Graham Chastney

"My name is Graham and I’m addicted to information."

There I’ve admitted it, and as they say admission is the first step in the recovery process.

A little while ago I wrote a blog making a joke of how I could waste a while day doing absolutely nothing at all. There’s another saying: "many a true word said in jest" and, as you’ve guessed, there is a good sized dollop of truth in that post.

I could, if I allowed myself, waste hours scanning for information, feeding on it, searching it out, getting to the end of a chase.

I don’t think I’m alone in this issue, so I thought I would share some of my journey and why I’ve got to the point where I call it an addiction.

This morning was a wonderful example of the issues that I face. Today I had two presentations that needed to be completed for sessions later in the week. I knew how long they would take, and what needed to be done. Did I sit down and get on with it – did I heck – I fed my habit, scanning blogs and emails and enjoying a trip down a few information rabbit holes. I did eventually get the presentation sorted, but just in time, and with just about enough effort.

But is addiction too strong a word for it, aren’t I just doing my job. Well I  also know a good deal about addiction. One of the things that I do outside of work is to help with a group that supports people in need, some of them struggling with addiction. There are a lot of parallels, but I’ll leave that for another time.

I’ve been looking for a new series for a while now; sometimes the obvious answer is the one directly in-front of you.

It’s not often that I write blog posts while I’m mobile. If I’m going to write anything I’ll normally twitter. But there are times when a thought comes to me that is more than a tweet and is worth writing there and then rather than waiting until I am home.
It’s not always a good thing to be too immediate about things, but there is a time and place for it. It’s at those times that I turn to Wordpress for Blackberry, and to prove the point I’m using it right now.
If I got more comments I’d probably also use it for keeping up to speed with the stream.
We have only just started the mobile revolution even. We’ve been working at it for some time now. In years to come we will do things while we are mobile that we can only imagine today. The devices that we have today are going to change radically as the computing power, storage and connectivity capabilities accelerate.
Writing a few words into a simple app might not be that radical, but it’s a signpost of the things that are to come.

This is also one of my sayings so thought I would share it:

Unfortunately in the job that I do saying these words rarely makes a difference to the outcome – and the effort that I have to put in to help someone with their “lack of planning”.

The thing is, I feel like I know the gentleman in the picture, but can’t place him?

I’ve been blogging for nearly 5 years now. It will be 5 years proper in April, but I’m likely to forget then, so I’m commemorating this event now.

Actually my first post was on 04/04/05 and sometimes I wished I’d posted a day earlier so it could have been 03/04/05, but I wasn’t that fortunate.

The first words weren’t very profound, but we’ve been on a long journey since then:

Welcome to my new home for Oak Grove.

This site will continue to focus on my work-type related stuff. I’m also planning something new for more general information and musings.

Graham

The description of “work-type related stuff” has probably been quite fair. My work is quite broad and increasingly focussed on concept and ideas rather than on technology products. The change in post topics has reflected this – I don’t think I’ve written about a technology product for some time, and the most popular posts at the moment are on team dynamics and rich pictures.

I continue to be hugely interested in how technology can add value to peoples day to working life – and the massive void between the technology available and the technology being exploited. Businesses move at a pace that is a mystery to me and I have to admit that I am still perplexed by what it takes to influence people to change. Someone once said “when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change – you will change” but that seems a bit negative.

Writing about concepts is much more difficult than writing about products, the audience is smaller too, but I’ve always written about things that I find interesting and will continue to do so.

The work on rich pictures has lead to some great conversations with my peers and customers. Much of this conversation has been carried out behind the firewall, as we move forward with our own internal social and enterprise networking exploitation, something that wouldn’t have happened 5 years ago.

Over these last 5 years my working life has changed massively, but there are yet more massive changes ahead. I think I’ll leave that for another post though. One of the things that I do intend to do in the coming months is to revisit the subject of the brain mainly to assess how this changed the way that I think personally.

Back then I wrote under the name “oak grove”, there’s some history to that name, but I’m not going to get into that today. One thing that has changed has been the lack of Jimmy and Grandad. I’m not sure why that happened, it just seemed to come to a natural end. Perhaps it’s time to bring them back. What do you think?

