Category: Solution Architecture

Working from home worries: Trusting people when you can't see them

Rocks

Slow Leadership picks up on an article in the Glasgow Herald on “Employees fear working from home may damage careers”.

I tend to work from home these days – so do I fear that is damages my career?

Fear is definitely too strong a word for starters, but I do have concerns about it.

My employer is very flexible and I work from home because it makes sense. I do a lot of collaboration work with teams where it is impossible for the team to physically meet on a regular basis. These teams often span continents and it’s just not practical to have everyone flying around all the time.

There are a couple of office locally and I could go and work in them, but that takes away my flexibility to work when it’s appropriate to work. I regularly receive calls early and have teleconferences late. Being able to work flexibly also means that I treat my home time flexibly too, I treat bloging in a similar way.

So what do I worry about? I worry that I’m not visible.

I don’t think it’s a good thing to be invisible at work. I never want to be in the position where someone is asking the question “what does Graham do all day?” I am trustworthy, I do work hard, I do put in the hours, but is that visible? My role is primarily consultative and advisory so I don’t actually produce very much physical evidence of my productivity and that concerns me. If I was in an office people would be able to see how much consultation and advice I provide, at home it’s invisible. As the consultation is often via IM, email and voice it’s difficult to provide quantitative measures of productivity.

The issue of visibility is largely my issue though. I have to make special efforts to make sure I remain visible. I have to make make special efforts to have those ‘water cooler’ conversations in some other way. When attending teleconference I have to make a special effort to add value and to be ‘seen’. I consciously make more phone calls because I know that anything written can be interpreted wrongly.

My ‘need’ to be visible need to be balanced though. I don’t feel the need to be online all of the time. I don’t get stressed about missing a call out-of-hours that I wasn’t expecting, but I am very conscious of responding to almost every call.

But, yes, I worry.

As we move to a world of self-directed innovators this is something that we are going to have to get used to though.

User Experience Thinking: The Left and the Right

Lion

I use my mouse in my right-hand – I write with my left hand. No I don’t know why, perhaps just because I’m awkward .

As I wrote the other day I am experimenting with some working habit changes. These involve me doing far more reading on my tablet and getting to grips with a pen based interface.

It’s only a simple thing, but my ambidextrous working this has lead me to a couple of user experience issues.

When reading, which is clearly what I do a lot of I often need to scroll down, no surprises there. When I am using a mouse I use the scroll bar on the side of the screen or the wheel. The scroll bar is on the right, my mouse is on the right, no problems their then. When I’m using my tablet (in tablet mode) I have all sorts of choices and these are leading to some confusion on my part.

  • If I use the pen and the scroll-down bar I cover the screen with my hand so I can’t free-scroll to get to where I want to get to. Not being able to see the screen makes free-scroll it a bit pointless as a feature. I have found myself doing a kind of contortion so I can do both but it doesn’t look very professional and certainly not cool .

  • If I use the jog-wheel with my right-hand I often find myself scrolling the wrong thing because I haven’t clicked on the thing I want to scroll first. This is something I find myself doing naturally with a mouse, but not yet with a pen and the jog-wheel .

  • If I use flicks I can’t free-scroll and flicks are a bit cumbersome anyway .

It’s a shame I like free-scroll so much.

I have a similar problem when I’m using hand writing for input. The words that are being interpreted from my spidery scrawl are shown on the bottom left of the window where my hand is. This means that I can’t do any kind of live check on the writing without lifting my hand off and out of the way.

I’m a bit bipolar on how this could be resolved though. Part of me would like the scroll bars (and other things) to be down the left of the screen so I can use my pen effectively, but I still use my mouse and it makes sense that they are on the right in that context. I’m not sure my brain could cope with having both . Like any western left-handed person I have dealt with the issue of things going from left-to-right all my life so this is nothing new it’s just a new take on an old issue.

The handwriting recognition in Vista is astonishing though. Like many left-handed people handwriting has always been a bit of a problem but Vista does a wonderful job of recognising it.

