergency Beds ? Or...

2008-12-17T22:09:00.006Z

On the morning that today's Irish Times announced that our health service minister is seeking a further 900Meuro reduction in the 14,000Meuro health budget, our deputy prime minster ("Tanaiste") Mary Coghlan announced a further 45Meuro investment in three large national science research centres.

I'm waiting for the reaction from certain public chat-show hosts on our national media: "how is it morally justifiable to spend 45Meuro when it would appear that the crisis in our accident and emergency units in our hospitals is about to severely deepen ?"

Let's see. 45Meuro would buy 560 return flights to Florida on the Government Gulfstream for the Minister of Health and her colleagues; or almost 5,000 return first class transatlantic airtrips for the CEO of a major Irish agency - funded by the taxpayer; or over a 1,000,000 pay-per-view private in-hotel movies for the executives of a major Irish agency - funded by the taxpayer; or 90,000 gifts (glass barometers) for a serving senior Minister - from taxpayers funds. And, as an afterthought perhaps, the investment is worth 228,000 attendances at accident and emergency units in Irish hospitals; or 69,000 in-patient bed days at Irish hospitals; or about just 35% of the cost of a failed and written-off national payroll system for our health service.

The 45Meuro invested today in world class scientific research is a serious moral choice. We can invest in science, or we can partially reduce cut backs in our public services. The consequential responsibility on our science research leaders is onerous. The three centres receiving funding today have already demonstrated impactful advances not just on the standard of scientific research in Ireland, but also to the potential economic and social benefits to Ireland - and indeed humanity at large.

Dr Fergus Shanahan's APC team have already produced world class leadership in the understanding, and the consequential application of, of the complex microbiology and pharmabiotics of the human intestine. The global benefits of pro-biotic food additives are largely due to their outstanding work.

One of the potential benefits of nanotechnology research is the highly targetted delivery of drug payloads to any specific part of the body. Today's delivery of drugs in the human body is akin to the military carpet bombing of world war two: one can appreciate the benefits if we could deliver drugs within the body as clinically as today's military smart weapon delivery systems. The CRANN team, hosted at TCD by John Boland, have much opportunity here and it is perhaps surprising that SFI have apparently not yet focussed more on the biomedical opportunities of nanotechnology research.

Dr Stefan Decker and his team at the DERI project (disclosure: I am on the technical advisory board) in Galway are focussed on enabling computers to really understand the deep complexity of human languages and nuances. If computers can learn to understand the semantics of human communication, then one of the many outcomes can be not just better web search engines, but better web based harmonisation engines which can reconcile what you already know with what you might not know. The opportunities to advance human understanding - by leveraging what is already known by across both today's, but also yesterday's, humanity, rather than forgetting or re-discovering what is in fact already known elsewhere or previously in history - are breathtaking.

But there are also other major centres in Ireland. Declaring a personal interest as the Chair of its governance board, the CTVR centre is globally unique in exploiting a great untapped natural resource, which we are extremely fortunate to have here in Ireland: the airwaves - the 'electro-magnetic spectrum' - which are unsaturated in Ireland, and thus a wonderful opportunity for very advanced new communication technologies. The BDI centre is researching very rapid diagnosis and self-test of medical conditions by non-invasive (e.g. saliva, sweat, blood pinpricks) sampling. The REMEDI centre is researching advanced stem cell research from adult humans.

All of this research, conducted in Ireland, is incredibly impressive. Furthermore, Irish scientific diaspora have returned, and Ireland is acting as a magnet for other nationals to undertake world class research here. The quality, and quantity, of high profile, globally widely-cited scientific papers, and of patents, has increased dramatically.

For me, one of the most exciting consequences has been the proliferation of cross-disciplinary and inter-institutional research amongst our young researchers and principal investigators, despite perhaps our long standing traditional hostility and open competition that all too often has hitherto corrupted some of the more established and senior talent in our universities (as I wrote here). There are clear opportunities for further collaboration between the universities in Ireland supported at the highest level.

But I remain concerned.

I remain concerned, because in my own view, the Irish state agencies - and in particular Science Foundation Ireland - have insufficiently focussed on the opportunity to translate world class research undertaken in Ireland into innovative products and services for the global market. In my view, Science Foundation Ireland is myopically focussed on Science: but what we also need - perhaps need even more - is a focus on Engineering. Ireland needs to take the most interesting scientific results globally available to engineer innovative new products and services for the world market.

I was surprised and concerned, for example, to learn that SFI reputedly believes that the work at REMEDI is overly focussed on commercial exploitation and industry linkage, rather than as SFI reputedly believes what is more nationally strategic basic research: this seems to me to in fact be the antithesis of what the small open Irish economy, with limited financial resources by global standards, actually needs. I am surprised and disappointed, that SFI does not have, and a senior executive has actually told me that it does not see the need for, a national showcase or centre for the outstanding scientific results which its sponsored researchers have already produced, and which are available for uptake by national and multi-national industry at large. I am surprised and disappointed that SFI sees no role in outreach to the Irish public to explain the importance of science in incidents like last week's national dioxin crisis, through a vehicle such as the Science Gallery (again a disclosure: for which I am chair). I am surprised and disappointed that SFI seems to think it can be just a shipyard launching ships, rather than an admiral not only building ships, but leading a complementary and mutually re-enforcing cohesive fleet to take on the world.

45Meuro is a lot of accident and emergency bed spaces. I absolutely know that the research teams receiving this funding feel the awesome national responsibility of the Irish taxpayer watching over them. But I am concerned that SFI is currently missing a much bigger picture than it currently seems able to see.

"You're not playing at Croker..."

2008-12-03T13:36:00.005Z

Earlier this week, I had an article published in the monthly Innovation supplement of the Irish Times newspaper.

The general thrust of the article was the synergy between the multinationals present in Ireland, and the planned and unplanned benefits to the indigenous industry.

The article is available here.

PS: "Croker", by the way, is the local name for Croke Park in Dublin, our national stadium for Gaelic football and hurling.

Tigre Tico - Tico Tiger

2008-09-29T16:47:00.008+01:00

Eva Paus, as far as I know, was the first to coin the term “Tico Tiger” in 2005 in her book subtitled “Can Costa Rica become Ireland ?” Richard Soley more recently resurrected the term when he suggested I use it as the title of a talk I gave this week in San Jose, Costa Rica, “Experiencias del Tigre Celta para el Tigre Tico”. “Tico”, by the way, is a form of endearment which Costa Ricans use colloquially to refer to each other as natives of their country, perhaps as we in Ireland sometimes call ourselves “paddies”.

I first met Richard just about 20 years ago, in Brussels at an annual ESPRIT conference. Pretty soon thereafter, when I was an academic in Trinity College, together with IONA co-founder Annrai O’Toole, I collected Richard from an OMG meeting in the height of the “troubles” in Northern Ireland and drove him across the border down to Dublin to give an invited talk on the OMG in Trinity. Richard regularly reminds me, and did so again last week when I met him, of our three passports – American, Irish, and British – being scrutinised at length by gun toting teenagers in army fatigues – apparently employed by the British Army – at the heavily fortified border crossing with the Republic. I think he was quite shocked, actually.

I was in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, last week to give an invited talk on the experiences and some lessons, from my personal perspective, of drama of the Celtic Tiger. The talk itself was on Thursday evening last, to the Club de Investigacion – run by Roberto Sasso – whose members consist primarily of senior executives from end user organisations throughout Costa Rica. Via Roberto, I also met the Minister for Foreign Trade, Marco Vinicio Ruiz and separately, the chief executive of CINDE – the equivalent of the Irish IDA.

It was my first visit to Costa Rica. I had heard of course of its astonishing natural beauty and lush green landscapes, as well as its extraordinary Caribbean and Pacific coastlines. However, I had not realised it was such a geothermally active region, with 38 volcanoes. San Jose appeared reasonably clean, not very much litter, and not very much graffiti, at least in comparison to parts of Dublin! In a very surprising way, it reminded me of the extraordinary beauty of the countryside of Rwanda, which I visited earlier this year, with luxurious forests and vegetation, lurking volatile summits, wonderful animals in natural habitat (e.g, gorillas in Rwanda, jaguar in Costa Rica..), low rise red tiled and silver corrugated roofed homes and buildings, and extraordinarily warm and generous people. I was fortunate enough to be taken, and to have a clear view for at least ten minutes, of the crater of Poas volcano , 2,800 metres high and about a 2 hour (uphill!) drive from San Jose. On the way down, I also visited the La Paz hotel gardens, with a wonderful track through native rain forest and damply intimate to a series of four spectacular waterfalls. Some of my own photos are here. It is the rainy season at the moment, and on Friday afternoon I experienced the heaviest and darkest monsoon cloud in my life: over 12 cm of rain gushed over San Jose in just a few hours. Everyone seemed to take it in their stride, and said it was routine and would probably rain as heavily the next day. And I thought we had had a wet summer in Ireland, but this was something else..

The democratic institutions of Costa Rica are interesting, and ones from which we in Ireland and in other countries, might appreciate. The President and elected members of parliament have four year terms. Since the 1949 Constitution, a member of parliament can only seek re-election after sitting out one term, ie after a four year participation in parliament, a further four years must pass before he/she can seek re-election! In the case of the President, eight years must pass before he/she can seek re-election. In my view, this philosophy ensures that politicians have an opportunity to stay more aware of ordinary society than some of the long term career politicians which we have in this country. The current president, Oscar Arias Sanchez, is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, after his work helping end civil wars elsewhere in Latin America. The next elections will be in February 2010.

In 1948, Costa Rica disbanded its armed forces, and has no military forces and no military drain on the public finances. There has been no civil war since 1948, unlike some of the neighbouring countries. There is a public security force, currently with a small number of aircraft and helicopters, for general law enforcement, border patrol, anti-narcotic activities, and rescue.

The Costa Rican economy has been growing fairly steadily, at about 7% in 2007. It has a high standard of living relative to its neighbours about a per capita income of about U.S. $5,800 (and approximately double that on purchasing power parity – PPP – terms), and an unemployment rate of 4.6%. Consumer price inflation has been consistent at about 10% for the last decade. Both the central government and the overall public sector ran fiscal surpluses in 2007.

Costa Rica’s economy has been driven by eco-tourism (particularly from the USA, Canada and Spain) and agriculture, and in particular organically grown coffee, flowers, bananas, pineapples and strawberries, with Dole and Chiquita. However more recently Intel Corporation is established in San Jose and employs over 2,000 people; Proctor and Gamble employs 1,200 people, and both Hospira and Baxter Healthcare add to the health care products industry. There are untapped (for environmental reasons) oil reserves off the Atlantic coast. 90% of electrical power is generated by hydro-electric units, and all fossil fuels are imported - in Ireland, well over 90% of our electricity generation is by contrast from fossil fuels. Surprisingly, in Costa Rica there are not yet any geo-thermal units [actually there is one so far, and I stand corrected since the original version of this posting - see Ignacio Trejos's comment below], and it would seem that Costa Rica has ample opportunity to become a net exporter of electricity, based on its natural hydro and geo-thermal resources.

