The Art of Writing an Academic Paper

Posted on May 9, 2013 by

I was asked several times by my students if there was a template for writing an academic paper. The short answer is: “Yes. Several”. The somewhat longer answer follows here.

First of all, anything you write should be interesting. Even academic papers. You should think about your paper as a Hollywood movie. You step in from the street into the movie theater, where you will be entertained for a while before you return to the real world with a new perspective on the world.

Like a Hollywood movie is divided into parts, the academic paper is similarly divided into parts. The introduction is an appetizer that sets the stage of the paper. Next follows an introduction to the problem area (the environment), the central authors (main characters) and the problem or research question (conflict). Then comes the elaboration where all the relevant background knowledge such as theory and method is presented. Then follows the analysis (escalation of the conflict), which is the core of the paper. This ends in the conclusion (conflict resolution). The final part is what perspectives this raises. After this you will return to the world a changed person.

A more detailed description follows here:

Introduction – This is where you create interest in the subject of the paper. Why should anyone care about your paper? It will typically be something that surprised you or made you wonder. What made you curious? This will lead to the research question.

Theory – depending on the type of paper this could be minimal or fairly comprehensive. Descriptive papers will typically have very little if anything, since it is fairly trivial to state that your theory is that through observation you will find out something. More theoretical papers will survey theories and end up with one or more hypotheses. This part serves as the box inside which you will now be thinking, so to say.

Method – This part describes the procedure you will follow when you move around inside your box. It may also be trivial if the paper is about reading other papers. It may also be central if it is an experimental setup, where the protocols have to be described.

Analysis – this is the actual movement inside the box. This is the backbone of the work. It maybe a structured description of a field work, data analysis, experimental findings or readings of other scientific works (meta analysis or theoretical syntheses).

Discussion – here is where you have a chance to reflect critically on your analysis. If you imagine that you presented your work at a conference you would get some critical remarks. This section replaces this interaction, only you will have to ask all the critical questions yourself. It is of course difficult to be critical towards your own perfect creation, but typically a discussion will circle around validity, that is, how valid the results are.

Conclusion – This is where you bring it all together. You extract the most important findings from the analysis. Sometimes it is just a summary. Sometimes it is where the hypotheses are evaluated. Anyway this is the part that will be cited by other researchers, if it were an article, so it’s best to keep it as clear as possible. Think about how you can condense it into one sentence, that people can remember and cite you for.

Perspectives – this is the “so what” section, where you tell the reader why he hasn’t wasted his time and what practical and theoretical issues it raises and very important, what future research could follow. This is where you lay the seeds for future research grants.

In the table below I have collected a number of key insights for the academic paper. You can print it and always keep it on you, or you can hang it as poster next to One Direction at your dorm room.

Part Personal opinion References Proportion of paper “The box”
Introduction Yes Yes 2-5% Locating a site for the box
Theory No Yes 0-10% Build the box
Method No Yes 0-10% Rules for moving inside the box
Analysis No Yes 60-80% The actual movement inside the box
Discussion No Maybe 5% Reflections on the movements
Conclusion No No 2-5% The gold nuggets found inside the box
Perspectives Yes Maybe 1-2% Stepping out of the box
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Millenials – Our Saviours (?)

Posted on January 25, 2013 by
Recently I read an article about millenials by Rajat Taneja. It seemed to indicate the beginning of a new and glorious age ushered in by the coming of a species known as millenials.

Sociologists sometimes talk about millenaristic movements. They typically believe in a fundamental change of the world. Originally millenarism was an apocalyptic belief in the end of the world. It got its name from the Book of Revelations 20:1-10, where it is foretold that the devil will be imprissoned for a period of 100 years. In this period the Christian martyrs would reign together with Jesus and everything would be just peachy.

