Random raves

So, the evo psychs have done some research on why penises are shaped the way they are and why human penises are so comparatively large (compared to most other mammals, well, except elephants and pigs). Dandy.

Their conclusion?

And how did they make this momentous discovery?

Handed in two assignments today. One of which being a presentation (not a very structured one, but it still required chatting up the tutors), while the other was a group assignment that I needed to put the finishing touches to.

One more assignment next week and then the two exams. I'm feeling very under-motivated about the exams, but c'est la vie. If I pass, it's all good.

Work is starting to settle in a bit for me. I'm still horribly under-organised, but one can't change the habits of a lifetime in 5 minutes (hah, although I've always been great at organising in some contexts). I do think I'm getting better, though. Another 6 months to see if I'm feeling more in control, and I'll know whether this will pan out. I'm feeling sufficiently in control of the people, mostly (although one staff member is giving me gyp) - it's the self-organisation and developing bureaucracy-fu that are the tricky parts. One thing that's useful is that I've never disdained bureaucracy-fu, unlike some techies - I've always thought it's a great skill. It's figuring out how to develop missing processes and do my own stuff in a timely fashion (and yes, uncertainty of how to approach doesn't help) that I find hard.

On the upside, and also in terms of dealing with people, other teams I have encounters with seem to respond to me well. I seem to have better-developed social skills than I thought I did - I'm so accustomed to thinking of myself as fairly introverted and socially-unskilled that I fail to notice that I'm actually not that bad at spotting political agendas nor charming people (actually, determining the best approach) in ways that are appropriate for them. I get on well with my boss, which I know he appreciates, although I also know he's being patient with me in terms of results. I need to start producing some substance for him shortly.

Since I won't be bogged down with study over the next few months, and I'm going to reduce my course load by half next year, I certainly hope I can start coughing up the goods.

Course:	841AA - Graduate Certificate in Business Informatics
Status:	ENROLLED

Period	Unit Code	Unit Name	Status	Grade	Achieved CP
2009/S1	6264	Organisational Behaviour G	COMPLETED	HD	3.000
2009/S1	6675	Information Systems in Organisations G	COMPLETED	HD	3.000

Well, I'm pleasantly surprised. Info Systems is really "computers for idiots", despite the fact it was ostensibly a graduate course. The exam was a slight fuck-up, since I spent most of it doing two questions (two diagrams were involved, and I was being particular), which left the grand total of 20 minutes for the remainder of the exam. Oops, but it seemed to have turned out ok.

Org behaviour, though, was challenging, and I'm genuinely surprised I got an HD*. My essay, which was 40% of the mark, must have turned out all right after all. I think I may now go pick it up to see the comments, since I was avoiding doing so. Heh.

I don't expect to do so well next term, since I feel like my life has more distractions in it - career-wise - at present, but it's a nice start.

* For non-Australians, an "HD" is a High Distinction. An "A" or 85%-plus for the rest of us.

I just have to say it's bloody annoying to have to debunk Hegel for a poxy reading review of an article on organisational learning I've just had to do. I was so tempted to write "appeals to irrelevant authorities are stupid", but I'll water that down a bit.

In short, organisations and groups can't "learn" because they're not living entities, duh. And no, the author is not going to bother discussing group knowledge and how it is added to and retrieved. Also, individuals apparently cannot learn in isolation, since "learning is the activity of interdependent people and can only be understood in terms of self-organising communicative interaction and power relating in which identities are potentially transformed." And no, that statement isn't qualified any further. Well, sticking your hand on the stove when you're entirely alone isn't going to do anything for you then, is it?

Well, I'm in a bit of a bind right now. I have read hundreds of pages in relation to power, and organisations, and so on, and I have realised that my lack of motivation about getting it all down in writing is essentially due to the fact I have no idea on how to relate it to the essay topic I was looking at.

Now, the quotation we're starting from relates to power as a "positive force". We are supposed to discuss how organisations manage the behaviour of their employees, and achieve their goals, and the importance of power to organisational effectiveness. All well and good, although fairly complicated (due to the fact that most management-type articles coyly avoid overtly discussing power, except in terms of top-down "empowerment" in the sense of their generously conferring a tiny bit of control to employees, such as "task autonomy"). However, where I'm getting stuck, quite majorly, is with the last part of the topic question, which states "...with particular reference to the complicating factors of organisations which have diverse workforces and/or operate in the global market place."

