What I find most interesting in looking back isn’t any of these, though. What I find most interesting is how IT is changing at Harvard, and in higher education more generally. The advent of on-line education is part of this change, but only a part. The full picture is far more complex, and far more radical, than just the advent of MOOCs (which, given all the attention to MOOCs, would seem difficult).

The baseline of IT in higher education really isn’t much different than IT in any other large organization. The goal has been to help run the business (and higher education does have major components that are like a business) and provide basic networking and computing infrastructure for the rest of the business. So Harvard IT runs a large set of business applications that are like any other business’ applications, having to do with payroll, and human resources, and budgeting. We also provide networking, email, and calendar functions for pretty much everyone associated with central administration and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, much like every other IT organization supplies such services to the rest of the business.

Of course, higher education IT has always needed to provide some extras to help with the mission of the university. The most obvious example of this is the iSites application, which is used to run a large number of Harvard courses. Such academic technology is an important part of what higher education IT does, but has historically been a minor piece of the work, especially when measured in terms of the amount of money invested. Historically, between 2/3 and 3/4 of the IT budget has been spent on support of administrative computing, with the rest going to infrastructure and academic support.

This is going to have to change, because the use of computing (and storage) within higher education (in general) and Harvard (in particular) is changing. Computing is becoming increasingly central to both the teaching and research mission of Harvard. As digital mechanisms become more central to the core missions of the University, the role of IT is going to have to change. Rather than being part of the administrative background, IT is going to be part of everything that is going on.

Courses have, for some time, used computing to allow posting of readings and assignments, but we are moving to a time when a course will include streamed lectures, on-line discussions, and the construction of digital artifacts by the students for evaluation of their learning. Research in the sciences has long required access to large amounts of computing and storage, but that need is now moving to the social sciences and the humanities. Just take a look at what Jeffrey Schnapp is doing at the metaLab, or the way that Peter Der Manuelian approaches egyptology.The need for large amounts of computing and storage is rapidly increasing, everywhere in the University.

This may become the newly expanded job of IT, or it may just require coordination with IT. In either case, the job of HUIT is going to be very different in the next couple of years. Our investment portfolio will, in all likelihood, invert. What we do now will, I predict, take up between 1/4 and 1/3 of our budget, and the rest will be taken up in support of research and teaching. Partly this will be done by savings that can be extracted in the administrative work that we are doing, as the cost of machinery goes down. Partly this will be done by adding to the investment in IT, but this will be hard in the current budget climate.

Most of this will occur as we decide to do less of one thing and more of another. There are tasks that we have been doing locally that may be outsourced or otherwise moved elsewhere. I suspect that there is a lot that can be gained from the commercial cloud providers, and other software-as-a-service providers. Some of this will be done by making more of what we do self-service; this can both decrease the cost of the IT group and empower the users, but has to be done carefully to insure that service is not degraded. The way we work now is going to have to change.

I find such a prospect invigorating. Doing the same thing has never appealed to me, so the prospect of major change in the way things are done makes me anticipate the new year. It will be interesting, it will be challenging, but it won’t be the same and it won’t be boring. And who can ask for more than that?

On hiring, bozos, and some (admittedly biased) history

Some time ago on this list I sent out a message concerning hiring, and mentioned that you need to avoid bozos if you want your company to survive. I said in that post

It is a truism that good people want to work with other good people; a corollary to this is that bozos attract other bozos. Once the bozo count reaches a certain percentage, the company is doomed (I saw this happen from the outside to Digital Equipment Co. and from the inside to Sun; I’mworried that Google may have hit the bozo event horizon).

A number of you asked, either privately or publicly, if I would expand on this, and perhaps talk about what happened at Sun and DEC, and what I’m seeing happening at Google (and what I mean by a bozo). These are difficult topics, some intellectually so and others emotionally so. But I’ve been thinking about this for a bit, and I’ll give it a try.

Let’s start with the notion of a bozo. All of the great companies I have worked for (Apollo and Sun in various incarnations) or heard about (DEC, PARC, Bell Labs and the like) started around a core of incredible people. These were people who are or were legends in the field. They were the ones who where 10 or 100 times as productive as the average engineer. Some, like Bill Joy, are idea gerbils who can spout out hundreds of original ideas a week. Only some of them are actually workable, but if there is someone around to catch the good ones and edit the losers, these people change the world. Others, like James Gosling, quietly change the world by building something (the core Java language and libraries) that make so much sense and are so elegant that you just smile when you use them.

