Moving the tea room

Last week I talked about mobility and how important it is to the future of companies.  Imagine though that this comes to pass and we enter a future where everyone works from home, there is simply no need to move from your house.  There is no commuting and there are no office buildings everyone works on preassigned tasks.  What would your company be like then?  There are people out there that say your company would be efficient, cost effective and low carbon.  They would be right but what they will have missed is that your company has no soul.  

In general humans are gregarious and furthermore when working together in teams we have a much greater capacity than working in isolation.  Many designs are formed and problems solved not at a stark white desk but in the kitchen, the tea room or around the water cooler.  With a mobile workforce there is no centralised point for chance meetings to occur.

One evening a little while ago I got involved in a discussion of the tea room kind.  It involved a good friend and as well as us several of his friends and a few of mine got involved in a lively debate.  Together we put the world to rights and developed some new friendships to boot, and none of us had left our respective homes.  That’s right we spontaneously created a think tank with no location barrier between us on Facebook.

Having used the word Facebook I’ve sent many of you running for the hills making cross gestures, but you need to reconsider.  Facebook is not evil or a time waster in and of itself, it is simply a mechanism that can enable that behaviour.  It can also enable a lot of good behaviours, used properly this kind of social networking can keep your company’s soul alive even after all the physical locations have be shut down.  It does not have to be Facebook, something that works in a similar way will work too.  It simply needs to give people ways to interact, without censure, so that they can find solutions or inject into someone else's work insights that they have to share.

People will use it when they are at home anyway, you may as well get some benefit out of it.  This kind of social networking is the tip of the iceburg, with much more coming in the future so think about how you can apply it to making your business more sucessful rather than how you stop it.

Working towards invisible travel

For many years now one of the characteristics of work has been that it is a place you go. This requirement has lead to many logistics problems that are continuing to escalate.  We go to work earlier and earlier to find space on crowded roads and in car parks or stand for hours on crowded trains and station platforms.  Not only is this not convenient, rising train fares and petrol costs are making the journeys more costly.  This is not the only cost either as there is significant environmental cost not just as pollution but also as noise and visual intrusion.  The truth is that if we continue as we have been with rising world populations travel will be halted by global gridlock.

Many technological solutions to this problem are being sought in intelligent traffic systems; self driving cars; interactive car networking systems and of course environmentally friendly vehicles.  These may help, certainly in the short term, but the best way of reducing the traffic is for people not to travel in the first place.  Most modern companies have remote access systems but how much do they really use them?  Although I see some technology companies using remote access systems aggressively my feeling is that most “normal” companies see remote access as a nice to have for emergencies rather than as a replacement for travelling to the office.

Sometimes it is the reliability,speed or ease of use of the solutions in place that promote this viewpoint, but more often it is the organisations view of work that is at fault.  Company culture drives a viewpoint that says if you are not in the office you are not working.  Working from home is seen as a euphemism for having a hooky day off and thus frowned upon.  As long as you are in the office you are deemed to be working and all is okay, yet in this lies the requirement that IT groups stop you “playing” with things that are not work.

To truly utilise mobile computing, companies are going to have to change they way they work.  ROWE - Results Only Working Environment was a concept that was one way of achieving this, people are paid for what they deliver, not where they sit.  The theory behind this makes sense however it’s failure to catch on (yet) demonstrates that this is a hard problem to crack.  In it’s extreme ROWE could even become something like Amazons mechanical turk a system that allows posters to submit work that freelance individuals can complete and return.  Companies like pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly have used this kind of concept to dramatically reduce their development costs, posting work and paying a bounty for the first solution to the problem.  These solutions could have applications for many companies, and an impact on the world of work that is currently difficult to predict.

I believe these changes will come in the long run, but in the meantime the key is to work with business managers to show them ways in which they can enable homeworking and yet still feel that the work is happening.  This means connecting HR, Business and IT together.  If it is done well for one part of your organisation then the resulting savings will boost the results of that area leading to others wanting to adopt it.  Just providing the tools and sitting back and waiting for them to be used, as IT departments have for years, cannot change the paradigm.  You have to work at it.