In the school system, the Government has given tax breaks for the purchase of computers, and many schools are fully equipped. Programming has become part of the entire school agenda. Turning to the software industry, the Microsoft evangelist in the region, whom I met, has done an excellent job for his company: all school students leave school not only with a good grounding in Office tools, but also as at least Visual Basic programmers. There is very little Java competency. The quality of programming capabilities in the young adult population is high. There are today about 80 independent software vendors, many of them however small, exporting in total approximately 200M US$ worth of services and products.

The Club de Investigacion is having its 20th anniversary year. It has recently published a digital strategy for Costa Rica, as part of a national drive improve productivity and to triple income per capita by 2021. It is available in English here and covers the major themes of productivity in the economy; education; and transparency in government institutions.

Next year, the OMG will celebrate its 20th anniversary year, and its June meeting will be hosted in Costa Rica. The OMG was highly influential on the development of IONA, and as a one time Board member of the OMG, I hope to be there to join in the celebrations of the longest global standards organisation in the software industry.

Twenty years of Club de Investigacion, and almost 20 years of the OMG. Reflecting back to 1988 and 1989, I do not believe any of us would have anticipated the rise of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland just a few years later.

I wonder what the next twenty years will bring for the Tico Tiger..

ArtBots at the Science Gallery

2008-09-20T11:00:00.003+01:00

I remember once in Trinity when I was an engineering student having a long and isolated evening trying to argue a case that there is beautiful art in software programming – and in all engineering disciplines – with a skeptical but distinguished professor of history and fellow humanities students. I explained that software can be incredibly wonderful architected, but of course only the cognoscente – ie software developers, but not mere mortals – can appreciate so. But on the other hand most mere mortals can appreciate the visual arts, good music and literature even if they have not had specialist training. I came away glad I had a flame suit, but it was a fun tease anyway.

The Science Gallery focuses on the confluence of science and technology with art and discovery. This weekend we are hosting ArtBots – the Robot Talent Show, as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival. I went along to the opening last night – it was pretty busy – and really enjoyed some of the more artistic entrants.

On walking in, you are met by Rubot II, which was a centre of attraction for many of the teenagers there, and impressive if not particularly artistic. But close to Rubot, you can hear and see what a 6 metre length of vibrating and oscillating steel band looks like in the Storm and 6 Bands. I really liked the Rechnender Raum, an inverted dynamic machine in which its computations are sent to its centre. What Is It Without The Hand That Wields It was little gruesome, weeping blood every time a player was injured in Counter-Strike Source. I really liked Gossamer-1 with the intricate patterns it layered in response to the ambient sounds in the exhibit.

Ray Lee gave an astonishing orchestral performance of robotic music entitled Force Field as he conducted, and played virtual instruments. By moving his hands – air guitar like – he could pluck strings, play chords, and assemble a rhythmical cacophony of harmonies and melodies – quite amazing. Unfortunately however his only concert was last night, and so if you missed it, well you’ll have to wait until next time.

There are fifteen exhibits altogether, together with play areas where you can build your own robots. Entrance, as is our policy is free. On the flip side, the exhibition is only running this weekend and finishes tomorrow evening: we have to meet the costs of having the exhibitor engineers and artists be with us in Dublin.

So, if you are in Dublin this weekend, do hop on the DART and go explore the show. Its great to be able to show the public that there is art in software, science and engineering :-)..

-
Postscript: some photos from the show are here.

Building Cathedrals from Bazaars

2008-09-18T13:22:00.006+01:00

I wrote this as part of my work for Cloudsmith. It is a follow up of my earlier posting a few weeks ago.

In summary, Cloudsmith lets you browse and find useful bundles of software components which work together – software playlists – and then download ones of interest. Each one can contain components from different software repositories, and Cloudsmith knows where to go, and how to get to them.

--

Eric S. Raymond wrote a seminal paper in 1997, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, contrasting how Linux emerged from a loosely structured, highly collaborative community or "bazaar" with the traditional approach to developing software (open source or proprietary), in which a select group of cathedral-builders controlled every aspect of design and technology.

Most engineers strive to build at least one great “building” during their career, a monument, a shrine, and a testament to their skill. Today, even "cathedrals" are made from parts found at the bazaars - a huge and growing marketplace for open source components, in which thousands of developers promote parts that many other developers combine into new products. The output of many bazaars -- projects and communities such as the Eclipse Foundation, the Apache Foundation, Google Code, SourceForge, etc. - support and publish the efforts of component development teams. Popular components turn up in multiple bazaars, sometimes as identical copies, other times with subtle variations.

Among the challenges development teams, and their co-worker product management and product marketing teams, face when operating within this new ecosystem are:

* What range of components is currently available? Which bazaars have them; what is their status and quality; how popular are they; where can updates and fixes be found; and so on.

* What works with what? What components, and combinations of components, are available? How do the pieces all fit together, and which bazaars have them?

* How popular is this combination of components compared to that alternative one? How do we know when and if we should update a selection of components, as new versions of the constituent parts emerge?

* How can we build playlists which combine components we built ourselves, with components found in public bazaars and that change in ways we don't control? How can we move to the new version of a public component without breaking what we already have? And how can we keep what we found in the bazaar from getting so intertwined with what we built that we can no longer separate them? What is the best strategy to manage change, when your organisation and your team are increasingly mixing public software components with your proprietary assets?

* Who is going to support us when we use some unique combination which we assembled from public bazaars? Is there anyone out there doing something similar we can learn from?

* We fix and extend components we find in the bazaar, and sometimes create entirely new component playlists of our own. How do we share our work with other developers in our organisation or (assuming our corporate policy allows it) contribute things back to the bazaar for the public good? And assuming we've shared it, how do we know who is using it, and for what?

It is, of course, no longer just an issue of providing a stable, managed foundation on which you and your colleagues can build. There is heightened corporate awareness reaching all the way to the audit committees of publicly quoted companies, due to the multiplicity of software licensing policies. The issue of knowing if, when and how public software assets are being used inside a corporation has become a high concern.

The ability to tailor software should be its value rather than its risk. But in todays world, isn't software componentisation paradoxically slower than it could be, precisely due to the changes, improvements and proliferation offered by the community?

Eric Raymond describes how extremely useful software can result from open collaboration, despite the absence of a clear lead architect directing the project. Today’s software repositories illustrate this principle on a grand scale - they are collections of really good and useful components developed, published, maintained and extended, sometimes by individuals and sometimes by organized teams of collaborators, in a process that can seem almost anarchic compared to conventional internal development.

As bazaars of developed, and contributed, software components have matured, the complexity of fitting together appropriate combinations have increased, as has ensuring that things do not break as each component is maintained.

One example is Eclipse, which is a common integration platform for many components. The recent Ganymede release lists nine application frameworks, six toolsets for embedded and device development, six toolsets for enterprise development, five language IDEs, and five aspects of its rich client platform. All of these elements, in principle, can be used in any combination of choice, although there are seven different official Ganymede packages are listed. Forty-five additional different project downloads are listed. And nine different distributions from member organisations are promoted. It shows an impressive level of community momentum and collective activity, but which of all of the alternatives do you really need for your particular project?

Actually, it is even more complex, because each bazaar stacks up components from its own shelves with components it finds in other bazaars. And you are often building not just one cathedral, but several based on a common set of blueprints. Perhaps you want to develop using Seam rich client Java toolkit? Then you might need a playlist of the Eclipse Classic IDE, JBoss Tools, Seam Core, JBoss AS, and PostgreSQL (with thanks to Stefan Daume for suggesting this particular playlist). But to do so, you may need to visit the Eclipse, JBoss, Seam and Postgres bazaars to put this all together -- unless you can happen to find somebody else who has already done this for you. If you want to build an email spam filter, then maybe a playlist of MySQL, qpsmtpd, my qpsmtpd custom modules, php pages (status), and open flash chart run-time files might be just the job (with thanks to Bjorn Freeman-Benson for this playlist).

Finding out what software components are available is a modest challenge: you can use raw Google, or Google CodeSearch, or Koders, or Krugle, or Codase, or something similar. The more significant challenge is finding out what works with what else to form a useful playlist; then how to get hold of the right version of each these pieces from each of the right bazaars concerned; how popular is this specific playlist of components; and how to get notified if any of the pieces are subsequently changed. If you want to be civic-minded, you might also want to find out how best to contribute original or derivative works back to the remainder of your organisation or community at large.

Our industry is maturing: we really soon should reach the equivalent levels of professional practice as our colleagues in other engineering disciplines, such as electronics hardware and civil engineering. There now is - perhaps at long last - a substantial number of re-usable, well-engineered, components available to all of us, being extended and improved on a daily basis. We should all be able to build cathedrals, and other artifacts, from the components we find. But the vast range of components, coupled with the fluidity of material - software - with which to work, has presented our industry with some new challenges,and which are not as apparent in other engineering disciplines.

Why is Engineering not taught by Professional Engineers ?

2008-09-12T20:55:00.006+01:00

I was asked to give a keynote speech earlier this week at the International Manufacturing Conference 2008, DIT.

I was perhaps (deliberately :-)) a little controversial and I had to wear my flame suit when responding to the Q&A afterwards, not least because sone of the audience were academics in Irish engineering schools, but not professional engineers!

If you have any views on this topic, please do post a comment.

Best
Chris

--

I speak to you today as the current Senior Vice President of Engineers Ireland, the professional body for engineers in this country. I will have the honour next year of serving my year as President.

I am an electronics engineer, graduating from a four year undergraduate programme in 1978. My first three years were spent in general engineering topics, and I chose to specialize in electronics only in my final year. So, I put my credentials in front of you ladies and gentlemen, and admit that I only have a hazy recollection of my lectures and tutorials in thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, applied mathematics, instrumentation and control, and so on....

So, in coming to you today I thought I ought to prepare myself by browsing the internet and trying to understand what are the current issues, opportunities and challenges facing you in the Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering professions today. Googling, I found myself reading current and back issues of magazines not only of our own Engineers Journal, but also of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Forgive me, but I was initially a little taken aback! I read a number of viewpoints which suggested that the West is losing manufacturing competencies and capacity to the emerging economies of the East, and in particular of China. If I were a potential student of manufacturing engineering, I might think that the future held little hope for me unless I emigrated to Guangdong, Zhejiang, Hebei or somewhere else in China!! Now personally, I really enjoy visiting that country and have done so regularly for some years – indeed I was the founding Chairman of the Ireland China Association back in 2001 – and frankly, if I were a younger professional starting my career I would seriously think of emigrating there. But I’m not convinced that many Leaving Certificate students would necessarily agree with me, and still less their parents. But some of your colleagues in your discipline seem to be strongly suggesting that there is no career future in manufacturing engineering unless one moves East.

