AboutUI

Das Mensch als Industriepalast – Animated

I have the poster of “Das Mensch als Industriepalat” created by Fritz Kahn in 1926 hanging in my office for several years now. I can never get enough of looking at the tiny details and amazing vision of this. Today I was exposed to an amazing work done to create an animation out of the poster –

Der Mensch als Industriepalast [Man as Industrial Palace] from Henning Lederer on Vimeo.

This is purely hypnotizing. I can watch it for hours. (Courtesy of FlowingData)

Posted in Fun, General | Comments

Or even worse

Funny quote from a Ruby on Rails installation guide:

“Incase you have problem installing using this command because you are currently on the plane or in the desert waging war against terror or may be worse behind a restrictive corporate proxy server, you need to download the gem files and install them individually.”

I love funny installation manuals. Which brings me to a recent conversation I’ve had with a Product manager of an upcoming SAP product. We discussed working together (his project and mine) and agreed that it made sense at which point one of the architects on the phone call asked – “can we get the installation manual so we can set up your product locally?” After a brief pause the guy answered. “No. Sorry. One of my KPIs is that I dont have an installation manual. If I have one – I’ve failed”.

This is the new SAP!

Posted in General, SAP | Comments

iPhones, Faxes and BPM

Last week the Apple iPhone finally made “ali’yah” and is now available for sell in Israel. Of course, all the early adopters already had iPhones they brought from overseas, but that’s besides the point. The point is that all the banks, newspapers and media channels are stampeding to get an “iPhone application”. If only we have an iPhone application to our bank before the other guys have it, everything would be good, they say. My bank is no different and in the last months they have made giant steps in the digital arena – a really good mobile site (for us un-cool Blackberry users), twitter presence (@leumidigital) and even Video chats with your banker via cellular.

Leumi's iPhone App

All this is fine and dandy, until you actually need to get some money out of them. I happened to require a hefty amount of money this morning (this rugged look doesn’t come for free, you know), which means I needed a cashiers check. The following flow occurred:

1. I called the bank and told them I need the check.
2. They asked me to fax them the request with a manual signature.
3. I wrote a request in Word, printed it, signed it and faxed it to them.
4. I called again. They confirmed getting the fax.
5. They printed a new form, detailing my request, signed by a manager.
6. They faxed the signed request to the physical branch where the cashier actually sits.
7. They faxed it again (hey – the branch has 3 fax machines).
8. The cashier entered the details on her terminal (same details I gave over the phone about 7 steps ago), notified me on the commission.
9. The cashier printed another 2 pages – one where I sign that I agree to the commission the other is my receipt for the commission.
10. The cashier went to the manger (with a hefty stack of papers) to get his approval and signature.
11. Armed with the signature and stack of papers – the cashier came back to start processing my request (checking that I actually have the funds to back it up, etc.)
12. I got my check.

Now imagine if the bank had taken a long hard look at its process and simply employed some BPM system to streamline it… it should have looked like this:

1. I call the bank and request the check.
2. Bank checks that I have the funds, a notification is sent to the manger which gets it in an inbox and approves.
3. Manager approval is kept on file for the cashier to view.
4. Based on that approval she prints the check.
5. I get my check.

In general, I fail to understand the fixation so many organizations still have on a ‘paper trail’ all these faxes and manual signatures. Not only is this not environment friendly, this simply makes all processes mind-boggingly cumbersome and failure prone (e.g. faxing the authorization to the wrong fax machine in the branch). But hey – its so much sexier to launch an iPhone application and renovate your processes.

Posted in Enterprise, General | Comments

The Business Case for Cloud Computing

(Picture Taken last week in the WDF21 cantina)

Posted in Cloud, Fun | Comments

Your Company’s App

Stumbled on this one today. So true. Worth also going to the comments for the enraged enterprise bots reactions…

Posted in Enterprise, Fun | Comments

Desktop? Why?

So, the Hard-disk on my SAP laptop died. For the third time in 6 months. I have a small suspicion that the Good Ole’ T42 is about to reach the big scrapyard in the sky, but with the current offerings from our IT department, I’ll stick to my IBM workhorse as long as I can. The one on my personal desktop died a week ago, so I’m finding myself re-installing two machines at the same time.

