A little while ago there was a video around that parodied the way that Microsoft did its marketing and packaging when compared to iPod marketing.
The new packaging for Vista and Office 2007 looks pretty good.
Month: October 2006
Count Your Blessings #87 – Electric Lights
Over the weekend we went through the annual routine of putting the clocks back. The result for me is that before I finish my working day it’s all dark outside.
Here in my study though I’m accompanied by light. There’s the small halogen lamp on my desk which lights the wall behind my screen. There’s the Ikea Nott uplighter in the corner by the window. I even have the choice of putting the light in the middle of the room on. In the landing outside the study there is another light, and more in the bedrooms and all the way through downstairs. Outside there are even more lights. Nowhere do I need to be in darkness.
The light allows everything to be seen.
Jesus used a lamp in a parable:
Then Jesus asked them, “Would anyone light a lamp and then put it under a basket or under a bed? Of course not! A lamp is placed on a stand, where its light will shine. For everything that is hidden will eventually be brought into the open, and every secret will be brought to light. Anyone with ears to hear should listen and understand.”
Centralisation Myths?
Centralisation is everywhere.
- Call centres are points of centralisation.
- IT is constantly trying to pull everything back to the data centre.
- Many business functions are centralised.
- Organisations outsource so they can get the benefits of centralisation.
Why? There are normally two reasons and they are the usual business reasons – cost and quality. Functions done centrally are supposed to be more cost effective than those done in a distributed fashion. Centralisation allows specialisation which should lead to an increase in quality.
If there is a quality problem, or a need to reduce costs the first mechanism that people turn to it centralisation.
The increase in quality and the reduction in cost is regarded as a certainty.
It’s almost become a business mantra – “I must centralise”.
I am personally becoming increasingly skeptical about centralisation.
I feel that I should declare my experience here. Throughout my nearly 20 years in IT I have been involved in a number of centralisation activities; centralisation to a data centre on a site, then to a data centre in a country, then to global data centres. I have also been involved in IT help desks. When I was a new graduate I would man the help desk for two afternoons a week. I watched on as the help desk went from supporting a site, then to supporting a number of sites within a country, then a country, eventually it supported a number of different customers across different time zones.
I’m not doubting that these activities reduced costs, though none of them gained the cost reductions people were hoping for. There was also a change in quality but it not dramatic and not on every measure.
So why am I skeptical?
My main area of skepticism is caused by one word – change. These centralised entities are terrible at responding to change.
They naturally become highly integrated within themselves
The help desk naturally consolidates to a single set of systems. That is how costs are reduced after all. The consolidation of the systems creates cost reduction and increases the quality. That is until something comes along which drives change. Lots of small systems, each running independently can change when they need to change. There doesn’t need to be a huge requirement to change. When a huge integrated system exists change becomes more and more difficult. Where change is difficult change will either stop, or the cost of change will be dramatic.
People forget that change is inevitable.
The same is also true for IT systems. Changing a single system that does a single role is far easier than one large system that handles lots of roles. I’m sure that some people believe that if the cost of changing one system with one role is X then the cost of changing one system with lots of roles (Y) is less than X * Y. In my experience it’s more than X * Y it’s more like X * 1.5Y.
Because change is difficult it happens rarely. When it does occur the change ends up being massive, it’s normally not possible to change a single entity. The system has coalesced and for one thing to change, lots of things have to change. It’s become a chain reaction. Between the massive changes, though, the quality of services is constantly decreasing as the service delivered becomes further and further from the service required.
I’m not suggesting that we throw out the baby with the bath water here. What I am advocating is that we approach consolidation in a more pragmatic manner. Rather than blindly following the centralisation mantra we should evaluate the centralisation option knowing that change is inevitable and plan for it. In planning for it we may discover that centralization isn’t actually the correct option.
Turn-off and tidy-up
Today Lifehacker has an article entitled “Top time-management tricks” which highlights this statement in Realtor Magazine:
“When I start to feel overwhelmed with clutter, whether it’s on my desk or in my home, I take a short block of time — 20 to 45 minutes — and I turn off all communication; I let voice mail take over. Then I just attack the pile. I’m always amazed at how much I can accomplish in this short period.”
Prior to reading this post I actually did just that. I’ve had a stack of document to review and stuff coming at me from all angles right the way through last week (and weekend). The result was a desk that was a tip and absolutely no focus on what I was doing.
Tidying through the clutter I cleared a whole load of actions off my to-do list. I did add a few extra back in, but these were ones I had been carrying in my head, getting them down on paper made me feel like I was getting rid of even more clutter. I’ve tried to be methodical and to keep my desk tidy, but I’m not that organised, particular when the pressure is on. Taking time out to tidy up makes all the difference to how I feel.
Following I tidy up I often feel the need to change my working practice a little too.
Technorati tags: Time management
Is change difficult?
Over on Thinking Faster, Jeffrey Phillips is trying to challenge some of our thinking about change.
