The idea of a computerised system that captures and models the very essence of a business, automating the decision-making process, and cutting out paperwork is an attractive one, but it has become clear that this is something of a holy grail that remains agonisingly within sight, but out of reach.

In pursuit of this ideal, we create more and more complex computer systems, using increasingly sophisticated design methodologies. We have drawn parallels with the construction industry, and have held up hopes that principles used to build bridges (for example) could be applied to the creation of software solutions.

Now let me say right now, if you are designing a weapons control system, an application that controls and monitors a nuclear reactor, or any other high risk, specialised modelling or control system then yes, absolutely, I want you to test every aspect to the highest degree possible, I want you to capture every rule possible, and I want you to build multiple levels of safety measures into the system.

But… business sofware is a completely different beast. Whether in a private sector or a public sector organisation, day to day business involves people, interactions with people, and regular changes to business rules. In many cases, business rules themselves are flexible and need to be applied in different ways according to circumstances. Capturing and encoding this into fragments of computer logic is not only resource-intensive, but such rules are likely to become stale before final testing has been completed.

It is this fixation with business modelling that has led to a number of different systems development strategies, all of which have brought great techniques and tools to the table, but none of them have provided the silver bullet, or the holy grail. The simple fact is that they can’t – organisations, whether large or small, are infinitely complex beasts and trying to pin down the intricacies of daily operations is like trying to carry water in your hands. If you freeze it, you can carry it easily in the form of ice cubes, but you lose all the dynamic and fluid properties of the original substance!

The problems associated with “freezing” a business into a software model has produced a multi-billion dollar industry, where projects fail, business analysts come into an organisation on a regular basis to re-analyse requirements, and software teams are constantly adding code to cope with caveats, anomalies and changes to business rules. After a while, a system becomes so bogged down with these additions and changes that a system rewrite is recommended, and the whole lucrative circus starts again.

There IS a solution, but I suspect I am somewhat ahead of my time when I suggest this, and so we will have to wait quite a while before it happens (sadly). We need to strip our business systems down to the core requirements of record keeping, report creation and data analysis. Allied to this, we need to return to the situation where skilled, experienced business experts are employed to work with these systems, use them as decision support tools, but ultimately business rule enforcement comes from the application of brain power, and not a reliance on a software system that’s probably using a stale rule-base and is a very efficient way of compounding errors very quickly.

Systemising a business, allowing low-skilled, low-paid staff to operate that business works fine for a fast food franchise, but in most other cases businesses should regard the “meat ware” within their organisation as more vitally important than any software or hardware. It is a fact that people are the greatest resource any business has and, until such time that a bio-computer can make real decisions, we really need to stop looking to computers to do the thinking for us.

In a nutshell, business software is a powerful, flexible way of managing important records that are relevant to your business. By stripping things back to basics, business software can become simpler, more reliable, easier and cheaper to develop/maintain, and businesses can avoid risks associated with vendor lock-in, and the need for massive system rewrites every few years.

Remember this: Software is a business tool that can aid and support decision-making, and inform businesses at operational and strategic levels. It is NOT supposed to run your business for you, nor can it ever accurately capture the up-to-the-minute nuances of your business.

I look forward to a time when we see a return to simpler software, and leave fuzzy rule-enforcement and decision-making to the devices that are capable of that; our brains.

The thing is, we see time and time again instances of people just “going for it” and being successful. It is all too easy to dismiss this as luck, but surely it happens so often that it’s more than that? Maybe these “lucky” instances point to a redundancy in most of the stuff we do in the name of “preparation”. Sure, if you’re going mountain climbing then there’s some preparation you will want to do, but what of the act of putting yourself at the base of the mountain in the first place?

I reckon everyone has a “bucket list” of some sort, and most people will wind up doing very little on that list. Why? Because most of us will plan to do all those things until time runs out. But forget about such grandiose ideas, like climbing Everest; there are countless things, big and small, that we constantly put off in our personal lives, business lives and social lives. We put things off in the name of “planning”, planning that we think we need to do because of booking time off work, having enough money in the bank, or lining some other ducks up to create a “zero risk” situation that allows something to be done.

Well, it seems that the world doesn’t work that way, and it’s no mistake that the achievers of the world are the risk takers; people who have a goal, a dream, a burning desire to do something, and just do it. Sometimes this “leap of faith” is taken accidentally, or is forced on someone by circumstances. You rarely (ever?) hear of someone achieving or doing something because they planned every last minute detail for 25 years, and then did it.

