By Karen Lopez on Monday, April 28, 2008 1:22 PM

Cory Doctorow is an activist, a writer, a blogger, a public speaker, and a technology person.  He writes science fiction normally.  He is also on the masthead of Wired, Popular Science, and MAKE.  He freelances for the New York Times and Salon.

I found a great web article of his about Metacrap in the Metautopia.  I think it is spot on.

If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip.

A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.

2. The problems

There are at least seven insurmountable obstacles between the world as we know it and meta-utopia.

If you have read any of my writings, you know that I love snarky writing.  Take a couple of minutes to check out his rant.

By Karen Lopez on Tuesday, April 22, 2008 9:48 PM

Adecco Group North America commissioned a Harris Interactive survey about how Boomers and Gen Y workers would set their salary requirements for environmentally friendly companies.

Moreover, firms that adopt strong green policies could find that it saves them money when looking to recruit younger staff.

Almost a third of respondents said that they would be willing to sacrifice a portion of their salary to work for an environmentally friendly firm with Generation Y workers saying they would sacrifice, on average, 6.2 per cent of their wages. In contrast, environmentally conscious baby boomers would be willing to sacrifice just 2.5 per cent.

Of course, saying that you would take less money and actually signing for less money could be two different things.  But the survey does show me that there is yet another difference between Boomers an Gen Yers.

By Karen Lopez on Tuesday, April 22, 2008 6:45 AM

Brent Green, author of Marketing to Boomers, has a blog entry that analyses (or is it attacks) a 60 Minutes segment on Generation Y in the workplace.  His entry, Boomer Bosses, Generation Y Employees, is scathing in its response:

A representative Safer observation:

"Faced with new employees who want to roll into work with their iPods and flip flops around noon, but still be CEO by Friday, companies are realizing that the era of the buttoned down exec happy to have a job is as dead as the three-Martini lunch."

This flip of a journalistic middle finger at a young generation is not new. Boomers were often criticized during their ascendance into adulthood, when the young, determined and idealistic were hell-bent on changing the nation’s social realities. (As well documented by Professor Leonard Steinhorn, that determination eventually helped the nation become far more socially and economically inclusive for women, for racial minorities and for people thought as odd when compared to the narrow strictures of 1950’s value consensus.)

I have actually seen the "roll into work with their iPods and flip flops around noon, but still be CEO by Friday" attitude with my team members.  My perception on this attitude is that if there is anyone slammed by this it is the Boomer society that raised these workers.  So while Green believes that expressing such fatigue at a generation that has different social norms than the previous generation is a commentary on that generation, I believe it is a commentary on the previous generation.

Flip flops?  I hate them at work -- not because they are casual, but because they are annoyingly noisy.  They remind me of dorm days, listening to other students make their way to the communal showers.  Now dorm rooms have private ensuites, so I'm betting flip flops are worn everywhere other than the shower.  I'm showing my Boomer age by saying that I will always feel these items of apparel belong at home, at the beach, and never anywhere else.   I'm just a crusty old Boomer, I guess.

Rolling in around noon?  Did that Gen Y worker spend 4 hours on a phone call to India starting at midnight?  Did he stay up until 11 PM working on a new set of code?  Or was he in the World of Warcraft form the time he left work until 15 minutes before his noon arrival?  We don't know and it could be any or all of those options.  What I do know is that manager who want to judge productivity solely by a 9 to 5 clock will stop getting all that extra work time out of Gen Yers (and Boomers) if they stick to such a poor measure of effort and accomplishment.

However, that Gen Yer may have had a 9:30 AM meeting with a Boomer business user who waited until 9:45 before giving up and vowing to never agree to meet the Gen Yer again.  The Boomer did this because the Gen Y worker expected to be forgiven for not showing up because she had a good reason.  She didn't think to call to let the Boomer know that he wasn't going to make it because she sent a text message to the Boomer instead.  But the Boomer had (politely) turned off his cell phone for the meeting.  A mis-match of communication methods led by a generational difference in expectations.

Wanting to be CEO by Friday?  Maybe a week from Friday.  This is the one thing that I'm going peg on the Boomer society.  Not Mr. Rogers.  If Mr. Rogers was able to skew the outlook of an entire generation, world wide, then it is a sad commentary on the parents that allowed a TV character to form the entire foundation of their kids outlook on work, life, and getting ahead.  Yes, Fred Rogers said that "you are special", but parents should have been saying that, too, with the proper context of how the world actually works.  If millions of kids had only Fred and Mr. Speedy Delivery to form their tiny minds, why is that the kids fault?  Or a Boomer Boss's fault to judge the appropriateness of this generations' workplace behaviours?