I’ve also been writing my Blessings posts for most of that time too; these posts come less often mainly because I find they need a bit more work and for me to have the time to be creative. Some of the responses that I receive to these posts are wonderfully profound and often a privilege to receive.

To those of you who have been with me on this journey – thank you for your input. To those of you who are a little newer on the road – welcome.

Before I start into 2010 I wanted to do a quick review of 2010.

Statistics are wonderful things and one of the joys of the rich set of measures that are available these days is that you can quickly get some idea of what is going on. as with all statistics though they are there to help to build a story, they are not the story.

So here are some of my Top 10’s for 2009 since I’ve been on grahamchastney.com which has only been for part of the year. (I didn’t really see any value in combining two sets of statistics especially as I moved to grahamchastney.com in February).

Top 10 active posts:

The main thing to note here is that one of these posts has outstripped the others, and two posts have far outstripped any of the others.,

The main reason for this is that both of these posts appear high on the Google page order.

Top 10 search terms:

Like I say, statistics only tell part of the story.

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

Well done Simon and Charlie.

If someone is going to do something for us we are likely to let them, even if they don’t quite do as good a job of it as we would like. That’s the way we are wired.

There are, of course, exceptions to this situation, but in general we would rather be lazy.

In IT our aim is to make things easier for people (I know it doesn’t always seem that way). The problem is, we often make it easier by taking away the responsibility from the consumer, making them lazy.

I was reminded of this again today by an article in Computerworld by Mathias Thurman. Mathias is talking about the creation of a policy within his organisation that enforces screen lock-out. Most people would regard this as good practice, and I’m not advocating that it’s not, my challenge and one that Mathias recognises is that the enforcement of this policy will make people lazy.

Some of the people within his organisation already have a setting that is more stringent than the policy that he is going to enforce. He says of these people:

They have shown the sort of awareness of security issues that I try to instill in the entire workforce, and now we’re rolling out a policy that seems to say that their security consciousness was unnecessary.

He’s right to be concerned, these people will start to see that the responsibility for security is no longer theirs and has shifted to be the responsibility of the policy set by the IT department.

There’s a greater challenge with this type of policy, and that is that all of the people will now rely upon the policy to lock their screens, including all of the people who used to manually lock their screens when they left their desks. For this group of people the security risk has actually increased, instead of the device being locked when not attended it will be left unlocked for a period of time until the policy kicks in.

This shift of responsibility means that people treat IT as something that is delivered to them, rather than something that they are responsible for.

Lack of responsibility has many facets to it that influence the behaviour of those consuming the services. These include:

• Abuse of the services – “why should I look after this stuff it’s not my responsibility”
• Working around the services – “if they won’t let me do it, I’ll just go and  do it somewhere else”
• Apathy to the service – “I’ll just have to use this service because that’s all I’ve got available to me”

We need to find a new way of working that protects the business, but doesn’t remove the responsibility from those consuming the services. We need to do this recognise people’s innate laziness.

I’ve been travelling a lot over the last few weeks visiting many IT vendors. One of the things that most of these vendors decided that we needed was a pen. Leaving aside the irony that IT vendors want to give us pens it was interesting to notice the difference in the pens that we were supplied with.

Do the pens say something about the companies? I’ll let you decide on that point.

Starting from the top of the picture:

Cisco

The only pen to come in a pouch. A very professional pen meant for serious people. An enterprise pen.

This is a heavy pen (but not the heaviest) which is going to be solid and reliable. It’s also the only pen with a lid meaning that is sits very nicely in the hand and is quite well balanced.

As for colour – it’s nearly black, so it’s conservative even in it’s colouring.

Writing Stars:

Salesforce.com

In complete contrast to the Cisco pen, the Salesforce.com pen is an incredibly cheap pen.

The pen I was given is actually broken. The reason it is the only pen pictured with the nib showing is that it won’t go back in and it has a crack down one side.

This pen did come in a kind of a sleeve, but it was really just a plastic wrapper. The side of the pen shows the logo, which is, of course, the name and the web site address.

Colouring – it’s silver and red which I take to be bold but not really funky or cool. It’s corporate, but not really corporate.

Writing Stars:

Eucalyptus

This is the only pen in the set to have a logo, a company name and a web site address. Perhaps this says more about Eucalyptus as a young organisation than anything else.

It’s a nicely weighted pen, on the light side, but with a good grip.

