Category: Solution Architecture

In Part 3 I talked about trust and control – how do I stay in control of my data? And I’m sorry but none of the Web 2.0 vendors make me feel comfortable enough to give them control. But I do find myself moving nearer to the model outlined by Chris Anderson in a post on The Long Tail call Who Needs a CIO?

The consequence of this is that many CIOs are now just one step above Building Maintenance. They have the unpleasant job of mopping up data spills when they happen, along with enforcing draconian data retention policies sent down from the legal department. They respond to trouble tickets and disable user permissions. They practice saying “No”, not “What if…” And they block the ports used by the most popular services, from Skype to Second Life, which always reminds me of the old joke about the English shopkeeper who, when asked what happened to a certain product, answered “We don’t stock it anymore. It kept selling out.”

The most dramatic example of this is on college campuses, where a generation raised on Google and MySpace meets its first IT department. Needless to say, the kids want nothing to do with “disk storage allocations” and “acceptable use policies”. The life of a university CIO is like the life of a telco CEO, fast forwarded by about five years. The users want a dumb pipe, preferably at gigabit speed. They neither need or want the university to administer their email, wikis, blogs, video storage or discussion groups. They want it to simply get out of their way.

[Emphasis mine]

He then goes on to quote another article from CIO magazine which I also read:

CIOs don’t seem to care all that much about the needs and desires of the next wave of workers, who come from Gen Y and are also referred to as Millenials. The gestalt of the Millenials (a.k.a., the “I’m special” generation) is that they grew up with a boundless sense of self-importance, always have had the Internet, love to share digital content, need to be constantly challenged, want high-level responsibilities immediately, expect a work-life balance with telecommuting options, and will go around IT practices and policies without hesitation. The old-school CIOs I spoke with seemed both annoyed with their audacity and mildly interested in what this new wave of employees could deliver in the IT department.

My son is 15 today (I’ve written about him before) and this describes so many of his generation.

Where is the data in this model, and who is looking after it? Some of the data is published on blogs, wikis, etc., but what about the background data that created the published data. If my experience is typical, the published data is less than 20% of the actual data. At work I have a file service that makes this issue the CIO’s problem.

Also, who is owning the published data. I pay for this blog service, and expect it to be available, but I don’t have any SLA for disaster recovery. If I delete the data on the site accidentally it’s my issue.  If someone breaks into my house today I will have lost a lot. I won’t have lost anything that I have published, but I will have lost an invaluable amount of data. If this was a corporate blog I’d expect the CIO to provide these facilities.

I do want a dumb pipe, but I’m not sure I’m ready to take on the reasonability of looking after all of the data. What’s more, I’m not sure I know how to protect the data in a way that I am comfortable with. I could use one of the online services such as Amazon’s S3, but I’m still not sure that the pipe between me and them is large enough to get me going quickly enough after a problem. Controlling data protection within the house isn’t good enough, if someone is going to break in and steal one of the PC’s they’ll take all of the electronic equipment.

I don’t trust anyone else to look after my data, but I don’t think I trust myself either. So are there developments that would change this situation? Sure.

There have been a few articles over the last couple of days dealing with the issue of information overload and interruptions – this apparently now has a name: informania.

The dictionary definition doesn’t quite seem to line up with the definition given in this article. There definition is this:

“infomania” — the loss of concentration caused by the constant electronic interruptions that plague many office workers.

The other interesting article is this one created by Dan Russell over on Creating Passionate Users.

I resonate strongly with both of these articles. If I turn on everything that could be screaming for my attention it makes for quite a list:

• Mobile phone – calls
• Mobile phone – messages
• Office/House phone
• Instant Messaging – personal (Live Messenger)
• Instant Messaging – corporate (Sametime)
• Calendar (Notes)
• Tasks (Notes)
• Email – personal (Outlook)
• Email – corporate (Notes)
• VOIP (Skype)
• Blogs (Feedburner)

And that’s without including all of the external distractions, or any interruptions from biological interrupters (people).

It’s a wonder I ever get to do anything other than deal with the interrupts. But I’ve learnt a lesson, a switch some of them off. It’s amazing how liberating it is.