Good tech companies find a way to reward these people without making them go into management or otherwise change what they are doing. DEC had the title of consulting engineer and senior consulting engineer; at Sun there were the distinguished engineers and fellows. These were levels above the rank and file engineers; no one could expect to be promoted to that level, but you always hoped to become one of the elect. I remember being told that the requirement for becoming a Sun Fellow was that you had invented one or more major branches of computer science; the original fellows (Bob Sproull, Ivan Sutherland, and Peter Deutsch) all qualified on that metric.

One aspect of these positions is that they generally required peer review. You couldn’t become a Sun DE or a DEC consulting engineer just because the managers said you should. You became one because the other DEs or CEs had looked at your technical chops, and said that you were one of the elect. It was often compared to getting tenure, except that it was often more difficult; professors with tenure who shifted to these companies often weren’t passed into this level. And these people were the keepers of the corporate technical flame, making sure that the company stayed on the right (technical) footing.

The core of this decision procedure was the ability of the top-level technical talent being able to make technical judgements about other technical contributors. But at some point in the history of the companies, there arose worries that the selection criteria wasn’t, in some sense, fair. People who, from the manager’s point of view, did great work weren’t being selected by the technical leaders to join the top group. People who did other kinds of important work were seen as being de-valued because they weren’t being allowed into the upper ranks. And at some point, in the name of “fairness” or “diversity of skills” or the like, contributors who would not have otherwise been let in are added to the group.

And these are the bozos. Not necessarily bad people, or even unintelligent, but those who have been promoted to a level where they are given technical weight that they don’t deserve. The “A” team now has some “B” members, but those outside of the team (and maybe some inside of the team) can’t tell the difference. The upper levels of the technical parts of the company now have some people who are driven more by politics, or quick business wins, or self-promotion (all of which may have been the skills that got them support from the non-technical to be promoted to the technical elite). Without a clear technical voice, management does the best it can. But the ship is somewhat rudderless.

Worse still, the bozos will push to promote others like themselves. Which dilutes the technical thinking even more. At some point, what used to be technical discussions devolve into discussions about politics, or business models, or market share. All of which may be important, but they aren’t the technical discussions that had made the company a leader. This is when you have reached the bozo event horizon. I’ve never seen a company recover.

All of this is about the technical bozos, because that is what I’ve experienced. But it wouldn’t surprise me to find that the same sort of phenomenon goes on in marketing, or management, or any other field. The indicator is when process and fairness becomes more important than judgement, and when it isn’t ok to say that some people have reached their limit. Or maybe this is something that happens more in the technical parts of an organization than in the others. I wouldn’t know.

I don’t know that Google has hit the bozo event horizon, but I’m worried that they might have. Part of the worry is just because of their size; it is really hard to grow the way Google has without letting some lightweights rise to the top. The other is their hiring process (full disclosure; I’ve looked at Google a couple of times and it never worked) which has gotten pretty process-bound and odd. The last time I went through it, the site manager admitted that I was plenty smart, but they didn’t know what they would do with me. Given what they were obviously looking for, I wasn’t sure what I would do with them, either. But the whole process seems to indicate that they are looking for people to fit a pre-defined mold, which the top performers generally don’t do all that well. In fact, the Google process reminded me of the time, more than 20 years ago, when I interviewed at Microsoft. And we saw how well that worked…

I think we may well be witnessing the beginning of a paradigm shift in higher education, which makes the question all the more interesting. And when I talk about this being a paradigm shift, I mean it in the sense originally outlined by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, not in the sense that it is generally meant today. Kuhn’s notion was that such shifts force a new way of looking at the world, a change that is so radical that the practitioners of the old science or paradigm can’t even understand the practitioners of the new science or paradigm. Such shifts, argues Kuhn, happen not because of a single experiment, result, or difficult-to-explain phenomenon, but rather when the set of counter-examples, unexplained phenomenon, or changes to the current paradigm in science become so cumbersome that there is intellectual room for a new approach that deals with the problems in the received theories in a radically different (and more elegant) way.

I think what we are seeing in the on-line education arena is the beginnings of a paradigm shift/revolution in education (rather than the more restricted “on-line teaching”). And like a scientific revolution, it isn’t being caused by one particular thing, but rather by an accretion of a number of factors that are encouraging the more adventurous in the field to think in different ways.