Re-installing all the different software which I need for my daily work (full list below), I found myself asking – Why do I bother? Why don’t I have everything browser based, or VM based. My laptop dies? Who care. Its just hardware. I hear this sentiment more and more reflected when speaking to customers. One of them just told me this week: “Product xxx should go to the browser. Why do we need a desktop? why should we incur the cost of supporting a desktop (following the Vista fiasco)?. Our roadmap is inclined towards browser only, looking into virtualization (esp. with HTML 5 coming out). We don’t believe in RIA – the plug-in concept vs. the HTML5 vision”.

I do believe in RIA, but I see the point. As HTML gets better and better (See how Firefox 3.5 handles Video) and the desktop OS’s not becoming any more stable (yeah, yeah, Apple and Linux fan boys), I am trying more and more to keep my information at the cloud. Instead of backing up to an external hard-drive, I’m using Mozy. Instead of jotting things to little notebooks, I’m using Evernote. Remember The Milk. Slowly but surely – I’m going to the cloud. And if this is happening for my personal productivity, what will this mean to Enterprise software? Can we break down the monolith Enterprise apps to small pieces/services which run somewhere else? More to come.

So what did I install?

SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio (Eclipse) – see above

Posted in Cloud, General, Tools | Comments

The LinkedIn Cycle

Having my LinkedIn network updates fed as an RSS to Google Reader, I couldn’t help but noticing the following trend:

Posted in Fun | Comments

Manual SEO

While I already twitted this picture, I think it deserves a more permanent mention:

For the non-hebrew speakers among you (you really should learn it, you know) – the sign says: “Type in Google 50 years reunion for Ort Kfar Saba and Register” (Ort is national school network). The concept is simply brilliant – why invest in AdWords when you can just print some signs and place them in the local neighbourhood. As @Shari noted (she actually went and tried it), they even have a nice domain name – http://www.ortks50.com/ and a nice site (too much flash for my liking). Is this a growing trend? Google as the ultimate Yellow Pages? no need to write a domain name on your poster which people need to copy while driving or taking the dog for a walk.

Posted in Blogosphere | Comments

Introduction to Twitter

I was asked by my colleague Dafna to give the team a brief introduction what is Twitter and how it may become relevant to our Enterprise customers. With Salesforce.com , SAP and every joe-enterprise-vendor announcing ’support for Twitter’ in their upcoming release, we wanted to take a step back and try to understand some of the nuances.

The slide deck itself is pretty rudimentary, as most of the discussion was verbal, but you can see it below. Followed by some insights which I gained from the meeting.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Blogosphere | Comments

MP3 TCO

For the first time in my life, I’ve bought an MP3 player. I’ve had some before which were crappy giveaways which I’ve gotten as some promotional thingies, but my (slowly) growing hobby on two wheels demanded that I get me a new thing. The requirements were simple:

1. Small
2. Have a clip
3. Nice design.

Naturally, I started with the iPods. They have superb design, small, clip, whatnot. Sure, they are expensive in Israel (as are all Apple products) but hey – I deserve it. However – here came the iTunes thingie. Installing an 80Mb bloatware on each computer I have/manage (4, the last time I counted) was unacceptable to me. So i decided to go with the really cool looking Sansa Clip:

Its small, I can just open it as a shared drive and drag and drop stuff to it, it looks cool and with 4Gb It can make both the Lufthansa flights more bearable and riding the bike real fun.

However, there is this tiny tiny problem. A lot of my MP3z have hebrew titles to them. My Brand new Sansa clip displays them from left to right, instead of right to left.

I know, This is a little thing, but it annoyed me. So I started searching for a solution to the problem. I quickly learned from Google that I need to install a firmware updater. No problem. Download, Install and then:

Which is of course completely not true. Sitting inside the sunny Walldorf offices of SAP, I’m naturally behind a firewall + proxy. The Updater is not smart enough to re-use the internet connection settings of one of my browsers (I have IE8, FF3 and Chrome all running) to connect and assumes a supr dumb connection setting.

In enterprise software terms, Sansa failed on providing BIDI support (Bi-Directional) and their software developers should really be sent to one of these 10 jobs.

However – they have such a cool looking MP3, so who cares? Which is actually the realization I have from this – Yes, TCO/TCA is important. But Bling Sells…

Posted in Design, Enterprise | Comments