Solution Architecture – Page 18

BBC: Blackberry ban for French elite

The BBC are reporting on a ban on Blackberry use for French Officials:

“French government officials have been ordered not to use handheld Blackberry devices amid fears that foreigners could spy on them, reports say.

Workers in the French president’s and prime minister’s office have been told their e-mails risk falling into foreign hands, Le Monde newspaper reports.

France’s SGDN security service is worried because Blackberries use US- and UK-based servers, the paper says.”

What I found interesting about this article wasn’t the erroneous security issues but this statement:

“But some officials are flouting the ban and using them in secret, it adds.

“They tried to offer us something else to replace our Blackberries but it doesn’t work,” one unnamed official told the paper.”

This is another example of the strength of User Innovation. These officials are really important people who should be very concerned with security. Their need to communicate is greater than their need to obey by the rules. I’ve witnessed similar behaviour in many organisations; people needing to get things done doing whatever it takes to get it done. If the French security services can’t stop people working outside the defined security envelope what chance to other organisations have.

The thought of all these French officials using these things in secret conjures up all sorts of clandestine images for me. I’m imagining lots of people in dark glasses and overcoats congregating down dark alleys to feed their addiction. Others are sitting next to each other in a public place agreeing the sign for the time when they should surreptitiously leave. Such is their need.

Technorati tags: User Innovation, Blackberry, bbc

Virtual Earth gets terrain

Microsoft’s Virtual Earth has integrated terrain for Great Britain.

A couple of examples.

The view of Scafell from Great Gable:

The view of Catbells and the Jaws of Borrowdale from Friars Crag:

Google earth has had terrain for a while, but this would appear to be more detailed than their offering (but not a lot)

I’m bigging this one up because it has come to Great Britain first, I always like it when we are ahead .

Bang goes a whole load more hours looking at things for no real purpose.

Technorati tags: Virtual Earth

Windows Live Writer – Playing

Beta 2 of Windows Live Writer was released yesterday. This is just me playing with it a bit…

It seems to work fine. They still haven’t done anything about the dictionary so it looks like I’m going to have to reapply my UK dictionary hack.

The spell checker now works inline with nice squiggly lines, even after the hack.

The interface has got a bit more cluttered, and I’m not sure it’s for the better. There seem to be more options that I rarely use taking focus of the ones I use a lot. Moving categories to the bottom seems like a change for changes sake rather than something that needed to be done.

Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer

A Creative Commons Example: I've had a picture published!!!

I use flickr to publish my photos so that I can use them on the blog, but also so friends and family can see them. Photography is a hobby which I enjoy and could really get into, but I have decided to restrict myself for now.

My standard setting for flickr copyright is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial. This one happens to be covered by version 2.0. I’m quite relaxed about people using my pictures, but I don’t want them making lots of money out of me (as if that was possible).

A few weeks ago I was contacted by someone putting together a free magazine that gets distributed at a number of regional airports in the UK. They liked one of the pictures we posted from our skiing holiday in Bansko, Bulgaria and wanted to use it in a feature.

Even though the magazine is free, it’s still commercial, so they were seeking permission in lines with the copyright agreement.

I gave permission asking that the “attribution” still stood and for a copy of the magazine in return.

Last week two copies of the magazine arrived with my photo in them and my name by the photo .

It’s a surprisingly good feeling to know you are a published photographer – even if it is just in a free magazine.

Creative Commons worked. They had access to the file, they could have just used it without asking, but they didn’t. Others may have used pictures without asking and without attribution but the fact that someone went through the process of shows that it can work.

Technorati tags: Creative Commons, Flickr

Sometimes I Hate Technology: All I want to do is print a picture!!!

Over the weekend Sue (my wife) undertook the monumental feat of walking 26.2 miles around the streets of London. As you might imagine she took lots of photographs of this adventure and she wanted them printing out so that it was easier to show people.

Printing – simple concept.

Last night was the first chance I had to go and get the prints. I anticipated that this would be a couple of short interruptions to my evening. It’s a 5 minute drive to the local supermarket (Asda) and I know that I would have to go drop of the files and pick them up later.