It got worse. I came across another article, suggesting perhaps that we are seeing the imminent demise of mechanical engineering. In the good old days, a manufacturing plant was driven off a central power shaft spanning the longitudinal axis of the factory, with various gears and belts driving machinery at each station. In the good old days, cars, trucks and locomotives had central powertrains, gearboxes and hydraulic fluids controlling the power and torque from the power plant to the wheels. But nowadays, the electrical and electronic engineers are apparently winning and, using high power semiconductor gates, large amounts of electrical power can be delivered and minutely controlled, with extreme precision, in ways that can only make mechanical engineers drool! Most modern aircraft, including in particular the entire Airbus family, use fly by wire rather than fly by mechanical linkage. All new cars soon may not have drive shafts and gears boxes: the power will be delivered using cables via all electric drive chains, with microprocessors making sense of it all:: Your garage mechanic will need to become a garage electrician!

But then, I was relieved to find counter-points of view, observing how both manufacturing and mechanical engineering are evolving. Composite materials are driving new applications, not least in the biomedical domain for prosthetics. Manufacturing engineering has evolved into systems integration and product integration, harnessing a diverse set of emerging, disruptive technologies to yield innovative and exciting products. Scales are continuing to shrink, and minimization of both mass and energy are a common objective. Smart, intelligent materials with their own embedded controllers are not uncommon. Kinematicians lead efforts in unraveling protein folding, essential to genomics, proteomics and DNA scaffolding. Thermal engineering is becoming more and more critical: I am aware of the truly excellent work being done by Jeff Punch and his team in the University of Limerick in this regard, in particular in the domain of thermal stabilization of photonic lasers for telecommunications applications, in the context of my chairmanship of the CTVR national project in telecommunications.

In fact, as reputedly one wag stated: it’s no longer about “M”anufacturing engineering. It’s no longer about “M”echanical engineering. The “M” denotes something else: today it is about Multi-disciplinary engineering.

I fervently support this view. In my own career with computers and software, my industry not only changes its technologies, but also rapidly changes its perspective as new applications appear. A professional engineer today, regardless of his or her background, must have a multi-disciplinary philosophy. That has two complementary aspects: the intra-engineering and external. Multi-discipline, in the intra-engineering sense, implies an understanding and training across multiple engineering specializations, understanding the application of mathematical and scientific results to civil, mechanical, electrical, electronic, software, manufacturing engineering, and so on. By the external multi-disciplinary aspect, I mean the ability to discuss articulately with line of business managers, product marketing, corporate marketing, corporate lawyers, human resource professionals, and of course financial analysts.

But today, forgive me, in this country, I wonder have our colleagues in our engineering academies – both universities and institutes of technology – lost the plot ? One of their concerns I guess – and I speak as a past university lecturer – is the usually desperate quest to achieve recognition by their peer academics in other departments across the rest of the organisation. As an engineering department struggles to achieve recognition, and of course financial resources, amongst perhaps stronger groups in the pure sciences, the medics, the department of law, the business studies department, all of the various departments of humanities and so on, there is a natural tendency to play the game: “publish or perish”. And in publishing, and researching, more and more esoteric niched topics are addressed, in which one may have a reasonable chance of obtaining international recognition as an accomplished researcher but in what may be a very narrow field indeed.

However a consequence of this may be a tendency to over-specialise undergraduate courses. In a national market in Ireland, where there are few enough Leaving Certificate students obtaining honours standards in mathematics – which of course is the usual standard for entrance into courses leading to professional engineering accreditation – does it really make sense to have proliferation of undergraduate courses ? Let me give you some idea, from the list of undergraduate courses nationwide which are accredited by Engineers Ireland as giving a foundation to become a Member of our organization: Chemical and Process Engineering; Electronic Engineering; Electrical Engineering; Microelectronic Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; Materials Engineering; Process Engineering; Process and Chemical Engineering; Structural Engineering; Civil Engineering; Environmental Engineering; Civil, Structural and Environment Engineering; Manufacturing Engineering; Production Engineering; Computer-Aided and Manufacturing Engineering; Industrial Engineering and Information Systems; Aeronautical Engineering; Digital Media Engineering; Information and Communication Engineering; Manufacturing Engineering with Business Studies; Mechatronic Engineering; Medical Mechanical Engineering; Biosystems Engineering; Computer Engineering; Building Services Engineering; Agricultural and Food Engineering. I know that all the academics involved in offering this wonderful diversity are sincere in their disciplines, but isn’t it time we stood back and asked ourselves is there a better way to help students select Engineering as a profession ? And ensure that they have a very solid, multi-disciplinary approach to Engineering as a profession ? And leave at least some of the specialization, when and as necessary, to their continued professional development during their career ?

Let me change tack, and give you another concern which I have. If one of my family ever were to pursue a career in surgery, I and they would expect to learn from practicing surgeons. If I were ever to take lessons to become an aircraft pilot, I would like lessons from a qualified professional pilot. In my business career, whenever requiring professional legal or financial advice, I have sought the necessary qualified professional individuals.

And so, if any of my family pursue an Engineering career – and one of my sons is studying Engineering – I would expect, and they expect, to be taught by professionals. Professional Engineers.

In preparing today’s talk, I browsed the web sites of the Irish universities and institutes offering those courses I alluded to above, and examined the credentials of the academics of the various engineering departments concerned – at least, as published on their web sites. It was very very interesting, and I encourage you to try the exercise yourself.

For example: one department: six full time academic staff, only one of them – the head of Department – listed C.Eng. as amongst his accomplishments. Another: four academics, no C.Eng listed. Another: twenty academics, one Fellow, four C.Engs. And so on.

Now there are many PhDs. And a few Professors. But why so few Chartered Engineers (or Fellows) ? I suspect that perhaps the various web pages aren’t always accurate, and C.Eng qualifications aren’t always listed. However, that in turn is indicative: why would an Engineering academic not be much more proud of the fact that he or she was a Chartered Engineer, or Fellow, and advertise that fact, ahead of being a Dr. or Professor ??...

In the medical profession, a simple Mr, Ms or Mrs as a title commands great respect: the individual in question is likely to be a highly qualified surgeon or consultant, rather than a simple General Practitioner Doctor, or an esoteric academic Professor. A highly qualified practitioner gains respect. Why are our own Engineering academics not as proud of practical professional experiences ? Why is it acceptable to have a non Chartered Engineer teaching professional engineering ? Should it be acceptable ? Why do engineering departments not insist on a C.Eng. recruitment policy, and why do they not demand that their younger staff achieve C.Eng. status as rapidly as possible, if necessary ahead of achieving professorial status ? Why do our engineering students not question – no, demand – that the majority of their teaching comes from professional engineers ?

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me remind you or advise you if you have not already heard, that Engineers Ireland has taken the decision that from 2013 in Ireland, it will be necessary to have achieved a Masters level of education, over five years, in order to become a Chartered Engineer, from the current position where a four year accredited undergraduate degree is sufficient. While thus bringing us into line with many of our international colleagues, the change is also an opportunity for us to consider the structure staffing, and directions of our academic engineering programmes.

Thank you for your time this morning, and my opportunity to address you. Let me leave you with a summary: if we are going to attract more people to a wonderful and exciting career in professional engineering, then we ourselves must become even more professional in our education. We need to stress a multi-disciplinary approach, re-visit our thinking about premature specialization, and ensure that as many of our instructors as possible have professional engineering qualifications.

Software Playlists

2008-08-27T17:08:00.004+01:00

I wrote the text below as part of a whitepaper on Cloudsmith – you may find it interesting to read through.

In summary, Cloudsmith lets you browse and find useful bundles of software components which work together – software playlists – and then download ones of interest. Each one can contain components from different software repositories, and Cloudsmith knows where to go, and how to get to them.

I did a few short (approx. 4 mins each) youtube videos to help you. The first one (sorry for the mug shot..) shows you how to browse and download a playlist in Cloudsmith; the second, how you can publish your own playlist, or distro, of interesting software and share it with everyone else, if you want to; and the third, how you can tell Cloudsmith about new software components available which it doesn’t already know about.

Have fun.

Meanwhile, here’s some motivation for why we put Cloudsmith together…..

Douglas McIlroy for the NATO conference on software engineering in Germany in 1968:

"Software components (routines), to be widely applicable to different machines and users, should be available in families arranged according to precision, robustness, generality and time-space performance.

Existing sources of components - manufacturers, software houses, users' groups and algorithm collectors - lack the breadth of interest or coherence of purpose to assemble more than one or two such families, yet software production in the large would be so enormously helped by the availability of spectra of high quality routines, quite as mechanical design is abetted by the existence of families of structural shapes, screws and resistors.

We undoubtedly get the short end of the stick in confrontations with hardware people because they are industrialists, and we are the crofters. Software production today appears in the scale of industrialization somewhere below the more backward construction industries."

Some forty years later, some cynics may argue that we software people are still crofters compared to our peers in other disciplines of engineering. However, there is considerable progress, at the technology level, for component based engineering applied to the software industry: modern programming environments such as Java, C#, Ruby, Perl, etc; modern development environments such as Eclipse and XCode; and emerging runtime environments such as OSGi. Likewise there are repositories of software components online at Eclipse, Apache, Sourceforge, and Tigris, as well as many others. Discovering what software components are available is a modest challenge: you can use raw Google, or source code searchers such as Google CodeSearch, Koders, Krugle, Codase, or some such. Competency and skills across a development organisation can be accelerated by understanding how different components have been used together by architects and experienced developers.

However, the momentum behind component based software paradoxically is not without problems. Many developers make contributions, and it can be difficult to clearly see the gems against the morass of activity. Software appears inherently unstable. Problems are found, bugs are fixed, extensions are made, and patches released. When the industry as a whole is increasingly adopting componentization, when components are supplied by third parties, and are upstream in the component “supply chain”, there is a serious risk of accelerating instability.

It can take hours, or even longer, to deduce dependencies between components (whether open or closed source); to copy folders; to pack; to download; to then unpack; to establish deployment targets, and all the sundry other activities needed to actually successfully build a system and get it to work. It is not uncommon for the skills involved to be concentrated on a very small number of key “build” or “configuration” developers, whose loss from an organization would could serious concern and vulnerability.

Following other engineering disciplines to componentization should be “a good thing” as McIlroy argues: but can we do more to enhance confidence and accountability ?

The momentum behind software components is resulting in increasingly less pre-packaging by specific suppliers and aggregators, and increasingly more tailoring by both suppliers and consumers. There is some analogy with developments in the music industry. In 1968, when McIlroy made his comments at the NATO conference, and even as recently as the start of this decade, music distribution companies and their contracted artists sold pre-packaged songs as albums: an album was distributed as a complete image printed onto some distribution media - an LP record, tape, CD or DVD - and the selection of songs it contained was pre-determined by the supplier. Software vendors have been doing something similar.

Today, while such music albums are still available, it is more common for the public to download individual songs and tunes from online repositories and stores such as iTunes. Further, anyone can package together a selection of songs and tunes which they believe form an interesting juxtaposition, as a playlist. A favorite playlist may be shared with friends and others, enabling them to download and also listen to the same selection.

A playlist can be part of another, forming a larger collection. iTunes v3 introduced automatic updating of playlists, based on ratings, popular plays, keyword tags and play counts. The playlist concept has been extended to videos and photograph selections.

