Graham Chastney

This is a note to self – use fewer words:

You might be interested to see what CSC is up to internally with Enterprise 2.0 type technologies:

Well done Simon and Charlie.

I’m doing a bit of work with Rich Pictures at the moment. I’m quite enjoying the storyboard elements of the process.

For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about then here is an example from the Open University:

Basis isn’t it? That’s the point.

There are a number of elements to a Rich Picture:

• pictorial symbols;
• keywords;
• cartoons;
• sketches;
• symbols;
• title.

The most interesting part for me is the “cartoons” part. As business people we can be so “professional” that we want things to look great from the start with fancy graphics. Rich Pictures allow us to step back and to deal in symbols and icons to depict an issue.

The challenge I am anticipating is that the Rich Pictures that I have created will need to go through a review cycle with “professional” people. As such I am going to have to battle the tendency to water down the message that comes with reviews. The challenge that I am wanting to depict is a big challenge with lots of facets to it. if we review it too heavily we will make it look far simpler and remove all of the value.

In many ways the fancy, even magical, world of IT can be broken down into three basic elements; storing stuff, calculating stuff and moving stuff. Everything we see around the Internet is driven by the inexorable progress of broader networks, larger storage and faster processing.

Ten year trends for networks, storage and processing show them getting ever faster, broader and larger.

We may not yet know how we are going to use all of this extra capacity, but one thing we can say is that the past shows us the future.

I started my IT journey at a time when we regarded kilobit networks as broad, megahertz processors as fast and megabyte storage as huge.

When I started in IT as a career I supported IBM DISOSS on the mainframe and the nearest thing anyone got to a desktop device was an IBM DisplayWriter. There were also a few VAX machines around used by those specialists in the engineering organisation.

The DISOSS system I supported, for those of you too young to know any better, was an early email system. It was so early, in fact, that it was pretty much bounded by the mainframe on which it ran. There was no connection to the internet, and limited connections to other parts of the organisation. SMTP was frowned upon as not being ready for the enterprise.

Apart from the DisplayWriters everyone else accessed the system via a dumb terminal over a dedicated SNA network; TCP/IP wasn’t ever discussed. We now have access to megabits of bandwidth at our houses, all of it running TCP/IP of one form or another.

I carry around more storage in my bag than was available within the multi-room mainframe that I started on.

The way that we use applications and services has changed radically. The internet has seen to that.

Information was an expensive commodity back then, most information is now effectively free. Search is expected and it’s free too.

Text was the only way of communicating, even tables within text were difficult. Every day I deal with diagrams photographs, graphical representations. Every time I start Audacity to edit some audio I am blown away by the realisation that I am doing this on a consumer PC with free software.

Years ago I used to have a set of floppy disks in a draw. Managing the data on these disks would take a significant amount of time. I probably had less than 100MB stored, but managing it was a complete pain. I now manage over 1TB of data, but only spend a minimum amount of time managing it.

I used to spend more on a CompuServe email account than I now spend on hosting this blog where I get unlimited storage. The paid-for email account could only handle a tiny amount of storage and it couldn’t handle attachments at the beginning. I now have a choice of multiple free email services allowing me to store hundreds of gigabytes and easily handle large emails.

To use someone else’s words, remember: “you aint seen nothing yet”.

One of my tools is a Logitech Cordless Presenter. I really like this device. It enables me to stand and present and to ignore the laptop and keep the engagement on me. This device has nine buttons – and is over-specified.

For some people it might be perfectly specified, but for me it is over-specified. Let me tell you why.

Yesterday I travelled to the south of England via a customers corporate jet (yes, I know that sounds very fancy, but it isn’t believe me). Even though this is effectively a private flight it still has to abide by all of the rules and regulations that a commercial flight would, the same restricted material, the same security checks, the same hand luggage restrictions. That’s where the problem comes in, the Logitech Cordless Presenter has a laser pointer, and lasers are not allowed in hand luggage.

I’m sure that a laser point is really useful to some people – but I never use one. The type of presentation that I give doesn’t require such a thing (to be honest I’m not a fan of people who do).

