Category: Collaboration

Moving Canvas – Amazing use of IT

I’ve just watched this video on a project called Moving Canvas. Basically the principle is that you can create a projection system and fit it into a small case. With the aid of suckers you can then attach it to the side of a train and project images on the walls of the underground. There is no way you would do it in London, or anywhere else in the UK for that matter, but that’s a shame. The other shame is that once the advertisers get hold of the idea we won’t be able to move for them.

The idea of projecting an image onto the wall of the underground to brighten up peoples day sounds like a fabulous idea. Watch the video and see what I am talking about.

Outlook Thread Killer

Wood

The other day I was rambling on about the fact that current collaboration software is disrepectful and how we needed both process and technology to help us with this. One of the examples I gave was how you couldn’t get yourself off an email thread once you had been included in. Well on that particular one along came Omar Shahine with an add for Outlook that kills the email thread for you.

What more can I say – great minds think alike.

Personal Productivity, Collaboration and Respect

Grafiti

My thesis for today is that our personal productivity is compromised by the way we do collaboration these days and that we all need to learn a new way of working that respects each other’s personal productivity. We also need to find and deploy technologies that foster these respectful working practices. I have written a bit about this in the past but I’m coming more and more to the opinion that the biggest issue is working practice and that the working practice needs to be governed by a very old fashioned word – respect.

The tools that we have today are powerful, but they don’t foster respect.

Take, as an example, the least respectful technology of them all – email. How many of us have been bombarded by email storms that simply wasted our time. How much time do we spend each day reading emails that are irrelevant to us. It’s easy for people to add people onto an email distribution without any real thought as to whether they would be interested, and no-one would ever think of asking someone if they were interested in an email subject before sending it. Once on the list though, there’s no way off it. This doesn’t happen in the paper-mail world because sending paper-mail is difficult so you think far more carefully about who you send it to. Unless of course the paper mail is driven by technology and then it becomes junk-mail.

No respect = reduced productivity.

Another example; teleconferences. How many times have you been dragged onto an urgent teleconference only for it to go on for hours with little or no progress and definitely no focus. This is a much smaller issue with physical meetings because a physical meeting is much more expensive, requires people to travel and results in a face-to-face meeting. If you are going to meet someone face-to-face you don’t want to waste their time, it’s embarrassing.

No respect = reduced productivity.

As a collaboration tool RSS and blogs help with some of these problems but we need to be really careful here. As soon as we start to be disrespectful by including posts that are unfocused, off subject, etc. we diminish the value and impact on others productivity. That’s one of the reasons that the Top 100 list thing really bugs me.

So how do we build respect. I think the first thing that we need to do is acknowledge that it’s an issue. Once we do this we will start to invest our own time in thinking about how we interact with others and how we impact upon their productivity. This might cost us, but people will soon come to realise that we are better people to work with because we don’t waste their time. The other thing that we can do as a technology industry is to start providing some better feedback loops. I would love to be able to mark an email chain as ‘not interested’ and then to never be bothered by it ever again. Going further, I would love someone running a poorly focussed teleconference to feel the embarrassment that they would have done if we had been meeting face-to-face.

Anyway, I’m not going to be disrespectful by waste any more of your time rambling on needlessly.

The simple things that catch you out

Cows

I regard myself as someone who reacts to change well and as someone who is constantly changing the way I do things.

So why am I being so useless at adjusting to a Bluetooth headset for my phone?

I keep picking the phone up rather than sticking the ear piece in.

I keep forgetting to switch it off when I’m not suing it. I phone home on it the other day while it was in my shirt pocket. Which means that Sue knew I had been shopping.

I keep holding the phone in my hand while using it.

I suppose it all goes to show that our brains are wired a particular way and changing that wiring isn’t always easy.

Perhaps us IT folk should be a bit more tolerant of users reacting to new software.

I must say, though, that I don’t think that the Bluetooth stuff has quite got there yet. The phone doesn’t always reconnect the headset when it’s turned back on, nor does it always react to button presses.

System Center Capacity Planner 2006

York Museum Gardens

Over the weekend Microsoft released a Beta of System Center Capacity Planner from my point of view this is actually a very big step.

For some time now Microsoft have published best-practice type papers, but have relied heavily on the hardware vendors to provide the sizing information. In my experience this has lead to a situation where one of two things happen. If you get all of your hardware from one vendor then you get a nice neatly packaged answer; if you are in a multi-vendor hardware environment then you get a story which is optimised at each layer of the solution. The example that Exchange environments always bring out is the one of storage. If the storage vendor is different to the server vendor then Microsoft will be no help at all and the storage vendor will give you their optimised solution, as will the server vendor. Neither vendor wants to be the problem, so they both over-do it a bit to make sure they are OK. The only way out of this is to do lots of testing, but that’s very difficult and costs more than just buying the over-done hardware. The problem with over-done hardware isn’t the capital cost though, it’s the fact that it’s normally more complicated than the ‘good enough’ stuff and costs more to support.