Something similar is taking shape in businesses around the world. A new breed of humans known as millenials (persons born between 1980 and 2000) or generation Y are coming to save us. This impending flood of computer geniuses are ready to offer their superior services to our humble enterprises. This will fundamentally change how we do business and the whole world as we know it.

Examining our future masters
Let us examine some of the claims expressed about millenials:
“They are digital natives” – everything about technology just comes naturally to them, whereas everybody else has to work hard to understand technology. They come fresh out of high school well versed in database construction, with the knowledge of a host of programming languages, hardware architectures and so on, right?
Not really. They may know programming at some level, but it is just different languages than the old guys. But what is it that they do as natives? They chat and post on facebook, instagram and other non work related media. This they do well. They can probably also locate the next big entertainment fad after LOL cats faster than you. But how is that helpful?

They are so innovative – New ideas and ways of doing things just comes to them.
While innovation is extremely important and everybody seems to forget the facts on the ground which is that 99,9 percent of jobs out there has no innovation aspect in them. They are just plain old jobs that you have to do to get money. Innovation is so much more than just fresh ideas.

They won’t take the job unless you give them their facebook, instagram and all the hyped technologies of the world and lay out a career plan with promotions within the first half year. Right, so the day they grow up and start a family, trust me, they will. As long as you live in mom and dad’s basement you can be picky. And yes Gen Y are staying in the basement longer.

So, what is the recommendation? Shouldn’t we do anything special for this generation? yes we should, but look behind the hype. Just as the world isn’t suddenly going to fundamentally change because of a certain date in the calendar. The influx of millenials isn’t either.

When to hire millenials
If your company really needs this generation and you can gain a competitive advantage by catering to their narcisism you should do that by all means. If you can make up for the reduced productivity of private conversations on facebook with increased competitive advantage in other areas. If it is the idea of being connected in a network establish an Enterprise Social Network, but don’t do because of the needs of one generation. Do it because it is a great idea communication wise anyway.

If you really need someone to guide you through how social media works because your primary customer group are millenials: Go for it

If you really truly do have a real innovation role open. Young people are typically less bound by traditional way of doing things, so they can see new ways of doing business. Especially if you are doing product development on the internet, they have internalized the different patterns that are prevalent there. If there is no one to receive the innovative input, it will just be a frustrating experience.

When not to hire millenials
If your workforce looks a bit dated and old when you look out the window of your corner office and you feel they do not know about new technologies. Odds are that any skilled IT developer can learn any new technology that millenials excel in in a couple of weeks or months. Only he has the discipline and enterprise culture to do something more productive with these skills.

If you already have a hard working and good team that has been doing what they do for years. If you put an adolescent in that mix, and promote him like the advice goes, odds are that the other members on the team that worked really hard and long for their promotions will take it badly. The move may in this case decrease team morale and productivity of an otherwise productive team.

If you think that it is necessary to recruit new talent just because they are new. You could gain an advantage from letting your competitors burn their fingers. Millenials expectations to work life are unrealistic. So let them realise this with your competitors and pick them up when they leave. By then they will have a more realistic outlook.

Colleagues not saviours
My advice would therefore be to reflect on your own specific situation before forming any opinion about hiring young people. The demands and behaviours are special, but so is every generation. It is not inherently good or bad. Just different. So don’t loose your head chasing the latest fad. Young people are our future colleagues, some things they already do well, others they need to learn. Don’t get all worked up, it’s business as usual.

Sources:

The Harper Collins Dictionary of Religion: “Millenarism”

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Experience or Vision – How to Make Awesome Products

Posted on January 21, 2013 by

Reading Steve Jobs’ biography set in motion a train of thoughts that took me from the Jobs/Gates controversy over history of religion and philosophy to what we need to do to make awesome products.

Jobs vs Gates
In Steve Jobs’ biography a chapter is dedicated to Bill Gates. Jobs and Gates initially collaborated tightly. Microsoft for example originally made Excel and Word exclusively available for Apples MacIntosh.