“Going for it” is a good way to live, now I just need to persuade myself to do that

http://garywilmot.net/2009/09/why-do-we-wait-for-the-ducks-to-line-up/

The number 1 focus of the business is to cater for “the little guy”, now and into the future. To help illustrate this point, perhaps I should explain that I have spent most of my working life in businesses that start out providing excellent value for other small businesses, but wind up being lured by the “Enterprise Dollar”.

While it may be tempting to go for that “million dollar deal”, a lot of companies then find that the large corporate clients take up all their available time and resources, leading to a rapid deterioration in the service levels provided to the small business clients. Sound crazy to you? Well, I can assure you it DOES happen, and it seems to happen far more often that not.

The difference with Avallach is recognition of the vital importance of small businesses, the need for high quality, affordable services for those businesses, and the significance of making a long-term commitment to those same businesses.

The fact is that in the wake of the global financial whatsit, small businesses are an increasingly important part of building strong local communities and will continue to be so.  Besides which, working with small business owners is infinitely more fun than dealing with soul-less corporate types (in my experience anyway).

Beyond this founding principle, Avallach also sets out to be a fun business to be involved with, and to do business with. The personality of the business pretty much reflects my own, so there should be no real surprise that Avallach is so “different”!

I get asked a lot about the name, the pronunciation of the name and the logo, so I’ll try and explain those briefly…

Despite being relatively young, Avallach actually has a heritage going back to about 2001 when I was involved in a joint venture under the name “id64.com”. When I was thinking of a name for the business, I reflected on the fact that while the name “id64″ had a catchy feel to it, it held no value or meaning to me personally. I really wanted a name that reflected the Celtic (Cornish) aspects of my heritage and my personal beliefs.

Avallach is strongly associated with Avalon, is sometimes referred to as “King of the Britons”, and according to Celtic legend had a daughter called Modron (not dissimilar to Madron, a village where many of my Cornish relatives can be found). I actually stumbled on the name, but as I explored the various references in Celtic literature the name quite simply started to feel more and more “right”, so that was that – done deal.

A Google Search will reveal plenty of references and additional information. As for pronunciation, the first part “Avall” is pronounced exactly as the “Aval” of Avalon, the final syllable is pronounced “ack” and not, as some do, “atch”.

The more astute members of the audience will have noticed that the logo is very much a stylised version of the famous Anarchy symbol. A splash of green and the addition of a flare effect and you pretty much have it. I am tempted to say that it represents “Anarchy with flare”, but that’s just a cheesey line that occurred to me quite some time after I created the thing. It also sounds awfully pretentious, which is something neither I nor Avallach sets out to be!

No, the reasons for the logo are quite simple; the first letter of Avallach is ‘A’, the chosen colour for the business is a shade of green (reflecting my nature-based leanings) and I have a lot of sympathy for the notion of anarchy (from the Greek word meaning “without ruler”).

Does all this really add anything to the business? For many people, probably not, but for ME it lays down the core essence of the business I am building, and what it is setting out to achieve. Others may find it all to be of casual/passing interest.

Most people would probably describe me as a geek, and that’s a badge I am happy to wear, if not a little misleading. Yes, my background is in software development, and yes I DO have a preference for typing commands instead of “point and click” and yes I have had Linux installed on my personal machines for quite some time. However…

Just like everyone else on this planet, exactly who or what I am cannot be packaged into one or more neat labels. My musical tastes are somewhat varied, my world view consists of an almost irreconcilable fusion of socialist, capitalist and anarchist ideas, and in matters of a spiritual nature I am very much drawn to pagan, earth-centred pathways.

But the world likes a neat label, so please feel free to use “geek” LOL

I’ve been programming computers since about 1981 when at the age of 12 I became a proud owner of a Sinclair ZX81. By the time I got to college, 4 years later, my thinking was very “left of centre”, I had declared myself a “pagan” (not really knowing /exactly/ what that meant at the time, but it felt right) and I was in no doubt that I really should have been born about 20 years earlier as the late ’60s would have been exactly the right era for me! As it was, I was a child of the ’80s, and my favourite music from that era tends to be bands like The Mission, The Cult, New Order and The Smiths. Yes, I was a bit of a “goth” – none of the “emo” crap you see these days mind you!