I have long puzzled why some change is easy and some change is more difficult, particularly corporate change. Previously I thought the issue was communication and understanding. If we communicate well enough to people they will understand why the change needs to happen and then it will go more easily. I then discovered how difficult communication is. Even when vast amounts of effort were expended on communication, the change still wasn’t easy.
Jeffrey suggests that the issue is really choice and control:
“I think this is driven by choice. I can choose to change my diet or route to work. I can even choose to change my career. However, I want some control when change is forced upon me, and I suspect that many other people feel the same way. The reason people resist change in organizations is not because they can’t change, and really not because they fear change, but because the individuals don’t control what’s happening.”
My experience is that choice and control are part of the story, but that they feed into a bigger issue – felt need. To put it more specifically – do I feel like I need what this change gives me. I’ve deliberately used the word “feel” here, it’s not whether I actually need the thing that this change is giving me, it’s whether I feel that I need this thing. A child feels the need for the favourite toy as much as the need for a glass of water, but they don’t actually need the favourite toy. Adults aren’t too different.
Asking people to take control and to give them a choice about when and how increases their feeling of need. They’ve put something of themselves into something, so they must need it. Giving a child more than one favourite toy is one way of removing their reliance upon one.
Communication is difficult because people will only engage with the communication if they feel they are going to need it. Most people read communications from the Tax Man because the likelihood of need is quite high, fewer people read the leaflet selling double glazing unless you feel like you have a need for new glazing.
Talking of double glazing, a great example of felt need is one of my neighbours who replaced all of the glazing in his house (at significant cost) because he said that the house looked “tired”. He didn’t even try to convince me that it would save him money in the long-run (the usual way of justify a felt need). He felt that he needed to change the glazing, so did.
Quite often, though, the felt need and the actual need are blended together into a complex matrix. Clothes are probably the most interesting example of this. We change our clothes with the seasons (in the UK we do anyway), and we change them because they get worn out. We also change our clothes because fashions change, what we regard as looking good changes. Because of this merged set of actual needs and felt needs there is a whole industry desperately helping us to change. They’re not telling us (directly) that we need to change, we are because we feel the need. One of the actual needs to change our clothes is that they get worn out – but there is very little information from the clothes industry on how long a piece of clothing will last. The reason for this is that one of our felt needs for change normally kicks in before the clothing has actually become worn out. We even see clothing that doesn’t fulfil the actual need, but the felt need is so strong that people wear it.
I’ve been involved in a lot of IT change. Most of this change has been very painful. In most cases we have focussed 100% of our effort on the actual need, and spent a minimal amount of time trying to understand the felt needs. I remember the commotion that one particular lady created by insisting on keeping her current monitor during a desktop refresh programme. Why? Because this monitor had all sorts of stickers on it that this lady felt she needed. The was an actual need to replace the monitor, it was worn out and probably hurting her eyes, but the felt need was far stronger.
We need to get smarter at trying to create a felt need; choice and control seem like good tools to use in this quest.
Count Your Blessings #86 – The Feel of a Conker
One of the great things about taking a walk in the woods at this time of year is the discovery of conkers.
Anyone who has handled a conker will know exactly what I mean when I say that I love to handle them. Fresh out of the shell they are especially tactile.
Although there is a pile of them in the pictures I actually prefer to have a single conker in my hand and to rub it between my fingers enjoying it’s smoothness on different parts of my palm and fingers.
These particular conkers have now been in my office for a couple of weeks and the experience has changed them. They are no longer soft, they have become much harder and have taken on a much darker look. They have shrunk quite a bit too. The smoothness is still there, but not in the same way. They have dried out.
Life can dry us out too sometimes. We need constant watering to stay fresh.
Running on IE 7
I decided that my experience with IE7 on Vista was sufficiently positive that today I upgraded my main machine to Windows Internet Explorer 7.0 for Windows XP SP2 or IE7 as it will be known 
.
A Free Software Adventure
Over the last few months I’ve been working on a project in my spare time. This project has been a departure for me because it has been for a charitable organisation where the terms of reference have been significantly different.
I’m used to situations where the questions of cost v benefit are defined in pounds and dollars.
I’m used to working in situations where the requirements specification is reasonably well understood (well sometimes anyway).
I’m used to large scale situations.
As a diversion from all of these, this project has been fun. It’s had a life of its own and hasn’t finished yet, but I thought I would share where I am up to.
The project in question is the web site for the church we attend Fulwood Free Methodist Church.
The first question I had was this: “What is a church web site supposed to do?” We had some key aims that we wanted to achieve, but apart from two or three basic things this was a journey of discovery.
My architecture skills helped (a little) with this journey; it helped me to break the problem down into a number of different areas:
- Audience – What was the primary audience for the site?
- Content – Where was the content going to come from? What type of content was it?
- Freshness – How was everything going to stay current and fresh?
- Technology – What technology were we going to use?
It was obvious early on that we needed to have some sort of content management system and to move away from one person being responsible for all of the technology, the content and its freshness. I looked around at a few Open Source Content Management Systems and settled on Joomla. This was a few months ago and it wasn’t 100% clear at that time whether Joomla was going to take off, but thankfully it has. We already had an agreement with a hosting company which included MySQL and PHP included, so that was the easy part.