Tags: ,

User Experience Thinking: The BBC World Cup Mode

Lilacland: Grandad wonders what it takes to be a Funky Chick

The BBC Web Site is currently sporting two modes which the humble user can choose between:

  • World Cup Mode: On

  • World Cup Mode: Off

What a fabulous piece of insight into the needs of their customers. The UK will be divided over the next few weeks between those who care about the World Cup and those that don’t. Most of Scotland, for instance, will only be watching with moderate interest because their team didn’t make it. Millions of us English will be desperate to get our regular updates.

Recognising the different desires and doing something about it is pure genius.

I wonder if it’s the shape of things to come though.

Here’s a few idea for some more modes:

  • I don’t care what Jordan is doing now mode.

  • I love cricket.

  • I’m a news junkie.

Asking Why?

Lilacland: Jimmy and Grandad meet some of the locals

Jeffrey Philips makes an interesting observation:

I worry that we are crowding our already complex computers and processes with so many short-cuts, hot-keys, hacks and other “time saving” devices that we are actually creating more complexity and less vision on what’s important.  For example, I have a colleague who has a BlackBerry.  He answers the BlackBerry while driving, in meetings, etc, usually entering six or seven word answers to emails.  Typically, these “answers” he provides don’t give enough information and require a second or third interaction before the solution is clear.  While he feels confident he has cleared his inbox, these interactions are like small candy bars, immediately tasty but not satisfying over the longer term.  We’ve built our productivity processes to a certain extent on the mental equivalent of junk food.

It’s true in many industries but the IT industry has to be one of the worst industries for thinking about going faster from A-to-B rather than thinking about taking a different route.

I was educated as a mechanical engineer and that included some production engineering. During my degree course (what seems like a lifetime ago now) I learnt about production lines and the radical (as it was then) new thinking of just-in-time. The production line techniques were all about going faster, just-in-time was all about taking a different route.

I have recently been enjoying the writings of Slow Leadership which is all about taking a different route.

I regularly return to the culture of writing huge documents to define something and think that there has to be a different route, especially when it comes to the document review process.

It’s time for more people to ask the question “why?” before they do something. There used to be a programme on the BBC called Why Don’t You, which had a more complete title of “Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead?”. The purpose of this programme was to encourage kids to do something that was more constructive than watching television, something that involved the whole person rather than just the small subset that the television was interacting with.

I’m sure we could all create our own “Why Don’t You?” and I’m sure that our business and personal lives would be all the richer for it:

  • Why Don’t You Just Switch off Your Email Client and Go Out and Do Something Less Boring Instead

  • Why Don’t You Just Switch off Your Blackberry and Go Out and Do Something Less Boring Instead

  • Why Don’t You Just Switch off Your Mobile Phone and Go Out and Do Something Less Boring Instead

A good dose of “Why Don’t You?” and a few new routes and we will all be a lot happier.

Vista Beta 2, Office 2007 beta 2 and Tablet

Lilacland: Jimmy and Grandad inspect a local art installation

Well I took the plunge and ‘upgraded’ my Tablet to Vista Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2.

The first attempt was done using the 512MB of memory that came with the Tablet. Vista Beta 2 runs fine in 512MB, just don’t try and run anything useful.

I’ve now added in another 512MB and it’s looking a lot better than I expected. I have the same problem that Steve noticed with the buttons, but I haven’t had any video driver issues. I still want the rotation to go a full 180 degrees so I can use it as most people would expect a left-hander to use it, although I think I might be the one getting the best deal there because I can scroll and pen at the same time.

I’m trying to swallow a huge pull here though. I’m trying to make a whole handful of transitions all in one go.

  • I’m trying to keep the build as clean as possible.

  • I’m trying to use the tablet without a keyboard.

  • I’m trying to switch to Feeddemon for my RSS stuff.

  • I’m trying to move to a tablet oriented way of working when I’m not at my desk typing something detailed.

  • I’m trying to loose my various notepads where I write junk and do that in OneNote.

  • I’m trying to switch to a tab browsing view of the world.

  • When I get around to it I will put Notes 7 on it.

  • And trying to do it all on Beta software.