The fact that Microsoft is stepping out from under this shadow is a big move – it would be even bigger if they were to attach some penalty system to it. A penalty system that works both ways – if we tell you to buy too much we’ll pay, if we tell you to buy too little we’ll pay. That would be a very courageous thing to do but would be a massive boost to customer confidence. It would also make Microsoft’s life easier to though. Why would anyone not buy the recommended hardware configuration and if the software actually works, people would then get services that didn’t require a call to Microsoft every week. Microsoft would then a chance to scale down its support organisation and its reputation for delivering reliable services would increase massively.

Perhaps I’m writing fantasy now and I should move on.

Thinking Faster

Blackpool Iluminations

Some great writing being produced over at Thinking Faster, a couple of tasters:

Teamwork Barriers

I’m concerned that we’re becoming even more productive individually and less and less productive in teams.  One reason is the computing power we have at our fingertips.  Most of us can create a financial plan, develop the powerpoint presentation and write up a proposal without speaking to anyone else or leaving our desks.  With access to the internet, you too can be an instant expert on almost any subject without speaking to anyone in your company.

The unreasonable man

For all the processes, software applications, communication devices and modern office tools we’ve got, what does it actually take to move an idea forward?  Is productivity driven by improved processes and methodologies, or are many decisions driven by a true believer who is willing to push any button to get what he wants?

I was thinking about this “nature vs nurture” type of question after reading a blog post of Shaw’s quote on progress. 

“A reasonable man adapts himself to his environment.  An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself.  Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Blog Succeed where Newsletters Fail

Water

This is purely a personal perception which I have not had chance to investigate too much but it’s a view that may resonate with others.

I work for an organisation that has not yet embraced blogs internally, but does do quite a lot with newsletters. I rarely read these newsletters, and I know that others are similar. I take in far more information through blogs that I ever do through newsletters. So why is that?

Some of it, I am sure, is related to to a lack of concentration of my behalf. I have become the ultimate skim reader. If the title or the context don’t make we want to read – I won’t. Skim reading newsletters is not easy. They are normally created in a form that assumes that they will be printed off, this doesn’t facilitate skim reading. I tend to skim read because most of the time I don’t need to know a piece of information, it’s more important for me to know it exists and that I can get hold of it quickly. That’s where blogs have a huge advantage. In my reader I can see that thousands of bits of information exist, when I need them I can go and get them. I know that the information exists because I have skim read through. If something new and pertinent comes up I’ll read it there and then but normally I’m in skimming mode. Why should I waste my time reading something in detail?

Another reason is similar to this one, but subtly different. An individual blogs tend to deal (if they are done right) with a single subject. Newsletters tend to deal with a multitude of things. Finding the quality in all of the words is very difficult (and boring).

The final reason (for me) is that there is a sense of control with blogs which corporate newsletters don’t have. I have configured my reader to go and get information from this particular source, I am in control. Compare that to my normal attitude to newsletters – “oh no, what have communications set me now”. The ownership is completely different. Yes I know these communications people are trying to do me a favour, but it doesn’t feel like it.

So give me a feed any day, don’t bother sending me a newsletter, and definitely don’t give me another repository to look in.

Service Entropy in IT Systems

Heat On

A while back (probably years now) Steve introduced me to the concept of ‘service entropy’. By this he was referring to this definition of entropy: ‘The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity’. Both Steve and I are from an engineering background where entropy is evident in real things. Steve’s theory was that IT services operate the same way and drive down towards the ‘lowest common denominator’. If you heat something up, it doesn’t matter how hot, it will always cool down to the level of everything around it, unless you keep heating it. If we view an IT project as a heating process and the resulting service or application as the thing being heated up, what happens after the project has finished is the entropy process.

As I have pondered this and how it impacts IT infrastructures I have seen it at work all over the place. As with the heating process, it starts before the project has even finished. As soon as the project is exposed to the outside world it is already giving off heat. As soon as a project starts to be exposed to the cold light of day the ‘heat’ is leaving it. I’m using ‘heat’ here as a metaphor for the changes that the project is seeking to make in the environment in which it is being delivered.

