Graham Chastney

Last week I referred to the TC1100 here on my desk as “Top Cat“, please accept my apologies for this momentary lapse of judgement. I have not got so attached to a piece of IT equipment as to be giving it a pet-name and normal rational service has been resumed .

(I don’t even like cats anyway).

I’ve been out for a few days training – ITIL Foundation.

I haven’t done any classroom training for year and I’d forgotten how enjoyable and frustrating an experience it was.

It’s very enjoyable to have the time to interact with others and to learn from each other. The people dynamics can be frustrating too.

I did the ITIL Foundation exam straight after the course and passed (92%, swat).

I can now confidently say that I understand the difference between an “incident” and a “problem”.

I was going to write a post on setting the TC11OO setup with Vista RTM but Steve beat me to it, And not for the first time in my life: Vista RTM on TC1100

Top Cat (my TC1100 tablet) made it home from his holiday visit to the health spa today with a new digitiser and a nice new unscratched screen .

Time for a rebuild as all of the software on it has gone from Beta to RTM while he was away.

Can’t fault the repair service, apart from the slightly bizarre delivery scheduling scheme. They don’t schedule anything, they just try to deliver it, if the delivery fails then they schedule .

Yesterday I went into hospital as a day case, when the nurses who were doing all of the pre-operation checks knew what my job was they decided to show me the software that they were using.

It was very interesting.

The software was very complex and the nurses had to know some amazing tricks to get it to do what it was supposed to do. At my initial check-in asked me a number of basic questions, when it came to the pre-operation checks they asked me the same questions again. Both times they asked the basic questions they asked me my height and weight, both times the software was supposed to convert the number that I gave them. I deliberately gave the same answer both times just to see, and both times it failed even though the two nurses entered the details differently.

The lack of intelligence in the questions being asked by the system were mostly masked by the nurses. Every now and then they would skip over a load of question when I asked them what the questions were they said that they were all questions that were only pertinent to a woman, or a person under 16 etc.

I was also struck by how impersonal it was that myself and the nurses were both pointing towards the computer to answer personal questions. If it was me, I would implement the use of tablets for this one reason. Using tablets would definitely let the nurse face the patient, in the same way as paper used to do.

Clearly no-one had thought about the user experience here.

My TC1100 has been off for a short holiday at the HP health farm.

I sent it off for its special treat because the pen had stopped working, it was actually the digitiser in the tablet. Apparently the nice people at HP have also given it a new screen because it had a scratch .

The strange thing about the HP repair centre is that they try to deliver (and collect) items without an appointment. Only when the appointment fails do they try to schedule an appointment.

I have found myself in a number of discussions over the last few days when people have expressed significant apathy about the value of IT investments. The apathy normally centres around the potential business benefits of making the investment. In clear terms people are saying that they are very skeptical about any claims of benefits from any IT investment.

This isn’t a new thing – we seem to have had nearly 5 years now when people’s focus has primarily been on cost reduction. But I had thought a few months ago that we were starting to see the glimmers of a change, a change towards focussing on value and innovation.

Is it just the people I am speaking to who are having the problem seeing the value or is this something that we are all facing?

Even when there is very clear benefit and lots of research, people just don’t believe it. My current example of this is the use of multiple monitors. There is loads of research which says that people gain significant productivity benefits by having more than one monitor. If I was specifying hardware I would insist on all desktop devices having two video outputs and purchase an extra monitor for every refreshed device. Unfortunately everyone I speak to is focussed on providing the cheapest standard desktop that they can. The problem is that this focus on cost closes the gate on the productivity gains from having multiple monitors.

If IT has become seen as a cost rather than a value then we have to do something to change it?

Am I just talking to the wrong people?

On this day when one of the important people in the world (Tony Blair) will be talking to another bunch of important people (the Iraq Enquiry) over a “video link” I thought I would talk about the latest iteration of “video link” – “telepresence”.

If you can take major global decisions over a “video link” why does anyone travel anywhere?

Once upon a time companies invested loads of money in ISDN links and dedicated video conferencing equipment in an attempt to get their staff to travel less and to be more responsive. Many of them had a flurry of activity, training people how to use the specialist equipment. Once the facility became available the rooms where the equipment was housed were fully booked, but bit by bit the poor unsuspecting video conferencing equipment became neglected and unused.  People found that the rewards for seeing someone on a screen were not high enough compared to the hassle of setting the conference up, getting the room booked and getting everything working. We discovered that voice was “good enough”.

The other week I was in a customer office and passed a set of five “video conferencing” rooms, in each of these rooms the equipment wasn’t even cabled in. I asked one of my colleagues there how long it had been like this. The answer “Ever since we moved in months ago”.

A few dedicated followers still use specialist video conferencing equipment but for most of us Video Conferencing Version 1.0 came and went.

Having discovered that it was too much hassle getting the dedicated equipment working we decided to try a different route. “Why don’t we give everyone a camera and then they can sit at their desk and be part of the conference?” we thought. But network bandwidth was limited, and cameras were expensive, and screens were only small. Each of us tried out desktop video conferencing, each of us thought it was great for a few minutes before we thought “what’s the point?”.