It's not wrong for Boomer Bosses to observe this generation's differing approaches to work or even to personally be annoyed by it.  What is wrong is for them to try to force our outdated view of the world onto people living and inheriting the world we made for them.  That's where the outrage ought to be focused.

By Karen Lopez on Monday, April 21, 2008 9:42 PM

Embarcadero Technologies is hosting an online challenge to perform common DBA/data modeler tasks in under a certain time frame.  If you complete the 4 challenges and are a resident of the eligible countries, you get the free t-shirt, too.

Embarcadero Technologies has thrown down the gauntlet to all database administrators, developers and data modelers. We firmly believe that our professional grade, cross-platform database tools, ER/Studio^®, DBArtisan^®, Rapid SQL^® and Embarcadero^® Change Manager^TM, can deliver measurable results in YOUR environment in less than 60 minutes.

For instance, the data model challenge is to reverse engineer a database and publish an HTML report in less than 7 minutes.  I know most of you could beat that time easily.

If you meet the challenges, I'd love to hear about your experience and your times.

By Karen Lopez on Monday, April 21, 2008 2:54 PM

Every year Infosecurity performs a security-related experiment.  They ask office workers questions about their passwords, where they work, what they do...then ask for their actual password.  A shocking number of people hand it right over.

OK, so here's the question: Exactly how ignorant are they? The experiment found that out of 576 people questioned this year, 21% were quite happy to reveal their passwords in exchange for candy.

But maybe some of the dire news of late is sinking in, because that number is a heck of a lot lower than when the same experiment was conducted last year. Back then, a whopping 64% of the respondents were willing to give away their passwords. It seems that users have never paid attention to their mother's advice about strangers and candy.

A curious aspect of the results was that, of those willing to trade away their passwords, women were 4.5 times more likely to spill the beans then men. Even more astounding was that 61% of all people surveyed happily revealed their date of birth!

This stuff drives me crazy.  I see people handing over personal data all the time in stores in exchange for a free t-shirt or even a free sample of something.   I always chalked this up to naiveté, but I can point to my own derivative experiment based on the Infosecurity one.  When the results are announced each year, I bring this up at work with my IT peers.  Usually 80% of my co-workers are willing to tell me enough about their passwords for me to guess or find out what it is ("My password is always my girlfriend's birthday, so I never forget it" or "I always use Star Wars, but spelled with a Z instead of an S.") without my even asking. I'd also say 9 times out of 10, talk turns to passwords for the non-user accounts, say the SA password for a production SQL Server.  For some reason, all sense of security of this information goes out the door as the password is almost always mentioned.  I've always wondered if this is because workers don't value these non-personal resources as much as they do their own browser history, e-mail, and YouTube ratings.

I remember meeting with a potential financial advisor for a very large financial institution. Our talk turned to passwords and I told him about the study where people would hand over their passwords for the most trivial of treats.  He rolled his eyes and then said how stupid IT professionals are to require these. I mentioned that I was an IT professional and that strong passwords were the best defense against data theft and fraud.  He then proceeded to talk about all the new online systems that his company was foisting upon him and his clients.  And, of course, then he proceeded to tell us what his login and passwords were and why they were so easy to remember.  I sat their in stunned silence.  His giving out this information was not a great selling point for me for his services.  After having bragged about managing millions and millions of dollars of portfolios for some very famous people, then telling me his login credentials, he had basically showed me he could not be trusted with my data or my finances.  Needless to say, he did not get my business. 

And what is this "women were 4.5 times more likely" to fall for this scheme?  Are we females really that clueless?  Is it that we avoid confrontation or have been raised to never say "no" when asked for a favor?  That number bothers me.  The Register believes it is because women love chocolate more than security.

I remember another conversation with a budding IT professional.  Actually, he was a non-IT professional training to become a professional engineer so that he could then become an IT worker.  (Don't ask; I never understood his career plan, either.)  Anyway, he had been talking to our intern about how secure the newest encryption technology was and how absolutely unbreakable it was.  As a sage (old) IT pro, I had to break the news to both the intern and the IT-wannabe that the encryption technology was useless in an age of social engineering and corporate cluelessness.  Both were flabbergasted that I could possibly question the value of what was probably 32-bit encryption at the time.  They both spouted off mathematical certainties of how many billions of years it would take to crack the code of highly secure encryption.  I tried to explain to them that technology was not the issue most of the time.  The both rolled their eyes and said that I just couldn't understand how big the numbers were. 

