Graham Chastney

Bob Parsons talks the same language as me when it comes to voicemail:

I’ve got a few tips for handling voice messages.
I also found it makes sense to be careful as to how you respond to voice messages left on your telephone.

If someone wants me to return a call, I’ve got to know what they want.
If someone just leaves a name and phone number and I don’t know who they are and what they want, I will never return the phone call. This doesn’t, of course, include messages I receive from family and friends.

I very rarely return any voice message.
If someone leaves their name and number with a message without detailing what they want, it’s been my practice to very rarely return the call. For me to return any call, the message has to be understandable, it has to be of immediate interest to me and it has to be something that I want. If a message left on your phone doesn’t meet these criteria, I think it’s nuts to return the call.

Messages left by customers always get handled.
If a customer leaves a message I will always have someone from our customer service department return the call. That assumes of course that the call relates to a problem with one of our products or a question concerning its use. If someone leaves a message saying they are a customer, and then want to sell me something, I smile – because there is no one I appreciate more than customers. That said, these messages are also subject to my earlier requirement of immediate interest and something that I want. Seldom will these calls be returned.

Just to back-up my thesis in “Is Corporate IT Becoming Boring” The latest issue of ACM Queue magazine has an interview with Ray Ozzie in it. He makes these statements:

“In the enterprise, I think if I could wave my wand, there would be some solution that would correct the increasing divide between enterprises and home use. As a software maker, I’m extremely frustrated by the fact that when you look at the market both small business and consumers go to Dell.com, order their computers, and get the latest and greatest version of Microsoft Office and the latest operating system. Then they download all this really neat, new stuff off the Internet. These individuals and smaller businesses are really benefiting from that.

Enterprise, on the other hand, are getting increasingly locked down and conservative because of compliance and CYA issues. I’m worried about that. And I believe enterprises should be concerned about this because it’s impacting their ability to be nimble and adaptive in today’s global market.”

“I’ve already seen people bringing their home laptops into work to do their jobs. People are using a product called Junxion Box, which creates a bridge from high speed commercial 3G data services to Wi-Fi, to create their own non-IT-managed wireless clouds within corporate boundaries so they can work in the office as they do at home.

I only see this bifurcation between the home and office experience becoming an increasing problem.”

Over the last few months I seem to be finding myself in conversation after conversation with skilled, even brilliant, IT people who are bored by what they are doing. I have to admit to a certain level of the same feelings myself.

Is IT becoming boring?

There is an old saying that us parents have repeated to our children throughout generation: “only boring people get bored”. Could this be the answer? I have known most of these guys for a long time and they are anything but boring.

Is it that there is nothing new in IT, nothing to get us going? Well I don’t think so, there is loads of change. New ways to interact, new ways to communicate, new equipment. We have all revelled in change over the years.

Is it a time of life issue? Most of us are approaching or into our 40’s; a time which normally bring a time of questioning for people and even a mid-life crisis. There is a little bit of that feeling in our boredom. Some of the guys have changed employer in the last 12 months which helped for a while, but no for long.

Is it that the particular area of IT where we are primarily working has become dull? We are all involved in the corporate IT space, we are not out there on the Internet, we are primarily dealing with customers and their internal IT issues. This is a big part of the problem.

So why has corporate IT become dull for us middle-aged hands (none of us would call ourselves old-hands)? I think the answer is simple – innovation. No one is doing any innovation, they are all following, like lemmings, the same road as everyone else. The problem for most of us is that these road are so slow and we’ve walked them all to often already. Customers have become obsolescence focussed and not innovation focussed.

I’m upgrading my email because it’s going out of support – not – we need to move towards an all encompassing collaborative environment that enables our employees to communicate in a variety of different way.

I’m moving to Windows XP because support for Windows NT 4.0 has ended – not – I want to revisit the way that we deliver applications and data to our staff.

I want you to work out how to deliver 2000 different applications to all of these desktops – not – lets undertake a radical review of our applications with a view to making applications accessible and integrated into the organisation processes.

Save me £xxx off my server support costs by getting rid of people – not – I want to review the cost drivers for our existing server environment so that we can look at automating the costly items and invest the savings into the delivery of innovative solutions to our user community.

The other day I linked to a report that from Thinking Faster about innovation. I wasn’t surprised by this report at all, it was depressingly familiar – innovation is a current management fad and isn’t resulting in very much that is actually new.

Has corporate IT finally moved from settler to settled, from trailblazer to couch-potato? Or is there a whole word out there ready to revolutionise corporate IT, deliver a new business model and give us all something to get excited about?

Well there are some glimmers of hope, it seems we are seeing another turn of the centralisation cycle. IT has always tried to centralise everything. Every time that centralisation has just about been completed, something new springs up and it all bursts open again. This happened with the Vax, it happened with the PC, it happened with LAN’s, it happened with file services, it happened with email.

Each time that something new has sprung up outside the control of the corporate IT organisation, it has grown and flourished until it has then been bought under the control of corporate IT. The primary concern of corporate IT has been cost. The way that cost is reduced is centralisation.

Because the focus of centralisation is cost, the flexibility of the service that has allowed it to flourish isn’t a priority and largely ignored. Once centralised the service stagnates because it hasn’t been designed for flexibility. The IT organisation has also placed itself into a position so that it can’t properly assess the risk of change because the impact is to the entire organisation change happens slowly if at all.. How is this stagnation broken, historically it has been by a new service springing up in the decentralised environment.

So what is happening in the new thing that is springing up in the decentralised environment? Over the last few months I have been speaking to a lot of organisations about increasing the flexibility in the client environment. These are organisation who have soaked in the Gartner TCO mantra. The problem with this mantra is that it tends to ignore the other side of the equation – value.