So far it’s been OK, but I have written this in BlogJet because I haven’t yet swallowed all of the changes. I will try Word 2007 blog posting, but there is no guarantee I will stick with it.

(PS: I am going to carry on calling it “Office 2007” and not switch to “2007 Office” until absolutely necessary, who’s ridiculous idea was that anyway)

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User Experience Thinking: Office and PDF

Lilacland: Jimmy and Grandad go Dog Racing

So it looks like the promised PDF capabilities are not going to make it into Office 2007.

In the face of it, it would seem that the only winners here are the lawyers, but perhaps there is more to it than that. Scoble doesn’t think there is, Microsoft Monitor has a different view.

In my experience it’s hard enough to get users to think about the files they create beyond the way it looks on the screen – and that, surely is the way it should be. I’m sure we have all received 20MB presentations which should really have been much much leaner than that. The split between different applications does at least require people to think differently about what they are creating.

When it comes to Office and PDF formats though, I’m sorry but I can’t imagine Microsoft doing the right thing here. We would all love the situation where we could send a file in a format which the person at the other end could work with in the way we want them to. It present we are expected to know what they can cope with. And this is where PDF comes in. Can you imagine a situation where Outlook said something like “I’ve notices that you always send John a file in a PDF format would you like to convert this one into that format”.

Without this kind of integration the availability of another format is of limited use. There is end user benefit, but it requires users to think about the format they use, something they rarely do. The main benefit, though, will be to the IT organisation who will be able to remove another piece of software from the software portfolio. There is also some benefit to application developers building solutions on-top of the office platform. But all of these benefits are limited.

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Steve Richards: Personal Priorities

Lilaclan: Jimmy and Grandad go exploring in the land of Pink Shoes

Steve is currently building a great set of posts on the different impacts of personal priorities and their impact on how we approach IT. He’s followed his initial post with some application of his ideas:

There are some great insights into the impact certain IT initiatives have had and why they have actually caused as many problems as they have solved.

One of the most telling insights for me is the insight on ‘process’. I have previously had a lot to say about the delivery of technology without process. Having read Steve’s article I don’t think I was really meaning ‘process’ I think I was meaning something broader than pure process and really talking about the whole impact on people of a technology change. Steve’s model does a good job of extending this issue by trying to explain why sometimes the impact on the end user is ‘a step too far’ for them.

This relates to my post the other day which picks up on the need for the CIO to deliver value. If, as Steve suggests, we have pushed the CIO into a corner (in the desktop arena) then it is going to be difficult for them to deliver the value without first increasing the cost.

Communicating: What Should You Expect

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Turn it down someone, please!!!

Creating Passionate Users has an interesting article today on the success of communication techniques.

When trying to communicate to a crowd it looks like the best you can get is about 30%, and that’s if you put something in their hands and communicate via written or video media.

This rings true with my own experience. I have been involved in a number of large projects that have implemented some new technology something (email, desktop, etc.). In each case the implementation has gone slower then the project managers expected and in every case the project managers have complained that the end user has not done what they were asked to do.

If a project requires the end user to do something – the best you should expect is that 30% of them will do it. If you start with that number you will build a project that will at least be realistic about the effort that is going to need to be expended overcoming this limitation. If you expect that only 30% will do what you want them to do then you will realise how important it is to have a project that requires the end user to do nothing whatsoever; any dependency on the end user will just slow you down.

Microsoft and Softricity: Licensing

The calming brook

A lot of comment on Microsoft’s intention to buy Softricity (Steve Richards, Brian Madden, others)

My own viewpoint can be summarised like this:

  • Technology: Great

  • User Experience: Great

  • Licensing: Problem

Both Steve and Brian touch on the licensing issue. The benchmark that everyone in the market works to when it comes to licensing is Microsoft. Whatever Microsoft are doing everyone else falls into line with. The Microsoft licensing engine is dominated by licensing that is installation based. In other words, you pay for every installation.

In order to accommodate the ‘terminal server’ type applications the pay-per-installation scenario has been fudged a bit to state that a license is required for each device capable of running the application on the terminal server.

