Interning at ABN AMRO's Dialogues Incubator

Been a while since I last posted something up.
So I started to follow a Masters study at the Delft University of Technology in fall 2008. It is a 2-year course of Management of Technology. I see this study as a facilitator for me to bridge between my technical knowledge in the software engineering realm and the managerial aspects of technology. I decided I need to do this because of my personal experiences looking at the clash between technical and business people. I figured I'd have the best of both worlds.

As the study nearing its end, I am to write a Master's thesis based on a research study. I opted to perform the research at a company of my own search. The search led me to a couple of interesting companies with interesting projects. At the end I had chosen to go on with ABN AMRO. The department I am interning at is ABN's Incubator, the Dialogues House. It is a business incubator that captures ideas within ABN AMRO and assesses them for their feasibility to be turned into new ventures.

My role here is to investigate the decision criteria for the decision makers, when they make the decision of whether a new idea should go on to the next stage or not. In parallel, I am also developing a decision support tool for the decision makers. This tool will give an overview of the on going projects and their position in the portfolio funnel (a funnel adopted based on the New Product Development Stage-Gate model of Robert G. Cooper). The decision support tool will also give project's information such as the resources it needs vs the overall resources available for all projects. Most importantly, this tool will require innovation managers to post answers to the criteria (my research focus) they are confronted when inputing a new project, which will be a decision support for the decision makers when making their go/kill decisions.

This project is really interesting from an academic point of view as I have to try to generalize all kinds of different ideas, which might or might not be strategically fit with ABN AMRO's strategy as a financial services institution, and formulate a generic decision criteria for these ideas. There have been some research in the past on this area, but my research will be specific to a business incubator environment, more specifically ones that are like the Dialogues House ;P. Whats more interesting for the business is the Decision Support tool that I'm developing. If this is a success, we might be looking into scaling the application to fit all business incubators ;) (ambitious)

This might all seem a bit blurry but I intend to label this topic on this blog to document the progress of this project. I hope a lot of people can benefit from this. Especially those who are dealing with portfolio selection complications or similar issues ;)

I'll keep you posted!

PRIMA error!!

I have been struggling to avoid the Internet for the holiday, but as a junkie, my body shivers if I don't have access for more than 24 hours ;P. I have been trying to occupy myself with my family whom I see only once a year for the past 4 years. I have been playing a lot with my sister's baby, Rania (6 months old), who is also the coolest baby I have met so far. When she cries there is only 3 possibilities: 1. She's hungry, 2. She pooped or pee-ed (not sure how that is correctly in English spelling), 3. She's tired. Any other time, as you can see on the picture, she's very happy and active :)

Anyway, I was home after a haircut and a visit to my grandma's, I went online and checked my email inbox. I was delighted to see an email from my ex-supervisor/Scrum master/mentor, Eric D. Schabell, from my last internship. The content of the email, however, was not that delightful as he was informing that there was an error occurred in the application that my colleague and I were developing, PRIMA. The application was developed for my graduation project at SNS Bank, for approximately 5 months (Feb-Jul '08). Development tools involved Adobe Flex 3 and ColdFusion, and the end product was a huge flat screen monitor displaying project information over the ongoing projects within the Java Domain department where we did our internship at. As you can see on the picture, the application is showing project information such as: Test Quality, Daily Builds, Hours Realization, Code Quality, Issues, and Weekly Score, of one of the ongoing projects; 'Webagenda'. This application also involves XML files that filter the large amount of information gathered from multiple data sources. The complaint was that the administrator, who saw that PRIMA was not working as usual, found out that one of the XML files was suddenly empty. This has caused the system to complain it was not able to find the correct XML file. Before the internship ended, I was busy developing the configuration panel, which enables users to add/remove projects. During testing, I had found out that the 'delete project' function was not working properly as it was always trying to overwrite the content of one XML file to the other after a change. I discovered that it was only due to a mix up of path and file names, and it was fixed before we left. But an empty XML file was highly unexpected! The cause of the problem is yet to be discovered, but the XML file was replaced with a backup so the application is now running normally. I had advised them if the problem occurs when trying to add/remove projects, then try to manually access the XML file and do the changes there. That way there is less chance of XML contents getting mixed up.