Software playlists are a new concept, introduced by Cloudsmith. A software playlist identifies a set of software components which can be usefully used together. Given a playlist, its constituent components can be automatically downloaded from their respective public or, as appropriate, proprietary software repositories and materialised onto a target machine. The publisher of a playlist - a company, or an individual - asserts that the specific components are mutually compatible, and usage and other metrics can confirm this. An example of a playlist, from Stefan Daume, might be a foundation for using the Seam rich client Java toolset and so list the combination of specific compatible versions of the Eclipse Classic IDE, JBoss Tools, Seam Core, JBoss AS, and PostgreSQL required to obtain the Seam environment.

Software playlists are an excellent way to encourage standard configurations and environments. Corporate “favorite” playlists, containing only approved executable binaries and libraries, can be enforced where appropriate. To the extent that playlists are shared in public (on the internet), different alternative configurations can quickly be appraised and compared for popularity and ubiquity. Software adoption trends across the industry can be monitored, and the stability of new releases can be tracked.

Changes to specific software playlists can also be monitored. Notifications can be received, for example, by using an RSS feed whenever one of the underlying components is updated. Equally, notifications can be received whenever a software playlist is in turn incorporated and nested inside another playlist: this can be one measure of adoption and ubiquity, akin to citation scores for top scientific papers and to pagerank algorithms.

In a software development environment, public software playlists can provide valuable information on configurations found useful by other organizations and developers. A well defined (evidently stable and popular) playlist can save wasted time and effort, otherwise need to find workable configurations of different versions of various components.

Inside the corporate firewall, private (ie to the corporation) playlists can be built from a mixture of proprietary software components from internal repositories, and from public components if appropriate. Playlists overcome the vulnerability of configuration skills being limited to a very small group of core developers and builders.

Software playlists can be a mechanism for describing a specific tailored configuration from a customer back to a software supplier, under a suitable support contract. They can also be a way for a vendor to release updates and patches in a limited distribution to appropriate customers.

The components – the “tunes” – within a software playlist need not be limited to executable modules and libraries. A software component can also be source code, or a test script, or documentation, or a presentation – in fact any soft copy of any information. A software playlist can, for example, describe the executable software, tutorials, exercises and class notes necessary for a particular training course. A prospective student – or the individual responsible for preparing a class room for a course – can then pre-load the material necessary for the course, from the playlist, and thus avoid time wastage for configuration activities during the course itself.

We have built and offer Cloudsmith to the global software community as a service to help find, assemble, load and track software artifacts, described by software playlists, as well as to help to encourage the construction of new ones.

Cloudsmith is a repository for software playlists: it contains information about components, but not the components themselves. Cloudsmith is thus not a software component repository, but augments them. Software playlists can be easily constructed from others, and from those software components known to Cloudsmith. Publishing; sharing or protecting; finding and searching for; downloading and “materializing” components for; and monitoring the popularity and quality of software playlists are all simple, easily-learnt, point-and-click, activities. Playlists are named, grouped into folders, and can be given keyword tags. Playlists can be shared amongst a specified set of users, or made generally public. All the components necessary for a specific playlist can be materialized and installed in a specific machine, as a single mouse click – and such “cloudlinks” can be shared via, for example, email or blogs. Versioning compatibility and specific machine environment differences can be automatically managed.

Public software component repositories, such as Eclipse, Apache, Sourceforge, Maven and Tigris, are largely already mapped by Cloudsmith, and so the components therein can be easily added into playlists. Cloudsmith understands all common industry versioning and meta-information formats for software repositories and build systems. Extending the map with further repositories, including private ones (for example inside a firewall), is straight forward. Components from private repositories can be restricted to private playlists for limited groups of users.

In a similar way, the Cloudsmith web site is a publicly accessible resource. When using public assets together with private ones, it is a common requirement to place key proprietary assets within your corporate firewall. We thus also provide private Cloud servers, which operate on a corporate intranet and co-operate with the main public Cloudsmith web site. A private Cloudserver can thus complement a private software repository.

Software components openly shared and accessible across the internet are changed (by third parties) in ways that sometimes may appear unpredictable, and perhaps even unwarranted from the perspective of your own use of them. By contrast, private software assets inside the corporate firewall can be managed and have their life cycles carefully controlled. A private Cloudserver can provide a useful interface to couple private and public assets, ensuring that specific versions and updates to public assets are only adopted inside the corporation within the firewall in a managed way.

A private Cloudserver can also serve as the "site of record" for the adoption and consumption of public software assets across an organisation. By using working via corporate software playlists on a private Cloudserver, rather than allowing the direct consumption of publicly available software components, the degree to which public assets are used can be controlled and monitored. This in turn can not just provide stability for software engineering activities, but also greatly assist verification and audit processes necessary for good governance and IP management.

Douglas McIlroy stated, back in 1968:

"Existing sources of components - manufacturers, software houses, users' groups and algorithm collectors - lack the breadth of interest or coherence of purpose to assemble more than one or two such families, yet software production in the large would be so enormously helped by the availability of spectra of high quality routines, quite as mechanical design is abetted by the existence of families of structural shapes, screws and resistors."

Today, there is a substantial spectra of software components on a global scale, and many of high quality.

The challenge now is to understand which software components work well with which others, and then how to understand and manage those configurations.

Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday

2008-07-04T18:00:00.002+01:00

Friday, july 18^th next is Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday.

In UNICEF Ireland, we’re celebrating his birthday by inviting everyone to send him a birthday card. We’re very grateful to the Sunday Times newspaper which next Sunday (6^th) will be including a birthday postcard, which you can then use to fill out with a greeting, and post in to us. There are also a number of volunteers and retail outlets around Ireland handing out the postcards. We’re also extremely grateful to An Post, who have very kindly offered to carry the cards free not only in Ireland, but also in bulk when we send them all on to his home in South Africa. Finally, there is an online version of the card which you can also use.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation has been a partner in the “Schools For Africa” campaign with UNICEF and the German philanthropist Peter Kramer, via his Hamburg Society for the Promotion of Democracy and International Law. Schools for Africa is catalyzing basic education across Africa, with an emphasis on girls, orphans and vulnerable children. Schools are being renovated or re-built, educational materials are being provided, and teachers being trained. As I mentioned in a previous posting, I visited a number of schools in Kigali earlier this year: both those which have been receiving UNICEF aid, and those which do not yet have the “child friendly” designation.

I remember when I was a student studying in Dublin in the 1980s, twelve staff at Dunnes Stores supermarkets, led by Vonnie Munroe and Mary Manning and under instructions from their trade union, IDATU, went on strike for two and a half years to protest against the importation of produce from South Africa during the anti-apartheid era. Vonnie could not keep up payments on her home, on her strike pay, and was forced to leave it. On June 18^th – just three weeks ago – a plaque was unveiled by the Minister of Foreign Affairs as a permanent feature outside the Dunnes Stores shop on Henry Street in the centre of Dublin, to remember the stand taken by the staff. Mary Manning has met Nelson Mandela, and also has had a street in Johannesburg named after her.

In 1958, the ruling National Party in South Africa, chose Hendrik Verwoerd (note that name…) as its new prime minister. He believed that the solution to the challenges which faced the country at the time was the complete separation of the black and white populations and, further, the division of the black population into ethnic groups or ‘nations’. He unveiled his master plan in 1959, positioning South Africa as a ‘multi-national state’ with separate homelands for eight black ‘nations’. In the same year, the African National Congress, founded back in 1912, suffered a split as the core ANC, including Mandela, pursued a multi-racial holistic South Africa; and the Pan-Africanist Congress demanded a ‘government of the Africans, by the Africans, and for the Africans’. In Sharpeville, a black township fifty miles south of Johannesburg, in March 1960, police opened fire indiscriminately on a crowd of PAC supporters, killing 69 and wounding 186. Using emergency powers, Verwoerd then banned, and cracked down upon, both the PAC and ANC. In July 1962, Mandela was arrested two weeks after having being surreptitiously abroad for six months.

Mandela was found guilty the following November of two charges, of inciting workers to illegally strike, and of leaving the country without valid documentation. He was subsequently charged in October 1963 under the Sabotage Act, which carried the death penalty. He conducted his own defence, and gave a lengthy, impassioned and widely reported speech to mitigate his sentence: he was sentenced to life imprisonment on the 12^th June 1964.

In March 1980. the Soweto newspaper The Post started a campaign to demand Mandela’s release, as a symbol of the anti-apartheid movement and in the light of riots and the repression that had followed. Probably millions of people around the world at the time frankly had little idea who exactly Mandela was, but the momentum against apartheid was building, and he became one of the most famous prisoners in the world. While still in Pollsmoor prison (having been moved from Robben Island in 1982), Mandela made several proposals to meet with the then president PW Botha to break the deadlock that had stagnated South Africa, both economically and socially. They eventually held a highly secret meeting in Tuynhuys, Cape Town, which was the president’s official residence: that meeting was 19 years ago tomorrow, the 5^th July.

Six weeks later, PW Botha resigned after friction with his cabinet colleagues. His successor, FW de Klerk, under pressure from international governments, but also calculating that the ANC was poorly organized and that he could form a winning alliance with conservative black organizations, lifted the ban on the ANC in February 1990, and released Mandela from prison on the 11^th of that month.

In April 1994, during the first national, and fully democratic, elections, the ANC won a national majority and Mandela became president. However a year earlier, the grand-daughter-in-law of the instigator of apartheid Hendrik Verwoerd (remember him from above?..), Melanie Verwoerd, had been invited by Nelson Mandela to stand as a candidate in the first democratic elections in South Africa. Melanie was duly elected as an ANC Member of Parliament. She was the youngest woman member ever to be elected to the South African Parliament.

Melanie today is the Executive Director of UNICEF here in Ireland.

So, in honour of Nelson Mandela’s 90^th birthday, and due to Melanie’s initiative in celebrating the event, please fill out and post the birthday postcard, either physically via next Sunday’s Sunday Times, or virtually on the web.

IONA

2008-06-25T22:17:00.002+01:00

This morning it seemed a very long time since February 1991 when Annrai, Sean and I started IONA.

In those very early days, one of my mentors told me that the chief responsibility of a CEO to his staff is to improve the CV of each and every staff member during their tenure with the company.

It’s a principle I tried to uphold during my two terms, and 12 years, as CEO of IONA. I certainly don’t claim a 100% success rate, but I honestly feel very privileged to have worked with each IONAian over the years since 1991, and sincerely hope that each and every career immensely benefited as a result. There are, and have been, wonderful people at IONA, and I cherish all those years with unbelievable fondness. The deep experience, and the proud development of each individual’s capabilities, will be something I hope that each person can reflect upon positively for the rest of their life.

When Software AG wrote a formal letter to the Chairman of IONA earlier this year, they triggered under Irish corporate law a lengthy and delicate process which has eventually resulted in today’s announcement. During the process, a large number of companies were contacted, which resulted in a shorter list of potential bidders. These included both trade companies, and private equity houses, who were then each invited to undertake detailed due diligence, including face to face meetings with the executive team and myself as a major shareholder and Board member.

