Making IT Happen

In the past week I have seen a number of tech stories about something to do with still and moving images and how they are obtained, managed, changed and stored. One example was a strange Japanese shadow lamp , which uses cameras to record the activities of a friend in their home, and then projects this as shadows inside a lamp in your home. Another is a clever bit of software that reviews your photos, and suggests replacements for things you don't want in them, be it a jutting roof or an ex-boyfriend. I also saw a project called Spellbinder which matches images and locations (although I have read the text three times and still can't figure out exactly what it does).

Point is that more and more technologies appear to resolve around images. In some ways it seems like we are grappling towards a set of rules and techniques for managing and using this data that will eventually parallel concepts such as the relational database. This seems likely to have a huge impact on any business that uses images in some way. It's certainly got me thinking about ours.

Sometimes it seems that success is the elephant in the room of the IT industry.
An IT director once told me that the IT industry should take collective responsibility for some of the “high-profile IT project failures”. He went on to say that these failures have forever tainted CEOs against IT.

I beg to differ. I don’t think my CEO really cares about someone else’s projects, as long as we deliver his. And, while I am happy to keep the sackcloth and ashes on hand for my own foul-ups, should I really be expected to wear them for someone else’s?

Mind you, if I should, then I should also be able to wear the finery of the IT industry’s successes. So here’s my list of the seven wonders of the IT world. (And, forgive me, although I am sure Eniac was wonderful, I have focused on the past 10 years.)

See extended entry!

I've heard a lot over the years about flexible working but have never seen anything to match the Interpolis head office in Holland. 3,000 people work there but the space is hard to recognise as an office - it's a mad mixture of all different types of space. I've seen this kind of thing in groovy PR companies but not on this scale - there's over 5,000 square metres of this on the ground floor in 10 completely different 'club' areas - and in a 'boring' insurance company.

I'll post some more pictures of this and other offices I've seen over the past 2 days on a trip to look at new ways of working, new combinations of people, place, process, culture and technology. This was oragnised by Phillip Ross at Unwired - a leading thinking in this area. Here's a few tasters...one of their meeting rooms...

...an 'office'

a room that defies description, but is used for confidential meetings - the chairs have acoustic deadening on the inside and no sound escapes - you really cant hear what they are saying

...

...and a more traditional conference room

the technology is pervasive but unobtrusive - more on this tomorrow, but in short - I'm inspired

Following on from yesterdays bog about new approaches to this, i went to three offices in Holland. The first was DELA, a company that insures funeral costs and provides funeral services

Each of their meeting rooms is known by its colour

and there is a wide range of types of workspace

We then went to the offices of Veldhoen, the consultants that developed all three projects. they had a curious chandelier in their reception. I know what it reminded me of but this is a family blog

This is one of their meeting rooms with a North African theme but also developed around the verbal culture of the region - no tables for taking notes - everything is discussed

Their general work areas are more like a club than an office

And finally to Interpolis, as mentioned yesterday. The main underlying themes here were:

• people - everyone is empowered and trusted. I know this sounds a bit trite but there were many examples of this in action - for example they ring up their own food items in any of the 11 restaurants in the building.
• workspace - you can see for yourself the wide range of spaces
• process - everything is based around digital flow - so you'll in the call centre photos there is no paper - in fact it doesnt look like a call centre
• technology - this ends up being fairly low key - everyone has a laptop and they just hook it up wherever they want.
• culture - the Dutch are a wonderful people (similar to the English in that they are tall, independent minded and enjoy toilet humour, but different in that they are all healthy and attractive and have good teeth - at least that makes them different from me). This shines through at Interpolis where the overall impression is one of relaxed order, good sense and vitality

Looks more like a starbucks than an office 

This is one of their call centres. An example of empowerment is that each of the call centre staff can negotiate and close claims themselves. There is literally no paperwork, and you could feel the efficiency in your fingertips.

...another type of workspace...

...and another....

...and another - I like the lights...