But once you leave academia, you enter the “real world”; the world of work and crazy shit like getting married and producing sprogs. With these things come a sense of responsibility and, for someone like me at least, a chronic sense of things not being quite the way they ought to be, but “hey let’s get on with it anyway”. You see, I’m not completely sold on the concept of modern society, not completely convinced that we’ve /really/ advanced in any substantial way. If I was a lot braver (and able to convince my wife), I’m sure I’d sell everything tomorrow and adopt a more nomadic lifestyle. But I’m not, so I don’t, but I still have that inner desire to be free of the scourge of working 9-to-5, never quite being able to do exactly what I want to do, and getting a feeling of despair every time I see a crowd of people heading to (or from) a train and realising that not only are they drones in a rat race, but I am one of them.

It’s those feelings that push me, paradoxically, towards the world of business. It is the urge to be free that gives me a real desire to build my own mini business empire. Not for the thrill of the “cut and thrust”, not to become one of the elite that (wrongly) controls far too much (i.e. all) of the wealth, but to give myself, my extended family and my friends a chance to experience life without unneccessary crap. Also the time and resources to do some real good, rather than chucking a gold coin in a charity box every week.

I remain, at heart, a socialist, but socialism has become tainted by men, much in the same way that organised religion (and religious leaders) has given “spirituality” a bad name.

One of the things, I think, about being a software developer is that it tends to encourage a pragmatic approach rather than a dogmatic one. One of the more bizarre outcomes of this, for me personally, has been a growing acceptance of some of the principles of capitalism. Not the dirty stinking capitalist dogma of the Thatcher era, nor the “greed is good” approach that has resulted in the so-called “global financial crisis”. No, for me, it’s the type of “social capitalism” that you see from the likes of Richard Branson (a guy I have admired for a long time).

The net result of all this is what you see today; a guy who hates red tape, detests much of modern society’s pointlessness, believes in equality and freedom for all, and is out to make a pile of cash. No real conflict of interests there then?

So, what will I do with all this wealth once obtained? The answer to that would cover several more pages, but suffice to say that priority number 1 is my family, and beyond that would come a number of varied initiatives to effect positive change in many ways.

Just as I have accepted that money, wealth and capitalism do not have to be bad, so do many right-wing thinkers also need to accept that socialist principles are not inherently evil either. In fact it’s probably ironic when you think about it; many of those people who berate “socialism” are devout church-goers, yet the last time I bothered to read the bible I think it had a lot to say about respect, equality and the lack of value in material wealth for its own sake.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy some of the stuff that has, and will continue to appear here and my other blogs and sites. If you feel inclined to get in touch, the best way is probably email (gary@avallach.com) or Skype (avallach9)

All the best
Gaz
p.s. for those who are curious, “Gaz” and “Gazza” are nickname versions of “Gary”, popular in UK and Australia (my country of birth and adopted home respectively). It has nothing to do with the Gaza Strip in the Middle East!

Links to these blogs are shown in the right-hand menu of this site, which will revert to a more general outlet for anything I feel like ranting about

Enjoy!

A lot of the overall concepts are captured on a blog post in a business networking site I belong to:

http://www.thatsbusiness.net/profiles/blogs/seeking-partners

Check it out!

Firstly, while accepting that we need to be the “experts” providing web solutions to small business operators, we do not feel it is appropriate to take advantage of our situation, blind people with science, and charge far in excess of a fair rate for the work.

Secondly, we aim to provide solutions that put control in the hands of the client. Instead of putting together a 10 page static site, and raising an invoice every time a change is needed, we put the sites together in a way that anyone who can use Word can update their web site content.

This is very much part of the goal to provide real solutions, delivering value for money, and ensuring affordability so even the smallest of small businesses get a chance to compete with the big boys.

Check out the initial announcement at http://avallach.com/2009/06/express-web-service/

From the results of some initial testing, I have unfortunately tested positive for what experts are now calling Wine Flu. This debilitating condition is very serious and it appears this is not an isolated case. Reports are flooding in from all around the neighbourhood of others diagnosed with Wine Flu.

To anyone that starts to exhibit the aforementioned tell-tale signs, experts are recommending a cup of tea and a bit of a lie down. However, should your condition worsen, you should immediately hire a DVD and take some Nurofen [Nurofen seems to be the only drug available that has been proven to help combat this unusual type of flu].

Others are reporting a McDonald’s Happy Meal can also help in some cases.

Wine Flu does not need to be life threatening and, if treated early, can be eradicated within a 24-48 hour period. If not, then further application of the original liquid in similar quantities to the original dose has been shown to do the trick.

Now everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but for me the main decision comes down to “what sort of site are you building?” If you are building an information site where people click around and read stuff, maybe fill in a contact form or post to a forum – that style of app is served very well by a combination of HTML, DHTML and JavaScript (even AJAX).