So I dragged our IT-wannabe over to the assistant to the CIO's desk and lifted up her keyboard to show him the Post-It note with all the CIOs logins and passwords.  He objected that the list of what were obviously user names and passwords could be anything.  Then I took him over to the DBA set of cubicles and showed him how the whiteboard outside their cubes contained mysterious pairs of what were obvious user names and passwords.  He still didn't believe me.  So he asked the admin assistant the next day how she kept track of all the logins and she showed him that she wrote them down on a Post-It and stuck it under her keyboard.  Then he asked the DBAs if those were credentials on the whiteboard, and they first denied it, then admitted it.  He chalked this up to clueless IT people.  So I walked with him back to his cube, and pointed out that he kept his own log in information on a Post-It note stuck on the side of his monitor.   Cluelessness, indeed.

Some days I feel as if all the work we put into data governance, information quality, and information security is for naught.  Why bother if no one values the data in the first place?

I believe that we data management professionals must hold ourselves to a higher standard that what we see in the rest of the world.  We can go on and on about data quality, information integrity, and information protection.  But if we are giving out passwords right and left, writing passwords on whiteboards, and generally following terrible security practices, how are we ever going to convince the business that they need to treat the data better than we do?

Your thoughts?  Your observations?

By Karen Lopez on Sunday, April 20, 2008 7:01 PM

 

This video, based on a presentation made to a local school board, does a lot to explain why Generation Y (and those born even more recent than Gen Y) really are growing up in a different world.  It is also titled "Shift Happens".

Each one of these trends noted will change how our younger co-worker approach work.

I highly recommend spending the 7-8 minutes it takes to watch this.  You'll also want to share this with your other team members.

By Karen Lopez on Sunday, April 20, 2008 6:31 PM

As I've traveled across the US speaking about collaborating with Generation Y team members, I am starting to see some common observations from data architects an project managers:

• Gen Y thinks they are entitled to everything....and right now
• Gen Y won't do any work
• Gen Y won't read anything
• Gen Y doesn't know how to dress
• Gen Y doesn't know how to get things done.
• .... and more.

Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D. has written an online article addressing many of these complaints.

Generation Y. The Millennials. The Tech/Net/Digital Generation. Boomlets. Echo Boomers. We've given this generation of people -- roughly those born between the late 1970's and the late 1990's and 72 million or so strong -- many names, but none so hurtful as the Entitlement Generation. They've also been called arrogant, self-centered, and possessing a short attention span.

This article, playing off the infamous Rolling Stone campaign, discusses 10 perceptions of Generation Y workers -- and then corrects or adjusts those perceptions with the reality behind each. Also included in each of the 10 misconceptions is advice for both employers and for Gen Y workers and job-seekers.

Perception: Spoiled/Entitled

Reality: To an extent, the folks in this generation do have a sense of entitlement, but it's not an entirely inherent personality flaw but partly the fault of Baby Boomer parents who coddled their children, constantly telling them how special they were and that anything they sought was possible, and rewarding them for every little thing, providing trophies and prizes simply for participating. These parents stunted their children's growth by proactively removing all obstacles and potentially negative experiences.

So, yes, on the surface Generation Y workers appear entitled.

The key for employers is approaching younger workers differently, providing constructive criticism that reflects confidence in them.

Generation Y workers must realize that their bosses are not going to be like theirr parents, and that part of growing as an employee is learning from past mistakes and accepting constructive criticism.

His thoughts mirror mine on this one issue and some of the others.  Yes, the younger generation of team members I manage all seem to expect to be admitted to a Harvard MBA in the next 6 months or so.  Or they expect to be the CEO of their own consulting company in the next 2-3 years.  Maybe I thought that way when I was 23...I can't remember.  See, that's why Gen Yers think I'm so old, because I can't remember for certain what my plans were more than two decades ago.

I do believe there is a lot of mis-information out there about Generational differences, but I keep seeing some trends that I believe are not just tied to being twenty-something, not being a new worker, not being coddled by parents.  Namely:

• Gen Y is probably the first generation to have always had  better PCs, better servers, and a faster Internet connection at home than they will ever have at work.
• Gen Y, due to having those great components at home, is the first generation to have always had system administrator access to the tools they use, even if they don't have access to those features at work.
• Gen Y, graduating from college/university starting around the year 2000, is the first generation to enter the market with a downward trend the number of graduates. 
• Gen Y, having grown up with Google and other strong search technologies that actually work, doesn't think in terms of structuring data in order to find it later.

I hope to expand on these observations soon.

By Karen Lopez on Friday, April 18, 2008 1:50 PM

Quote of the day:
All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed. - Sean O'Casey

 

If all the world's a stage, how do you/did you rehearse for every day you've stepped up to be a Data Architect/Project Manager/Developer/DBA/Business User/whatever hat you are wearing today?

