Blue Prism robots and a new year

https://larsxjohansson.blogspot.com/2017/12/when-im-sixty-five.html

A year later not looking forward to my 66th birthday, still do not know what to do with my life, especially the professional part of it. Last year I decided to be an independent IT consultant and learning new skills primarily JavaScript and front end of web development. I became a consultant, that is a huge step when you are sixty-five and that I’m very happy for it. Unfortunately very little JavaScripting almost nil, on the other hand I did some C# and Python, at least Python came as a big surprise for me. A new client only do Python code so I had to learn, can’t say I’m a master but proficient enough. I also have taken som baby-steps or rather an old man slow stumbling into AWS, cloud is certainly one way into the future actually it’s already here and I expect some Azure too this year.

The big thing for me 2019 is Blue Prism, the so called robots are really the new hype in the corporate world, not by IT professional, but by ‘business people’ especially the finance guys seem to think robots are the next thing in IT. Some very clever marketing have disguised screen emulation as robots. The so called robots emulates a screen and replace keyboard and mouse with scripts. For me this is the last resort when you have no other means to connect IT systems and there is no APIs or other integration tools that work and the need for automation is great then ‘robots’ is a viable system integrator. Robot scripts are more complicated than interfacing between APIs and they are brittle. The screen is a very complex ‘interface’, actually the screen needs HI, AI is not really there yet, so complex scripting is needed to bridge the gap between HI and AI.

During the 1980ties I did a lot of screen scripting (IBM mainframe 3270 scripting), mainly for stress testing online manufacturing systems. I learned how hard screen scripting is, you need to take everything into account, error messages, pop ups, timeouts, not to mention screen resolution etc. The mainframe TTY screen environment was a lot simpler than present GUI screens.

    

3270 screen

The Blue Prism robots are much more advanced than the 3270 screen emulator I used in the past.

I really hope Blue Prism robots also are fun to work with. Here I come stepping into the future, I will have a good start 2019, I sincerely hope your 2019 will be a good year.

Happy new year to all of you😊

Merry Christmas

to all of you from me. Now I ready for the Christmas Party tonight. I bring the cured or pickled herring and vodka

an Absolut must on a swedish Christmas Eve dining table.

A traditional pickled herring

This year I made three different kinds of herring, we will be some +15 grownups so there will not be much over

for tomorrow, which is a pity, the pickled herring is perfect on swedish crisp bread, the day after the Christmas party.

Tonight I will eat and drink too much that is the same procedure as every year.  Later this week I will sum up

my first year as a consultant, it was a different year indeed. But now I go home to my sister and meet up

with the rest of the family. This year is a special, we have a newly born Walter, the first in a new generation

of the family. I’m the grandma’s brother, I do not think there is an english word for that relation,

“old uncle” maybe.

I hope we all will have a nice holiday no matter how we celebrate it.

PHPers help save the world

I happen to believe Global Warming is for real, and have done so for last twenty years. I also believe we all (in the the richer countries) can do small things to lower the emission of greenhouse gasses.  I also believe we PHPers all over the world can do a great thing for our world, migrate to PHP 7. Watch this video with Rasmus Lerdorf. If we all follow his advice we can make a substantial contribution for the Earth. And that without sacrificing anything. You will increase your programmer skills by migrating to a significantly better programming language, increase your users response times at the same time you help save the Earth, that is what I call a win-win situation. You do not even have to believe in global warming, it's still a good deal.

Spread the video to all you know, and start now migrate all your systems to PHP 7. You become a better programmer with happier users and as a side effect you help saving the Earth.  

Next generation of business intelligence - 2.

Don't get me wrong, in the previous post on NG BI, I'm expressing myself a bit condescending about the big guys BI systems in particular SAP's business warehouse. That does not mean I think those systems are bad, some of these are actually quite good. My remarks are just a bantering expression of the fact these guys are still struggling with problems I addressed some 25 years ago. It would be preposterous of me to claim my BI system is better than the big guys systems, but I created a system the second version 2006 which in some aspects still is better than what the big guys have today. You should also note my Data Warehouse is only the back end, which is what a Data Warehouse should be, that is why it is called a 'data warehouse'. This was not so when I started design my Data Warehouse at the end of last century, back- and front-ends where often tightly coupled. At the time the data models from Kimbal et al. dealt successfully with shortcomings of the hardware mainly small and expensive memory. But the spintronic revolution gave us large and inexpensive memory and I broke free of the cube data models, made full use of inexpensive large memory multiprocessor computers as early as 2000. The big guys still seems to be locked into the data cubes though. SAP uses HANA to speed up processing which is good, but it's not only speed, the cubes models is restraining the developers by it's complexity. Actually I once read a paper of one of founders of SAP very close to my original data warehouse vision. He had a zillion € to spend on his vision, I had 2000€. I came up with my Data Warehouse, he came up with HANA. (I have search for his document issued somewhere around 2008, but I have not found it.) HANA is good, very good indeed, but it is not the whole answer, there is more to it than raw hardware speed.

One often overlooked aspect of Business Intelligence is organization. Most companies use an organization model suited for ERP systems, with traditional development, test, QA and production systems, with hierarchical demand, analyst and development teams. This is good or sometimes necessary for ERP systems, but the inertia of such organization is disastrous for BI activity. All and every company tell you they have a close to the user BI organization with agile development methods, but if you look behind the fancy words you often find an old ossified organization where users if not have died waiting for requested reports have forgot about them, when the reports finally arrive.

Poster boy

Finally I’m appreciated for my true virtues. Poster Boy for protecting intellectual property!

Actually I’m very protective of customers intellectual rights, i.e. intangible assets that allow our
company and our customers to maintain a competitive edge and which contribute to the ability
to effectively conduct business.