Watch out for increased worker productivity...

As it reports on the continuing Wall Street recovery, CNBC often cites the upbeat economic indicator of "increased worker productivity." It implies goodness, but is it? Is it in fact a short-term and potentially business-killing condition? Here are some of my concerns.

Product design and implementation will suffer because there's less time to simply think. New requirements, new designs and defining effective practices require time to step back, perform continuous research and get the attention of those around you to establish the support (and good critical thinking) you need.

Fewer people wearing more hats means less than 100% responsibility. How can you be in two or three roles at once and really feel like you are covering your territory? And what happens during crunch time, such as a product release, when all your responsibilities become #1? If you were once a person who took pride in your productivity, you find you are becoming an excuse-maker, not out of incompetence, but from feeling just plain overwhelmed.

Critical cross-training becomes an after-thought. Who has time to train people? Who has time to be trained? As essential as it may be, you feel like you're just ensuring that folks won't meet the deadlines they're already facing. Congratulations, that extra hat you've been wearing looks like it's found a permanent home.

Burn out will occur at a faster rate. It doesn't matter how much you love your work. When you're just keeping the ship afloat, there's not much time for the things that previously fueled your passion, such as vision-making or healthy research of new strategies and technologies.

Finally, there is no substitute for intuition or simply sensing that something isn't quite right. A few months later, you're kicking yourself for not having researched that gut feeling when you had it. Then you ask yourself, "why?" and all you can come up with is, "I was too busy being productive."

Still Cloudy, But Steadily Getting More Clear...

I've been using the Cloud as hosted by Amazon EC2. Unexpected value? Yes... as a staging and test deployment platform. The value comes from the ability to take a more deliberate path that puts off hardware purchase plans. Being able to feel like you can really think out the deployment is quite a luxury.

Right now I'm enjoying thinking of using the cloud as a type of DMZ... at least until it's production time. But who knows if I'll want to just keep it in that role through production deployment?

I also like it for the potential of having standardized test platform images. These are pre-configured operating environments that you clone out based on the environment that you've set up and refined. Beats starting over every time you want to create a 2nd, 3rd or 4th testing environment. The only downside to images that I've come up with is this: You often want to assign new developers the task of setting up these environments from relative scratch so that they get an deeper impression of what goes in to setting up the server applications that they've been hired to build, expand and maintain. Without that experience, months and years go by before they really realize how the application they work with is choreographed with respect to support bash scripts, file system layout, including the use of NFS, and other supporting processing, such as a messaging server. There are also the critical configuration property files they read from.

So, what do I think of cloud computing right now? Very cool. It's taught me a lot about firewall configuration, in particular. It's made me feel empowered to try stuff without being dependent on IT. And it simply gives me another arrow in my quiver when contemplating test and, maybe, production deployments. Now... I've got to figure out the contrasting values of going with a hosted cloud versus an in-house VMWare-style cloud... hmmm...