I don't think I can get away with simply saying that "x stuff I just discussed will be complicated in organisations with diverse workforces", as much as I'd love to. I was going to discuss how individuals will respond to power interactions differently... but I don't think that's sufficient for this. Buggery bollocks. I could talk about how workers on a factory floor will have a different experience of power interactions than the white-collar workers in the office, but have I found anything I can reference that talks overtly about that? No. While we're supposed to express opinions at the post-grad level, we are also expected to back them up. :-(

I need to submit an assessable essay outline by next Tuesday - the actual essay is due a month later, but I also need to complete three more assessable pieces of work for this course during that time, one of which being a group exercise (not to mention the other assessable work I need to complete for my other course). I'm wondering whether to ditch all this work I've done so far, and do the alternate topic, which relates to the efficacy of organisational change, and is much simpler to tackle (since the management journals do overtly discuss it, and with varying points of view).

Hmmmmmm.

Someone - "Kutiman" - has done the most coolest of jobs mashing up YouTube user-created music clips into funky sounds. The first one (The Mother of All Funk) is funk-rock, complete with brass, guitar solos, harmonica, and theremins. Then there's a dub track with real drums, double bass, trombone, melodica (of course), funky electronic effects, and a groovy vocal (not the pastafarian, although he's hilarious) and xtra bonus gadgets! The third track is a groovy downtempo breakbeat number reminiscent of Red Snapper (double bass, bongos, piano), and just the perfect vocals (the melodic and rap parts). And a wind quintet, assorted keyboards. The fourth track is full-on d&b with a 3-manual church organ, OMG GADGETS, and a bouzouki. Very reminiscent of Venetian Snares! Fifth track is bossa nova with Hammonds of hilariousness, awesome vocals (with a chick of hotness singing them), a jew's harp, a vibraphone (oooh yeeeah), a recorder, and assorted gongs. Sixth is a downtempo r&b-ish kind of track, but pretty pleasant. The last one is a very skillfully-repurposed emo-chick's bluesy warblings, with a nice flute solo, giant windchimes and a harp. Anyway, check out ThruYOU - the 8th track is Kutiman explaining his process. Yay!

That was a reward for finishing my latest and greatest reading review on a journal article called "Why is it so hard to be fair?"

( excerpties )


I love those reasons for not behaving fairly (well, I think they're crap, but it's illuminating. I do sympathise with the last one!). Honestly, that kind of stuff is like throwing me into a lolly shop and saying "Go to it". I've never understood people who say things like "I can't be bothered with politics". The decisions that people make, and that includes the ones they supposedly make on your behalf, directly affect our lives. And knowledge is power.

It's kind of ironic that this Organisational Behaviour class is incredibly stimulating - if hard work - where the Information Systems in Organisations is comparatively meh (although it is interesting background). Of course, the latter isn't helped by a tutor who obviously knows his stuff, but who dithers. Hopefully it'll pick up soon.

Cloud-computing is the buzzword du jour, and refers to services that host applications and data that are accessible by way of the Internet. Zoho/GoogleDocs, Microsoft Hosted Services and plenty of others are examples of these.

It's new assignment time - Reading Review: Are Leaders Smarter or Do They Just Seem That Way? - and, gah, I can't finish it off. I've been using an online service that is subscribed to by the university for my references, RefWorks. It's great, because you fill in these little forms for all the data, you can add notes and tags and whatever, you insert little macros in your doc and upload it (this works for all kinds of document formats, or you can install a Word add-in), and the product formats both the inline references (ick) and reference list perfectly... and the references are available wherever you are. In theory. Alas, I can't logon to the site today. From a non-university machine, you logon to the uni web proxy which then forwards the connection to Refworks, where you logon there. No dice. I tried from one of the university's machines subsequently, but no luck there either. This is the second time I've had trouble with this, meh.

So maybe one day we will be able to guarantee connectivity, security - and more importantly, responsive support - of applications and data hosted in the cloud, but that day hasn't happened yet. And if you're a money-making organisation, and/or one that needs to be able to respond quickly to clients, then you shouldn't rely on these services either (unless you're tiny). Part of the problem with these services is that the support can be dicey. RefWorks are yet to respond to any of my emails (I'll be chatting to the uni library tomorrow if it's still a problem); organisations like Google can be less than responsive. In an enterprise context, unless it's entirely shambolic, you'll at least have people you can talk to about the problems you're having, and you should also get a reasonable ETA of when they'll be fixed.