Some of these changes are technological. Access to computers, and more importantly to networked computers, is now pervasive over much of the human population. Many of these computers are called cell phones, but the fact is that they have the power of a high-end engineering workstation of not that long ago, and are connected on a network with reasonable speed. The pervasiveness of these devices can’t be overstated– think of all of the interesting micr0-scale power generation ideas that you have heard about that are designed to allow people in the more remote parts of Africa or Asia to charge their cell phones.

Beyond the technology, there are the problems with the way education is done today. The obvious problem has to do with the cost of education, which gets a lot of press and is a genuine worry. But just as worrying is the uneven distribution of education over the geographic area of the globe. Not everyone who wishes to learn is able to get to a place where they can learn (or learn well); partly this is cost but mostly this is physics. High-quality education is currently available in a breathtakingly small number of locations, often in areas that are difficult and/or expensive to get to.

And then there is the problem that current education doesn’t scale much beyond the point where we are now. The last major scaling revolution in higher education was the introduction of the lecture. This allowed a single professor to educate a couple hundred students at a time, rather than the seminar-style of teaching that limited a single professor to educating one to ten students at a time. The quality of education through a lecture was not the same as the quality of the seminar, but it was good enough that the scale made up for it. In the same way, approaches to on-line education allow educating hundreds of thousands rather than hundreds at a time. The education may not be quite as good, but the current belief seems to be that the scale makes up for this.

None of these by themselves are enough to explain why we are seeing the surge in interest in on-line and technology-enabled education. But taken together they put pressure on the status quo. Add a visionary like Sal Khan who shows an alternative without asking if it is a good idea, and we get the revolutionary ball rolling.

As I’ve said before, I don’t see this revolution as being about on-line education. I see it as being much broader than that, looking at how we can use the technologies currently being pioneered in on-line education to make all education, whether on-line, commuter, or residential, better. I’d love to use on-line mechanisms to allow me to never have to give another large lecture. I’d much rather use class time for discussions, or team problem solving, or in some other way that would engage the student and teach the techniques of thinking rather than the content of a field.

I don’t know if the approaches that are being tried in edX or Harvardx will be a better way of teaching. But trying them lets us ask a different set of questions. And that, in itself, is one of the main characteristics of a paradigm shift: when practitioners of the new paradigm are asking different questions than the practitioners of the old paradigm.

Here we go…

Back when I was in the commercial world of hi-tech, I used to refer to thinking like this as being an example of the Highlander Fallacy. This is the fallacy based on the assumption that there can be only one; one programming language, one database, one web-server, one network transport. The new will always win over the old, and we will unify around a single standard that everyone will use. The real world doesn’t work that way; while there may be a best programming language, database, or transport for any (particular) problem, there isn’t a best of any of these for all problems.

Saying that on-line education will replace residential education is another example of the Highlander Fallacy. But it also misses the point of residential education in so many ways that it is hard to know just where to begin. A residential education is a way to spend four years in a community that is all about learning, allowing students to experiment in ways that they won’t be able to when they are out of school. At a place like Harvard, the interaction with other students is probably more educational than any courses that you could take. And heading off to college is the first chance many get to re-invent themselves; going to a new community frees us of the history that has been built up around us in our old community.

But the real reason residential education (or at least co-located education) will never go away has to do with the different kinds of things that we learn when mastering a subject. There are multiple things that need to be learned to attain mastery in a particular subject. One set of things is the content of that subject matter. But the other, more subtle and I think more important, is a set of techniques around problem solving that are used in that subject. Back in my days as a philosopher, there was an important distinction between knowing that and knowing how. Knowing that has to do with the content of a field. Knowing how is a set of skills that allow you to think like a practitioner in that field.

Consider the example of computer science. The content of computer science includes, among other things, learning about a lot of algorithms, different programming languages, the principles of operating systems and databases, and the math needed to understand cryptography. But the techniques of computer science are none of those– they have to do with learning to decompose a problem into a set of (hopefully simpler) problems, of knowing how to build a set of interfaces between different components, or how to design a user interface so that it is intuitive and easy to learn. The notion of computational thinking is all the rage at the moment, but the real core of that kind of thinking is learning how to approach problems the way a computer scientist would.

Other fields have other ways of approaching problems, which are the techniques of that field. You need to learn the content of the field to become a practitioner, but it is far more important to learn the ways of thinking. When I studied philosophy, it seemed that most of the content of the field was uninteresting (which may be why I’m no longer a philosopher), but the techniques of analytic philosophy were very interesting (and have served me well as a computer engineer and scientist).