As you can probably guess by the title of this post things didn’t work out that way:

Put required photos on USB memory stick. Everyone supports USB, right?
Drive to Asda
Walk to photo booth.
Look for USB slot, but no slot to be found .
Ask lady behind counter if she can help. Shouldn’t have bothered .
There is no USB slot. Even though there has to be USB within the machine, there is no USB slot. I’ll need to come back with the files on a different format.
Walk to car.
Drive home.
Put pictures onto Compact Flash card. That should be fine. Consider putting them on CD as well to be sure but know that the machine has a CF slot so should be fine.
Drive back to Asda.
Walk to photo booth.
Follow instructions on screen and insert Compact Flash card.
Screen tells me that it is reading the card.
Screen counts through the photos it has found 1,2,3…11…stops… but there are 62 pictures on this card .
Start again.
Follow instructions on screen and insert Compact Flash card.
Screen tells me that it is reading the card.
Screen counts through the photos it has found 1,2,3…8…stops… but there are still 62 pictures on this card .
Remove card.
Go to second machine.
Follow instructions on screen and insert Compact Flash card.
Screen tells me that it is reading the card.
Screen counts through the photos it has found 1,2,3…12…stops… but there are still 62 pictures on this card .
Ask lady behind counter if she can help. Shouldn’t have bothered . “We see lots of problems with those type of card, sorry”. Decide that I am not going to be beaten by some poxy machine.
Walk to car.
Drive home.
Put pictures onto CD.
Drive back to Asda.
Walk to photo booth.
Follow instructions on screen and insert CD.
Screen tells me that it is reading the CD.
Screen counts through the photos it has found 1,2,3…62…result.
Follow the rest of the instructions for size and quality, etc. Just about to finish and then get a prompt from the system for authorisation of the order showing a screen requiring a PIN.
Ask lady behind counter for help (different lady by now). Get the wonderfully helpful response “Oh, I’m just standing in while she’s on her break, I don’t know.” . She asks the supervisor, shouldn’t have bothered. She asks another colleague, shouldn’t have bothered. Eventually phones through to the canteen and interrupts the other ladies break. Turns out that the PIN is the default “1234” . I have no idea what the purpose of the PIN was, she didn’t check anything, she just put the number in.
Pay for pictures
Walk to car.
Drive home.
Stop, relax, unwind for 40 mins.
Drive back to Asda.
Walk to photo booth.
Original lady has now returned.
I hand over my slip.
She spends 10 mins finding the pictures. There still on the machine
Walk to car.
Drive home.

I’m a technologist and I struggled – how does anyone else get anything printed. Why is this so complicated?

Sometimes I hate the way that technology has been implemented.

Communicating the motivations for change

Today KC Lemson has an interesting story about the changes they are making to meeting rooms at Microsoft Campus.

In these new conference rooms we got fancy new projectors (no more screwing around with the darned output to some random TV![1]), new tables, and they changed the wall covering. Where many individual conf rooms used to have 3 walls of whiteboards on it (soooooo handy), now they have one whiteboard, one blank wall (for projection) and one brown fabric-covered wall.

When the rooms were finished and I attended various meetings in the new rooms, the conversation would invariably start out with some wonderment about what was the point of the brown fabric wall. The best scenario anyone came up with was that it was to be used for pinning up notes, hardly a common use case. So we thought about occam’s razor and realized that ah-ha, the problem is just that the facilities people are dumb and they didn’t realize we liked having so many white boards! Satisfied with the knowledge that we were on the top of the evolutionary heap, we went about our way.

Then, an enterprising coworker decided to actually investigate instead of assume, and eventually made his way to the right person in facilities who informed him that actually the reason for removing the multiple whiteboards was for acoustics – we are an increasingly global workforce and many meeting attendees aren’t located in Redmond, so LiveMeeting conferences are becoming increasingly common.

I have spent much of my working life on the flip side of this situation – being the person making the change. I am sure that myself and my team have been regarded as “dumb” on more than one occasion .

