Category: Weblogs

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.

IT Power Consumpton

SleepJonathan Schwartz talks to the issue of IT power consumption particularly in the data centre. In true American fashion his main reasoning is the cost of oil and the cost of real estate. The environment gets a tiny mention;  even tinier than his dig at Dell and their delivery of servers that consume huge amounts of power.

Even so, an industry wide initiative to reduce power and heat would be most welcome.

Stu applies Emergency Service Best Practice Incident Management to IT

Maize MazeStu: “The important thing with any incident is command and control with an associated communications plan. So often I see outages where one engineer is working on resolution but is constantly pulled away from the task to talk to his manager, then the service delivery manager, then the account manager, then the project manager …….. and on and on.”

Typepad – New Features

Outlook

New features in TypePad mean that I can now include a feed in my side-bar with ease, so I’ve added my del.icio.us feed and a feed for Happenings. I’ve already found them quite useful myself.

You’ll have to visit the site to see though. Alternatively you could subscribe to the feeds that I’m presenting. It’s a free world out there so I’ll let you decide.

(Typing still slow, but getting there)

Changing Bad Habits

Snail

I have had a bad back for the last few weeks and of course it is all my fault. Poor posture and terrible typing style had to take their toll eventually.

So I have decided that it is time to learn how to type touch properly. I have been learning for a few days now. Why is it so difficult to change these things? I can read a book and take in a good deal of what it says without any problems; but why is it so difficult to tell my left hand that it’s the right hands job to press the ‘y’ key.

Perhaps thats the way other people feel when we change their IT. Over the years I have seen all sorts of definitions which characterise people and their resistance to change; but never a definition of change types that people can cope with. I don’t think that all types of change affect people in the same way. Perhaps it’s about time that we stopped branding people as resistant to change when it’s only certain types of change that they are resistant to.

(writing this took ages)

Longhorn (heart) RSS

Maize Maze

I love to watch enthusiast people – it’s infectious, and this team are certainly enthusiastic.

The RSS team at Microsoft demonstrate what they have been doing in this Channel 9 video. They do a great job of talking through the importance of building subscription right into the bedrock of the platform.

We are going to have great fun as Infrastructure people working out how that impacts on the infrastructure that we deliver. Content providers are also going to have to consider the impact of their actions, and that could be fun. Imagine the corporate environment where a huge number of individuals have chosen to automatically download enclosures and someone decided to add a 200MB file into the enclosure set. Within a very short period of time those enclosures are on there way down to every device.

It has to be the way to go, though. The challenge is dealing with the human behaviour changes that will be required.

RSS – What?

Castle Howard

Do you ever wish that you could be told that a web page has been updated rather than going and looking and finding all of the same old stuff that was there last time you looked.

Well that’s what RSS is about. You don’t need to know what it means, like you don’t need to know what DVD means.

RSS allows you to subscribe (or syndicate) to a web page and to be told about updates. This blog, like most blogs, supports it.

So how do you get to use it?

Well there are a number of different ways. If you want help deciding which is best for you please leave a comment with some contact details and I’ll get back to you.

One way is to install a program on your computer. There are loads of these, but I’ll focus on a couple of free ones for now.

Sue is using RSS Popper which plugs into Microsoft Outlook. All of the updates appear as if they are emails. You can sort them, search them, just in the same way as when you use email. You can also click on links start your browser and see all of the content as if it were on a web site.

The other favourite around is RSS Bandit. This is a dedicated program and doesn’t require anything like Outlook. I’ve not personally used RSS Bandit, but friends have and quite like it.

The other alternative is to use a web site which brings together all of the subscriptions. One of these in NewsGator Online, another is Bloglines. I don’t directly use either of these, so I’m not in a position to recommend, but I’m sure I could help if you have an issue.

The really great thing about RSS is that it is getting everywhere. You can now subscribe to news directly from the BBC, you don’t need to go and look at the BBC web site to get all of the news, you can have it delivered.

Why spend time going from site to site trying to  wok out if something is new, or not. Get told that new stuff is available and what it is.

