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.
Category: Solution Architecture
Speak Clearly
This is a note to self – use fewer words:
We all have a perspective
Whatever we are looking at, whether we are near to it, or a long way away from it, we have a perspective on it. We can’t see the back of it, we might not even be able to see the side of it. We are limited to our perspective.
The same issue of perspective can also apply to our attitudes and ideas.
I know of people who write off an application or web site after only a few minutes of looking at it. I know other people who regard everything from a particular company as being the best at whatever it is that the product is doing. I myself would prefer never to see a product from certain companies ever again.
Each one of these opinions is formed from a perspective built up from an experience.
Whether this perspective is a good one, or not, is difficult to assess, particularly by ourselves. We can’t see what we can’t see.
Some of these perspectives are formed from our irrationality. Even when we know something that would change our perspective we don’t.
Standing at the bottom of a cliff our perspective towards the cliff could be completely different. We could see it as an adventure to overcome, we could also see it as a dangerous place to move quickly away from.
In many work situations we try to gain the perspective of others, but often we choose people who will reinforce our perspective to review our understanding. We need to do a better job of valuing diverse views and opinions.
Sometimes perspectives are called “experience” because they’ve been held for some time. But often this type of perspective isn’t built from experience at all, it’s built from an experience.
We use statistics to support our perspectives and reinforce the words of Einstein: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Spend any time at all looking at the statistics that surround the issue of global warming and you will find people who people who’s perspective, no matter what it is, is supported by one statistic or another.
When I am reversing my car into a tight parking spot my perspective is very limited. Sometimes someone will off to show me the way in. These people don’t sit next to me an use the same perspective that I have, they stand outside the car to give the situation another perspective.
Many of the words innovations have happened by someone taking what already existed and seeing it in a different perspective. One example is this video from Ikea:
I quite like this quote, it seems to sum up what I’m trying to say:
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
There’s lots of power in connecting with the field of vision of someone else.
CSC and Collaboration 2.0
You might be interested to see what CSC is up to internally with Enterprise 2.0 type technologies:
We’re all journalists!
Yesterday Jonathan was involved in a bit of a news incident. One of the buses at his college exploded into flames as it was sitting waiting to leave the college where he studies.
This happened around 4:30pm. According to the local press the fire services were called at 4:26.
By 17:44 the first comments were being added to a Facebook group.
A bit later than this an article was being written on the local newspaper’s site featuring photos and videos taken by students on their mobile phones. The article was posted to Twitter at 18:17.
By 18:44 one of the students (Sam Pratt) posted:
Within two hours and 10 mins since the Runshaw bus fire, a Facebook group was created, 4 videos and 12 photos were on it and the LEP had already covered it on their website. How’s THAT for social media?
By 20:48 it was in the BBC web site with what looks like a security camera picture.
The BBC site has a single 150 word article with a single picture.
The Lancashire Evening Post site has a 650 word article a single video and 7 photographs. There’s also 8 comments (mostly pointing people to the Facebook group)
This morning there are nearly 1200 members of the Facebook group. There are 30 photographs and 8 videos. There are are over 180 different comment threads as well as comments on lots of the photos and videos. Some videos have also been posted to YouTube.
I’m sure that this scenario is being played out all over the world right now because we’re all reporters of the news now.
The Lancashire Evening Post sites say: “See The Evening Post on Friday for exclusive pictures and comments from eyewitnesses", why should I? I’ve already read the eyewitness reports from hundreds of students and seen more than enough photographic evidence.
I’m sure that there is still a need for journalists, but it needs to be about adding value.
We’re all irrational!
How many rational decisions do you make? Do you think that most of your decisions are rational? 
Do you worry about anything?
Did you know that people feel less safe in a highly guarded airport than they do in a less well guarded one?
Have you ever worried about illness? Do your worries reflect the reality of the risk?
Do your death worries reflect the size of the bars in this chart?
Are you twice as worried about cardiovascular issues compared to cancer, or over 1000 times more worried about cancer than swine flu?
I work in IT and I see irrationality everywhere I look.
On a weekly basis I see projects that people expect to “revolutionise” the way that they work. This is a completely irrational expectation. Tell me the last thing that completely “revolutionised” anything? No I can’t think of anything either. I can think of things that have made a positive contribution, and some thing that have made a negative contribution but nothing that on its own could be regarded as truly revolutionary. There is a cumulative effect that could be regarded as revolutionary but that comes over time and it the outcome is normally unexpected.
Another area of IT irrationality is the area of cost control. The only factor that seems to influence whether something is worried about as a cost is it’s size. You might say that that was a rational response, but it isn’t – the real measure should be value. Microsoft software, as an example, gets managed quite tightly because it’s a big number, but this software is used all day, every day, by most organisations. Very little control is normally placed upon the thousands of other bits of software that most organisations use and that’s because the software tends to go out in small chunks, for a project here and a project there. The overall cost of the little bits is itself a big number, but the amount of value that is being generated from it is quite low. I see many of these applications, that get delivered as “vital”, ending up dormant and waiting to be used.
Another area of IT irrationality is how few of the capabilities that people have available to them get used, even when they could add value. I’m becoming very intolerant of the people I see using an application like PowerPoint who draw a box and then put on top of the box a text box and then put the words into the text box. I want to scream – “just right click and add the words straight into the box” (and I must admit that sometimes I do).
I’m not immune from this irrationality. One of my irrational acts is checking my Blackberry at completely inappropriate times. These are times when I know that I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do anything with what I have just read. Why do I bother looking then?