Ultimately, a number of formal bids were made. The IONA Board, after careful consideration and detailed professional advice, have decided to recommend the Progress offer to our shareholders. Many factors weighed on that decision, heavily complicated by multitude of requirements under Irish, European and US legislation. In the thoughtful view of our Board, the Progress offer price - in cash - not only makes sense for our shareholders, but also Progress have the capability to execute (ie complete) the transaction; the acquisition should meet the requirements and expectations of continued service and quality to our customers and partners; and, from what we as a Board were able to discern from the character of the leadership teams of the various bidders, Progress’s values and culture appears to be the closest to our own.

I have known Joe Alsop for many years. I have no doubt that he feels the same responsibility I held when I was (twice) CEO, to improve the CV of each and every staff member during their service with the company.

I sincerely believe that there is a wonderful opportunity in the global enterprise middleware sector, and – assuming the deal is ultimately approved later this year - I fully encourage the combined Progress and IONA teams to (in due course) extremely aggressively compete in this vicious market. I will watch with interest.

Myanmar

2008-05-07T17:17:00.000+01:00

The crisis in Myanmar after cyclone Nargis of May 2^nd last is critical. There have been at least 21,000 causalities, with – at the time of writing – some 40,000 people still unaccounted for. The catastrophic damage to infrastructure, including transportation, water, shelter and food immediately threatens even more.

I personally would concur with those who are concerned for human rights issues in Myanmar, and some of the policies and actions of the Myanmar Government. But an emergency situation is not the same as a longer term development initiative: in my view, a solid, democratic government should never be, and rarely in practice is, a pre-condition to emergency relief.

UNICEF has been on the ground in Myanmar since 1950. It currently has 9 offices in addition to its headquarters in Yangon. We currently have 170 UNICEF staff on the ground nationwide. Aid given via UNICEF goes directly to the people of Myanmar.

When the structures of a civil society are weak, when poverty is widespread and governance leaves issues to be resolved, the need in an emergency is even greater.

Delay and procrastination will cause further, and avoidable, deaths in Myanmar. The response to the 2005 south east Asian tsunami was immediate, and indisputably saved lives which would otherwise have been lost in the chaotic aftermath. In the case of the tsunami response, and now in the case of Myanmar, in-country pre-disaster stockpiles of emergency response materials by UNICEF and other major global organizations are critical. Replenishing those supplies is vital. Rapid reaction by the host government, including issuing visas to overseas nationals, is equally essential.

In my view, it is irresponsible, morally inexcusable and potentially murderous to delay.

The leader of the Irish agency Goal made certain statements today broadcast nationwide in Ireland by the national radio organization. Goal fundamentally is an excellent organization, and indeed UNICEF frequently partners with Goal in targeted projects in those developing countries in which Goal actually has a credible presence.

But I am disappointed by the comments today from Goal, which frankly were ill-conceived, factually incorrect and morally dangerous.

If the Board of Goal really sincerely believes that the Government of Myanmar does not care for millions of its own people, can the Board and wonderful staff of Goal still nevertheless sleep comfortably at night just letting people die, when practical assistance is possible and desperately sought ?

What moral right can an aid organization justify telling the people of Ireland to deny the people of Myanmar, to not join with the international community in responding to the plea for help, and to instead just allow people to die in the aftermath of Nargis ?

The Big Switch: book review

2008-03-03T16:08:00.003Z

I wrote the following book review, by kind invitation, for the Irish Times Innovation supplement, and which was published today.

Nicholas Carr came to notoriety in 2003 for asserting that information technology no longer delivers a competitive edge. He claimed that although such technology is a prerequisite of any enterprise, it is no more so than electricity or telephones. Likewise, he argued, neither electricity, phones nor computer technology give competitive advantage, since everybody else has these too. Fortunately companies like Capital One, Southwest Airlines, Goldman Sachs, Toyota and many others ignored him. Police and the security forces, and the military, are not the only organizations who extensively exploit computers and software to overcome aggressive adversity from the opposition. Information Technology can strategically be used to give competitive advantage.

His latest book, The Big Switch, is in two parts. The first gives a charming history of the electricity industry and some comparisons to the computer industry. For computer industry practitioners and technology historians alike, it is a light, interesting and innocuous read.

The second part is more significant. Carr bleakly observes complacency and naivety amongst internet advocates. Rather than the internet being a liberalizing force for global humanity or an empowerment away from governments and towards their peoples, Carr sees dangerous forces at work which may be concentrating power and immense wealth in a few fortunate individuals and in specific companies, as well as of course manipulation of populations by governments. Google comes in for particular attention, in the entire concluding chapter of the book. Carr discusses Google’s reputed quest to exploit artificial intelligence to the fullest by using the knowledge inherent in the world wide web, ultimately striving to be able to whisper answers and suggestions to any of our thoughts directly within our brains. God, Carr argues, has become the Great Programmer and the Universe is but the logical output of a computer.

Those concerned by privacy may be interested in Carr’s assertions that anonymous information and anonymised data can easily be overruled by inference automatically deduced through information culled from a small number of disparate sources. Those running businesses which rely on the internet may be interested in Carr’s observations on the fragility of the internet – as was exposed as recently as the start of this year by international sabotage in the Middle East, Iran and India. Those concerned with cultural understanding and appreciation of much international content on the web will be interested in Carr’s views on the inevitability of blandness. Those observing the polarity of US political commentary may be interested in Carr’s hypothesis on web newsfeeds and blogs which he infers from Thomas Schelling’s (an economist) experiments in 1971: these showed an intrinsic natural propensity towards racial segregation within America’s suburbs. Those concerned by skilled labour shortages in Ireland may be interested in Carr’s conjectures on how the computer industry worldwide is in fact destroying jobs, not creating them.

Perhaps having forcibly laid down some portentous predictions, Carr might have suggested some alleviating actions. For example Carr asserts that everyone in the YouTube economy is free to play, but only very few reap the rewards; the erosion of the middle class may well accelerate, as the divide widens between a relatively small group of extraordinarily wealthy people – the digital elite – and a very large set of people who face eroding fortunes; and humanity is left with a prospect which is far from utopian. If computerization is really different from those past technological revolutions which helped close wealth gaps, then a discussion of actions or policies which might ameliorate the future would be insightful: but Carr appears reluctant to offer his wisdom.

People like Carr may be skeptical that the Web will create a more bountiful culture and they are equally dubious that it will promote greater harmony and understanding: instead they believe that cultural impoverishment and social fragmentation are as likely outcomes. If this is the case, then what should or could be done to improve things ? Do we trust that humans browsing the web can extract balanced judgments ? Should we – and what right do “we” have anyway – care about such issues, and should we make such judgments ? Should society encourage web content to be apolitical ? Old-timers like this reviewer will recall that commercial promotion using the internet once was ruled unacceptable by the community. Should our search engines attempt to tag argument with counter-argument ? Is there an opportunity to use the Web to aggregate and bundle (as in the traditional media, including for example this newspaper) and thus present balanced views, rather than the Great Unbundling which Carr perceives in the Web ? Should search engines be more circumspect about inferring our personal preferences as to our preferred content, and thus risk presenting content contrary to our individual prejudices ? Is the concept of a responsible, “public-service” search engine, useful and conceivable ? Certainly there is scope for reasoned discussion on improving upon or even avoiding the various outcomes for the Web which Carr discusses and predicts - but perhaps Carr is saving this for his follow-on tome “The Big Switch 2”.

This – in part two – is a dark book. It is characterized by sometimes nebulous extrapolation of certain trends and selected observations to assert sensational outcomes for the future of the internet and the web. Extreme positions and incitement to fear may no doubt generate some attention on the international speaking circuit. A more balanced and mature treatment is possible and arguably more responsible if, admittedly and almost certainly, less lucrative.

LeCayla bought by OpSource

2008-02-11T14:22:00.000Z

OpSource’s acquisition of LeCayla was announced today.

Conor Halpin and I met with OpSource in Santa Clara late last year, and I was immediately impressed by Treb Ryan and his team. LeCayla’s business has been growing to the extent that we needed to open a physical presence in the US to serve customers, and convert US based prospects. We considered various options: organically building a direct presence ourselves; acquiring an existing US company; or partnering with a stronger and complimentary US operation. We talked both to our existing Irish based investors, and potential new US based VC investors interested in the SaaS delivery space.

In the end, acquisition by OpSource makes a lot of sense. LeCayla was already a customer of OpSource’s hosting solution, and both companies were thus aware of each other. OpSource has a vision of a complete SaaS delivery platform: not just basic hosting, but also valuable services such as analytics, visualization and now - via LeCayla - billing. OpSource brings a wider reach of deployed customers; LeCayla brings OpSource not only a well architected and proven self-service billing solution, but also an excellent engineering team and a business presence in Europe. It is my understanding that Treb Ryan intends to retain Conor Halpin and all of his team.

I have enjoyed working with Conor and the board of LeCayla, and sincerely wish the entire teams of OpSource and LeCayla not only success, but fun in achieving that success while working together.

Rwanda

2008-01-28T14:00:00.000Z

I spent last week in Rwanda, as Chair of UNICEF Ireland, bringing some of our individual donors to see our work with children.

It was my first visit to Rwanda, and I was incredibly impressed by the sheer beauty of the place. It is a small country, almost the size of Ireland, and like Ireland extremely green and lush. The scenery is stunning: Kigali, the capital (of “mille collines”, a thousand hills), is built amongst hills and valleys; Gisenyi near the border with Congo is on the shores of the spectacular Lake Kivu; and we finished amongst the Virunga volcanoes near the border with Uganda. Bluegum, sugar cane, eucalyptus trees and vegetables and flowers are abundant in the fertile soil. Three languages are predominant, with most people multi-lingual: Kinyarwanda, French and English.

In preparation for my trip, I had read Dervla Murphy’s own account of her visit in 1997, and I was very keen to see what changes had occurred since then.

The entire country is pristine. I saw no litter anywhere whatsoever, and no graffiti. Plastic bags are illegal, and I had been warned in advance that customs officials will confiscate them from your luggage on arrival. One Saturday morning each month, the entire nation – including its politicians – take part in community service, umuganda, which traditionally was a form of labour, as opposed to financial, tax: as I saw last Saturday morning, each community goes to work on maintaining the local paths, tracks, water infrastructure and so on.

The parallels with us here in Ireland seem remarkable, except perhaps a different view in Ireland of pervasive tidiness, purity and social commitment. Like us a few decades ago, Rwanda is a wonderful country with incredibly friendly people, in a green oasis of rural agriculture, and an under-developed but potentially services-led economy. Gisenyi is a concealed haven, right on the Congolese border beside Goma, but at our hotel we saw an internationally very well known US film star, and Bill Gates is also rumoured to be a periodic visitor.

The population of Rwanda is 9m, with only about 23% urban. The main roads pretty much everywhere have people walking along both sides of them – it needed steady nerves from our UNICEF driver to ensure that nobody was hit. The main roads are tarmaced, but potholed, and almost all side roads are heavily rutted dirt tracks. On one bruising 20km drive along one to visit a school, I had the chance to ride a gicugutu: a scooter, made entirely of wood – the frame and the wheels - great fun, if exhausting.

