On the other hand eBay is notable for always finishing an auction at a predefined time. This encourages bid sniping where potential buyers tactically try to wait for the last possible moment to get their best bid in. So I was fascinated and entertained to read in “The English Year” by Steve Roud about traditional buying auctions which rely on a fixed time to end rather than continuing indefinitely.

In a candle auction a candle was lit and bids were accepted until the candle went out. Or a pin would be put in a candle and bids would be taken until the candle burned down far enough for the pin to drop out. Apparently this was an officially sanctioned way of running auctions in the 17th century and Steven cites examples where candle auctions still take place in England (on the 6th of April at Tatwell, 13th December at Aldermaston).

Other weird and wonderful (to modern readers) auction types Steven cites are

• The Running Auction that takes place in Bourne, Lincolnshire on the Monday before Easter. This is to auction grazing rights on a piece of land, and bids are accepted for as long as it takes for 2 children to complete a 200 yard race, and
• An auction at Wishford in Wiltshire that takes place on Rogation Monday, also for grazing rights, in which “[b]uyers are summoned by the church bell, about fifteen minutes before sunset, and the parish clerk walks up and down between the church porch and gate while the bidding takes place. As soon as the sun dips below the horizon, he strikes the church key on the gate, and the auction is over”.

Looks like eBay’s approach has a good historical pedigree

The serious point, though, is that these types of auctions that tried to fix a specific end time eventually died out to be replaced by open-ended auctions.

From http://code.google.com/p/aost/downloads/list get http://aost.googlecode.com/files/tellurium-core-0.6.0.jar
and http://aost.googlecode.com/files/tellurium-0.6.0-dependencies.zip

Extract these into a lib folder somewhere and replace the groovy version 1.6 file with the groovy-all-1.6.4.jar from http://groovy.codehaus.org/Download

Now follow the instructions at http://code.google.com/p/aost/wiki/CustomTelluriumNetBeansProject (but obviously make sure you include all the jars you downloaded, not just the ones listed).

I find the company fascinating for a bunch of reasons:

1. They are a marketplace that allows people to find tradesmen very easily. It’s shocking how easy for the user it is, in fact – and I speak as someone who has used the service as a user. The model is pretty similar to MFG.com - regular readers will know I’m a fan.
2. But even better than the traditional online marketplace idea, Rated People is more like a dating agency. I don’t go on the site and choose from hundreds of plumbers. The system chooses the best plumbers for me based on my location, budget etc.
3. The upshot of all of this is that the ratings system on Rated People is the best I’ve come across. It is the hardest to fake. Amazon’s ratings are useless – as a manufacturer I could easily hire plenty of people to post positive reviews of my goods. Even on MFG.com I could register myself as a supplier, create a number of fake buyer accounts, award myself some contracts and give myself a great rating. On Rated People you can’t just do this.
4. It’s still sourcing!

On a “small world” note, I was out with one of the guys last night and found out that he once used to be a buyer at Brakes where he used to run their reverse auctions and was involved in the early incarnations of Trade Interchange.

So I was surprised to read The Sunday Telegraph Stella Magazine’s (8th March 2009 – yes it was a slow Sunday) article on “the great eccentrics of world fashion”. Some are listed alongside URLs:

Susie Bubble of http://stylebubble.typepad.com
Tavi Gevinson of http://tavi-thenewgirlintown.blogspot.com
Diana Pernet of http://ashadedviewonfashion.com
Yvan Rodic of http://facehunter.blogspot.com

Out of these four, only one runs the .com domain of their online presence. The others are content to let blogspot and typepad do the heavy lifting and are evidently happy to be associated with those domains.

And given that 99% of first time visitors to your location will get there by typing in the name  (e.g. facehunter) into Mr Google’s Guidebook, the .com-ness or not of the domain name becomes less relevant.