Application virtualisation only becomes truly valuable where the licensing terms are flexible and fluid allowing a pay-per-use type model.

The pressure is on to make this change, but until Microsoft makes a dramatic change no-one else will see the need to. Moving to a pay-per-use model would require a huge shift for Microsoft and significantly impact the revenue from enterprise licensing and from Office; both of them things that they will be unwilling to tinker with too much.

Without a shift in licensing mechanisms application virtualisation is stick.

Tags: , Softricity,

It's time to deliver VALUE Mr. CIO

This is high

Michael Platt has picked up on some research done by Gartner stating that IT must start demonstrating value – not just cost reduction.

CIOs need to establish a track record of creating value faster than reducing IT costs by 2009. CIOs are now expected to provide high-quality, secure and cost-effective services. CIOs must deliver a record of high performance to establish their position and contribution in the organization. To do this, CIOs will need to create business value faster than the market and technology can reduce IT and business costs.

I’m just adding my voice to the chorus here. The primary role of IT needs to be the delivery of VALUE and not just the reduction of cost of the existing.

We’ll see whether reports from people like Gartner have the same effect they did when they made created a huge hullabaloo about TCO some years back. A hullabaloo I have to say has enabled IT organisations to reduce cost and also to massively reduce the value. High value and high cost has been replaced in most organisations with lower cost and lower value.

The cost centred thinking may have been appropriate in the last economic cycle. As the cycle turns another corner it’s no longer appropriate, it’s time to think value. Value thinking will require a huge metamorphosis for most IT organisation and many won’t be given the opportunity. What I see happening is that businesses will focus parts of their organisation on innovation. It will be the innovation function that drives expenditure on IT. The innovation expenditure will be focussed directly on creating innovation and on supporting the innovations that they develop, this will normally result in some IT expenditure but probably not by the IT function. The IT organisation will get given the technology that supports the innovation only when it is no longer innovation and requires a run-and-maintain, cost-centred approach.

Engineering organisation have worked this way for years; the IT organisation rarely supports the IT for the engineering part of the organisation. The the engineering function fund and normally support the technology themselves because they need to be closely intimate to the value it delivers, because value it the primary driver and not cost. Having the IT function supporting the engineering function normally has the effect of slowing down the engineering, the same would be true for the innovation function.

If the IT function only looks after run-and-maintain why bother having an IT function. Most organisation let someone else run-and-maintain their buildings, why should the run-and-maintain of IT be different.

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Your Identity in their Hands

This is high

Slightly off the beaten track for me.

Kim Cameron picks up on a publication by a leading IBM Researcher Michael Osbourne regarding the proposed architecture of the UK ID Cards scheme.

Kim’s strongest words are these:

The resulting central database, where everything is connected and visible to everything else, is as vulnerable as a steel ship with no compartments – one perforation, and the whole thing goes down.

The starting point for a security thinker is that there will be perforations.

As a UK citizen this sounds like a problem to me. If mine and everyone else’s identity is lost (sunk) how do we ever get it back?

There are experienced Identity professionals out there – why doesn’t our government appear to be listening to them?

And don’t tell me that the ID Card is optional – because in practice it isn’t. If I have to have one to get a new passport then it isn’t optional for anyone with a job in any multi-national because travelling abroad comes with the territory.

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User Experience Thinking: Project Orange

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Grandad gives Jimmy a lift up

A reasonable amount of buzz has be flowing around today about Project Orange.

Project Orange is described by the WinFS Team Blog at:

The killer app for getting users organised

Project Orange is about the creation of an application that demonstrates the reason why WinFS is the replacement for the file system. But more than that, why it’s something that truly liberates data from the constraints of the application.

The file system has been a mainstay of the corporate and desktop infrastructure for a very long time now. If it’s going to change then the change can’t be about the technology. The change has to be about the user experience, enabling them to do things they have never done before in ways that feel more familiar than the file system today.

The WinFS iWish Video is quite interesting to watch – not a ‘file’ in sight.

Tags: WinFS, Project Orange,