Bringing this back to on-line education– I think that the real promise of on-line education is the ability to teach the content of a field. But it is going to be much harder to teach the techniques of thinking in an on-line fashion. The best ways to teach technique tend to look like the apprenticeship model. I’ve talked about this for system design elsewhere, but I believe it is true for lots of other fields as well. That is where the residential (or at least face-to-face) form of teaching will still be needed.

In fact, I think the proper use of on-line learning materials will enhance the residential experience. If we can get most of the content taught on-line, we will have more time to mentor students in the techniques of a field. I’d love not to have to do lectures again, and just work on problems and code and designs with students. That sort of work needs the content to be known, but is much more rewarding for both the student and the teacher.

So don’t think of edX as replacing the residential experience. The real goal is to enhance that experience.

It will come as no surprise to learn that the partnership with MIT was not the only choice that had been offered to Harvard. The usual suspects had all come by. It’s nice to have the Harvard brand, in that educational ventures are all anxious to have us join in.

I was also heartened (and impressed) by the considerations that made Harvard decide to go the edX route. One of the core reasons that we are taking the direction that we are taking is that we can approach on-line education (and how it impacts the on-campus experience) as a research project. The folks who are guiding the educational ship have the Socratic wisdom to know that we don’t know how to approach the use of technology to teach. The folks at MIT who are doing this have the same wisdom. So this isn’t a venture-funded concern where we are shipping a product. Instead, edX is a not-for-profit run by two universities with the stated goal of finding out, through real research, how best to use on-line technologies to enhance our core missions of learning and research.

This is not a simple research endeavor. I’ve been known to characterize this as something on the order of the Manhattan project or the Apollo program. It is going to take time. It is going to take money (fortunately, we are already being approached by foundations and other donors who are excited about this). It will take cooperation and the suppression of some standard primate behaviors. Most importantly, we don’t know what the end result will be. But we do know that it will be transformational in the areas of teaching and research. Which are the areas that a university like Harvard should be transforming.

I think the whole thing is pretty exciting…

This has been a particularly busy semester, both from the point of view of my academic life and as CTO. The academic side has been great– I’ve been teaching CS 105, Privacy and Technology, which is always more fun than I should be allowed to have. This is a class that looks at technologies that are seen as privacy-invasive (things like surviellance cameras, wire tapping, and Facebook), dives into the technology and policy, and tries to figure out what can be done. I co-teach with Latanya Sweeney, who really knows this stuff, is a great lecturer, and a better friend. But what made this semester fantastic was the best group of students I’ve ever had in a class–smart, engaged, funny, and fun. On days (and they happen) when I wondered why I was doing all of this, I just had to go to this class to be reminded what fun it is to be at Harvard.

The CTO work has been a lot more scattered, but has also been interesting. Probably the biggest change in my life as I moved to the CTO position was finding that I have very few concentrated, extended periods of time to think about things and get things done. The life of a CTO is one of constantly swapping context, trying to help others (who I hope have concentrated periods of time for their work) to move forward or course correct.

There is also another, odder, part of my job which I characterize as being a technology canary. Canaries were used as early warning systems in mines, organic sensors for dangerous gases. My role of technology canary is to be an early warning system for HUIT on technology trends that are going to change the way we do our jobs. There are lots of these changes coming around, like the changes in client devices (moving from desktops to laptops to tablets and phones, a change that had a pretty disastrous impact on the University of California’s email system). But the most interesting whiff of the future that I’ve seen had to do with a bill from Amazon.

First, some context. All colleges and universities are supposed to offer a net price calculator, a tool that will allow prospective students and their parents to estimate what their college educations will really cost at a particular school (anyone who has to worry about this doesn’t pay list price, at least at Harvard). The financial aid folks here have done a very nice web tool, which they decided to host on Amazon.

Recently, I got a copy of their bill for a month. They had had about 300,000 hits, most from the U.S. but others from all over the world. And the total bill for running this site? $0.63. That’s right, sixty-three cents.

Now, not everything we do at Harvard in IT can be farmed out in this way. This is a simple site, and doesn’t have to be up all the time. It doesn’t have a lot of computation associated with it, and there isn’t a lot of data being moved around. More important, there is no confidential or protected data. But there is a lot of computing at Harvard which has similar characteristics. And at this price, we need to figure out what we can host elsewhere. It may cost more than this example, but even if it is one or two orders of magnitude more it will be less expensive than setting up our own servers and running them here.