As an architect who has a vision for a certain amount of ‘heat’ (change) to be produced by a project it is a huge challenge to consider how you can insulate the results of the project from entropy. Because entropy dissipates the energy within the ‘closed system’ the larger the ‘closed system’ the more energy you have to put in. In the context of an IT ‘closed system’ the extent of the change (heat) may be the whole organisation or may be a smaller group. In a ‘heat’ system it’s the insulation that makes it ‘closed’, for an IT system it’s probably the organisational construct that replaces the insulation and is the thing that keeps the ‘heat’ in (you have to remember though, that there is no perfect insulation)

Entropy explains why it is easier to impact a small organisation in a big way and to make a permanent change. Entropy explains why it is very difficult to make a small change in a large organisation and to make it stick. Entropy also explains why a large change in a large organisation is practically impossible without massive amounts of ‘heat’. I tend to be involved in making medium sized changes in large companies where organisations presume that because the change is ‘not huge’ that it should be easy. Most of the time these projects result in deploying technology and some process change, but never make the productivity increases that were expected. At this point it is generally the technology that is blamed rather than the lack of ‘heat’. It’s not normally the technology itself that generates the ‘heat’ though, it’s more to do with the way that the technology generates change and community.

The other thing with large systems is that it is impossible to apply the ‘heat’ uniformly. Some people will get direct ‘heat’ from the project, others will get it transmitted to them from another. Some people are conductors and some people are insulators. In some ways this lack of uniformity is worse than having a small amount of ‘heat’ everywhere. The reason for this is that when ‘hot’ meets ‘cold’ you generally get a reaction that cools down the ‘hot’ as much as it warms the ‘cold’. Take the example of calendaring and scheduling functions. These functions have been available for years (decades even) in corporate email services. Some organisation have managed to make a transition to making them uniform, but many organisations have not. As soon as there is any doubt (cold) about whether someone uses their calendar the value of all calendars is reduced.

There is a great danger in taking this metaphor to far, but I just want to take it one step further. You can undertake the heating process in one of two ways. You can either heat a small area to a very high temperature and hope that it will reach the edges of the system; or you can heat everything in a uniform way to the same temperature. The Internet has shown us that for large systems heating up a small area to a very high temperature works better than trying to heat up the whole. Take the example of Google Earth, this is a very ‘hot’ piece of technology and has generated a huge community. A few connected with that ‘heat’ and bit by bit the ‘heat’ is distributed. The trick is to keep the ‘heat’ going at the centre, which is what they have just done with the integration of National Geographic data. As a system becomes older it is more difficult to keep the heat going at the centre, and that is the challenge for Microsoft with Office 12 and Vista.

So how as architects do we resolve the entropy problem. For starters we spend as much time and attention on the insulation surrounding our heat source as we do on the heat source itself. In other words we try to understand where the heat will be taken out of the project and insulate the project from it. The other thing we do it to try and generate as much heat as possible knowing that some it will be dissipated.

The Need for Something New

morecombe Bay

What is it that creates a drive in people to always be looking out for what’s new.

I recently let on to Jonathan (my son) that I had access to the Windows Vista Beta code. This was followed by a couple of requests from his friends to get them access. I declined, but it did get me thinking. What is it about people that keeps them pushing for the new. Is it something that you grow out of? Do you go into reverse at some point and start pushing for something old?

My drive to see something new is certainly less than it is for these teenagers. Perhaps I’m just getting to the point where I feel that there is nothing really new. A new version of Windows and a new version of Office; both of these things will make a difference to the way that millions of people will work (even if they don’t use it). But will it make a real significant change to the way people live their lives. We’ll still be typing for the most part, even though voice recognition software has been available for years. We’ll still be using devices on a desk, whether they are laptops or desktop. Other device types won’t really make a significant difference to us, they’ll still be on the periphery of most of our lives. Let’s face it, the iPod and other MP3 players haven’t really changed the way we live our lives, all they have done is made it more convenient, it’s still personal music coming through those headphones.

Boy, I sound like an old man – “there’s nothing new under the sun”.

Perhaps I’m suffering from a bit of a mid-life crisis – perhaps IT is suffering from a bit of a mid-life crisis. IT has certainly moved out of the pioneering phase into more of the mainstream, but you certainly can’t regard it as a utility or even ubiquitous.

What do you do in a dull teleconference?

Jonathan

Like many people these days I spend a lot of time on teleconferences these days. The thing with teleconferences is that the level of involvement can often be very low. You need to be sitting listening and adding value when required, but the involvement can often be low enough to enable you to do another activity. There is something about teleconferences which make them particularly poor at time keeping (perhaps it’s because we are all doing something else as well).

You can’t do something requiring a lot of thought, ideally it is something you can leave and come back to with ease. There are, therefore, a number of things that I find myself doing while on a teleconference.

