It has been a while...

It's always embarassing to look back at your blog, and see the last post from several months ago describe a well-intentioned return to blogging on a more regular basis.  So, if it's all the same, I'm going to forego that future embarassment, while neither ignoring the fact that it has been some time since I posted last, nor predict the frequency with which today's well-intentioned return will continue. But for those of you that were once regular readers of my musing, it's still me, the iteration::two, Flash Remoting and J2EE, Cairngorm and Flex guy, who is now Technical Director of Adobe Consulting. I'm back, kinda.

 

The Adobe Consulting team has continued to grow; in no particular order other than starting with the one that last time I checked I had a permanent desk in, we have offices with Adobe Consultants in Edinburgh, London, Paris, Rome, Milan, Brussels, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Munich, Rattingen, Boston, New York, Washington DC, Tampa, Ottawa, Chicago, Austin, San Jose, San Francisco. 

 

Put like that, my half a million airmiles with British Airways aren't so much of a surprise; for the last several months I've been splitting my time pretty evenly between North America and Europe (each will tell you I spend too much time in the other), and enjoying the time to not only spend time with our own team, but with many of our customers around the world.

 

Every day, the teams are delivering innovative solutions upon our enterprise and digital media solutions, solutions that deliver, as I talked about at MAX 2007 in Chicago (have I really not blogged since then ?), "innovative experiences on both sides of the glass". 

 

On the glass, that means leveraging Flex, AIR and PDF, Flash and Flash Video, Flash Lite, or as I like to say to customers, "the medium to match the moment".

 

Behind the glass, our enterprise customers value the solutions we can build upon LiveCycle ES and LiveCycle Data Services, while digital media customers benefit from our ability to craft solutions upon technologies like Flash Media Server, Flash Media Rights Management Server and Flash Media Encoding Server.  When you combine these Adobe technologies with the development environment, programming languages and 3rd party products that are typical of a customer environment, whether that be a financial services, government, life-sciences, manufacturing, media and broadcasting or start-up customer, the possibilities for innovation upon this technology platform really are endless.

 

When our consultants aren't delivering solutions for customers, they're innovating about how these solutions can be delivered in the future.  Within each of our practices - and we have 3 practices, a Technology Practice, a User Experience Practice and a Project Management practice - our consultants are asked to spend a percentage of their time ("practice time") working on ideas and innovations that can improve the way we consistently deliver solutions, and that can ultimately be contributed back to the community.  Cairngorm and FlexUnit are obvious contributions from our team in the past, and rumours of the slowdown in their innovation have been greatly exaggerated.  In fact, we'll be moving these projects in the very near future to opensource.adobe.com - they're already staged there and awaiting some content (well actually, all of the content) and approval.  We want to treat these open-source contributions by Adobe Consulting exactly the same way our colleagues within Adobe are treating their products like the Flex SDK. We'll open up the way we accept commits to the project, we'll be more open with the charter behind the project (how do we decide what should and shouldn't be part of the framework) and we'll strive to share even more experiences with using Cairngorm through whitepapers and technical guides rather than just coding examples.  Your thoughts are, and will continue to be, welcomed.  

 

It's not just about technology best-practice either; our user-experience team never cease to amaze me with the innovative solutions that they deliver for customers, and while so many of those are destined to be experienced behind enterprise firewalls, the patterns and practices are not.

 

Several years ago I, and the team I worked with, were passionate advocates for agile software methods as a particularly appropriate means of developing high-quality, mission critical, bet-the-business solutions. This is an area that Adobe Consulting have continued to innovate in; blending agile methods within the User-Experience process as well as the technology process, and building project management best-practices within our Project Management practice to support this kind of multi-disciplinary agile-delivery approach.  What's perhaps most encouraging about all of this, is the number of customers I have visited in the past 18-24 months, in Europe and North America, in Financial Services, Government and some of the largest media corporations, where as I have walked from reception to the room we will be meeting in, I have observed whiteboards covered in story-cards, organised into iterations, sprints, backlogs, with burndown charts on the wall and even the odd crazy toy on someone's monitor (I guess that's the guy that broke the build). 

 

Just as I am spending less and less of my time helping customers to understand why they need to focus on delivering better customer experiences, to instead focus on helping them understand how, so too do I need to focus less and less on discussing the drawbacks of age old engineering methodologies and the advantages of adopting agile methods, and human-centered methods of defining and delivering solutions. When you look back, you see how far we have come. Agile is now orthodox; in this world that is flat, it's not the biggest that eats the smallest - it's the fastest that eats the slowest.

 

So with all of this, you'd think I should have something to talk about on this blog; and with all those airmiles and impromptu opportunities to wander around Heathrow Terminal 5 for a few extra hours instead of going home on time, plenty of time to flip open the laptop and talk about them.

 

So that's the plan.  It continues to be a rush, each and every day, working amongst a small group of thoughtful and committed people, and I long to share more and more of the lessons that we're learning.  It's an incredibly exciting time to be working in this industry, as the disciplines of Design and Technology collide.  

 

As the anthropologist, Margaret Mead said, "...never doubt that a small group of thoughtful and commited people can change the world.  Indeed it's the only thing that ever has."

 

It's great to be part of this growing, thoughtful and committed community.