The problem with making changes to things that have multiple purposes like meeting rooms and PC’s is that the solution is always a compromise. It is normal to have two requirements that conflict; whether that’s the need for good acoustics and lots of whiteboard space or the need to control the configuration of a PC and the need to make it as flexible as possible.

The greatest challenge is communicating the motivation behind the compromise that’s been made to the people who have to work with it. Because it’s difficult to communicate it’s much easier to not bother trying. I’ve been on the receiving end of that situation too.

If you don’t communicate, though, people will surely find a way of working around your compromise. Remember User Innovation is a very powerful force. If you are going to make it work for you, you need to decide how you are going to harness it rather than try and work against it. I’m sure there must be a way of having good acoustics and lots of whiteboard space, perhaps they should have harnessed User Innovation to come up with an answer to that problem.

Technorati tags: User Innovation

Helvetica is 50

The wonderful Helvetica font it 50 according to the BBC.

For a font to survive that long and still be in such wide use shows that it is a good font. They also say that “imitation is the sincerest of flattery”, and this font has been imitated more than most.

As people seem to want to abuse our eyes every day with the worst of fonts I thought I to would pay tribute to one of the best of fonts.

Perhaps it’s time that we started building “bad design” indicators into modern publishing and office productivity tools so people could learn the errors of their ways.

Technorati tags: Fonts, Helvetica

Big Picture Thinking – The Need for A Design

Today I am sat in an office where the big picture of the design was completely missed.

This building is a long thin building. Along the long sides are individual offices, leaving the dark middle for these not entitled to such luxury.

The heating for the building also runs along the long side (in the offices). Because the heating was designed to heat the whole space the individual office get very hot from the heating. The space in the middle stays cold because it has no heating.

The individual offices have air conditioning (as well as heating) because they get too hot.

On many days of the year the heated air is simply being pumped straight out of the air conditioning leaving the poor individuals who aren’t in an office with no heating and feeling rather cold.

I have been involved in many IT projects where this situation has also arisen. A programme of work is created to achieve a major goal. The major goal is split down into a set of projects with individual objectives. The individual objectives are tracked and managed assuming it will result in the major goal. All to often the result is a freak that looks ridiculous.

Visualisation Techniques

I’ve been thinking today about how to visualise some things. I tend to think in pictures so visualisation tends to come fairly easily, but I’ve been struggling with this one. I recently came across A Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods and this has given me some great ideas.

It’s good to think about something in a new way.

Technorati tags: Visual Literacy, Visualisation

User Innovation and Security

User Innovation by end users of IT systems is inevitable. For years this innovation has primarily happened on the end user device. There have been a number of reasons for this; flexibility, isolation, responsiveness, connectedness, tools, capacity, control, etc. Each of these have created a compelling User Innovation platform.

Most organisation don’t actually like their users innovating in this way because they think users should be “doing their job”. One of the levers that organisation pull when they are trying to get people to focus on “doing their job” is security; “you can’t do that because it’s against the security policy”. The “security policy” being the lever to get them to step back into line, but this doesn’t work because the need to innovate is strong.

Let me try and explain the reasons why I don’t think that management via a rules based security policy works.

Security is normally the responsibility of a central function who express this responsibility through a security policy. Users are responsible for following the security policy, not for good security. The policy that is defined needs to be applicable to everyone making it generic in nature and tends to be rules based “though shalt not send executable files across email”.

The combination of centralized responsibility and generic rules based policies put the end user in a situation where they don’t understand the real security issues and hence innovate around the policy in inappropriate ways.

Rules based policies then get embedded into the service that is manufactured for the end user. Because the User Innovator assumes that the rules have been embedded into the service they also assume that if they are allowed to do something that it’s not a security problem.

But the truth is, it’s not possible to embed the rules in all situations within the service. Lets take Internet based services as an example. How do you set boundaries on the whole Internet with a set of rules and how on earth do you embed those rules into the service that you deliver.

At the same time you limit what they can do within the organisation so that Innovators are more likely to innovate outside it.

The publishing of potentially sensitive corporate data on Google Calendar which has been uncovered this week is probably a good example of these issues. I’m sure there are a number of reasons for the problems, but one of the main ones has to be people’s lack of understanding of the security issues involved, their reliance upon the security boundaries set for them and the level of control placed upon them within the organisation.