But as we all know, Bill Gates eventually decided to make a new version of his operating system and called it Windows. It was inspired by the graphical user interface he had seen on the MacIntosh computer. Naturally Jobs didn’t like that Gates had stolen his idea and this started an ongoing animosity between them. Jobs, however didn’t dislike or envy Microsoft as a business, he simply had a problem with how they designed their products, which he thought lacked style and finesse.

We hear about how the first version of Word and Excel were ridiculed by Apple engineers and how the first version of Windows was unanimously mocked by the press. In both instances, however, the Microsoft team was very fast and efficient in correcting mistakes and improving the product to something that worked.

Gates on the other hand didn’t like that Jobs had no experience with coding or any real technical experience. He put a high value on having personal experience with what you were doing.

Superficially that is interesting from an anecdotal point of view, but there is a much deeper philosophical divide between the two approaches, than what can be gleaned from Jobs mocking Gates’ lack of style. Let’s start by noting that Microsoft valued experience and experimentation highest.

Experience
The focus on experience and experimentation can be traced to the epistemological position known as empiricism. It is defined in the Encyclopedia Brittanica as “the view that all concepts originate in experience, that all concepts are about or applicable to things that can be experienced, or that all rationally acceptable beliefs or propositions are justifiable or knowable only through experience.”

Wikipedia continues: “Empiricism in the philosophy of science emphasizes evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world” (empiricism). This is the philosophy that fuelled the industrial revolution and this is the approach by Bill Gates and Microsoft. It is based on experience with coding and experimentation is the way to find out how to make the optimal product.

Vision
But what about Steve Jobs? when he is evidently not an empiricist, then what is he?
He was very inspired by buddhism especially zen buddhism. He travelled through India in his youth and was eventually married according to Zen ritual.

Now, according to buddhist writers the material world, we have access to through our senses, is an illusion. Concepts exist before and independently of the experienced world. In western philosophy this is similar to the epistemological position known as idealism. The other major epistemological school in philosophy championed by Plato.

Jobs had a vision of how the product had to be. He also made several attempts at producing the product, but here the purpose was to get closer to an already existing idea of how the product should be. The attempts were not experiments in the scientific meaning of the word, but mere materializations that could be measured against the immaterial idea.

How to make new products
So, finally we have come full circle. The disagreement between Jobs and Gates on how to develop technology was not just a superficial disagreement about lack of style or coding skills. It was philosophically abysmal. It was about whether the best way to develop a new product was obtained through vision and thought or through experience and experimentation. Beneath the difference between two of the worlds largest technology companies lies a century old divide between empiricist and idealist philosophy. Both have been very successful, but in radically different ways.

In software development today the winds are blowing the empiricist way. The Lean Startup movement focuses on experimentation. Start-up after start-up put their ideas into the world quickly in bad shape and experiment, like Microsoft, to arrive at a product that is good enough to satisfy a market.

If followed correctly it can give you good products, but it will never in itself give you awesome products. In order to create awesome products, this is not enough. If you are fumbling along in the dark with sequential A/B test designs and random hypotheses, you will arrive at weird products that are good enough to generate money for your company. But in order to create something truly great you need the ability to soar above the terrain in the sky, you need to have vision.

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Prediction markets as early warnings of projects going off track

Posted on November 9, 2012 by

It is well known that many large IT projects fail. It is also well known that they may have been saved if proper intervention had been undertaken. The question is just how to get an early warning? How will management or project management know when things are going wrong?One way to know when a project is running off track is prediction markets. Prediction markets are based on the basic assumption that crowds are wiser than any individual even an expert. The obvious question then is, why not just send out a questionnaire on a regular basis to ask how people are feeling about the situation. The problem with questionnaires is that they are more easily distorted.