Google search for "facehunter"

Not surprisingly, as with pretty much any .com name made up of two arbitrary words, facehunter.com is apparently owned by a domain squatting organisation. I presume this to be the case because (a) facehunter.com is just a list of links to adverts and (b) I’m struggling to see what other reason Rough Media can have for registering 2,000+ domains.

Google is wise to this: if you even do a search for “facehunter.com” you still get links to the “real” facehunter at http://facehunter.blogspot.com rather than the squatted domain.

Google search for "facehunter.com"

Where is the benefit, these days, of having http://www.myname.com over http://myname.wordpress.com or  even http://www.twitter.com/myname? How long before having your own .com domain starts feeling rather stuffy, quaint and old-fashioned?

1. It’s a relative concept. I was very excited in the mid 90′s to see how easy to use SAP R/3 was.  Compared to SAP R/2.
2. Of course you think it’s intuitive. You wrote it.
3. Things become intuitive once you’ve been trained to use them. I now find the Office 2007 ribbon intuitive, just as I find the location of Accelerator, Brake and Clutch pedals in my car intuitive. There was a time when I didn’t.

The only person who can convicingly claim that your software is intuitive or not is the person using it. As a developer it’s something I’ve often struggled with because what the end user finds intuitive can often be very different to what I think they’d find intuitive. Getting this right is half the battle (and half the fun).

Mr Rajan of the University of Chicago says academic research suggests mortgage originators, keen to automate their procedures, stopped giving potential borrowers lengthy interviews because they could not easily quantify the firmness of someone’s handshake or the fixity of their gaze. Such things turned out to be better predictors of default than credit scores or loan-to-value-ratios …

In other words -  if the devs found something difficult to deliver they descoped it. Pretended it didn’t exist. A viewpoint that is more common than you might think: to develop software you need certainties (if x occurs then do y).

Not that this viewpoint is limited to devs. In my work with buyers I’ve seen a marked reticence to even attempt to quantify the non-price elements of the bids they are being faced with, and certainly a reticence about weighing up the non-price elements of bids against the price (e.g. is a 3-year warranty worth an extra £x per unit).

It’s almost as if there is a tendency to ignore the subjective when what we should be doing is incorporating the subjective, but accepting it as such.

At TradingPartners the auction manager is central to the whole process – from the supplier selection and training through to actively driving the negotiation during the reverse auction itself.

For example during a TradingPartners auction the auction manager can be seen communicating via instant messaging with bidders in order to encourage additional bidding. I have written before about how judicious use of instant messaging increases bidding activity and therefore savings.

My moles in other providers tell me that many other purveyors of auction systems seem to treat the auction itself as a technical activity that pretty much runs itself, barring any technical mishaps. The auction manager’s role is a more “up front” role to get bidders ready for the auction. On the day of the auction event the auction manager’s role is to watch the event rather than to drive it, and to respond to technical issues rather than to stimulate further competition.

When I have discussed the role of instant messaging with non-believers the usual riposte I get is something like: “Ok, you have shown how sending an instant message at 10 minutes into the auction got you an extra bid and more savings, but even without that instant message, you would have got that bid in the revese auction extensions.” It is impossible to prove one way or the other what ‘would have happened’ so it’s an impossible argument to refute. When it’s been my budget up for grabs I’ve been keen to take every possible opportunity to get the best possible result rather than leaving things to chance.

If you are planning reverse auctions as part of your sourcing strategies take the time to consider whether you expect your auction managers to be watchers or drivers, and understand what your vendor/provider’s approach is.