One of the things that I do is to browse flickr pictures in the groups that I am interested in. I particularly like to look through sunsets and sunrises, or UK pictures.

It’s also a good time to catch up on feeds that don;t really need reading. It’s surprising how many of these there are. There are loads of feeds where it’s sufficient to know that it exists, a prime example of this is the Microsoft Download feed. I don’t get an RRS feed for news because there is too much of it, so I also spend some time looking at the BBC News site.

Every now and again someone will send me a silly game to play. My attention span for these things is not very high. The latest one pokes a bit of fun at Steve Ballmer and his (reportedly) throwing a chair at news of one of his employees leaving to join Google. I can’t do games like the Pit Stop Game because that requires my attention, and part of my brain is still listening to the teleconference.

I have, from time to time, also used the time to sort through my task list.

The other thing I do is to write blogs.

I have considered whether it would be possible to do some exercise while sat listening but concluded that it would be difficult to sound calm and convincing while riding an exercise bike.

The question I am not particularly clear on is whether this actually adds to or removes from my productivity.

Small Well-Focussed Teams

Bringing the Sheep In

Jeffrey Philips over at Thinking Faster exposes a philosophy that I have exposed myself for a long time:

Note though, that I am advocating making your team, your hierarchy, your organization as small as possible.  That’s counter-intuitive in a time when we are evaluated on how large a team we manage.  Frankly, I’d rather manage a smaller team that has greater focus and higher commitment.  I guess it’s a question of guerilla tactics versus the armed frontal assault.

Put me into a small team focussed on a task and we will together each miraculous things, put anyone (including me) into a large, diverse, physically separated team and the level of productivity will diminish into nothingness.

This morning I have attended a conference call with a cast of thousands on it (well not really but I think you get the viewpoint) and the call followed the age old rule on productivity – a meeting will only move at the pace of the slowest person. Small well-focussed teams don’t work like that, everyone knows where they are going and agree how to get there. What’s more small well-focussed teams allow for a much better division of responsibilities. In large teams you quite quickly get to the point where you rely on individuals to answer questions because the team isn’t of one mind. This is counter-intuitive, but having been the individual that others rely upon on more than one occasion I can tell you that it’s true. Questions don’t get answered in a timely manner in this model. What’s more questions are normally asked more than once. This happens because the trusted individual isn’t always available, so a semi-trusted individual is asked who may or may not answer the question correctly. It doesn’t actually matter whether they answer correctly or not, because they are semi-trusted the question will get asked again of the trusted individual. This wastes everyones time.

Small teams behave like a pack of dogs – large teams behave like a pack of sheep.

Solution Architecture – Being One Step Away

Volume

One of the things I find challenging as a Solution Architect who delivers solutions to tens of thousands of users is that you know that they don’t understand what it is that you are trying to achieve, the constraints that you were working under, or the things that you had to go through to get there.

Today I was sat in a plane travelling to one of my customers sites and behind me were two individuals who had been given a new laptop as part of one of my projects. They were talking about their experience which on the whole was OK; but then the issue started coming out. There primary issue was with an application that they both used and had errors. In client refresh projects it’s always the applications which are the major problem. It doesn’t matter how much testing you do there is absolutely no way of testing all of the functions and combinations, so you always have problems. But then came the comment which demonstrated the lack of understanding which is my problem – “You would have thought that a professional organisation like that could deliver applications that worked”.

I wanted to jump up out of my chair and go and sit between them and explain the multi-tiered testing process that their application would have been through. I wanted to explain how their own organisation would have defined an application owner who should have thoroughly tested the functions of the application that they use. I wanted to explain that the main reason for application problems were security settings that were necessary to project their environment and to maintain their accreditation regime.

Being a reserved and polite British person I sat where I was and said nothing. Perhaps I should have given these two gentlemen some of my time and then they could have become advocates for the project in the rest of the business. But I didn’t. Instead I sat there and pondered the whole issue of complicated projects and our inability to communicate to people in a way that they understand that IT never delivers a perfect solution and that we would do our best to assist them. I also considered the ever increasing complexity in the infrastructure caused by more and more applications being deployed. I even considered how much the Internet revolution had so far failed to reduce that complexity for even the simplest task.

But then the plane landed and I decided that I would write something down and conclude with these words “you can please some of the people some of the time; you can never please all of the people all of the time”. My personal challenge is to get to the point where I am comfortable that I did all that I could to deliver the best that I could. It’s also about time people started to understand that they are really pioneers in the IT industry and pioneers need a sense of adventure – which allows for failure.