I rehearse everyday by:

• Reading about data management issues
• Reading about non-data management issues
• Listening to people who use models
• Listening to people who don't use models
• Looking for analogies that I can use in explaining about data models/schemas/XML/databases

In fact, the only thing I really do rehearse, in the true sense of the word, is my current project's Elevator Speech on why we need to do data modeling.  This Elevator Speech is slightly different for each project and sometimes for each model.

I need to rehearse this one or two sentence "speech" because I want it to come across clearly and sincerely, even if I have to fake it .  It's important no matter where I am, or what I'm doing, that I be able to articulate the real business value, the real project value, of doing what I do.

Before I share a few my my speeches, I'd love to hear what others have used in the past.

By Karen Lopez on Friday, April 18, 2008 1:36 PM

A colleague of mine on the ARTS Data Model Committee, John Glaubitz of Vertex, shared with me a simple technique he uses with the ARTS data model. (click on the image to see a larger version)

For some of the more complex concepts in the model, he adds a text box next to the entity with its definition.  This allows his team members to quickly reference the definition right on the diagram.  This is so simple and so obvious, I'm thinking "why didn't I think of that".

He has to do this manually, though, which means if definitions are refined, there is a huge manual effort to keep these text boxes in sync.  That started me thinking....what if there were features in our tools to do this presentation for us?  What if, on an entity by entity basis, I could say "Fly Out Definition in Diagram"?  I'd want to do this only for certain entities, not necessarily all of them, because I'd want to have this additional meta data at my finger tips only for those of interest to the current display/submodel.  I'd also want to limit the display of definition to the first X characters as well.  I know some entities have long definitions and I'd want to limit the display to getting just that first "A _______ that _________" part of the definition that I always start my definitions with.

Wait, you say, there is a similar feature in most tools, one that displays the definition right inside the entity.  Yes, there is. (click on the image to see a larger version) I don't want just the definition, I want the full meta data such as attributes, primary keys, foreign keys an datatypes as well as the definitions.

Then I'd also want the drawing features of the program to handle these text boxes correctly, too.  For instance, I want them linked to the entity and tightly coupled with them so that we don't end up with long lines connecting the text boxes an the entity from the other side of the diagram.  Perhaps the solution would be to have these tightly coupled text boxes be a generic concept that use place holders such as [Entity:Definition], [UPD:PrivacyCode], or [Entity:Notes].  That way I could show anything I wanted there.

I know this asking for a lot, but I do believe this sort of enhancement could be significantly beneficial for modelers, developers, and end users.

What do you do to display definitions within your models? Would a feature like this be beneficial?

By Karen Lopez on Tuesday, April 08, 2008 8:27 AM

One of the other issues that comes up from time to time about these generational issues is whether or not the behaviors we are seeing are just a US thing.

While I wouldn't call myself a global worker, I do work with teams in many other continents on my projects and volunteer work.

I do see some traits in younger workers that I believe are tied to the world in which workers grew up.

For instance, having many technologies at their fingertips, I find that younger IT workers expect the business to love new technologies as much as they do.  We Boomers started our careers with almost no technology at home and got our hands on computers only at work.  The technologies we had at home were TVs and telephones.  Actually, many of us grew up during a time when we had zero to one of each of those. I can still remember the day that we got our second TV and the day that we got a second phone installed.

I can also remember the day I received my first real personal computer at home.  I think I missed sleeping for a couple of nights just playing with it.  It was a few months later we got...wait for it...CompuServe so that I could go online with it.  In fact, I remember calling Compaq for a problem we were having with the modem and the 3rd level tech support person eventually diagnosed the problem as our being in a foreign country, because phone lines aren't well maintained in foreign countries.  I believe he thought we lived in an igloo. That's how new everything was to them and to us.

So we Boomers came to work to get our hands on technology, while GenYers go home to play with the newest technologies.  This generation will almost never find better technologies at work.  My developers have better monitors, better systems, more up to date software, more tools  and better development tools at home than they will ever get at work.  Sure, some of them have stolen that software or they are using open source tools that aren't allowed at work.  Either way, they still have it and use it at home.   We Boomers, on the other hand, had no opportunities to go home and play with the latest technologies because we didn't have a mainframe at home to play with (at least I didn't). 

Because they installed this software at home, they have sysadmin (full administrator rights) on all these applications at home.  They feel frustrated that we admins "don't trust them" to have admin rights at work.  

I have seen this response from my teams in many geographic locations -- Asia, Middle East, Europe, North America.  Does that make it a global trend?  Not necessarily, but it sure does tell me it isn't a US-only thing. In fact, as I get more opportunities to work with the younger generation of IT professionals around the world, I'm finding that they have much more in common today than I had when I was starting my career.