It is really difficult to assess exactly what the problem is since I do not have a direct access to the infrastructure, plus the fact that I am in Jakarta, Indonesia and the office is located in 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, makes it even more difficult to communicate.
I do not know if its just me, but it worries me to know when the application I created encounters an error! grr! just makes me wanna jump in there and fix it!

Diving Into the Phenomenal World of ICT

The idea of having a blog has been going around in my mind for a while. I did not decide to have one earlier, because I always thought people who write blogs are those who do not know how to spend their leisure time, or they simply have too much free time. Besides, I always think that I am not worthy enough to write something useful for people from anywhere in the world to see. And I would not want to write something useless. Anyways, today I had an inspiring experience, which had encouraged me to, at last, create my own blog and start writing something. It may not necessarily be useful for everybody, but it might just be an insight to particular group of people who are seeking for similar topics.

One of my high school best friends has decided to step it up a little in his commercial life by creating a small company of 2. Teaming up with one of his family members, he developed an idea of a new media for company's advertisements, which involves an IT system (I am holding back details to keep its originality) . He had found a software developer who managed to develop a system that enables network filtering for advertisement purposes so that people using internet connections at 'hot spot' cafe's/restaurant could "elaborate further" through their internet browser. Having zero knowledge of ICT, he then turned to me, who had just graduated a bachelor's degree in software engineering and fortunately enough is on holiday in Jakarta, for a second opinion. Although I am just a fresh graduate, but he thought it might be a good idea to have someone who is actually into "these things" to have a look at the system that has been developed, before concluding the deal.

Anyway, what I wanted to spot out in this post, which by the way also the kind of topics that I'd like to keep posted around this blog, is the IT elements of this story. When I was first told of the idea, I went "Wow! that's actually a really good idea! I think that's gonna work really well. Really nice prospects on the commercial side as well", but when thinking of the development of the system, I immediately thought of writing a project plan, a little bit of tools research, sketching up some design, development, testing and boom... we're talking about at least 2-3 weeks. But then my friend went "..yeah I found this dropped out IT guy who has developed the system and I want you to take a look at it. Oh and by the way, he did it overnight..". I was in shock. What a waste of 4 years of software engineering study! I thought to myself.

So I went to this meeting held at a cafe with my friend, his uncle, the "IT guy" and his middleman. My friend started out by stating again the whole idea of the system, then followed immediately by a demo of the system by the "IT guy". The system is actually not as complicated as I thought. A machine (Linux based) acting as the server would catch all port 80 requests and reroute them to a dedicated port. Using a particular mechanism, the server would then fetch the objects contained in the request, add desired contents into to the objects, and then hand them all back to the users (browsers). A little bit of HTML designing, and boom! you have your desired contents visible on every browser that tries to use your connection.

What I can highlight from this story is how amazing and easy system (software) developing is nowadays. With all the open source software available, cutting all production costs (no license required), giving the "IT guy" the power to sell his product at whatever price he wants his skills to be valued. We had a little chat and he told me that he finished this project in approximately 6 hours. I was quite amazed at first, but then I came home, did a little research myself on the available tools and I thought, hey, its not that difficult after all. I mean, I am sure this guy is highly talented and experienced, but it got me thinking, how many people with a little bit of IT background and an internet connection could do that? I do not know if this idea has been developed anywhere else in the world (I believe they have it already in The States?) but I can almost say that this post could endanger the originality of my friend's business idea. Well, my intention has only been to share the IT perspective of the story. And I am sure people who read this are polite enough not to copy other people's ideas. Cheers! ;)