...a very smart meeting room - the one next dor had 5cm pile carpet on the table surface

In summary I have never seen the five things referred to in the title of this post brought together so well and to the obvious benefit of all stakeholders - why cant every workplace be like this?

The Register are running pics today of what's supposed to be RIM's first touchscreen model. I like the look of the rotating 'keyboard'. RIM won't confirm the story.

Much reaction to Steve Jobs saying "There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk." Most of the news sites interpret this as Jobs saying that sub $500 computers are junk, but that's not the way I read it - he's just saying it's not his sector.

I think netbooks will grow and grow - RM are shifting huge volumes of their RM Asus miniBook in the schools market, and it's clearly not junk.

This is why Microsoft's announcement of Windows Azure is so interesting. They seem to have half thrown in the towel by accepting that more and more software can be cloud based - but that there will still be a need for client software and (my implication, not theirs) powerful PC's.

My view?

Corporate users need to be able to use MS applications - Outlook, Word and Excel - on the move. Netbooks aren't beefy enough to support these - we have users with 2GB mailboxes, and those who use 20MB spreadsheets.

If connectivity was good enough this wouldn't matter - they could just run their MS applications on the server and access them from a netbook. (almost all the rest of our corporate applications are server based) But it isn't. We've been running 3G cards for 6 months now and they are flaky unless you stay in one place with good connectivity - it's a bit like using a mobile phone in 1992.

Better connectvity will drive smaller form factor devices like netbooks, and support the shift of applications to the cloud, but it will take 3 to 5 years for these trends to fully materialise.

An amusing article on The Register Channel site - the site is required reading for the thinking reseller. "Now might be a good time for CIO Magazine to stop bugging chief information officers and IT managers about their IT spending plans. Its surveys are killing us."

There's a story on BBC today about an Australian court granting permission to serve papers via Facebook.

Serving papers is a costly and complex process. Could we get to the point where electronic addresses have as much legal 'meaning' as physical addresses? And at what point does an electronic address become an electronic identity? For example, if you can serve papers to a 'place' in Facebook could you serve them a 'person' in Second Life?

Scanning through the Digital Britain report the following recommendations seemed most relevant to a corporate CIO working in B2B rather than B2C:

1 - Intellectual property protection - bad, in that if your staff use your network to abuse intellectual proeprty, the risks grow.

2 - Universal broadband - good for homeworking staff in marginal locations, bad for cost (we've got around 500 copper lines installed - £3K a year)

3 - Public service content - good to the extent that these improve government to business (G2B?) services 

4 - Wireless infrastructure - good promotion of extended 3G / next generation coverage

5 - BBC - good extension of the BBC's role as content provider - they are surely the UK's content provider of choice

CW site has a summary of the report and responses here

Interesting link on The Register to a report which concludes that Moore's law is losing it's practical application. Two main reasons:

• Chip speed increases are being driven my multiple cores not clock speed - and software design doesn't generally support the threading needed to exploit multi-cores.
• The econmics of sticking with Moore's law aren't working - as each new chip generation comes out chip-makers are seeing lower demand spikes - this means they are having to extend the generations to make the investment pay.

This chimes with what I'm seeing at the moment - making investments pay, rather than being at the cutting edge. Overall, probably a good thing for the corporate perception of the IT function.

Today's issue of the UK cyber security strategy coincides with a dinner I went to earlier in the week. At the dinner a security expert demonstrated various types of electronic surveillance, including a £50 gsm bug that can be left under a table and will call a programmed number whenever there is a conversation in the room, relaying the conversation. We also discussed the capabilities of systems like the (mythical?) Echelon system, which can filter information needles from data haystacks. Hackers are one thing, but this stuff is truly scary.

This got me thinking about my own antennae for cyber security risks, and what questions a CIO should be asking about the security of their information:

• for each of my major customers, suppliers and other organisations I do business with, how useful would it be for them to know what I know?
• would they go to the lengths of using electronic surveillance to find out what I know?
• how capable would they be of finding out? Are there people or organisations that would help them?
• if they did (or already were) would I have any means of detecting this?