I’ve had a read of the eSCM-SP and am struggling to see what value it adds, certainly in terms of how I understand sourcing and eSourcing. Two things to bear in mind with this model:

1. The acknowledgements list includes contributers from Satyam, IBM, HP, Accenture, Deloitte etc. No mention of an Ariba or a Freemarkets (let alone anyone else in the space). No long list of CPOs from major organisations. No mention even of any organisations that track and analyse the space. Yet the ITSqc says in its description of the ITSqc research consortium that Our members consist of international industry leaders in eSourcing on both the Client Organization and Service Provider Sides of the relationship, including clients, service providers, advisors or consultants, and the standards community.
2. I’m dubious about the value of their definition of sourcing vs e-sourcing. You’ll have to download the documents yourself to see the graphic I’m referring to – in the meantime here are the definitions:

• IT Sourcing contains Applications Development & Management, Desktop Maintenance, Application Service Provider, Data Center Support, Telecommunications Network Support
• Task & Business Process Outsourcing contains everything from IT Sourcing and also includes Finance & Accounting, Engineering Services, Human Resources, Data Capture, Integration & Analysis, Call Center, Medical/Legal Transcription, Purchasing
• eSourcing covers IT Sourcing and also Task & Business Process Outsourcing
• Sourcing contains everything in IT Sourcing and Task & Business Processing Outsourcing and also the likes of Janitorial Services, Lines Services

Clear? Like I said – you’ll need to look at the graphic in their documentation to get a better understanding. In the meantime here is my interpretation:

According to the model the core of sourcing is the sourcing of IT-related services, e.g. Desktop Maintenance, Applications Development, Data Center support.

The next level up in the sourcing definition brings in the sourcing of what has become known as BPO (Business Process Outsourcing), e.g. the sourcing of Accouting services, the sourcing of Legal Transcription services, the sourcing of HR services, putting together call centers.

Both of these levels are covered by the model’s eSourcing definition. The sourcing stuff that is outside of scope of the model is, for example, Janitorial Services and Linen Services.

There is a pattern in all of this: The model defines eSourcing as the stuff you can outsource to a 3rd party offshore provider. It excludes from scope the stuff that needs people onsite, or transportaton of physical goods.

Now – if you look back at the list of the contributors of companies to the definition of the model you’ll see that, surprise surprise, they tend to be the providers of the outsourced services that can be provided offshore (e.g. legal transcription, application development services).

But when someone tells me that they are looking for eSourcing or IT-enabled sourcing, to me that means using IT to help make sourcing better. This can mean anything from using SAP to using Excel templates (or anything in between) and can certainly by used to source Janitorial Services better just as it can be used to source Desktop Maintenance better. The definitions used by the eSCM suggest that they see eSourcing as the procurement of services that can be provided remotely using the internet.

So is the model going to help you decide whether to go Ariba or SAP, or whether to outsource the whole of your sourcing function to China? Probably not. But will the model help you decide whether Accenture or Wipro will be best to run your 400 person call center? Possibly yes.

So tread carefully – and beware that just because people are using the same words doesn’t mean they are talking about the same thing.

While I’m on the subject of the eSCM here are a few more thoughts:

The eSCM shares the same brand as the CMMI that has become very popular with IT service providers over the past decade. But it doesn’t follow that just because the CMMI is a de facto standard in the IT industry that the eSCM will become a standard in the procurement space. In fact CMMI level 5 certification is not in itself a guarantee of a stable, quality provider: Satyam (coincidentally one of the contributors to the eSCM) are CMMI level 5 certified (check their awards page and scroll down to 2005-2006 for CMMI and pre-2001 for SEI-CMM, the predecessor of CMMI) and yet its leaders are at the centre of a fraud probe.

As far as 5-level maturity models go in the sourcing space I am quite taken with Hackett’s one. Incidentally my post on the subject is one of the most popular pages on this blog.

Till next time.

And yet we persist in interviewing key users and running workshops to find out how to build our systems. Even though we know that the resulting documentation is often very wide of the mark.

An article in the 17th Jan edition of The Economist, called The Price Of Prejudice makes some strong arguments that not only is what people say they do often different from what they really do … what people think they would do is often different from what they would do in reality.

From the 2nd paragraph:

[T]he implicit association test measures how quickly people associate words describing facial characteristics with different types of faces that display these characterisitcs. When such characteristics are favourable – “laughter” or “joy”, for example – it often takes someone longer to match them with faces that they may, unconsciously, view unfavourably (old, if the participant is young, or non-white if he is white). This procedure thus picks up biases that the participants say they are not aware of having.