User Innovators need to be embraced as people who are adding value, they then need to be given some responsibility to consider the risks of the innovations that they are undertaking. Sometimes this means physically protecting them. Sometimes this should mean educating them on the risks that they are about to face and providing them with mechanisms for mitigating those risks. User Innovators need to be taught how to undertake a risk assessment of their innovation. They are going to innovate, so we should help them to do it knowing the risks.

The User Innovators are not the enemy though, they are trying to innovate so that they can gain something and that something is normally a benefit. Their skills should, therefore, be harnessed to help answer the security problem that are changing every day. There are a number of ways of getting their significant expertise focused on a particular problem, but I think that’s a topic for another day.

Technorati tags: User Innovation, Security

User Innovation and End User IT

I’ve been giving some thought, and just a little reading, to the concept of User Innovation and its impact on IT. Because we are talking about User Innovation my primary area of interest is with the End User devices and the services that they are provided with.

To start with it’s worth putting some form of definition around the phrase User Innovation. I’m primarily talking here about the phenomena researched by Eric von Hippel and documented in The Source of Innovation and Democratizing Innovation.

Perhaps the best way of defining it is to describe a personal experience. I use Flickr as a photo sharing site, when I first started using the site I noticed that there wasn’t a group for photographs of Lancashire, where I live. So I created one. Having created one I invited others I know to join it. Not long after I’d created the group Stu notices that the group has a strange URL and thinks that it would be great if it had a simple URL. What’s more Stu did a bit of research, worked out how to do it and gave me the instructions. So now Flickr has a Lancashire group with a nice simple URL (http://www.flickr.com/groups/lancashire/) where people share pictures almost every day.

There are two innovations in this example, the creation of the group and the change of its URL. Both of these innovations where undertaken by a User of the service, not by the Manufacturer of the service. I wasn’t 100% happy with the service as it was delivered to me by the Manufacturer, so I modified it. Fortunately Flickr has been built to encourage that kind of innovation, but more than that, the modification I made was immediately available to the whole community.

The alternative to User Innovation is Manufacturer Innovation. In Manufacturer Innovation it’s the person who is creating something to sell that undertakes the innovation. Manufacturer Innovation normally to follows the design, build, test, deploy process, with the requirements for the design phase coming from within the Manufacturer.

I have a lot of experience as a Manufacturer of End User Services (what used to be called Desktop Services). I (We) design a service and sell it to the people who are going to Use the service changes to the design are driven by the internal development process.

For years there has been one primary driver for the development of these services – cost. This has included the cost of support as well as the cost of acquisition.

If you want to reduce the cost of acquisition then you need to make the delivery of a service highly automated and to automate something you need repeatability. If you want repeatability then you need uniformity. Delivering 1000 PC all the same is cheaper than delivering 1000 PC that are all different.

Capping the ongoing costs requires the perpetuation of that uniformity, but more than that, it requires simplicity. If you are going to maintain simplicity you need control.

Uniformity and control might cap costs, but they also stifle User Innovation. The need to innovate is strong, though, and Users of the service innovate anyway. They innovate outside the boundaries of the control whether that’s through Internet delivered services, or by utilising equipment outside the control of the standardised service (like the PC at home) or by finding loophole in the control.

So the costs still exist, they have just been moved, and probably increased by people working around the system.

On the flip-side of this debate is the need to protect User Innovators from themselves, but more about that another time.

Technorati tags: End User, User Innovation, Eric von Hippel

Feeling a little older – ZX Spectrum makes 25

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum.

When I was at school I did most of my ‘O’ levels on a trusty ZX Spectrum, printing it out on a thermal printer and then sticking the bits of metallic paper to some real paper so the teachers could read it.

Knowing it is 25 years old makes me feel that little bit older .

Knowing that I have 2GB in my USB memory stick doesn’t make me too nostalgic for the days of fussy micro-tapes, but knowing how much we managed to do in 48KB does make me wonder whether we have used all of these extra circuits to their full potential.

Technorati tags: Sinclair, ZX Spectrum

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