As I join the flight reasonably early in the morning the location of the Presenter is not high on my list of priorities. A couple of times now, most recently yesterday, I have had my bag checked on the far side of security and had to relinquish the Presenter to security. It sits in my bag for those occasions when I want to use it.

Even though it’s only nine buttons, this one button makes the Presenter over-specified.

The keyboard in front of me has lots of buttons on it. I know which ones I use because they are clean and shinny, there are an awful lot that are dull and dusty. Why on earth would I want a “Shopping” button? The keyboard is over-specified.

I’ve recently started using TweetDeck for Twitter. It’s a really nice twitter client. Today I updated to a new version and got, in return, a few more buttons. I’m highly unlikely to ever use these buttons. TweetDeck had the capabilities I required, it now has some capabilities I don’t. TweetDeck is in danger of becoming over-specified.

Over-specification is a huge problem in IT. People ask for more and more features which have less and less value. If they were high value it’s likely people would have thought of them early in the lifecycle – the further along the road you get the less likely it is that you are adding something of really significant value.

What’s even worse though, is that the new features become diversionary, particularly in the development cycle. I’m currently working on a number of large programmes where we are in danger of focussing on the peripheral requirements and not the core capabilities. People will get something new and shiny, but not something that makes a real difference to how they work.

Someone once told me a story about a spider that lived up in the eaves of a garage.

One day the spider noticed that there were lots of nice juicy bugs down on the ground, so he decided to lower himself down. He started by building a simple web to see how he got on. This web was a very successful web and the spider decided to extend a little further to see whether he could be even more successful.

Bit-by-bit he extended to form a whole complex of webs that kept him supplied with more bugs than he could have ever imagined.

One day he was walking around his vast abode when he noticed this rather scruffily and dusty looking strand leading up into the eaves above. Seeing all of the webs around him he decided that he no longer needed this connection with his past. He climbed up onto the webs and rid himself of this piece of history with a single snip.

No sooner had he snipped than the web below him started to collapse, trapping his feet. Further down he sank deeper into the web. Before he knew it he was completely engulfed, with no way out. There he lay until he starved to death.

The spider took his focus off his foundations, we must be careful that we don;t do the same.

My job title includes the words “solution architect”, words are interesting things. Words have been used by people to communicate things for thousands of years, and yet we still spend just as much time defining words as we have ever done.

I’ve also noticed that words have a life. They have a meaning for a particular time, that meaning then becomes mainstream, its meaning gets diluted, so people move onto a new word.

So what do these two words in my job title mean?

Let’s start with “architect”. Someone said to me the other day that they regarded an architects is an engineer + an artist. I liked that, it simply summed up a lot of my own feelings.

An architect is someone who has an idea that needs to be brought to fruition, but it can’t just be engineered through technical reasoning, it needs to have some creativity to it, it needs to be beautiful, functional, emotional, efficient, elegant and practical. It also needs to fit the budget and deliver on the requirements.

Art + Engineering

My father is an engineer, my mother is an artist, perhaps that’s how I got here.

I think I’ll leave the “solution” word for another day.

Interesting questions, interesting responses:

• £50 today or £60 in a month?
• £350 in 12 months or £360 pounds in 13 months?

It’s interesting what our response to some questions are.

• You have a ticket to the theatre which cost £20 and a £20 note in your pocket. When you get to the theatre you have lost the ticket. Do you buy another ticket?
• You have two £20 notes in your pocket. When you get tot the theatre you have lost one of the £20 notes. Do you buy a ticket to the theatre?

Your first reaction to these questions and your considered response might be significantly different. The problem with estimating the value is that we use very strange (complex) logic.

I spend a lot of time helping people to change there business by bringing extra value to the way that they do things. These changes normally involve IT, because that’s my area of expertise, but not always. Understanding and agreeing what the value of any particular activity is can be quite a stressful exercise, particularly when it comes to the decision to spend money.

The values that people place on things has always fascinated and frustrated me. Surprisingly few decisions are based cold hard economics. The value is often much more subjective, or so it appears to me. Perhaps I’m just not seeing the complicated value judgement that they are making. Perhaps my value judgement is missing important elements.