Anyway, moving onto the current events of the world, cheshire_bitten expresses perfectly just what I've been thinking about the Catholic Church this past week.

So one of my units, which I start on MONDAY (argh, how did that happen?) is on Organisational Behaviour. I read the first chapter of the prescribed text, which looked at a whole bunch of organisational configurations and theories, and in passing announced that hierarchies are "here to stay" and in fact remain the 'best available mechanism for doing complex work'. That last quote comes from an article by Henry Leavitt in the Harvard Business Review, which of course I had to read. It seems fairly even-handed, except for the aforementioned conclusion, but this section on some of the benefits of heirarchies cracked me up.


So, who's the boss and the subordinate in this scenario, eh? Since the goats are directing the work, obviously they're the bosses! ;-)

So, yeah, structure does not necessarily = hierarchy (and I get tired of people who should know better confusing the two). *snortle*

Moving along to the wider question, I think hierarchies are a convenient and accustomed way of assigning roles and accountabilities, but I don't actually think that those assignments need to be done in a top-down manner (I can't help my anarchist tendencies). Foucault talks about "governmentality", which can apply to the application of power in many ways (including self-regulation), but he makes a distinction between that and domination. And I'll wank on about an alternative organisational model some other time, I think. I've already decided on my essay topic for this course!

The first chapter in my text talks about how organisations are pretty much always arranged in a hierarchical fashion, even though there have been recent efforts to flatten structures and work across them in recent times. There is also a discussion about the difficulties of contract management when "alliances" are made between organisations to work together in the delivery of a larger project (such as public-private partnerships for public works - feh - or entirely private projects, such as building a new football stadium) . Now, in that kind of area, who is the boss and who is the subordinate? The simple answer is that there are none. There are contacts and there should be deliverables/KPIs to describe what outputs are required of each party in order to complete the projects. While there might be a co-ordinating body or final customer, they aren't the "boss" of the project in terms of directing the actual work. However, roles and accountabilities must be clearly stated in the contracts, with redress if there are failures to perform.

I don't see why these concepts are so difficult to extend to a more micro level. My team at work needs to deliver certain things, like email services and application maintenance. Our point of contact is our team leader. While she is our supervisor, in reality there is no reason that performance metrics could not be maintained within the team, and she just carry out the role of co-ordination and communication. If we, on a team or individual basis, fail to perform what we have agreed to do, given the appropriate resources, then fine, time to do some serious renegotiation or do something else. Well, that may be pie in the sky, but it's an area that interests me. I don't think devolution, with appropriate means of co-ordination, should necessarily mean a shambles, although of course that's the common fate of many co-operative ventures. So much so that the word "co-operative" almost epitomises shoddily-run and chaotic organisations, which I think is a shame.

See, there's a reason I'm a techie - I figured out the problem that I was having with my course enrolment yesterday.

One of the questions was

8. Where was your permanent home residence during Year 12?

<input ... >

Now, I fairly naturally stuck in "NZ" - the above is the entirely of the question. There was no cute dropdown, nor specification to enter an Australian postal code. If you look at the HTML for the input box name, it is "p_commencing_location". Aha! And the max_size for the field was 5 characters. So I nabbed the 4-digit code for NZ that had popped up after an earlier dropdown selection, and stuck that in, and OMG, it worked. It would have been really tough shit if my permanent home residence in Year 12 had been a different country to my final year of school, which is not necessarily the same in NZ (we go up to 7th Form, which is Year 13).

I'll now drop their webmaster a note advising them of the trouble with the form. Student Records - or whatever they're called - haven't got back to me yet after my messaging them yesterday.

Dear Ms [Trix]:

Thank you for your application for entry to the University. I am pleased to offer admission to the following:

Course Code: 841AA Course name: Graduate Certificate in Business Informatics

Commencement Period: 23 February 2008

Holy shitcakes.

Dear procrastinating and lazy part of myself - please to be getting your shit together before I take this on. I would quite like to have a respectable piece of paper to wave around sometime in the next year or so. Aspirational, moi?

Love,

Trix