They cite three other fascinating experiments. The first two are by conjoint analysis experiments by Dr Eugene Caruso and the third is by Kerry Kawakami.

In the first, students were asked to pick team mates for a hypothetical trivia game. Potential team mates differed in their education level, IQ, previous experience with the game and their weight. When asked to rate the importance of the different characteristics, students put weight last …

However, their actual decisions revealed that no other attributes counted more heavily. In fact, they were willing to sacrifice quite a bit to have a thin team-mate. They would trade 11 IQ points  – about 50% of the range of IQs available – for a colleague who was suitably slender.

In the second, students were asked to consider hypothetical job opportunities that varied in starting salary, location, holiday time and the sex of the potential boss.

When it came to salary, location and holiday, the students’ decisions matched their stated preferences. However, the boss’s sex turned out to be far more important than they said it was (this was true whether a student was male or female). In effect, they were willing to pay a 22% tax on their starting salary to have a male boss.

The last example looks at attitudes to race. In this experiment a non-black student enters a waiting room in which there is a white “student” and a black “student” (these last two are in on the experiment). The black “student” leaves the room and gently bumps the white “student” on the way out. This white “student” either ignores the bump or might say something racist about black people. The real student’s emotional state is then measured and the student is asked which of the two “students” they would pick as a partner for a subsequent test.

A second group of non-black students, rather than going into the waiting room either read a description of the proceedings or are shown a video recording of the scenario and asked to imagine how they would react.

Both those who read what had happened and those who witnessed it on television thought they would be much more upset in the cases involving racist comment than the one involving no comment at all. However, those who had actually been in the waiting room showed little distress in any of the three cases.

In addition, a majority of those imagining the encounter predicted that they would not pick the racist student as their partner. However, those who were actually present in the room showed no tendency to shun the white student, even when he had been rude about the black one

More grist to the mill for an ethnographic approach to software development: one in which we build what people do rather than what people say they do, or say they think they might like to do; one in which the software developer spends significant time doing participant observation with the end users to really understand what she is going to build.

But the edit area font looked very uninviting, even with aliasing configured

The fabulous new Inconsolata font looked like the solution. You can install it (or at least the .otf version) as per usual.

But Jedit leans on Java and Java (apparently) requires ttf files, not otf files.

Here’s my workaround which, although a bit hacky, works for me.

1. Install FontForge
2. Download the FontForge sources
3. Open the FontForge source in FontForge
4. Export it as inconsolata.ttf (ignore any warnings)
5. Copy it to the ttf-inconsolata font directory that was created as part of the installation of the ubuntu package, e.g: sudo cp inconsolata.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-inconsolata
6. Now edit fontconfig.properties.src in /etc/java-6-openjdk and add the following four lines

filename.Inconsolata-Regular=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-inconsolata/inconsolata.ttf
filename.Inconsolata-Bold=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-inconsolata/inconsolata.ttf
filename.Inconsolata-Oblique=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-inconsolata/inconsolata.ttf
filename.Inconsolata-BoldOblique=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-inconsolata/inconsolata.ttf

There you are, now you can use Inconsolata in your Jedit.

Was it worth it? For me – being used to Windows and Mac it has made my Ubuntu dev environment much more friendly than it was before. YMMV: screenshots of different fonts on my machine are below.

Bitstream Vera Sans 12

Courier New 12

Deja Vu Mono 12

Inconsolata 12

(*) FWIW – I do my RoR hacking on Textmate on the Mac and recently moved from Aptana to Jedit on Windows (I didn’t need the full-on IDE features). On Ubuntu I was looking for an alternative to Eclipse. I started with Gedit for a while but syntax highlighting was pretty poor and I spent too long chasing down all the different advice available on the interwebs and still not getting anywhere. IMHO Jedit is an altogether simpler option for RoR as it needs only a few tweaks as documented by the likes of Eadz and Xiabozz to get you moving in the right direction.