I don’t have any answers here, I’m just making an observation, but I’m not the only one that sees the paradox. Dan Gilbert does a much better job of explaining than I do.

If you ever want to extend your thinking TED is a really good place to start.

One of my tasks at the moment is to plan a significant change to a customer “desktop” infrastructure. A significant portion of this change will be looking at application management and delivery.

The technology is now available for us to make all sorts of changes without the end-user even knowing – we can be seamless. Technically, that’s what we can achieve now.

We have a worry though, what will the human impact of this be?

People are used to being disrupted by an application change, they complain about it all of the time, and rightly so. What we are discovering, though, is that the disruption actually gives them some value, and we are not sure how much of it to reproduce.

People feel attached to their personal device, even though it’s clearly a corporate asset they still feel that it’s theirs. The primary value in the interruption is communication – they know that the application has been updated. They don’t have a say in whether updates occur, but at least they know that something has happened to their device. Seamless changes mean that they don’t know and arguably that there is, therefore, nothing to worry about, but my concern is that seamless upgrades without communication start to breed a sense of mistrust – “something has changed and I don’t know what”, or “they keep changing things and I haven’t a clue what they’ve done this time”.

The other thing that the interruption does is warn the end-user to look out for things that might not be correct. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Sometimes they see problems in a change that weren’t caused by the change, but regularly they notice issues with the change that weren’t revealed in testing.

Interruptions also tell the end-user to look out for the new features that they have been looking for.

This is one of the situations where the technology is easy, but the customer experience is more difficult to judge. Any wisdom for me anyone?

The IT landscape is composed of millions of moving components that we plumb together to create thousands of applications. We then take the thousands of applications and plumb them together to make systems.

But how do you know what works with what, how do you find out what the problems are. You’d think that this was a simple question, but it’s not. There are many reasons that it’s not simple, one of the main ones is the relationship between organisations. It’s very difficult for one organisation to validate the work of another organisation without a lot of work. Lots of the larger vendors run verification programmes but they can be expensive especially for the smaller application vendors.

Citrix has recently taken a different approach – community verification.

The IT community is integrating applications and components all of the time and Citrix is hoping to tap into all of this knowledge, but also to make it available to everyone else.

“The Community Verified site is a platform in which third party products are added and verified by community members. Community members are helping each other by posting and voting on third party products known to work in their environment.  These products do not get any Citrix Ready program benefits.”

There’s no warranty involved here just the knowledge that someone else has gone ahead of you and managed to succeed, a very valuable asset. The voting system also enables you to put some weighting behind your confidence.

In my experience it’s not integration of applications from the large well known vendors that cause the problems, it’s integration of products from smaller companies. These companies have less extensive experience and who would be struggling to undertake a formal verification activity anyway. A community based approach gives a very valuable middle ground.

Sometimes I feel I’m turning into a grumpy old man before my time and all that I am doing is raising the ills of IT. Unfortunately today is no exception.

Today’s ill is disconnect anxiety:

Disconnect Anxiety refers to various feelings of disorientation and nervousness experienced when a person is deprived of Internet or wireless access for a period of time.

If you are reading this blog you have probably experienced this anxiety and you are not alone. The Solutions Research Group has done some research in the US and the numbers are quite startling:

Overall, our research finds that 27% of the population exhibit significantly elevated levels of anxiety when disconnected. In terms of profile, 41% of this group are 12-24, 50% are 25-49 and 9% are over the age of 50.

A secondary group of 41% exhibit above-average levels of anxiety occasionally, depending on the situation.

The balance, 32% are below average in their anxiety response when unable to use their cell phones or the Internet. This group is disproportionately older than average (i.e., majority being 50+).

Or to put it graphically:

They went on to do research to try and understand why and how the anxiety was manifest. It’s a good report and links in nicely with a number of the things I’ve said previously about ADT and the machines taking over.

Perhaps that is why laptop free meetings are such tense affairs these days – everyone is experiencing disconnect anxiety.

Personally, I’m only occasionally anxious about being disconnected.

The summary of the report is here (pdf).

Hat tip to Endgadget.