Category: Work

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Facebook payments coming?

FPpayment

Gizmodo has a really interesting article about an alleged Facebook payment functionality, which might see the light of day soon. Working in the financial sector, og coure makes this a very interesting thing to me, since payments are a an area where the competition is heating up quite dramatically these days. Danske Bank is doing a bang up job with their MobilePay solution, and the other banks (well, most of them) are trying to get the Swipp application to take off for real.

Considering eBay has spun off PayPal in order to maximize the market potential, does indeed set the stage for some interesting fights over the years. I am curious as to how the banks will react to IT companies stepping on their turf. And who knows, maybe consumers will have no problem at all trusting IT companies with their payment information. And why wouldn’t they? At the end of the day even clearing is an IT system.

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Tools of the trade

Scott Hanselman is nothing short of a blogging god. Seriously, he is. Scott has a really good good post about the ultimate developer tools, which he updates around this time every year. Since I am not a developer, this list is of limited interest to me, at least in a work context. However, during Christmas dinner I started talking with my sister’s boyfriend about software development processes, he’s working on getting his start up off the ground, and I thought of the ultimate developer tools list. So, in stead of emailing a long list of links, I thought it might interesting to compile a list of tools for analysts and product owners. So without further ado, here’s my list of tools of the trade:

Rally: Rally is an online tool that allows a scrum team to manage their sprint backlog as well as their product backlog. As a product owner you simply create you’re a card for every feature you want in our product, and then the development team take these cards and add them to their sprint backlog. As far as I can tell, there’s no support for user stories, but you can always put these on your Sharepoint site.

JIRA: JIRA is Atlassian’s eqivalent to Rally. We used it in my previous work, and it worked very well. JIRA allows you to create Kanban cards as well, and has a pretty nice dashboard feature. As far as I remember, there are a couple of nice features for the project managers as well.

Confluence: Confluence is also made by our good friends at Atlassian, and I am a pretty big fan. It’s basically a wiki with limited blogging functionality. It’s really easy to use, and you can create teams wikis as well as a personal wiki, that also works a bit like a blog. I used both features quite a bit, but I think the blogging functionality could benefit from an update. Support for Windows Live Writer for instance.

Any emails over five paragraphs are in my opinion a blog post, and Confluence is so easy to use that it becomes an easy thing to incorporate in your daily work.

Blogging: If you are looking for more of a dedicated blogging platform, there are quite a few useful options out there. I prefer WordPress, but Community Server and to some extend Sharepoint offer workable alternatives.

Pencil project: For my mock up needs I currently use the open source tool Pencil project. It is a nifty little tool, which allows you create simple mock ups. It is not the most advanced piece of software, but it serves a basic need very well.

WebMatrix: For HTML editing I tend to use WebMatrix. Well, I used to. I don’t have the rights to install it on my current work PC, and to be honest it might be overkill too. However, I used to have copies of our front end HTML, which I would modify to reflect new UI requirements. Once you get to spend some time with it, it is a really fast way to create mock ups. The added benefit is that you can use the correct CSS in you design, thereby letting the developer know exactly how you want the front end to look.

I have tried to get into Microsoft Expression, which is now a free tool. As far as I can tell, it is a really useful tool, but to be honest, I find it pretty hard to learn. It might be me who is too dense, but I like my tools fairly light and very easy to use, and I am not sure Expression is just so. That being said, I fully plan on leaning it once I start my paternity leave.

As an analyst XML is the cornerstone of any project. Normally I use XML Spy, which is pretty much the standard app for working with XML. However, it’s a fairly expensive piece of software, and fortunately, there are alter alternatives.

XML Notepad is another little useful tool, however, I rarely use it for some reason. It’s probably because I use Notepad ++, which is really excellent, especially if you know how to work with regular expressions. When it comes to extracting data from large chumks of XML there’s nothing quite lik eit.

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Danish banks build private cloud

In Danish.

Samtlige danske banker, bortset fra giganterne Danske Bank og Nordea, får nu samme cloud-platform til it-drift. Det bliver JN Data, som skal drive bankskyen.

Det dur ikke for en dansk bank at sende it-driften til Amazons sky – selvom det ville kunne spare mange penge.

I stedet har stort set alle danske banker nu valgt at gå sammen om en fælles cloud-tjeneste, der kan fungere på samme måde, men hvor bankerne altid ved præcist, hvor deres data befinder sig i verden.

Alle andre banker end Nordea og Danske Bank – som begge har IBM som driftsleverandør – får nu en samlet sky, en såkaldt private shared cloud. Det skriver Nyhedsbrevet Finans, som udgives af fagforeningen Finansforbundet.

Dermed kan bankerne få stordriftsfordele og fleksibilitet i skyen, men altså i et lukket miljø, der kun er for danske banker.

»Vi opnår store besparelser og stor sikkerhed via et partnerskab. Det er en anden måde at have cloud computing på, og det betyder også, at behovet for at gå i en public cloud er langt mindre,« udtaler Nykredits it-direktør Lars Mathiesen til Nyhedsbrevet Finans.

Source: Jesper Kildebogaard @ Version2

This is going to be very interesting in the times to come. It will be very exciting so see how this cloud will fit into the existing infrastructure. I think this will open up some new possibilities that are not there now.

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The perfect job

image (2)I have been saving this picture for many years, but for some reason I have never included it in a blog post. These past couple of week I have been thinking a lot about the nature of work, and what really makes me tick in a professional context, and this is where I think this illustration fits pretty well.