Most people I know have a USB connected camera somewhere in there desk or at their house; most of them are sat in boxes gathering dust.

Loads of kids still video conference their buddies but for the rest of us Video Conferencing Version 2.0 came and went.

Many products take until version 3.0 to be useful, could Video Conferencing be one of them?

Over the last few months a flurry of announcements and commentary has been expended on the new buzz word- “telepresence” (or Video Conferencing Version 3.0?).

If you haven’t a clue what I am talking about you should watch one of the many videos that are available (here, here, here).

At the same time the desktop video conferencing arena is going through a change as the quality is getting better and better.

But will these changes make us use it? Why didn’t I use video conferencing before?

This is a purely personal perspective, but I have heard others express similar views.

The face-to-face element of face-to-face meetings are overrated. The amount of personal effort I am willing to expend to get the face-to-face experience is very small. I normally work from home and using a telepresence type facility would require me to undertake some travelling. I’d need some convincing before I could see the value in the effort required. I’m one of a growing number of people in this situation. What I actually want is a far more realistic “around the piece of paper” experience. I want to be able to share a piece of paper and voice far more than to be able to share a face. I’d actually be more interested in sharing my hands than my face.

There are occasions when face-to-face is very important. They tend to be meetings within a particular context (negotiations, interviewing) but I don’t personally spend all day in those type of meetings.

There are some things that I do want from something I would call telepresence, especially when I’m working from home. I want to feel like I am in a team and I think that video could play a huge part in that. I want to feel that I am sat with a bunch of colleagues whom I could look at and ask for help in a way that is far less intrusive than Instant Messaging or the telephone. I suppose what I am asking for is ambient presence.

Once upon a time I had time to craft answers to problems, I would investigate them get into the roots of them, immerse myself in them and know that the answer was indeed the answer.

It is getting increasingly difficult to do.

I don’t think it’s only me.

The Internet has turned us into scavengers. Whatever the problem, whatever the situations, someone on the Internet has an opinion on it. Quite often those opinions are good opinions, but they stop us looking further, they stop us short of actual understanding. My field is hardware and software, but if this was reading it would be like moving from Shakespeare to Mills and Boon, the words are the same, the subjects are the same, but they just don’t go as deep.The Internet has allowed us to find an answer much quicker, but the vastness of the information available stops us doing the ward work of getting to an understanding.

I have been in numerous conversations with people when I have been given phrases like “Microsoft say that most of the problems they see are to do with name resolution, therefore, we need to check name resolution”. The statement is valid, but in the situation, the context, when it is used it is often completely invalid. The statement is used without understanding. A similar one is “This system is so flaky, we need to rebuild it and start from scratch”. Starting again may indeed be the correct answer, but when I challenge the flakiness and try to get to the bottom of it I find very little real evidence that a whole series of problem warrant a rebuild. What is really being said is different, what is really being said is that we don’t understand this thing, so if we create something new we might have a better chance of understanding it. The problem is that rebuilding something doesn’t normally help with understanding.

Understanding is hard work, there are no short-cuts to it.

The other day I mentioned that Microsoft have started making VHD of their products available for evaluation purposes. Some of them are limited to 30 days. 30 days is long enough to look at the gloss, but it’s certainly not long enough to gain an understanding.

How do I gain understanding:

• I start with the principles – why is something built like this. Quite often it’s been built like that because of history – so what’s the history?
• I try to understand all of the elements – there’s no point in understanding the software if you don’t understand the hardware. I normally do this by applying knowledge I already have, but I also read a lot.
• I focus on the dependencies – if things are dependent, why are they dependent? I try to do this with real test systems. If I take out a component what happens?
• I assume that nothing works exactly the way it is supposed to. Software is great at doing what it is supposed to do when it is in a nicely tuned test-bed; it rarely works the same in real life.
• I meddle outside of my remit. I have a remit, I am an architect so I’m not supposed to look at real software, or real hardware – rubbish. If I’m going to understand why something is as it is I need to meddle with the real thing.
• I read broadly, I don’t just read within my context, I try to gain an understanding of the broader principles at play. It’s all about understanding “why?”

How do you gain understanding?

tags: learning, understanding, architecture

Steve has written a great piece on telecommuting.

The advice is good for anyone teleworking, I have a little of my own to share too:

• Realise that you don’t need to be sat at a desk to participate. Participating while walking can be just as good. Be careful though, that you aren’t too out of breath.
• Create the ‘I’m busy’ signs so that everyone understands when you are not to be disturbed. These need not be real physical signs, but need to be clear signals. One of the problems with modern earpieces is that people can’t see clearly that you are busy.
• Run a personal blog. Colleagues don’t just want to talk to you about work stuff, most of them also want to know about you.
• Remember that the people you are interacting with might not be from the same culture as you, aren’t having the same weather, might not even be in the same season.

I’m not actually a fan of the telecommuting or teleworking words because they have both become heavily linked to home working. Most teleworkers I know sit in an office.