A third option to when your frustrated waiting for a permit

Chris Crosby has a post on the frustration of waiting, fighting City Hall to get permits to build a data center.

Since 1 in 10 Irish jobs are provided by multi-national companies, and Apple certainly qualifies since you can pick up an iPhone in Astana, Kazakhstan, as easily as you can in Dublin, no one anticipated any problems as the planning and permitting processes commenced. Unfortunately, it was at this point that things began to go “off the rails,” as they say. As all involved soon found out, even a corporate behemoth is no match for a not so friendly planning appeals process. Apparently, two individuals stood fearless and undaunted in the face of what they felt was a corporate incursion that would change the nature of the town forever, and, using continual appeals as metaphoric speed bumps, thereby caused the entire process to drag on for three years.

Patience may be a virtue, but it also has its limits. It took Apple 1095 days to reach its limit before formally announcing the decision to end the project despite a personal visit from Ireland’s Prime Minister.

The Irish Times covers the specific that Chris mentions of effort by the Ireland Government to improve the process.

Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation Heather Humphreys expressed disappointment at the decision. She said the delays the project has faced have “if nothing else, underlined our need to make the State’s planning and legal processes more efficient”.
“The Government has therefore already been working, over the last number of months, to make improvements to those processes. This will ensure we are better placed to take advantage of future such investment opportunities, whether from data centre providers or other sectors,” the Minister added.
— https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/apple-scraps-plan-for-850-million-data-centre-in-athenry-1.3490316

The problem with trying to improve the existing process is people spent a lot of effort to make the process the way it is, and it is assuming the process is right and it just needs to be made faster. As many of you know the process has many flaws which cause the delays as departments requirements conflict with each other.

An example of a conflict that illustrates what happens when you let a department make its own optimal decision is from the Polaris missile program development.

In each subsystem difficult technical problems had to be solved by narrowly focused specialist, and there was always the danger that the solution they would choose would be detrimental to the larger system. For example, there were a number of methods for launching a ballistic missile from a submarine, but each was a bit different in regard to crew safety and submarine detectability. Permitting the launch mode decision to be made solely in terms of launch efficiency could, of course, jeopardize the value of the entire system.
— "The Polaris System Development, Bureaucratic and Programmatic Success in Government" - Harvey M. Sapolsky

The third option is to introduce to system thinking. You may want the permit faster, but if the requirements are still in conflict, you lose in your build. What we need is a better way to build for the overall good of the City and User.

Good example of networking at 7x24Exchange conference

The top benefit of attending a conference like 7x24 Exchange is networking. Meeting new people and building better connections with people you know. Kieran Begnan, CEO of Integration Facility Solutions posted a LinkedIn post that has had 48 likes and 10 comments.

This is both a good example of networking at 7x24 Exchange and a good way to post about your experience on LinkedIn to share with others. The 48 likes has spread the word to many more. Note this post has had over 4,500 views in 2 weeks. 

China’s JD.COM shares its automated warehouse and logistics system

Axios posts on JD.COM’s automated warehouse. https://www.axios.com/china-jd-warehouse-jobs-4-employees-shanghai-d19f5cf1-f35b-4024-8783-2ba79a573405.html 

 “JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce gargantuan, has built a big new Shanghai fulfillment center that can organize, pack and ship 200,000 orders a day. It employs four people — all of whom service the robots.

What's going on: Welcome to the creeping new age of automation. When the talk turns to Chinese big tech — rivals to Google, Amazon and the rest of Silicon Valley — the names usually cited are Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent. But scrappy JD, with a respectable $58 billion market cap, is investing aggressively to be added to the pantheon.”

JD.COM shares its vision is similar to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

”The rap on JD has beenthat it is far less profitable than Alibaba. But JD responds that, as Jeff Bezos expanded Amazon, its logistics buildout is proof it is investing in itself.

  • "Everything is about scale," says CTO Chen Zhang, speaking with a small group of reporters at its Beijing headquarters.
  • "When you invest in technology, you don't worry about spending money. You worry whether you can get to scale. When scale comes, profit will come."”

The one slide out of 294 Mary Meeker’s 2018 Internet Report that shows great insight

Mary Meeker is famous for her 2018 Internet Trends report. Here is the link that you can go through it. http://kpcbweb2.s3.amazonaws.com/files/121/INTERNET_TRENDS_REPORT_2018.pdf?1527701640 

It is 294 slides. 

Out of all the slide, here is the one that caught my eye as demonstration of the insight Mary has.  This is slide # 228.

In this one slide Mary covers the state of China’s AI efforts and 6 goals that are part of the plan. This is something that had occurred to me a couple of years ago, but hadn’t summarized it as well as Mary did. 

When you plan your AI and ML efforts you need to account for what China is doing and how your efforts will be impacted by China’s effort.

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