The next thing to tackle was the audience and to structure the content around the audience. We concluded that our primary audience were those people who didn’t attend, with church attendees being a secondary audience. With that we did a bit of brain storming around the type of questions that someone not attending might ask:
- What is on?
- What should I expect when I visit?
- etc.
We also wanted to make future events and important content visually up at the front.
Joomla has a concept of Sections, Categories and Items. Items are created in Categories which are within Sections. Any item can then appear on the front page along with selected modules. Modules provide added functionality like a calendar or a document management capability, or a banner. This is then all displayed in a template.
Since starting we have constructed the main site and sorted out the structure. We have also sorted out most of the content, though there is more content to come.
The next challenge was how to make things more interactive. Being a blogger I am now encouraging the church staff to get blogging. Joomla is a bit clunky when it comes to blogging so I decided to make a break from Joomla for blogging and to add WordPress into the mix. Have WordPress alongside Joomla also allowed me to put the mechanics in for podcasting the Sunday Talks.
Although very different to Joomla, WordPress has a similar set of concepts and structures.
So without spending any money on software we created a web presence that:
- Is interactive through feedback and comments
- Stays fresh with time based material
- Controlled making some information available to everyone and some only available to registered users.
- Allows multiple people to update it so I don’t have to do it all.
- Allows changes to the theme without messing about with the content.
- Continues to be extended with new components, modules and widgets.
- Supports subscription
- Supports documents
A big thank you goes out to all of those people working away at producing this software so that the rest of us get such great functionality for the best possible price.
It’s been great fun learning something new.
Go and have a look and let me know what you think www.fulwoodfmc.net.
Vista Upgrade (Again)
OneCare 1.5 Beta
Count Your Blessings #85 – Safe and Sound
Yesterday morning I was out on one of my regular morning walks listening to a podcast from NCC, it was great. As I got closer to home I looked down at my phone (which was playing my podcast) and saw that there was still 10 minutes to run. I only had a couple of minutes left to walk and there was a nice bench there next to me.
I’ve done this a few times, it’s nice to sit and listen even though it feels a bit strange to be doing it early in the morning with a steady stream of dog walkers passing by.
As I sat there, looking over towards the rising sun (even though it was hidden by a few clouds) a felt a chill blow against my back. It felt as if some huge beast was walking up behind me, then I saw a flash from it’s teeth and heard it roar. It was a huge roar that rumbled around the small valley where I was seated.
I turned to face the beast, it was approaching fast. It flashed its teeth again giving out another mighty roar. I decided that retreat was a better course of action and set off for home.
The beast was in hot pursuit but I managed to make it home before the beast caught me up – safe-and-sound. There was no way it was going to get me now.
Having escaped from the beast I made a coffee and set off for my study for a time of quiet. Before sitting down for quiet I looked out of the window to see what the beast was doing.
Kneeling on the sofa in my study I watched as another flash of lightening cracked across the sky, counting the seconds before the thunder arrived. Another flash, more counting. The rain beat against the window driven forward by the wind of the storm. I was safe-and-sound.
It reminded me of being a young child. The house I was bought up in had a bay-window. In one corner there was a small wooden footstool with a wicker top which my Dad had made as school or college (I forget which). The stool was just the right height for me to sit on comfortably and watch out of the window with only my head showing. I felt like I was watching the world go by, but that no-one could see me. This was a special place, especially when there was a storm outside. I loved to watch the ladies as they walked past with umbrellas out of control. I delighted to see the children as then jumped in the puddles oblivious to their parents desire for them to stay dry. I longed to watch the cars plowing through the small ponds by the side of the road dispersing the water onto any unsuspecting passer by. I was safe-and-sound.
Then I sat down and read, as I regularly do, today’s Psalm. To my amazement today, of all days, was the ultimate safe-and-sound Psalm, Psalm 23:
The Lord is my shepherd;
I have all that I need.
He lets me rest in green meadows;
he leads me beside peaceful streams.
He renews my strength.
He guides me along right paths,
bringing honour to his name.
Even when I walk
through the darkest valley,
I will not be afraid,
for you are close beside me.
Your rod and your staff
protect and comfort me.
You prepare a feast for me
in the presence of my enemies.
You honour me by anointing my head with oil.
My cup overflows with blessings.
Surely your goodness and unfailing love will pursue me
all the days of my life,
and I will live in the house of the Lord
forever.
I AM safe-and-sound.
Sue Writes a Blog
Sue (my dearly beloved) has started to write for a Blog. The Blog in question is The Lightfoot Lane Blog, which is a new venture for our church. Go and encourage her by leaving a comment or two.
You might also like to check-out our new Sunday Talks Podcast too. The audio gets there via a tape at the moment so is OK, but has a small gap in the middle. We plan to change that over the coming months.
If you have any comments on either of these two sites please let me know because they are my creations and I want to make sure everything is OK, it’s difficult to test every configuration .