These organisations are realising that there are a whole set of individuals and teams for whom a low IT cost also means a low value. In general these individuals and teams aren’t low cost entities, they are high cost. Providing a more flexible environment to these teams would enable them to generate a significantly higher value. This may also lead a higher cost, but the value far outweighs the cost. Rather than regarding all individuals who look at new things as an organisation problem they are starting to regard them as a good thing – as innovators. These organisations are recognising their own stagnation and are looking for a way out of it, and that necessitates IT innovation as well.

The IT organisations that don’t embrace this issue are likely to loose control of an increasing amount of the IT estate as the organisation that they are supporting needs to innovate. Rather than delivering controlled release they risk anarchy, and that will cost more than the controlled flexibility that the organisation craves.

Get ready for the innovation evolution.

I have always had loads of problems with multiple calendars and having to cross reference across things. It’s one of the reasons that the only definitive calendar I run is the one on bits of paper. The technology has just not helped, and it’s been like that forever.

Along comes Ray Ozzie who describes the problem:

For years, as many of you, my work life has involved significant travel.  As significant bi-coastal coordination has now entered into the mix, things have gotten even more complicated for me, for my wife, for my assistant and hers.  In order to stay on the same page, each of us has the need for (limited) visibility into aspects of each others’ calendars and schedules.  Each of us has a mix of private, shared, and public events and meetings that we’re tracking.

Some of these we edit privately and publish to others.  (This itself has posed significant challenges – particularly sharing partial information from confidential calendars.)  The most challenging calendars we deal with are those that are “shared”, such as the family calendar my wife and I jointly maintain, or the calendars we share with outside groups – such as the meeting calendars of volunteer organizations.

It’s tough because we use a mix of different email/calendaring systems – corporate as well as non-corporate, web-based as well as client-based.  And to each of us it makes sense to want to edit the calendar in our own PIM application of choice where we do all our calendaring and scheduling work – not within calendaring systems on other various websites.

And then describes an answer to the problem:

And so we created an RSS extension that we refer to as Simple Sharing Extensions or SSE.  In just a few weeks time, several Microsoft product groups and my own ‘concept development group’ built prototypes and demos, and found that it works and interoperates quite nicely.

Just like that. Yes please. Let’s hope that this really takes off and that I can have a great synchronisation experience for all of those things that I have wanted synchronised forever; calendars, contacts, reading lists.

The one I didn’t see in Ray’s list was the ‘wish list’, why should I need to maintain a different wish list at each online store I visit. I should have one wish list and allow each store to show the ones that they stock.

Thanks Ray. I hope the rest of your blogs have this same level of impact.

Everyone seems to want to be a Technology Evangelist these days, some of them are, but some of them aren’t. Some of them are glorified sales people, some of them are really zealots.

Let me explain:

The dictionary definitions of ‘Evangelist’ are all Christian and relate to someone who takes ‘good news’ from place to place for the purpose of converting them to Christianity. In technology terms I am assuming that those people who call themselves Evangelists are doing so because they want us to convert to their particular version of ‘good news’.

The thing about an Evangelist is that they believe what they are preaching.

If you want to be an evangelist for something then you need to realise that you need to be in it for the long haul. You can’t just see it as a job, this is something that you believe in. This is clearly not your usual sales person!

Scoble has been talking recently of being offered more money to go somewhere else but he is demonstrating some belief and staying at Microsoft (Can’t find the link, ah). Dave Winer; there’s another evangelist (even if he doesn’t call himself one), he believes in what he creates, he doesn’t just create it so he can make loads of money from it.

A zealot is different. The dictionary definitions for zealot  talk about being fanatical; being part of a sect; being partisan. It’s this word partisan that is the key one. A partisan is someone who exhibits blind, prejudiced and unreasoning allegiance.

I don’t hear of many people wanting to be a technology zealot, but you know what, there are plenty of them around. My arena is primarily the desktop and collaboration arena so it may just be my arena, but I don’t think so.

How many of us have had a reasoned debate on the merits of Notes/Domino v Exchange/Outlook? This one is a great one for the zealots. Mention anything about either technology and you will get some wise-crack answer from the other side. It’s great. Sometimes I enjoy bating them. Both sides miss one huge thing sitting right in front of them though – neither is dominant in the market place for a reason and that is because both are good enough and both have their place. The other thing they miss is that the debate has moved way past them and on to collaboration and neither of these products has the answer to collaboration question. If the answer lay in these two products alone IBM and Microsoft wouldn’t be investing billions in other technologies – as they are. I have experience in both, there are bits of both that I think are terrible, there are bits which I think are great. Ask me which I would choose and I would tell you that it depends – but it doesn’t depend on technical squabbles (I’m faster than you are?) it depends on all sorts of other things. It’s that inability of the zealot to see the bigger picture that ultimately hurts us as an industry.

So what is it about the IT industry that breeds zealots? As IT people we like to think that we are all scientific and business like but that’s just rubbish. The fact that we have Evangelists demonstrates that. This industry is more like a religion to most of the people in it; and the thing about the people in this industry is that they don’t represent the society as a whole. We are a predominantly a small sub-section of people with a particular set of characteristic. I’ve been doing a reasonable amount of interviewing recently and this has been confirmed over-and-over again. Perhaps it’s time that we started a rehabilitation programme for all of us IT people; something that gets us out into society and shows us the bigger picture. Notes v Exchange – who cares. Farming subsidies resulting in thousands of children starving to death every year – now that’s an issue…

I’m off now to have lunch with some colleagues, old and not so old. We’ll talk a bit about technology, but most importantly we’ll talk about LIFE, try it some time.