The pen itself is a Smokey black, but it writes blue. It might just be me, but there is something wrong about a pen that is coloured black, but writes blue.

It writes well and starts from the off, not requiring any warming up.

Writing Stars:

VMware

This is easily the heaviest pen in the set. I wouldn’t want to write with it for long, my fingers would drop off. It’s a proper metal pen and you definitely know if you drop it on the desk, actually the whole office knows if you drop it on the desk.

This time it’s a blue colour pen – that writes black (What are you guys trying to do to me?) Having said that, the blue does appear to be the standard VMware blue that they use in all of their material so works as a branding tool.

It writes well enough, but for such a heavy pen there is no grip to step it sliding around your fingers.

This pen also rattles a bit, I really dislike pens that rattle as I write.

Writing Stars:

Appirio

Not sure quite what to say about this pen. There’s no logo on it, or any writing. It came with a notebook with the company name on it. I’m not sure whether putting the name, or logo, or web site address on the pen was too expensive for this relatively new organisation, but it’s certainly an opportunity missed.

I have hundreds of this type of pen and quite like them. The only think I don’t like about them is that I have a habit of twisting the clips off the top of them and it’s almost impossible to twist it back on.

It’s silvery see-through with a black grip. Not much to say really.

Writing Stars:

Google

I did have a couple of the Google pens in different colours. One of the things about having children is that pens quickly get appropriated to other purposes. On the colour front, as you’d expect, the pens were all in the colours from the Google logo.

No need to put a web site address on this pen.

It’s a perfectly adequate, functional, plastic, writing implement. The grip is good and it’s a good size for my hands.

A green pen that writes blue, but somehow I can cope with that more than a black pen that writes blue or vice versa.

The kids regarded this as the cool new pen to take into school.

Writing Stars:

Microsoft

We did go and see Microsoft, but they didn’t give us a pen – they gave us a drinks bottle.

I’m not sure whether this counts as a real fully fledged concept, or just an idea, or actually even whether there is a difference.

The idea comes from Jonah Lehrer over on The Frontal Cortext blog where he reflects on the diversity of music that we enjoy (his pretext is the events at the MTV awards with Kanye West and Taylor Swift).

It got me thinking, in what other ways are we culturally plastic:

• Food: The range of food available in the UK is incredible. Foods from every country in the world and even fusions of different food types. We skip between them without really thinking about it, something that my grandparents would never have done.
• Video/Television/Films: I know a few people who will only go to the movies to see a certain type of film, but there aren’t many of them. And the range of film genre is increasing all of the time.
• Reading: Looking at the book shelf beside me there is a huge variety of material. There’s no Mills and Boon, but apart from that there is practically every other type of writing.

So what impact does this plasticity have on the world of work?

Teams that accept diversity work better and produce stronger results. As people become more tolerant of, and learn to enjoy cultural differences hopefully this will be reflected in teams. This will be especially true for international teams which will become more prevalent as technology enables it.

I suspect, to, that people we start to choose the places where they work on the basis of the diversity of the culture. Places with a monolithic culture we be regarded  as stale and dull. Skilful business managers will be able to create diverse cultures that are highly productive.

The other day I was listening to a radio programme about book binding (no, I’m not sure why I was listening, if that’s what you are thinking). This programme talked about the elaborate process that the ancient book-binders used to go through to create what would become a work of art. One particular book that was mentioned took 2 years to bind – not to create, to bind.

On returning from holidays we wanted an physical album of photographs to show people; it’s still a much better way of interacting with the images in many situations.

What did I do?

• Downloaded the photographs from my camera.
• Sorted through them for the ones I wanted to put in the album.
• Downloaded some code from a web site where I was going to get the photos printed.
• Started the code and imported the photos.
• Looked a the book that it created automatically and made a few changes.
• Sent the book for printing.
• 3 days later (because of the weekend) my photo album had arrived.

The album looks wonderfully professional and cost me less than the price of a new shirt and only about twice the price of a paperback at the local book store.

I’m not suggesting that my photograph album compares with ancient book binding – but the change in the process of creating a book is incredible. What’s more I undertook this transaction using commodity technology and a service from a budget supermarket. It’s not specialised, it’s not “out there”, it’s normal life.

Sometimes it’s good to remember how far we have come.