An example is that for the past few elections for President of the USA, such as the recent, the outcome has been more precisely predicted by the bookmakers than the polls. The reason for this is that an opinion in a poll is free, but when you bet you have a stake in it. It is not free.
Prediction markets are modelled on this dynamic. Participants in the market are given a virtual currency to invest in the likelihood of future events. This currency then will eventually be turned into some sort of reward in real life.

The British company qmarkets has developed software that allows companies to use prediciton markets to predict the future*. Companies have used it to predict which new product to invest in or which drug to bring through to clinical trials, or which risks are most likely to occur. If applied properly, prediction markets are the most accurate way to predict uncertain events.

The project portfolio managers challenge
One of the most challenging parts of project portfolio management is to manage the uncertainty in the portfolio. It is inherently uncertain whether a project will be finished in time for the deadline, whether resources are available or whether the quality will be good enough.

Standard textbooks prescribe the use of complicated algorithms and reference class data to determine whether the project is under spending or overspending with regard to the burn-down rate of a project. A project that burns less hours than expected may experience resource bottlenecks or lack of commitment. A project that burns more hours than expected may have underestimated the amount of work. Either way, the likelihood that the project will be on time and on budget is diminished.

The challenge is to be able to say exactly when a project is going off track. This can be done if we know when exactly a project is overspending and when it is underspending. The problem, however, is that all projects are different. Some have a much slower start and explosive finish, others start really energetically and then level off.

I Predict
When traditional ways of detecting when a project is going off track don’t work, prediction markets may offer precisely the solution needed. Prediction markets are good at early detection of sentiments and information that is distributed among a group of people. It could therefore serve as an early warning system.

The prediction market could be implemented as a market where the question of whether any project in the portfolio, or at least the largest of them, would meet their deadline. All employees would be given a pool of virtual money to buy stocks in the project. These stocks can be bought and sold at any time. The stock price therefore reflects the probability of a project meeting its deadline.

The portfolio manager and senior management could therefore, just by monitoring the market, much earlier spot projects that had a high risk of failure. That would allow them to do one of two things: discontinue the project or give it more attention to bring it on track. Either of these options would benefit the company. It would either minimize losses or maximize likelihood of delivering quality on time.

These are the hard benefits, but there are also, soft benefits that would not follow from the traditional method. Since this is a game, it is a way for employees to take the mind of their work for a second and still be doing something relevant, instead of posting links to youtube movies on facebook.

It is also a way to create awareness of all the projects your company is running. Suddenly employees will know what other departments are doing and they may even serendipitously discover synergies or redundant projects

Since it is a game it can be entertaining, which may boost morale.

Further it may create positive incentives to make the real projects finish on time. If you invested in it, you want to protect your investment (this is why it is probably a good idea to disable the possibility for shorting project socks).

Future potential
Unfortunately this solution is not in use anywhere yet. It is only a possibility, but with the market maturing and ideas about collective intelligence becoming more widespread, it is probably only a question of time. the current economic climate calls for solutions that would help you minimize losses and maximize success. The problem is just whether the cultural gap of actively letting employees play and even rewarding them for it is too big for most companies.

The typical risk analysis is inherently flawed. It is only based on the project managers subjective opinion and furthermore it is typically made with a 5 point scale idiosyncratically interpreted. This doesn’t guarantee a good estimate of the future
Furthermore we are natural born optimists. We overestimate the likelihood of something good happening and underestimate the probability of negative events occurring.

* Best Buy used decision markets to find out whether a new product idea would succeed (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122152452811139909.html). They built a market where it was possible for about 2000 employees to trade imaginary stocks that related to questions about the future. So, if a question was very likely to be true the price of the stock would go up and if it was likely to be false, the price would go down. This means that the price of the imaginary stock would match the probability of the answer being true.

References:
Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz: “Prediction Markets”
James Surowiecki: “The Wisdom of Crowds – Why the Many are Smarter than the Few”
Eduardo Miranda: “Running the Successful Hi-Tech Project Office”

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So you want to be a blogger?