How many organisations are there out there that are running business critical processes on platforms that are out-of-support, unsupported and unsupportable. Why don’t they do the rational thing and replace them?
Having said all of that, I’m not sure that rationality is always a good thing. Most of the successful innovations I have seen have been a complete surprise to the people who created them. If they had been rational they wouldn’t have done what they did. We need some things to fail to know that they are failures. Perhaps we need to regard the next great thing as “revolutionary” to give it a fighting chance of being just that.
(Thanks to Information is Beautiful for the charts, I really like charts and visualisations, so much better than words)
We’re all lazy!
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.
What would you like me to write about?
Some of you who read this blog know my quite well, others of you who only read about me here are starting to know me.
So I thought I’d ask the question.
What would you like me to write about?
Not sure why I’ve never though to ask before.
I’m writing this post sitting on a full train using a Blackberry while reading an article that states "within the next few years as many as 20 million people will be choosing to work one or more days a week in third-place facilities – that is, public or private spaces built specifically for the temporary or semi-temporary business purposes of companies and individuals".
And I’ve spent most of today in a meeting in a hotel lobby…it’s a changing world of work.
Digital Distraction
Having written about the things that I could waste my time doing I really liked this visualisation of Digital Distraction.
That’s amazing – Creating a photograph book
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.
Engaging with Paper and Interactivity
I was at a session on Friday with a client and a number of our own people.
I could have presented my material (I think I knew most of the answers) and told them my opinion. But I wanted a bit of engagement and I find that people don’t engage with presented material, they become passive, sit back and just receive.
Why did I want engagement? The main reason was that I wanted them to start to own the things that we were talking about.
My solution was simple, but the impact was profound – I got A1 sized print-outs of uncompleted slides and asked everyone to get involved. Rather than starting with a completely blank piece of paper we had somewhere to start from, but there was still plenty to do.
Straight away people were engaged, they were so engaged that it took us a good 15 minutes to explain what we were doing. From the start the discussion was about “we” not “you” – “What are we doing?” Everyone was hooked in right from the beginning.
Armed with the A1 sized pieces of paper and a pen we went on to fill in the information with everyone contributing as we went along, even arguing vehemently about the content. Different people added value and it became a team effort with everyone contributing.
I don’t think that anything was put on the paper that I wouldn’t have put on the slides beforehand. What was different was the commentary that went with it, different people stating one opinion over another. I’m sure that each person who left that session learned something that they wouldn’t have done with a presentation.
The material wasn’t any different, only the media.
I’m not suggesting that we should do all sessions this way but what I am saying is that we still have a lot to understand about interactivity.
- How would this session have turned out if we had used a 3D world?
- What if the material had focussed on scenarios?
- Was it the paper that made it interactive?
- Was the interactivity partly because the set-up was a bit like a school classroom?
- Would the session have been the same if we had interacted with a virtual piece of paper?
- When are you best to simply present?
- What does art have to teach us?
- What does journalism have to teach us?
I still have a lot to learn.
I could spend hours doing this…
Discipline is such a key issue for productive work especially when there are so many distractions around. Let me give you my ultimate time wasting recipe:
- Check your corporate email for unread items.
- Read the first two emails by which time you should be bored
- Wonder what is happening on Twitter.
- Browse through the fresh set of updated. It is essential that you are following enough people to guarantee a fresh crop of tweets every time you look. This is easily done by following a number of news accounts.
- Once bored of tweets skip over to your RSS reader to see if there are any updates. Like twitter it is vital to be following a whole stack of feeds. The syndicated and group blogs are the best for guaranteeing updates on every visit, LifeHacker and BetaNews are good examples.
- Read posts until bored. The key is to never get to the end of your unread list ensuring that return visits result in further reading.
- Continuing the blog theme jump over to your WordPress Dashboard. This is the first of many information sources that you are convinced give you important information each time you visit.
- From your WordPress dashboard take particular interest in one or maybe two vital statistics justifying your next stop – Google Analytics.
- Google Analytics will highlight some interesting searches that have reached your site – it always does. Justify to yourself a quick trip to Google Webmaster Tools for further information.
- If there is any danger of you getting to the end of the statistics before you have successfully wasted enough of your valuable time you can also skip through the Bing Webmaster Tools and the Yahoo Webmaster tools. Three search tools are normally enough, but if you want to waste even more time other search engines are available.
- Your next stop is your personal email – again, read a few posts but never get to the end of the unread items available.
- Hopefully your personal email will highlight some justification for going to Facebook, but if it doesn’t just go there anyway. Don’t waste your time on applications or silly games – that would be a real waste of time. Spend time reading status updates and looking at photos of people you have never met.
- It’s time now to graze through some of the corporate tools that you have available. Portals and dashboards provide more information than you could possible consume. This can soon be justified as work even when you are only mooching around. Justifiable time wasting is the best form.
- The next activity that is vital to your time wasting credibility is your ability to browse around new sites. The BBC is particularly good for this there are endless possibilities in news and Sport.
If you are in danger of having to do some real work, by getting to the end of the list, you can, at any point, return to the top of the list.
If you have followed the guidelines correctly there should always be something to do.
Also, remember that you can carry on these same distractions when away from the office by use of a SmartPhone or other such device. Location should not be an inhibitor.
Following this recipe should ensure that you always look busy and avoid unnecessary activities that may result in something being produced. Alternatively, you could just redefine these activities as work and then you will have completed everything there is to complete.
Working through this kind of distraction reaction process is what I’m sure many people do and will do, but it isn’t good for you, or for your brain. Being able to cope with the lure of these attention giving sirens will be a defining feature of the future workforce.
Graham Chastney 