Write your password down?!?!?

Fruit Cocktails

The Register highlights the ongoing debate started (this time) by Jesper Johansson about writing passwords down. Apparently we are all supposed to be used to controlling access to bits of paper.

Jesper was at Tech-Ed and he made some comment about this there. One of his arguments was about single-sign-on solutions. His point was that these systems drive to the lowest common denominator and hence are bad. He’d rather people write different, complicated passwords down.

I have mixed feelings about writing passwords down.

Firstly, if users write passwords down on the same piece of paper, they may as well just have the same password for every system. If they loose the piece of paper, they have lost all of their access and all of the systems are compromised. This is the same as having the same password for everything.

Secondly, organisations need to start differentiating systems on the basis of the importance of the information. Some businesses do this, but many don’t. For these systems it should never be acceptable to write your password down. Single sign-on solutions should be used to simplify the general purpose systems, but not the important systems.

Thirdly, I’m not sure the assertion that people are used to protecting bits of paper is true. Just look at how much credit card fraud goes on after people have thrown credit card statements, etc. away, in an in controlled way.

The biggest issue, as always, is user experience and education. People need to realise the potential consequences of their actions. This type of education is sadly lacking, it’s also not easy to give. The technology does not provide a clear indication of impact or consequences. If someone were to drop a carton outside my house containing nuclear material, I would know immediately that what it contains is very dangerous. I also know that there are certain handling rules. I know all of this from a couple of pictures on the side of the carton. If I start an application, how do I know what the handling rules are for the data held within it. Even if it was communicated within the application it wouldn’t be in anything like as intuitive a way as the one on the side of the carton of nuclear material. If people are going to have a piece of paper with their passwords on it, they need handling rules, and those handling rules need to be different for each password.

Uwe Hermann makes a similar point.

Blog Fun (Typepad Fun?)

Foxgloves

Had some fun today with my blogs. When going through them every other entry was corrupted in some way so that it didn’t display. All of the information was still there, I just needed to re-publish the posts – very strange.

So if you see any other funnies please let me know. (And they don’t just need to be technical funnies)

Fred Wilson Says it Better Than Me

Derwentwater, Cumbria

Last week I had a bit of a go at the way that we build online communities in exactly the same way we build real communities.

One of my issues was the need to for the ‘Top 100 Lists’. Why is it important how many links a person gets?

Seems I wasn’t the only one having the same thoughts Fred Wilson who probably appears on most of the Top 100 Lists has made his views very clear.>

To paraphrase from the famous Treasure of Sierra Madre line, we don’t need no lists and I don’t want to be on any stinking lists!

He then goes on to say:

And if everybody is directed to read the “A list” bloggers, we’ll miss all the best stuff which is being blogged by people who get maybe 100 to 1000 readers.

But there is an interesting thing here; because he is on the list, people link to him, and in so doing drives the thoughts of the entire community. His list of trackbacks is impressive.

Back to my whole point of the last blog though, why do we need to build hierarchy? Do we hope to get a greater standing in the community if we can demonstrate how popular we are? Our human need to be popular is strong, and so is our need for position.

Do Virtual Communities reflect Real Communities?

Icy Derwentwater

I have been giving some thought to the following question over the last few days:

As the Internet becomes a more social media do the communities that are being created simply reflect normal face-to-face communities or are we seeing something different?

The first thing that got me thinking was the reaction to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s statements in a speech at Lambeth Palace. The Observer had an interesting commentary on it, and received some interesting comment.

The second thing that got me thinking was the Blog ranking game that technorati and others get into. Feeding on from that I wondered why these sites were popular, but why does it matter that they are popular?

And then third, I was reading Robert X. Cringley’s article about ‘predicting the future’ where he goes on to talk about the likes of Bill Gates trying to influence the market.

There are some really good articles around on the sociology of virtual communities. Even today Steve publishes an article on Microsoft Published Research. Although we talk regularly we hadn’t talked about this, so it’s interesting that we are both thinking the same way (is it just the market influencing us). I considered not even posting this because there is obviously a load of good material in there that I wasn’t even aware of until just now.