The five year term of Paul Kagame since 2003 has seen the economy grow 44% to 2.4Bn$ (2006 figure), with growth of 4.5%-6.5% expected for 2007. The incidence of HIV/AIDS in Rwanda is just 3%, very low compared to some other nations, and due in part to the strong educational and health programmes of the government. There are elections next autumn, and from what I learnt, Kagame is a highly popular leader even if sometimes controversial internationally in the aftermath of the genocide.

Re-integration of society since the genocide of 1994 has clearly been painful and every citizen was affected by what happened. It was surreal to visit and have a drink in the bar of the Hotel des Mille Collines in central Kigali, an apparently perfectly normal international hotel but also Hotel Rwanda. Each April, there is a one week of national mourning, in memory of the start of the events of 1994. I naturally took the opportunity to talk quietly to individuals, and heard their personal stories and how they have dealt with the situation. One of the key national educational issues is how to explain what happened to the young Rwandans who have been borne since 1994: how do you explain to young teenagers what the adults around them – including their teachers - did and experienced just 14 years ago ?

On this particular trip, the focus was primarily on education (as opposed to e.g. HIV/AIDS for which I have visited other African nations before). UNICEF worldwide has a programme of what are called “child friendly schools” – a term which I personally find strange since it implies that other schools are “child unfriendly”, but there is a certain logic. Child friendly schools generally have better staff/student ratios, sports facilities, teacher training, re-integration of orphans and challenged children, and in particular are safe locations for girls – separate latrine facilities for example. Attendance rates, and completion rates, in child friendly schools are generally excellent. In Rwanda, the target staff-student ratio is 1:55 (as opposed to nearly double that historically). Sports facilities – like soccer, volleyball, basketball, gymnastics – are very helpful in re-integration of orphans and vulnerable children into the normal society of their peers.

We visited both child friendly and as yet un-refurbished schools. A child friendly school is used as a centre point for a cluster of schools within a district, with teachers at the centre training those from the periphery. The contrast in terms of fit-out were obvious: concrete floors instead of mud; desks instead of benches; good sanitation and separate latrines; rain proof roofs; rain water collection tanks, and so on. The far better attendance by girls in child friendly schools was conspicuous as we visited classes.

We also visited child headed households, which I had experienced in Kwa-Zulu Natal and Zambia on previous trips. I was invited into the home of a 14 year old girl, who ran the household for her three younger siblings with support from UNICEF. Her extended family had been killed in the genocide. Her eyes carried a deep sadness which will haunt me for some time. In the schools we visited – of both categories – there were between one third and one half of the children like her and her siblings who had been orphaned and were vulnerable. Attending school, and getting younger siblings educated, is clearly an enormous challenge when so many domestic issues – including in particular food – pre-occupy teenage-led families.

Paul Kagame hosts a national childrens summit on an annual basis, over two days which are also nationally broadcast. Childrens issues are high on the national political agenda and UNICEF is a valuable partner.

For me, UNICEF is a wonderful organization and I occasionally surprise myself with deep awe, respect, sadness and hope – and yes, from time to time, tears. IMHO, to make a difference we really do need global organizations with scale and impact. UNICEF eradicated polio across the planet: I’m not convinced that many other organizations could have done this. It is not just about emergency relief but also about development of nations. I understand that a well known Irish national NGO has recently decided to cease any development activities and focus solely on emergency relief: while this is perhaps understandable given their limited scale, it has left projects abandoned with funding suddenly stopped, and with organizations like UNICEF then having to step in at short notice to pick up the shattered pieces. Development requires sustained, multi-year long term commitment: a “spray and pray” strategy is immature. Sometimes smaller NGOs suddenly abandon a country, as a response to strife, and in some cases – despicably – pull out their white staff, leaving other staff to their fate: UNICEF continues for example in Kenya and indeed Melanie Verwoerd, our UNICEF Ireland Director, had been in Kenya just the previous week – she was interviewed live from Kenya on the Gerry Ryan show amongst others. Sometimes, as an emergency relief response, smaller NGOs have difficulties working where they have no track record: at the time of the Asian tsunami in 2004, smaller NGOs reputedly turned up at Jakarta on short term tourist visas. The Indonesian government came under some entirely misplaced media criticism here in Ireland and elsewhere at the time: but on the ground the Indonesian authorities had long established operations with UNICEF and the Red Cross and handled the crisis well with military efficiency.

We visited, on our first morning, the Kigali Memorial Centre, where there are mass graves for 250,000 people. We laid three wreathes on the graves, and spent several hours inside the centre itself. Apart from the Rwandan story, including its impact on children, the remaining third of the centre is devoted to other genocides, including the Nazi and former Yugoslavia genocides in Europe. Let me leave you with one of the quotes carved outside the centre:

“In a search for a hideout, I found Jerome, his legs cut off. I could not leave him in this state. I tried to lift up Jerome so that we could leave together, but the car of the commune stopped near me. It was full of machetes and other instruments of death. I lay Jerome down on the ground and ran because a man got out of the burgomaster’s car to kill me. He finished Jerome off. I saw this when I looked back to see if anyone had followed me. I will never forget the way Jerome’s face was filled with desperation. Whenever I think about it, I cry all day long.”

Eric, 13

In the spring of 1994, approximately one million Rwandans were brutally and savagely murdered. But, as the Memorial Centre says, what really happened was not a million murders but first of all, one extremely violent and brutal one. The loss of a beautiful human life. And then, another was done. And then, incredibly, a third. And then a fourth. And on and on and on, relentlessly, on over a million separate individual occasions.

PS: if you are really really interested, there are some photos here.

Ready to be Illuminated ?

2008-01-19T16:47:00.000Z

A lot of things happening at the moment in IONA, Le Cayla, Cloudsmith and UNICEF, and more about these in due course, but this blog entry is about the Science Gallery.

I first wrote about my involvement with the Science Gallery almost a year ago, and now – at last!! – it is opening. The launch event is on the first week of February 2^nd-9^th next, and is all about the science and art of light, with techno-artists and punk scientists :-). If you are in Dublin that week, do come along – most of the events are free!

The full programme is a .pdf here but to give you a flavour of what’s happening:

· U2’s light show director Willie Williams

· The Sun in 3D

· Playing pong live on neighbouring urban buildings

· Live illumination of bumble bee flight paths

· Hand cranked luminescent jewellery

· Light tracing

· Ultrasound fusion – Camera Lucinda

There’s also informal meetings with creative individuals in events like the Open Mouse Night, Seed Dating, Show and Sell, etc. LightWave fun will also be on the streets of Dublin for the week – the Lightmobile VW Beetle; Laser bombing; the Bubbleheads on their 4 seater bike; 120 traffic cameras montaging on to the Irish Times building in Tara Street, and The Hive down in Grand Canal Square.

Have fun. The Science Gallery has been a fun project for me, and it’s great to get it open at last. I think it will change the public’s perception of science and technology.

PostScript: The Science Gallery now has a YouTube channel, and a short video of the opening night on 1st February last is here.

Engineers Ireland Innovation Awards

2007-12-12T11:42:00.000Z

This morning I had the pleasure of giving a brief talk at Engineers Ireland on the occasion of their second annual Innovation Awards, for the most innovative engineer and the most innovative company of 2007. A couple of people asked for a copy of what I said, so for better or worse, here goes…

172 years ago, on the 6^th August 1835, the first president of our Institution, Colonel Burgoyne, at our inaugural meeting, said:

“We are engaged in the service of Ireland, and it is our duty, as well as our interest, to promote its prosperity to the fullest”.

In my view, ladies and gentlemen, we – the Engineers of Ireland – could be doing considerably more to promote the prosperity of Ireland to its fullest.

Let me explain. In 2000, our Government had the foresight and commitment to initiate Science Foundation Ireland so as to develop a world class research capability in biotechnology, and information and communications technology, as an essential foundation to our nation’s growth. The discovery of new things, by research, is a commendable activity and may indeed be a foundation for our nation’s growth. It may attract foreign investment, and it may encourage the invention of new appliances, and machines based on insights from the natural world. We celebrate our most successful scientists via SFI, the Royal Irish Academy, the British Telecom Young Scientists Exhibition, and indeed via others.

We also celebrate our entrepreneurs. Ernst and Young, and Ulster Bank, recently hosted a televised evening at CityWest in which our entrepreneurs of 2007 were celebrated. Entrepreneurs organize and manage a business, sometimes taking considerable risk to do so. This year’s winner, Liam Casey of PCH, is a well deserved winner. Having known Liam for some time, I was delighted to sincerely and warmly congratulate him in person on the evening for his business in sourcing manufacturing services from China. But I did reflect at the time on the extent to which entrepreneurship in general, as so ostentatiously celebrated at CityWest and as reflected by the portfolio of finalists chosen by the judges, really benefits our economy. It is wonderful to see the growth of family businesses, and the implementation within Ireland of business models imported from overseas, but it is unclear to me at least whether these examples necessarily lead to a sustainable prosperity for Ireland. We can have successful hospitality businesses, successful reseller and distributorships in Ireland, and successful implementation here of models already proven elsewhere. While all these entrepreneurial activities create employment, it is unclear in general whether they lead to sustainable national prosperity. “Me-too” businesses here in Ireland may enrich some individuals, but in my view at least will not overcome our faltering national competitiveness.

Science is the discovery of what already exists. Entrepreneurship organizes a business. Invention yields new ideas which did not previously exist. But innovation puts new ideas into practice, bringing to life new insights. Joseph Schumpeter, in his Theory of Economic Development (1912/1934), noted that innovation brings new goods, new methods of production, new markets, new sources of raw materials, and new organizational structures into practice.

I believe if we, in Ireland, can innovate and thus put new ideas into practice, then we will benefit from a sustainable national prosperity. If we can bring new products, new processes, new markets, new sources, and new business structures into practice, then we will not only change Ireland but also change the world.

Today we rightly celebrate our innovators, and our innovative companies. They should be the true foundation for promoting our national prosperity to the fullest.

Open Source, China and Microsoft

2007-11-10T12:22:00.000Z

Confucius was born in the state of Lu. When he received news that the powerful state of Qi was preparing to attack his homeland, he sent his gifted disciple Zi Gong to talk to the rulers of the surrounding states. Zi Gong went first to the state of Qi and observed to the military generals the flaws in a strategy to attack Lu. He succeeded in persuading the generals to first attack the state of Wu instead. Zi Gong subsequently went to Wu and instigated the king of Wu to attack Qi…Thus, Confucius saved Lu.

From ninth chapter of Chang Duan Jing.

At first sight, it would appear that there should be an excellent cultural fit between the open source movement in the West, and Chinese values. Open source emphasizes collective knowledge and sharing of competence. In China, the loyalty to the group is strong; communist philosophy emphasizes sharing, and Confucian teaching emphasizes the latent potential of the individual to attain skilled judgment from the experience of others.