This will change a lot of things. We need to figure out what will be changing rather than having it done to us. As the canary, I get to think about these things early on. Which makes life more, um, exciting. But also a lot of fun.

What is more distressing is the terms that are understood, but in a different way, by the general community. In particular, I find that I often get worried looks from my colleagues when I talk about doing some hacking, or being a hacker. Those not in the programming community understand hacking to be the act of breaking into a computer system. But the older meaning, still in use by many in the programming world, is much different. On that meaning, “hacking” is the activity of writing code that is particularly clever, elegant, or that solves a particularly difficult problem, and hackers are those who have shown a consistent ability to write such code.

In the programming culture, being called a hacker is an honorific. This is the sense of the term that Steven Levy wrote about in his book Hackers (subtitled Heroes of the Computer Revolution). To be called a hacker in this sense is a considerable honor, and (at least in the old days) was not a title that you could bestow upon yourself, but one that had to be bestowed on you by someone who was himself (or herself) a hacker.  A kind of hacker writes good, clean, understandable code that runs well and does the job at hand. It is a term denoting craftsmanship and art.

But now the term “hacker” is being used to denote those who break into networked systems. There is a connection between the old meaning and the new– some of the early (code) hackers believed that they should be able to look at any code to try to make it better, and would use their (considerable) skills to break into computers that those who were not hackers would try to close off to them. But the goal, in those cases, was always to make the underlying code better, not to steal information or shut a system down. That is a new phenomenon, or at least newer than the term. I’m afraid that the press has made this meaning of the term the dominant one, and trying to change it is a battle already lost.

But it does lead to confusion. When I tell people that I am going to do some hacking, I get odd looks, and have to explain to them that I just mean writing some code. Even worse, when people ask me if I am a hacker, I have to ask what they mean by that. On one sense of the term, I am proud to say that I am (or at least once was). But in the more popular sense of the term, I am not (by choice, rather than because I can’t).

But I’ve also found it a bit odd that everyone talks about what an innovator he was. He wasn’t, really. Apple didn’t do things first. Xerox PARC did the windows/mouse/icon interface well before Apple. Sony did personal and portable music before the iPod. Smart phones existed before the iPhone, and tablets were around for a couple of years before the iPad.

What Apple under Jobs did so well was to design products that were beautiful and a joy to use. Much of this had to do with the design aesthetic that Jobs brought. But just as important was that Jobs trusted his customers. He felt, in the face of all the business advice to the contrary, that building a beautiful product that was easy to use would be appreciated, and that his customers would be willing to pay extra for the beauty and ease of use. And he built a company around that, which was successful. You can see the same sort of faith in the customer in the products of his other company, Pixar– the animated movies didn’t condescend to the audience, but expected a level of intelligence and sophistication that differentiated those movies from the usual animated stuff.

I hope those now running Apple are allowed to continue on the assumption that their customers care about more than cost, and that design is important. We won’t know until the product pipeline that is currently filled has emptied out. I sincerely hope that they will, and that I’m given the choice to fill my computing world with objects that make me smile (mostly). Otherwise the world will have lost much more than just another innovator.

I still think the best exemplar of the Jobs attitude is the famous 1984 ad. This is how I will remember what Steve Jobs did to the technology industry, and I will always be grateful.

Let me start by saying that, in my experience, the worst (and least innovative) technical organizations are those in which there is a single career path that starts with individual contributor and moves to various levels of manager. This might work for some functions (although I can’t think of an example right off hand), but is very bad for engineering. The only real advantage that this sort of organization has is that it is clear who gets to make decisions. The higher up on the organizational tree one is, the more authority one has. It is efficient, lines of authority are clear, and if you are trying to do something technically innovative you are doomed.

This kind of organization has the well-known drawback of making bad managers out of good engineers, but it also means that many of the most important decisions that are technical in nature are made by people who are spending their time on management. Having spent time as both a technical contributor and a manager, let me assure you that it isn’t just the skill sets that are different. The main difference is the way you spend your time in the different roles.

Engineers (and, by that term, I mean anyone who is building something, whether it is a web site, a new OS, or a service) need blocks of time to think about what they are doing. There is a lot of context that needs to be swapped in to the brain, and a lot of concentration that is required to delve into all of the corners of the implications of any decision. They shouldn’t spend much time in meetings, and the unit of time for their schedule should be no less than an hour (it’s even better if it is the day).