If you’re building an online equivalent to a desktop application – HTML and AJAX suck – end of story. I’ve written thousands of lines of code using this more traditional style, and it is a serious pain in the backside. It’s the biggest reason I have long held out hope that Java would become the dominant web app technology. A Java app can be programmed in the same way as a windowed desktop app, can maintain state, and can be made as robust and responsive as any desktop application.

But there is a huge problem with Java, for me anyway; it feels too thick and heavy, and all the goodies that help people create Enterprise solutions with it seem to get in the way of “Rich Internet Application” development.

So what’s the answer? HTML is too fragile, Java is too heavy – Silverlight? No thanks – I’ve been a Windows programmer for a long time but there’s something about dotNet, and Silverlight in particular, that leave me feeling underwhelmed – but that’s another topic entirely.

The technology that has won me over is Adobe Flex. I know some people have issues with Adobe, but I have used it for a number of apps now and it strikes the right balance; it’s not too heavy, but it supports the creation of very attractive and usable interfaces, easily. Coming from a background of classic client-server development, data-aware controls, and the like, one of the things that threw me initially was the complete lack of any database capability. This actually turns out to be a major strength of Flex.

Even when the pressure is on, you are forced to create a system that separates database code, and presentation layer. You can still hack the business rules in multiple places, but the fact that you are forced to make SOME separation in your code, also discourages you from making “dirty hacks” that are so easy in an environment such as VB or Delphi.

You are also free to use whatever server-side technology suits your experience and/or needs. Implement a fully-fledged Java application server, a Ruby on Rails app, a custom set of PHP scripts, or a SOAP interface in ASP.NET. The choice is yours, the list is endless, and the difference to your Flex application is relatively minimal.

Is it perfect? Of course not, but for my money, when it comes to creating interactive desktop-style web applications you’ll find a good solution with an Adobe Flex RIA,  and simple HTTP/HTTPS communication with business/data layers coded in PHP on the server side.

My other burning desire relates to my background as a software developer and long-term computing enthusiast, and the emergence in recent times of the Free / Open Source “movement”. It’s been a real joy to watch the Linux world evolve from providing out-and-out geek hobbyist toys (powerful, but useless to any non-technical person) to well-rounded distros such as Ubuntu and LinuxMint.

I’ve hovered between these two distros for a while now, having become a Debian fan some time ago, Ubuntu really caught my eye a couple of years back, and I then encountered Linux Mint. Mint is based on Ubuntu, but attempts to create a more usable “out of the box” system, with a cleaner/nicer look and feel. For what it’s worth, I think the Mint developers have achieved what they set out to achieve – in many ways, Mint can easily claim to be a better Ubuntu.

But I still come back to Ubuntu for one simple reason – the time delay between a new Ubuntu release and corresponding Mint update. This isn’t a criticism, just a reason. Hopefully the Ubuntu team will create a different default theme at some stage (in fact I believe that is slated for 9.10), thereby removing one of the main reasons I prefer Mint.

There’s something still not quite right with Linux though – it’s not /quite/ ready to achieve its full potential on the desktop, home or business. The main reason, in my opinion, is an apparent lack of business applications. Now before people start shouting about Open Office, various open source mail clients and all those other wonderful general purpose, “horizontal” apps, I am talking about the more “specialised” business applications that are used on desktops across the globe; payroll, HR, accounts, asset management and specialised database apps in vertical markets.

Once that is solved, and Linux starts to penetrate the small to medium business desktop market, the penetration of the home desktop market will follow. Firstly people will be more comfortable with Linux, having used it at the office, and secondly the creation of business software will probably flow through to apps for home use.

I personally believe we are a long long way away from working with computers much differently than we do now – at the small-to-medium business level “cloud computing” is unlikely to have a huge impact. The biggest change I think we will see in the short-to-medium-term, is that Linux will become  the dominant desktop operating system. That’s been promised for a long time now I know, but I still believe it WILL happen, eventually.

Based on what we have today, I personally would love to see Ubuntu become the operating system that kicks Windows off the throne. The efforts and vision of Mark Shuttleworth will be appreciated for many years to come I am sure. It is for this reason that Ubuntu is the “standard operating environment” (SOE) adopted for Avallach Technology, and why one of the things Avallach will be concerned with is creating business software for that environment.

It is envisaged that the software develooped will ultimately help create greater depth to the Ubuntu desktop. With continuing efforts being made with the operating system itself, and active development of business apps, the potential of Ubuntu will finally be realised.