The use of the web is growing fast in China – exceeding the US and growing much faster than the US - as reported in Forbes. Open source collaboration uses the web as a collaboration platform, so you would also expect this to add to the momentum of open source in China.

The Economic Intelligence Unit recently reported a ratio of 100 jobs for every computer science graduate in China, with this number expected to sky-rocket; and Duke University reported 60,000 computer science graduates from 4-year degree programmes in China in 2004, and 292,000 from 3-year programmes. This huge domestic demand, and huge output, of software developers might lead you to expect further momentum for open source in China.

A recent Eclipse Members meeting noted that China has the most number of the downloads globally (over a recent 18 month period) at 21%, followed by the US at 18%, and both Germany and Japan at 8% each.

So: what is the status of open source in China ?

Well, there are a small number of open source projects in China, but apparently not as many as you might expect. XOOPS (a content management framework) is quite well known and Stephen Walli’s blog contains an interesting presentation by Tiaiwen Jiang, the community leader in China, on the project from the Chinese perspective. Huihoo is a leading open source middleware project including a J2EE implementation, JFox. Qianqian at Harvard Medical School initiated, in 2004, a collaborative project Wen Quan Yi to develop an open source font set for the 70,000 Han characters encoded by Unicode.

An interesting development is the merger of ObjectWeb in France and Orientware in China at the end of 2006, to form OW2. They are sharing open source contributions in a variety of middleware technologies and their deliberations are documented in their Board of Directors minutes...

But, perhaps predictably, the main interest in open source in China is Linux: just google ‘china open source’ and you’ll see! In 2003, China enacted the Software Government Procurement Regulation (SGPR) which excluded foreign companies from the federal software market. As recently as the end of 2005, CIO Magazine was discussing China’s federal commitment to Linux – for multiple reasons at the time, including suspicions of US intelligence agencies “trojan horses” in US proprietary code (remember the B-767 government jet delivered in 2002 to Beijing, but with eavesdropping devices discovered on delivery ?); overcoming WTO IP concerns by promoting open source; localization to the Chinese market; and kick-starting a strong domestic software industry.

But then things changed in 2005, despite CIO Magazine’s analysis above: in trade talks, China laid aside the SGPR in favour of concessions on industries such as textile and colour television.

So now, according to Lou Shouqun of the China OSS Promotion Unit (a non-government organisation) in a recent presentation, the Linux revenues in all China last year (2006) were about 218M RMB (20MЄ), with a market share (by revenue) of just 3%. Other UNIX systems were 52% - the financial services and telecommunications industries in China have heavily used Solaris, AIX and HP/UX, amongst others. Windows was 42%. While the overall market is growing about 10% per annum, Shouqun believes Linux in China is growing faster than the market, albeit from a low base.

Things have changed even more significantly since the 2005 abandonment of the SGPR directive: Microsoft seem to have successfully found favour with the federal authorities. Fortune magazine documented Bill Gates recent summer visit to China; the history of Microsoft in China, and how Microsoft has very successfully wooed the Chinese policy makers creating an apparent “win-win” situation. It is a fascinating article, and I recommend it to you if you haven’t already read it.

So, why are there few committers in China, and apparently meek participation in the global open source, particularly when the number of software professionals in China is rising so rapidly ? Why is it that Windows is far more successful in China than Linux, and is Microsoft’s new strategy truly a “win-win” ?

The urgency to make money is IMHO a national obsession in China. Consumerism, and chasing Western fashions and brands are all-consuming. You must remember that, within the life times of those of us in our 40s or more, very many Chinese were incredibly impoverished to appallingly abysmal standards of life. It really is only in the last twenty years or so that national living standards have consistently dramatically improved – while admitting of course that there remain many challenges and disparities today across the huge country. In my own experience, making money is far more important to many Chinese than political discourse.

If your parents and grandparents have supported you, a single child, through your professional education as a software developer, their expectations (and needs in their senior age) will be that you will support them. Your partner’s parents and grandparents will have similar expectations. An engineer, including a software engineer, is considered a respected professional: many policy makers, senior business managers, and senior party members also have engineering backgrounds. As a software engineer, your own, your family’s, and society’s expectations are all that you will be financially successful.

Can you be truly financially successful in China if you are an open source developer ?

In the West, much of the open source activity in fact is carried out within companies, including Intel, Novell, IBM, Sun and Oracle, amongst others. Foreign companies in China with recognized global brands – such as Microsoft, with its very wealthy founder – are highly attractive as employers, since they not only in general pay well by local standards but also potentially open the possibility of international travel.

But, which foreign companies have so far established software development laboratories in China which contribute to open source development ? IBM have a Linux technology centre in Beijing. Intel announced in 2004 development centres in Beijing, Xi’an, and Guandong to help Chinese companies develop desktop applications for Linux. Oracle promotes its products on Linux in China, including via the Oracle technology centre in Beijing. But these centers appear, on the surface, to be solution centers which promote Linux based application solutions perhaps as a response to the apparent promotion of Linux by the Chinese authorities and prior to the SGPR retraction; rather than development centers actively contributing to globally available open source. I of course am very open to correction, but it would appear that to date only Novell has opened an R&D centre in China specifically for Linux system development. It is also noteworthy that IONA (of which I’m Vice-Chairman) has Chinese committers from its Beijing R&D centre on the Eclipse STP and Apache CXF open source projects.

For domestic Chinese activity, the largest player in open source Linux is Red Flag. It is ambitious to develop into an international player in Asian Linux, and has recently announced a specific initiative. However its current sales revenue is still relatively small, even by Chinese national standards, at just 40M RMB (3.6MЄ).

To the extent that open source development is being conducted in China by foreign companies, with Chinese committers, then arguably these initiatives need to be more openly promoted and publicized to the Chinese software development community. The open source movement in China needs major foreign brand name companies to visibly invest and recruit in China for development of open source.

Well, then how about Chinese open source start-ups ? Are there any budding MySQL ABs, SugarCRMs, or xTuples ? Yes, and I mentioned Huihoo and Red Flag earlier, as examples. But IMHO the open source industry in China is currently fragile and considered so both by potential employees (ie software developers) and, as importantly, Chinese corporate customers. It is frankly easier – and perhaps more socially acceptable with one’s parents – to work for an established organization, particularly if it is a foreign brand.

Let’s now look at that second question I posed above: why is Microsoft now being much more successful in China ? Microsoft seems to have overcome concerns by Chinese policy makers by pro-actively taking a number of steps. The “trojan horse” threat has been overcome by allowing access (and hence inspection) under appropriate conditions to Microsoft source code, and China now has a federal laboratory to do exactly so. Microsoft has been very actively investing in the education sector, including rural classrooms and software engineering universities, and so aligning its investments with the federal desire to strengthen software skills nationwide – Microsoft is training 1,000 instructors and 20,000 software engineers, and offering online courses to another 50,000 engineers. It has worked with the federal authorities in the context of WTO obligations to ensure that more Chinese PCs have legally licensed pre-installed copies of Windows. In turn this is overcoming piracy issues since the pre-installed versions are more current, have less bugs and more features than older copies of Windows. It has also dramatically dropped the price of Windows in China. In summary, President Hu Jintao on a visit to Microsoft said that Bill Gates is a friend to China and the Chinese people: in China, this is an incredible endorsement, and it is difficult to find any analogy in the West for such an important and powerful public ratification.

It would appear that Microsoft is on a roll in China. It is very interesting to reflect on the Microsoft strategy and their execution of it within China, and contrast that to the open source industry and initiatives in China. Of which open source project or company will the President of China publicly endorse as a friend of China and of the Chinese people ? If the open source industry globally is to benefit from China’s rapid development, it is clear that investment – perhaps akin to Microsoft’s commitment to China – will be needed.

It is also very interesting to ponder to what extent the prices Windows customers in the West are paying are being used to subsidise Windows customers in the East. Cross-subsidies are of course not at all a new idea in any industry: I find the Microsoft case interesting because it is part of a much broader initiative.

Let me finish by a hypothesis for policy from the Chinese Government perspective. The war is not about whether Windows or Linux will ultimately win. Both are sufficiently low cost here in China to be usable. Microsoft is generously up-skilling the national software engineering talent pool, and the open source industry is also helping by publishing its source code and inner workings. The war is rather about building a vibrant software industry in China, capable not only of satisfying national needs, but also exporting and becoming a world leader.

The main requirement is excellent application development, on whatever foundation systems and middleware technology are de facto in the global industry (it doesn’t matter which, as long as they are low cost in China). Open source by the Chinese industry – and for the Chinese industry - could play a very significant role indeed. By fostering a national repository of re-useable Chinese application components – with documentation and test suites – written by Chinese developers (in Chinese first, and then maybe English), with a framework put in place and re-enforced by Government policy and investment, then the national industry could be rapidly enhanced.

“Therefore the Master concerns himself with the depths and not the surface, with the fruit and not the flower….When his work is done, the people say ‘Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!’’”

The Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu

This was the basis for an invited keynote I was to give at the OS Summit in Hong Kong at the end of this month: but the conference has now been postponed until sometime in 2008.

Think Liquidity.

2007-11-05T22:50:00.000Z

Professional investors understand liquidity. They understand asset backed securities, and they understand the risks when assets subsequently emerge to be poorer quality than they were represented to be. Sub-prime assets can be embarrassingly illiquid and career changing.

In the world of enterprise IT investments, customers have likewise yearned for liquidity. Lock-in to assets available solely from any single vendor implies significant risk to the purchaser. Bad investment decisions into IT assets which subsequently emerge to be poorer quality than they were represented to be, can be embarrassing and career changing – particularly if the assets are illiquid and difficult to replace.

Financial markets have been driven by liquidity. However by contrast, purchasers of IT assets have found it challenging to be able to subsequently replace and substitute alternatives when desirable.

Until now.

Today, I believe that the software and hardware industries are fundamentally changing in favour of liquidity. Software is increasingly componentized. Software has increasingly recognized industry standards which facilitates substitution of alternatives. Open source provides liquidity through lowering the cost of change.

Enterprise software vendors should be trusted partners in providing and maintaining tailored solutions. The ability to successfully integrate a variety of components from a variety of sources to an enterprise level of service is valued. The ability to scalably manage multiple configurations, and evolve them dynamically over time, is valued. Tailorable, personalized solutions for specific customers, partners and staff, but all as part as of the holistic enterprise, are valued. Dynamic systems enable liquidity amongst software assets – no matter from which particular vendors specific assets are obtained.

New, and sustainable, business models are emerging from software vendors who deeply understand technology liquidity.

Single, monolithic, vertically integrated silos of software stacks is thinking from the last century. Integrated stacks are illiquid if any specific components or layers cannot be readily substituted by better alternatives on the market today, or which may emerge tomorrow, from any vendor.

It does not take an oracle to foresee what will happen if BEAS are purchased by ORCL. Overlapping products – portal servers, application servers, service busses, Java development platforms, whatever – will be culled: “synergies” throughout the two organizations will be executed. ORCL will attempt to cross sell its own offerings into the BEAS client base and migrate them away to ORCL alternatives.