Managers, on the other hand, are interrupt driven. If you get a full hour of time to spend on some topic, it is a bonus. A really effective manager may occasionally disappear to do long-range strategy or planning, but once that plan is in place the decision process is to compare an action to the plan and then do the action if it fits and do something else if it doesn’t fit. Contemplation is not part of the job description.

Dual Track Systems

A much better organization is one in which there is a dual career path. One path takes a person into management. The other keeps a person in engineering. And each lets a person move up the organization, increasing scope of authority, pay, and prestige. The first company that I can remember having this sort of plan was Digital Equipment Corporation. I lived in the dual track at Sun for a long time. Most high tech companies have adopted some variation of this scheme, and many that you might not think of as high tech have also decided that this is a good idea. I’d love to see something like this within the IT organization at Harvard.

Most dual track system will have a number of points at which your career can branch. You start as an individual contributor, but at some point (sometimes early on) you can opt to go into line-management or become a technical lead. Line managers and technical leads share responsibility for a development group. The technical lead makes the technical decisions, while the manager makes business decisions, deals with budgets, does reviews, and the like. Clearly, these two people need to work closely together. The manager needs to be technical enough to understand what the technical lead is doing (if for no other reason than to explain the work to other managers) while the technical lead needs to understand the business case for the technology. But the creation of the business case is the job of the manager, while the creation of the technology is the job of the technical lead.

At the best companies, this dual track continues all the way up the organization. At the old Sun (and now at Microsoft, IBM, and lots of others) there was the job of Distinguished Engineer, which was the technical equivalent of a director or first-level vice president. The D.E.s (generally) had no reports, but designed and led the implementations of major parts of the technology. Becoming a D.E. was not something that just happened as a matter of course, just as becoming a director or a v.p. did not just happen. These engineers were often associated with a manager at the same level to oversee larger and larger parts of the company. At the very top of the company, the Chief Technical Officer was the technical representative on the executive team.

Decision Making

This did mean that the authority to make decisions was often unclear. While the distinction between a technical decision (made by the technical person) and a business decision (made by the manager) might seem clear, it often isn’t. The best groups had a team of leaders who could work well together, when those two didn’t work well together, it was not a pretty. When D.E.s decided that they could manage, bad things happened. When managers decided that they were sufficiently technical to make design decisions, worse things happened.

And then there are those companies that have decided that two decision makers is not enough. The thinking there is that while there is a clear distinction between the technical aspects of a project or product and the management of that project or product, there are other stake-holders that need representation. So the role of product manager is introduced to speak for the customer. VMware had such a system, which I believe is also used at Microsoft. At its best, this form of user-representation can provide valuable input into design. At its worst, it introduces the moral equivalent of the political officer in the Soviet military– someone who can second-guess any decision without having the responsibility to actually do the work.

From what I’ve heard, Google has introduced even more roles. At best, this will allow more points of view to be represented in the decision making around what is to be done. At its worst, this will make it harder to move quickly and will make everyone feel less responsible (since there were so many voices). It will be interesting to watch; I’ll express my own skepticism that it will work, but we will see.

Missing the Point

But at bottom, all of this talk about roles, and career paths, and tracks misses the most important point. It confuses management, organizational structure, and process with leadership, which is the thing that is really important.

All of the successful groups, products, and technology development I’ve ever seen or heard about were organized (intentionally or, more often, by chance) around a strong leader. Sometimes this was a manager, more often it was a technical person, and on occasion I’ve seen it be a marketing person or a product manager. But someone needs to be willing to insist that they know where everyone should be going, and have the force of both vision and personality to get others to sign on.

This is not something that you are going to get out of any definition of roles, or career track, or process. My own observation is that when a company tries to insure innovation through one (or more) of these things, it is probably time to look around for another gig. Innovation is the sort of thing that happens in all sorts of ways, almost none of which can be replicated or scaled. It is like good design– all of the best studies show that good design comes from good designers. Innovation comes from (and is driven by) innovative people, no matter what their title or role and no matter what process they use. This makes it impossible to manage, which in turn makes many managers nervous. But it is, I’m afraid, the truth…

All topics are open. If nothing else, come with the feature of Java that you hate the most, and I’ll tell you why it happened that way (working on the principle that history clarifies stupidity).