Dan’s recognition of the “setup time” between interruptions is spot-on. There are some days when I feel worn-out by all of the context switches.

I think we have a long way to go before we really understand how to attract peoples eye-attention to the correct thing at the correct time. We need to think a lot harder about the impact of the technology that we are making available and the way that it influences the user experience.

People on a conference call behave differently to those on who are face-to-face in a meeting room. We all know this to be true.

• We are more likely to interrupt someone who we can look at.
• We are more likely to have side conversations in Instant Messaging when we are on a conference call. It’s rude to do it in a face-to-face meeting.
• We are more forgiving of people losing attention in a conference call. No I don’t know why, but we are.
• We are more likely to make decisions in a face-to-face meeting.

But what about the situation where there is a mix, which behaviour dominates.

I’m speculating here about where the line is, I think the line probably moves depending on the personalities. What I’m not speculating about is that there is a line, there is a point where the practices change from one mode to the other.

Where the flip gets interesting is that the flip from “conference call mode” to “face-to-face mode” is an exclusive one. “Conference call mode” includes everyone, “face-to-face mode” excludes people on the phone. You have to be a very strong character to dominate a face-to-face meeting if you are on the phone. Even if you are able to dominate, you actually remove some of the value from the face-to-face members of the meeting. All of the people who are face-to-face will have to work the way a conference call works. If you are face-to-face and working in “conference call mode”, what’s the point of being face-to-face?

I’ve witnessed these effects a few times. On one occasion I had to give a regular briefing to a large team. Half the team were in the same location I was, the other half were on the phone. I used to have to close my eyes to make sure that I wasn’t communicating by gesture to those people around me and excluding the people on the phone.

On another occasion I was in a face-to-face meeting and there was only one person on the phone. This meeting had a few sessions. It the start of each session we would acknowledge the existence of the person on the phone and then completely ignore them for the next hour.

I suppose that what I am saying is this:

• If some of the people in the meeting are going to be on the phone, and they are going to be included, there is little point in the rest of the people meeting face-to-face.
• If there is only going to be one person on the phone, they may as well not bother, they aren’t going to add any value.
• Face-to-face mode will win, it’s a very powerful force.

I’ve drawn the line as progressively changing, and I’m not sure that is correct. I think it may just be a straight flip – “conference call mode” to “face-to-face mode”. I’m not sure what the middle ground looks like. I certainly don’t think that it’s the best of both worlds, it’s more likely to be the lowest common denominator. It’s probably going to be very frustrating for the people meeting face-to-face. When it comes to the time for making decisions, for instance, the people meeting face-to-face will be able to make an agreement between themselves far more easily than the people on the conference call.

I’d prefer it that we didn’t call both of these things “meetings” because they are different types of event. I’d also like there to be more research on behaviours in the two modes and training for people. We train people as meeting facilitators, so why not train people to be conference call members?

Andy Piper left an interesting comment on my previous File Server post:

Interesting discussion. Appreciate that this is mostly aimed at the enterprise.

So, how successful do you think the new Windows Home Server product will be? And should we all just use Amazon S3 instead?

I’ve run a Linux server at home for many years, but in terms of file storage I just can’t get myself to move over to a server-based model at home. The Linux box handles e-mail, an Apache server, DNS etc. and there are some shares on there, but I just don’t use them very much.

This got me thinking about the influence of the consumer experience on the file server, and the chance that other technologies will replace a significant part of these capabilities.

I’m unlikely to have SharePoint (or any other similar technology) at home so will use some form of file service, either local or server based.

We are increasingly finding ourselves in a position where the consumer experience drives the enterprise experience. So if the SharePoint type of technology is going to be successful it needs to answer questions within the enterprise space that are different to the questions being asked by consumers. If the technology is answering questions for which the consumer already has a solution they are going to favour the consumer solution.

One recent example of this phenomena has been desktop search. Many consumers have installed a desktop search product on their PC at home, I have then been on the receiving end of people requesting the same on their work PC.

So how does this influence the file system?

People are dealing with far more data on their home PC than on their work PC, so why shouldn’t they just do at work what they already do at home? What’s going to make them do something different at work?