Having done a bit of searching around I came across an article by Nancy White who starts “Search the web and you will find dozens and dozens of discussions on the definition and existence of online communities” too right Nancy. She ten goes on to bring together a whole load of definitions of community.

So community is a big deal on the internet.

But here is my problem, each of the definitions that people are working towards, or seem to be working towards, regard the internet as a group of individuals with little or not hierarchy; in a sense completely egalitarian. But my experience is that it isn’t like that at all. As in real life, we are all equal, it’s just that some people are more equal than others.

Install any blog aggregator and you will get a list of popular blogs already completed for you. You are immediately drawn to these entities. It’s a bit like having the most popular choices in the supermarket at eye level so you notice it.

We (yes me included) read the blog of people like Robert Scoble because of the access he has in Microsoft. We don’t read it just because he’s a ‘good bloke’. A huge part of why we read is because he is the mouth piece of one of the most powerful organisations on the planet, and a very rich man. Jonathan Schwartz, the same, if he wasn’t some important guy in Sun would we care what he says. This is exactly the same as in the real world, where we listen to the words of people like Bill Gates because they have a position and the extent of that position is far broader than the position they have got to on merit alone.

Why does Technorati’s Top 100 Blogs list, even matter? And why do I care that I’m 343,593? This is exactly the same as in the real world where we are constantly checking league tables for one thing or another.

I think that Virtual Communities do indeed reflect Real Communities and where Virtual communities are influenced by the Real Community in which they operate.

There are, of course, individuals and communities which do operate according to merit, but even they are influenced by the communities around them and in turn by real communities. And likewise they will try to use their position in the virtual community to influence the real community. David Winer has a huge influence on the virtual community which he has gained through his own merits; so why did that give him any credibility to influence people’s voting decisions in the Presidential election.

For that matter, why should anyone listen to me in any community, against any other community I am a member of.

I suppose what I am saying is that the split between Virtual Communities and Real Communities is a completely false one. We all exist within a number of different communities. Each of these communities utilises different media to build the relationship which is required to make that community work. Sometimes the media will impact on who are the influencers within that community. Sometimes the media will impact on the reach of a community. But the media doesn’t create a different community model

Within my immediate family community we spend time together and communicate by talking, mainly over a meal. It’s a close community which would be much poorer if all we did was communicate via email.

My extended family all live away so we communicate and build relationship utilising the phone (mainly) and the occasional visit. We speak regularly because it’s an important community.

My church family meets together every Sunday, but the mail place where we build community is in our small groups. For us we need to understand community in a Christian context.

My flickr community is made up of people who I know from my work community, my friend community and people who have seen my stuff and like it. And because flickr understands the importance of social interaction they give me the ability to make and receive comments as well as to build contacts. While there is no immediately apparent pecking-order there is certainly a lot of pride in having a picture noticed by others.

I contribute to www.geograph.co.uk and become part of another community. Geograph is another place where the community has a hierarchy; this time it’s based on how many pictures you contribute.

The blog gets a few comments (very few) but actually get a reasonable number of comments via other media. I try to increase the coverage by making comments on other people’s blog, I try and be noticed. I try to make my mark within a large community. I try and link my flickr community with my blog community by using the pictures from flickr in my blog and by linking to my blog in flickr.

I add myself to feedmap.net, someone notices and I become part of another community.

The media is different, the communication is at different levels, but they are all community. As such they are all interlinked, via me. They all have hierarchies, and my place in each of them is different (normally near the bottom). None of these communities is completely isolated from the influence of other communities and none of these communities is a true meritocracy.

Sounds just like real life and real community, really.

 

 

Happy Bunny – NewsGator 2.5 and Read Counts

Derwentwater, Cumbria

I am happy today, because I now have read counters updating in NewsGator 2.5. Brilliant. I use two machine (most of the time, today it’s three) and it was really difficult to be clear about what I had read. Now I know.

I’m starting to worry though about how impressed I am with the simple things.