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Vale Cyril Brookes

Information Age staff, Information Age

19/02/2008 15:26:21

He spent a decade with BHP after gaining a BE (Electrical Engineering) with first class honours at Sydney University in 1962, later a Masters and then a PhD from Oxford for his thesis on "Adaptive Control Systems" in 1964.

At BHP Newcastle he did pioneering work in developing production planning and process control systems for iron and steel production, before moving to Port Kembla as its data processing manager in 1968. From 1971 he headed up BHP's national IT group of more than 1000 staff from the Melbourne head office.

He became the founding professor of information systems at the University of NSW in 1974. The IT faculty grew to be one of the largest in Australia with 30 academics and 1000 students during his 20-year tenure, which also included being head of UNSW's School of Accountancy from 1979 to 1985.

Directly involved in the design of some of the world's most advanced computer-based production systems, the work spawned an abiding professional focus on the management and application of formal and tacit data which would later result in his establishing grapeVINE and BI Pathfinder as highly successful commercial enterprises.

The grapeVINE technology was sold to Sun Microsystems in 2000, and has become an integral part of Sun's corporate Intranet server business software environment.

Brookes has also worked to promote professionalism in ICT including being NSW chair of the ACS, an executive committee member for several years and serving on IFIP's information systems committee for a decade from 1975. On the day he died, the Rust Report carried this piece from Brookes, typical of his prolific writing style:

Like it or lump it: looking for value in Web 2.0

What does Web 2.0 really mean for BI? Will the My Spacers really act differently from us oldies when it comes to collaborate time?

No doubt, like, My Space, Facebook etc are great, like. Everybody uses them, like. Sadly, most of us could have built them instead of working on far less remunerative activities, like.

Ah well, life is naught but missed opportunities, like! But I digress, like!

Although touchy, feely, warm, and cosy can help with BI collaboration and teamwork, they're not the end results we're after - it's better decisions, made right time, right place. This implies the business has instrumentation and metrics. And metrics invariably come down to numbers.

Therefore, BI is a numbers play; presenting them, assisting their assessment, finding issues hidden in them, empowering action to resolve issues, and sometimes automating them. Web 2.0's contribution to corporate BI isn't related to collection, storing, and disseminating numbers though. It can't be, because it's social, and social isn't numeric.

Web 2.0 is about making sense of situations, finding people with similar interests, sharing experiences, and (my hobby-horse) creating knowledge from tacit resources. For BI, the critical element, Dear Reader, is that Web 2.0 enables collaborative commenting and assessing significance of facts - especially numbers that may or may not be important.

Therefore, Web 2.0 can play a vital, but subsidiary, support role in BI; it's not the main event. That doesn't mean it's not important, just that it will be a secondary design, something built to enhance the reporting.

I'm not sure how a corporate My Space would play out in the longer term. There's heaps of scope for embarrassment, witness the use made of YouTube's videos to embarrass Kevin Rudd on the earwax thing.

Certainly, the new generation of My Spacers will be familiar with online collaboration. Will this translate to sharing information and knowledge that could come back to bite them? I think not. Whatever the new generation is, it's not stupid!

Will project team ingenues blow the whistle on a bad manager, or will they respect team solidarity? Solidarity will surely remain dominant.

I think that the My Spacers will be just like employees are today; they'll be most circumspect when it comes to collaboration that could be risky to their careers, such as publicising a rumour that could be wrong but if correct would be very important to the business. They won't take that risk.

However, they will be much more ready to participate in Web 2.0-style corporate collaborative activity (Wikis, if you will) that is peer level, peer driven, and allows each person's contribution to be recognised.

Summarising, Web 2.0 capability and experience will lead to a more collaborative local workplace, but self-interest will ensure the corporate-wide, more strategic, cultural barriers remain.