Professional investors understand liquidity. Even if they are new to investing in IT equities, they therefore should have little difficulty in understanding that enterprise IT customers likewise yearn for liquidity of technology assets. In the past, enterprise vendors have been slow to offer liquidity. Now, the IT industry is changing fast, and the potential upside for investors in IT is vendors who understand and are executing on technology liquidity: vertically integrated illiquid stacks are from a former and sub-prime era.

Think liquidity.

The Long Tail Wags

2007-10-30T09:58:00.000Z

What kicked of this blog entry for me were some reflections I had as I chaired a one day conference, with a preceding half day workshop, a couple of weeks ago, which was organized in Galway by Fidelity Investments, on the subject of Web 2.0, and how commercial organizations – such as Fidelity – can benefit from and add value to the global internet community.

A core theme of Web 2.0 is the collective wisdom that results from the network effects of sharing across the community. The wisdom of the crowd is sometimes more than the sum of the individuals therein. Wikipedia is one prime example, since collective knowledge can trigger insights for individuals, which can then augment the collective wisdom: the added knowledge which would not arise if the group did not collaborate together. I recently wrote a blog entry about a similar phenomenon in multi-disciplinary research. Group and individual reasoning can positively feed off each other.

One of the dichotomies of the Web 2.0 phenomenon is on one hand, the power of the group and the collective knowledge of the crowd; and yet on the other the significance of each individual. Yes, collective knowledge such as Wikipedia and del.icio.us (and of course Google!) have emerged, but blogs written and commented by individuals are still a fundamental force. Some may argue that indeed the information in specific blogs written by certain individuals is more valuable, accurate and reliable than that in shared wiki repositories maintained by the amorphous net community. There is room for both individuals and the crowd.

In the race to be successful on the web, the focus is on attracting and retaining users, eyeballs and clicks. For the promoters of a web site - whether a commercial venture, or just a worthy cause for society at large - building and growing a “market” is key. Monitoring usage patterns, listening and reacting to user feedback, all builds momentum: hopefully a tipping point is passed, and the network effect of market momentum reinforces the popularity and acceptance. However: does a mass market strategy play only to the crowd, and not to the individuals therein ?

For Web 2.0 , Chris Anderson introduced the term “long tail” to emphasise deploying:

“customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head”.

As noted by an Amazon employee quoted by Wikipedia: “We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday, than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday” -- read that slowly to yourself again if you hadn’t come across it before..

Further, in his discussion on technology market dynamics, Christensen noted:

“Simply put, when the best firms succeeded, they did so because they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. But, paradoxically, when the best firms subsequently failed, it was for the same reasons--they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs ….But the problem established firms seem unable to confront successfully is that of downward vision and mobility, in terms of the trajectory map….”

Success – at least in some industries, such as the disk drive and earth moving machinery industries which Christensen documents – can equally lay the foundation for failure. Group and individual behaviour can play off each other, creating emerging forces from below.

Combining the Anderson’s exhortation to reach out to the edge, with the warning by Christensen not to be outflanked by emerging disruptive technologies from below, it would seem wise to ensure that a Web 2.0 market strategy explicitly recognises the potential of the individual, as well as the mass market of the group. Even more important is to react to dynamics in the market and to changing tastes. The observation is: that in a global market of mass consumerism, the ability to cater for the vast number of changing individual personal tastes and desires – to personalise and dynamically tailor your products and services – may be much more commercially – and socially – valuable, than volume plays of standard products and services to an anonymous amorphous group.

The long tail changes: it wags. The universe of micro-markets in the long tail is worth addressing – this is Anderson’s observation. In addition, changes in a micro-market may in due course influence the mass market (and blind side you) – this is in essence Christensen’s observation.

Ajit Jaokar was one of the contributors at the Fidelity event in Galway, and he reminded the audience of Tim O’Reilly’s characterization of the Web 2.0 phenomenon:

the web as a platform;
harnessing collective intelligence;
data as the next Intel inside;
the end of the software release cycle;
software above the level of a single device; and
rich user experiences.

I thought about each of these six facets as I reflected on the dynamics of the micro-markets, and list some (not all!) of my observations below: how does Web 2.0 address the wagging long tail ?

One common way of reaching out to the long tail, and monitoring its movements, is “data as the next Intel inside”. Google exploits what its itself calls the ”uniquely democratic nature of the web” to derive data on the click activity of millions of users to drive its PageRank algorithm. I suspect that social networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and LinkedIn, could likewise exploit their data about networks of people. I’ve always wondered in passing how data regulators, such as the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, view such click gathering and social networking activities…

As Web 2.0 embraces beyond “the level of a single device” – which was Ajit’s theme of his presentation - I observe that telecommunications operators, such as Vodafone, O2 and T-Mobile, collect and record quantities of data, ironically in a large part due to regulatory requirements of data retention legislation in jurisdictions such as Ireland. These vast data archives capture about social communication patterns of populations – it is not just the social networking sites which have such data! There are opportunities, and privacy risks, to exploit these vast patterns to provide commercial value. One can imagine intelligence being generated by mobile phone operators to enable targeted marketing by third parties and content providers…

Quietly collecting mouse click activity, or analyzing phone call patterns and triangularising the locations of their owners, are data driven ways of using to drive for the long tail. Importantly, the data is dynamic and therefore so also is the derived collective intelligence: as trends emerge, or change, so can the offerings tailored for particular sets of individuals. But it seems to me that these approaches may wear a clandestine cloak: there are more explicit ways of using collective intelligence for the wagging long tail.

A successful web site needs stickiness to retain, and track, its audience, including the wagging long tail. A social networking site such as those above in part generates its stickiness because of the network effect of having ones friends, co-workers and colleagues using the same site: most people think it is too cumbersome to re-register oneself and encourage one’s cohort elsewhere. IMHO, the resulting stickiness is in fact rather superficial, rather than systemic: it consequently threatens any purported fiscal value for the site. The SIOC project at DERI in Galway underlines the benefits, and business consequences, of seamless federation of online communities. Stickiness should not be driven by re-registration inertia, but rather by community value and impact - which is one reason why I believe Ammado will succeed.

Another strategy to capture the long tail wags is “harnessing collective intelligence” – another of O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 facets. One explicit way is to allow individuals to define their own collections of interesting items, and then to share and discuss them with other like-minded souls. A simple way to do this is just by tagging items: for example, photos tagged with “Galway” on Flickr will appeal to certain people. But tagging rather quickly loses its impact when trying to find items with a combination of tags, requiring tedious trials of various search criteria; and tag synonyms are a problem in a global world: try “football” in del.icio.us as an example – or even “Galway Hooker” in Flickr!

Rather than expecting people to work out the correct search and query expression across a set of tag values for what they actually want, another way is to let people explicitly define and share their own collections. Hobbyists – such as stamp collectors – have been doing this for years, and a craft worker likewise learns what the set of right tools are for the job from the experiences of his trade. Enabling individuals – and micro-markets and even the crowd - to share what works well together when, is a positive tactic for managing the wagging long tail, and which I wrote about recently in the context of software configurations and Cloudsmith.

When doing a little research for this blog entry, I came across Dan Bricklin’s interesting blog entry on When the Long Tail Wags The Dog. His theme is that “must have” items have more value than those which are less likely to fit the job at hand; and that general purpose items are likely to have most value since they can entertain the dog as well as its long tail. While I don’t disagree, my thoughts about the dynamics of the long tail, and how to work with within it, are a slightly different emphasis.

Reinforcing Bricklin, being relevant to the individuals and small groups in the long tail requires customization and tailoring of general purpose offerings. In the enterprise software space, software vendors have traditionally worked with systems integrators to tailor more appropriate solutions to different niches of the market. With componentization in the software industry, in principle useful aggregations of different constituent parts can more likely be used to tailor specific solutions. Collective intelligence can be harnessed by explicitly sharing these aggregations, as I indicated above.

However, once delivered, installed and put into use, assemblies of software components in production environments have in the past usually been relatively static. The challenge is that the long tail wags: micro-markets and even mass markets change, and production systems need to more easily do so too. One promise of the dynamic module environment of OSGi is to enable dynamic evolution: if collective intelligence can be dynamic as trends emerge, or change, and then suggest new offerings tailored for particular sets of individuals, then perhaps also can production software assemblies in business and enterprise environments be dynamically adjusted. This is a theme which we are working upon in IONA, particularly in the context of our highly dynamic plug-in architecture for Artix and our open source FUSE offerings – see Eric Newcomer’s blog.

But if the world is dynamic, and contains a universe of micro-markets as well as a mass, can offerings not only be tailored so as to be a good fit, but also be priced attractively for each ? What when micro-markets change ? As I wrote about, one industry which faces these challenges is the mobile/cell phone operators, for whom intelligent and responsive bundling of services (SMS and MMS and call rates and roaming charges etc) is competitively critical. The ability to generalise this approach into the world of software components and packages is of interest and relevance to the wagging long tail. LeCayla is one company building a common approach to the issue of dynamically rolling out new charge and billing rates so that software vendors can competitively foster specific micro-markets.

Let me summarise: the internet as a platform enables a global market to be addressed. Web 2.0 uses collective intelligence to play in both the mass markets, and the long tail of numerous micro-markets. There is room for both individuals and the crowd, and group and individual reasoning can positively feed off each other. – creating the ever lurking possibility of being disrupted from below. Scalably addressing both the mass market and the long tail is however not the complete issue: markets change, the long tail wags, and scalably addressing dynamic markets is even harder – but possible.

Footnote: my 7 month old Alsatian, Charlie, has yet to grow into his long long tail. He wags it a lot.

News; Cloudsmith, Science Gallery, UNICEF and Ammado.

2007-10-26T14:57:00.000+01:00

Some news snippets from some of the things I'm involved with:

Cloudsmith

An upgrade to the web site at www.cloudsmith.com – more features, particularly so that you can easily map your own repository, better documentation. The site is generating considerable interest in both the open source community, and some commercial firms seeking interesting new ways to distribute and support their software.

Note that the next major release of the Eclipse development environment – the Ganymede release - will be built using Buckminster: the team behind Buckminster also have built Cloudsmith, as I discussed in some earlier posts..

Science Gallery

Opening in Feburary next, with the LIGHTWAVE festival and showcase, and getting some good coverage eg in Nature and the Irish Times recently. Watch the blog at www.sciencegallery.org for further news and announcements.

UNICEF

A great new video at http://www.youtube.com/user/UNICEFIreland - featuring Irish children with Irish celebrities Andrea Corr, Colin Farrell, Marian Finucane, Stephen Rea and Ryan Tubridy. Our UNICEF colleagues in the US Fund produced a similar (US centric) video last year, and the Irish National Committee have borrowed their idea, with permission.

“Every single child deserves to live”.

Ammado
Their web site is now live at www.ammado.com I first mentioned Ammado and their CEO Anna Kupka earlier this year. Actually, I'm not directly involved in Ammado, but know the senior team and are very excited by what they're doing.

An entirely new way of thinking about social networking is imminent...

"Creating heros.."