Posted on October 15, 2012 by

Here are some interesting facts about blogging:

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How to Select The Right Database in the Future

Posted on October 3, 2012 by

At the Goto conference in Aarhus I noticed some new trends are emerging in the database field. For the first time in 30 or 40 years there is a fundamentally different alternative. Several talks and stands at the conference centered around the new movement called NoSQL. I decided to sketch a decision tree showing how you will probably be selecting your database system in the future, but you can start already now:

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The Agile Move from Efficiency to Effectiveness – How to Do the Right Thing

Posted on October 2, 2012 by

A good indicator of where agile development is going is the Goto conference in Aarhus. Monday October 1st  the track “Agile Perspectives” dedicated a whole day to presentations on agile development. It was quickly visible that something new was moving in the agile community.

Track host, Jesper Bøeg, talked about his movement from Extreme Programming to Scrum and then to Kanban. Kanban is a framework that builds on other development methods, so it could strictly still be agile. It originally derives from Toyota and lean thinking. It can be described as a “pull” system and the central feature is the kanban board where you can follow how the work proceeds. The  purpose of kanban is to limit work in progress, in order to keep focus on the flow.

In his talk “Lean Startup: Why it Rocks far More than Agile Development”. Joshua Kerievsky argued for the Lean startup methodology instead of agile development. Initially the title disturbed me. How can you compare  an IT development method like agile with a business development method like the Lean Startup?

In an agile context you would assemble a product backlog describing all the features your product is supposed to include. You would then prioritize them and assign them to sprints. The metric then becomes one of burn down rate and how much you can produce. You optimize for keeping everyone busy. Jezz Humble in his talk argued that optimizing for this is demonstrably not the most efficient way. He conveyed the image of an airport with only one counter: that person is busy, but the throughput is not optimal. It never will be as long asthere is no free resources. This is why his solution is to optimize for throughput. The metric of traditional agile development often becomes one of how much work is produced, which was also what you could understand from reactions from the audience.

While agile may help you produce and release features faster, that is just what you do: produce features. What keeps you in business, however, is happy customers buying your product. If you have developed a lot of features, but they don’t keep the customers happy they don’t really help. Agile development focuses on the product backlog, but does not necessarily have any idea whether the product backlog has any real customer value.

Lean start up on the other hand focuses on customer development. It is based on the build-measure-learn cycle. You build something because you have a hypothesis that you want to test. You measure whether that hypothesis holds up and you learn from the experiment. This will give you ideas for a new hypothesis that will start the cycle all over again. The focus will therefore be on building a minimal viable product. This product is the absolutely minimal version necessary to test a hypothesis about the customers being willing to adopt and use the product. You then gradually add features in order to test new assumptions. You have to make sure that they can lead to validated learning. It should be possible to validate whether the hypothesis about the customer behavior holds up. This is called “innovation accounting”. The ultimate metric for the Lean Startup is therefore whether the customer likes and uses the product.

Gabrielle Benefield also noticed that Agile development should not be too focused on the features produced: we should “Stop build the wrong things righter”. Benefield likened agile development to a machine gun, where a lot of innocent bystanders could get hit. In agile development it is possible to build things really fast, but the problem occurs if it is not the right thing. Then it doesn’t make sense. Instead we should take away the features that are not essential and make a minimal product first.

One of Benefields solutions is to make developers observe users use their software. This could be done by taking them into the field or by having them watch a usability test. The effect of this is striking and has a large effect on the developers who may suddenly become more aware of whether their users would actually understand the features they develop.

There is a realization in the agile community that being agile is not enough. The distinction between efficient and effective accurately describes the core theme. It can be paraphrased like this: Efficient has to do with doing the things right and effective has to do with doing the right thing. The conclusion is that focus should be shifted from efficiency to effectiveness. It doesn’t matter whether you efficiently build a product that has no value to the customer. All that counts is to make a product that has an effect for the customer.

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