The real question, I guess, is which company offer you the option to have you dream job, or at least come as close to the dream job as possible. As far as I am concerned that company does not really exist and here’s why. No matter what you do, you will always be constrained by the overall goal of the company, which is making money. Now, this is not something new, the number one reason why companies exist is to make money, not to make employees happy. When you sit in a position like mine, your reasoning is based on different variables compared to what might hold the interest of top management. Inevitably, this creates a conflict of interest, which the employee will always loose due to the power structure.

If I am right, and I might not be, we should question the general notion of the principal-agent relationship. This relationship stipulates that the manager is hired by the owner to look after their interests, however, if the management’s interests differ from what is in the company’s interest the management might actually benefit from running the company into the ground.

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Loneliness of the long distance traveller

Map picture

I returned from a week long trip to Manila two weeks ago. While it was not my first business trip, it was by far the longest. In fact, it was the trip I have ever taken in my life. Granted, the trip was fairly comfortable, even for a guy with my long legs, however, it was also a very educational trip in so many way I have lost count.

Normally I go to Sweden or Norway to talk to customers, but this time I went to meet my development team, who I only know from communicator chats and Skype calls. Of course I had a pretty good idea about who these people were, but as any product manager, hopefully, will tell you, nothing beats sitting with your developers and work closely with them. The funny thing about this trip is that I actually met a Danish developer from Saxobank in wine bar in Dubai. It was really great sitting there sipping wine and talking about software development. The really interesting thing was that we shared the exact same views on pretty much everything related to software development. It leads me to believe that I am not completely wrong when I argue about how I think software should be developed. But that is another blog post I guess.

P1010017Living at a five star hotel and enjoying the warm weather  on my employers bill is needless to say exceptionally nice, however, I still think the work experience was the most stimulating aspect of the trip. I got to sit with my development team on the 24th floor of one the high riser in Makati city and work on our solution. Despite a pretty bad change of plans regarding the purpose of my stay, we still managed to get some things going, and more importantly, we got to establish a good working relationship. I am lucky that I have a really good team to work with, and I am lucky to have a good architect who is sharper than most. However, the trip also highlighted some the issues with outsourcing development. Even though I talk to my team on Communicator and Skype, nothing beats the face-to-face contact the I experienced that week. Small problems were solved much quicker than they normally would, and we were able to make smaller changes to the application on-the-fly without having to wait out the time difference or cumbersome decision making processes. I hope we will be able to keep that pace up now that we are on different continents, but I have my doubts.

The most profound experience though, was seeing my own company from the outside. Working from Manila gave me the opportunity to see how we act towards our partners as well how we come across generally. My wife has travelled a lot, and she told me that once you get to see your company from the outside you either fall completely in love with place, or you realize that you cannot get behind it at all. It is almost like being on the inside of a cult that defines your every day and then suddenly be let out in the world to see what other people see when they look at you. I can really only agree with her on that one. I most certainly had that experience…

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Does work really have to suck?

Before I get going on my rant here, let me just point out that I am not bashing anybody here, not even my own employer. And if I am bashing anyone, it is “the man” who in this case is synonymous with big faceless corporations here everything is systemized and all actions are controlled by over-zealous managers and time sheet keepers.

So anyway, I was reading this article on my iPad earlier, which talked about why people in Seattle all of a sudden wanted to work for Amazon again.

Amazon has been a cornerstone in Seattle for more than 15 years now, but it wasn’t always seen as a great place to work.

Employees talked about long hours and a pressure-cooker atmosphere, and the core business — e-commerce — didn’t seem very sexy.

What a difference a couple of years can make.

Over the New Year’s holiday, I visited Seattle for the first time since late 2010. A bunch of people in the tech scene told me the same thing: Amazon is THE place to work now.

Here’s why….

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-everybody-in-seattle-wants-to-work-for-amazon-2012-1#ixzz1in1ItJik

Source:  Matt Rosoff @ Business Insider

amazonI have been a huge fan of Seattle’s for many years. In fact, so much so that I did part of my Master’s degree there (well, close to anyway) and married a woman from Seattle, to whom I have been married now for almost eleven years. That is still not the point though. As it states in the article, Amazon has a new HQ close to downtown, which is walking distance to pretty much everything. Furthermore, there are all kinds of Googlesque benefits for the employees, which is also a nifty thing I’ll admit. The really interesting thing though, is how the local area area has developed explosively since the move, because so many people now work there.

And so I wonder. I wonder why that kind of approach has never really taken off here in Denmark. I mean, I for one have never heard of any company that takes really makes a point out turning the HQ into a place where people actually want to spend their time. For that matter, I have never really seen any places in Denmark, where the campus has been designed to allow people to be creative or innovative.

In my younger days when I was a consultant I visited a lot of customers and I never encountered anything but standard Lenovo PCs, Nokia phones and crappy coffee.  There’s nothing wrong with Lenovo or Nokia at all, actually the both make some really cool stuff, my is this though; everything is so standardized around here. We use the same tools, we runs our businesses the same way, and we never really seem to actually create something new. Considering how we consider ourselves well educated in this country I find it a little odd that we do not have any real startup culture here.

My stipulation is of course not right. We do have start ups here, that seem to approach the whole business life somewhat different than the bigger guys. Tradeshift and Podio are really good examples of companies that do not adhere to “the rules”; companies that are not afraid breaking some norms in order to do new things, and do them differently.

Perhaps it would be easier to make the employees “live the brand”, be more efficient or even more loyal to the company.