Coffee Innovator

As part of our celebration of Christmas, it is a tradition for our family to exchange gifts with each other.

This year, I received a home coffee roasting kit.  This is one of my best gifts ever – it satisfies my let’s-get-technical itch, as well as pushing me out one more step towards the perfect espresso.

Home coffee roasting is an up-and-coming activity – catering mainly to the “innovator” fringe of coffee drinkers but gaining mainstream attention (see this news article as an example).

What made this gift so great was its engineer appeal.  You probably don’t know about it, but there is a whole sub-culture of green coffee bean / home roaster enthusiasts and even people writing books on the perfect roast.  Read more here…

This home coffee bean roasting thing is out there on the Innovator’s Edge as defined by Geoffrey Moore in his book Crossing the Chasm.

And, as it happens out on the Innovator’s Edge, it’s a bit like the almost-out-of-control wild west.  Customers apply know-how to fit their specific needs, sometimes kludging things together in ways that were never intended by the original equipment manufacturer.

Check out this picture of how someone has hooked their PC to their hot-air popcorn popper for computer-optimized roasting of the perfect bean!!

Could this be similar to how some people hook their Distributed Control System (DCS) to their database???  Or how others provide wireless access to sensitive plant data??

I hope not, but I have this sinking feeling that there are plenty of do-it-yourself technical enthusiasts out there, and that their documentation may be like our friend with the modified hot air popcorn popper.

The challenge for us Innovators is and always will be … Documentation!

Argh!  It’s so much for fun to make things work and then move on…  isn’t it?

But as professionals, we do need to stay disciplined and a much as we may want to invent or re-invent, we need to also document and re-document. (Ugh!)

But for that, there’s Integrity…  (read more about this auto-documentation, change management and data flow mapping tool here)

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Comments

[Jan Brock]

Dear Sir,

I read with interest your thoughts about coffee machines - you see I have alredy seven ! One for each week day as my wife says ! We too have the tradition of gift excahnging at Christmass time like you so many miles away. Good luck to you.

Yours faithfully,

Jan Brock
Tampere
Finland