Graham Chastney

For a while I had a working Blackberry, then my Blackberry got broken and it took some weeks to replace it. I was shocked at the impact.

I spend a lot of time working on two monitors. When I only work on my laptop I am shocked at the impact.

Why shock?

When I was given or invested in these technologies I would have put a relatively low value on them, in the case of the Blackberry I would have put a negative value. Now that I have them I am surprised at the impact when you take them away.

I’m not a crazed crackberry addict who can’t survive for 30 seconds without looking at it, I have my Attention Deficit Trait (ADT) and Disconnect Anxiety reasonably under control. I’m talking here about all of the things that I had integrated into my day-today working that I hadn’t even noticed until they were taken away.

When I am working on two monitors I naturally start and use applications on the different monitors without too much rational thought. When I am working on a single monitor the switching time between applications becomes so noticeable that it gnaws away at me.

I suspect that if you took my iPod away (also a relatively recent addition) I would also be annoyed at the impact.

Much of my career has been spent convincing enterprise customers of the value of some piece of technology. This discussion goes all the way back to arguments about 20MB hard disks. Over all this time it has been a recurring them that IT has had little understanding of the value of the technology that the end user is wanting, IT is normally focused on cost containment.

End users sit outside wanting value, and IT is just worried about the cost of the new value.

There are a lot of technologies, probably as many as at any time in the history of IT, that give end users value, but have a cost impact upon the IT organisation. the problem with many of these technologies is that the value is not clear cut although it is potentially massive. Within this context it is often difficult to get organisations to move forward.

• Tablets – another type of device for IT to manage, but what’s the real tangible value?
• RSS – another set of tools to manage and loads of data all over the place, but what’s the real tangible value?
• Web 2.0 – stuff that IT can’t even control, but what’s the real tangible value?
• iPhone – far to sexy for corporate IT, but what’s the real tangible value?

So, why don’t we ask the question the other way? Why don’t we see what the value is by giving it to someone, and then take it away. If you can take it away with little impact then the value wasn’t that high anyway. Take it away and get a big push back then you have found something of true value.

For some time I’ve wanted to create an internal free market in an organisation for IT capability and technology. This would work by giving people a set of credits and a choice of technology. They would then trade in the technology in a free market manner, buying and selling at the credit value they chose without reference to the physical cost. If the supply and demand (credits) were properly constrained so people had to make choices you would start to see the true value of the technology to the end user.

It would be interesting to see the value of an iPhone v the value of a Tablet PC, a second monitor v an RSS reader.

I’ve always been uncomfortable just giving people technology to evaluate without any clear link to value, but it’s often difficult to define what the value might be. Rather than just giving new technology to people to evaluate the internal market would allow the evaluation to be undertaken within the context of perceived value. Perceived value is probably a lot closer to real value than people think, especially in a knowledge worker type environment. The things that have little value are the things you should give back. The things of high value are the ones that you should invest in.

A bit of fun for a Wednesday morning threatening to rain:

Some people manage to summarise things in such a brilliant way that there message is clear and concise. Here is one anyone who does presentations should see:

PresenTired: “The Voicemail” from Scott Schwertly on Vimeo.

How many of us would prefer presentations using these principles?

FeedDemon is my feed reader of choice and has been for a very long time now. I loved FeedDemon so much that I actually paid for it when it wasn’t free.

It’s now free which just adds to the goodness.

Steve commented a few days ago, when talking about email overload that:

If anything I find I suffer much more from RSS overload than Email overload, but RSS readers are designed from the get go to help people cope

I would agree. My feed list is several hundred long, most of them active, but FeedDemon allows me to scan through them in a way that I regularly find remarkable. If I had as many email as feed posts I wouldn’t cope, but I do cope and cope quite well.

Feeds have revolutionised the way that I interact with the web – I rarely go to any web site to see what’s new. I used to go around a set of sites regularly, it was frustrating and annoying and took up loads of time. Feeds give me the changes, FeedDemon presents them in a way that allows me to scan through them quickly.

My favourite key combination within FeedDemon is ctrl+d which takes you to the next feed with unread items. On one of my keyboards the “d” key is starting to look a little warn which shows how often I use it.

My normal working habit is to scan through quickly flagging things within FeedDemon that I am going to read soon and I tag things into del.icio.us (using  FeedDemon) that I want to remember for some indeterminate point in the future. I tend to do this early in my working day. If I’ve got some time to read I’ll do it there and then, if I haven’t I’ll close FeedDemon down, leaving it closed until I have time to do some reading.

If I forget to close FeedDemon I find myself going back to it to see if there is anything interesting happening in the world – this becomes a huge time drain.

One of my biggest friends in FeedDemon is the “Panic Button”.

On returning to my feeds after my holiday last week I hit the panic button and marked a load of older feeds read. As the dialogue says – this isn’t email after all. I’ve recently introduced a few, non-technical, friends to FeedDemon and feeds in general and they are really struggling with this concept. We still have a long way to go before we really understand the social impacts of some of this technology. People have learnt how to scan a newspaper over hundreds of years, and I think that it’s a similar skill, we just need to help them realise that.

I use FeedDemon on a number of devices, depending on where I am sitting. The NewsGator synchronisation engine is great for keeping the feed list and read/unread status aligned. It’s not always perfect, but it’s close enough for me to be able to switch between machines with little impact.

Last week was a silent week because I was on vacation.

I spent some time decorating Emily’s room.

I spent some time pottering in the garden.

I spent some time walking in the Lake District.

Normal service should now resume – for a little while anyway.