Taxi to the cloud

Earlier this week I sat and listened as a supplier talked to me about the five kinds of cloud.  Once again I see confusion as I believe that this is a digital question, it is either cloud or it is not.  Just because something is not a cloud solution does not mean that it’s the wrong thing to use but labelling it “Private cloud” to keep the CEO off your back or sell your product does not work for me.  As the father to two boys I often have to get them from A to B and as I approach a time in my life where I don’t have a car I started wondering, is owning a car the same as a “private taxi”?

A Taxi frees you from the costs of car ownership and driving but requires you to pay for the service that you actually consume.  Use of a Taxi frees you from concerns about parking, car theft and even more mundane things like purchasing fuel.  It is flexible, can do anything a car can do but can also scale to deal with unusual requirements, for example additional people.  There is also a possibility that in some circumstances it could become unavailable, if for example every Taxi in the area was currently in use.  To ensure best use of the Taxi you need to ensure that you change your working methods slightly for example by ensuring you book the Taxi ahead to ensure it is where you want it when you need it.

A car forces you to take on a number of ownership responsibilities such as ensuring the car is registered, has road tax and MOT and is regularly maintained.  Once you have chosen your car its capabilities are fixed, until you decide you must select another, you cannot scale it to deal with extra passengers for example.  A car can become unavailable through breakdowns, or even through theft none of which can be easily predicted.  It can also become unavailable through routine maintenance, for example when it is in for MOT.  Additionally a car can become unprepared for your requirements causing inconvenience, for example if you neglected to fill with fuel and have a long journey the next day.  Like a Taxi you need to understand how to use a car to its best for example by planning refuelling stops and by arranging a courtesy car during routine maintenance tasks.  On the other hand it’s use generally involves just taking the key from the hook, and it’s often handy additional storage too.

The truth is that although the two seem superficially to be the same because they are both based on a particular physical object, the two things are really very different.  Depending on your circumstances one or the other will prove most appropriate.  In this particular case a Taxi is often used in addition to a Car, for example to solve the additional passenger or car parking problem.

Just as a Car is not a “private taxi”, use of virtualisation products etc. in your data centre services does not represent a “private cloud”.  It is a very advanced corporate setup with many of the same characteristics as the cloud but has a wholly different set of advantages and disadvantages. Your CEO should be happy with that rather than forcing you to buy something with the word Cloud attached to it.

Buying services

A good friend of mine is in the market for a new car.  In the conversation about this significant purchase we talked about how when we were younger we would always look at what was under the bonnet.  It turned out that my friend had decided and bought the vehicle without ever even thinking about doing this.  He simply fully trusted that the car would do what it told him it would in the brochure.  

This experience is not new to us, the same is true of our home telephone; the satellite TV we buy; the electricity our children consume so much of etc.  We buy them and use them when most of us do not have clue about how they work, we simply trust the provider will supply what we want.  99% of the time this works for us but occasionally there will be a feature that we don’t like or that we feel is missing.  When this is the case we put up with not having it because the rest fulfils our need.

The problem comes when someone knowledgeable about the inner workings of a service is asked to organise procuring that service.  This happens quite frequently within organisations when the architect that designed the previous exchange system is asked to outsource email for example.  Their perception of what is necessary is coloured by their previous experience and often has a highly technical flavour, something that the end user will probably never notice.   Small, often infrequently used, facilities that are available in current services are held up to be vital.  This leads to hosted services being customised by vendors at the insistence of the specialists, even though the vendor has not operated the service like that before.  Doing this adds additional delay and quite often makes for a service that does not operate as expected.

When considering the use of cloud services this lack of customisation is often the key objection within the technical areas.  Missing features are highlighted as an absolute no go, despite the fact that they are not often used.   This is the equivalent of rejecting the car purchase because an otherwise perfect vehicle does not have a folding rear arm rest.  The truth is when buying into services as with buying a car you must expect to make some compromises. If your requirements are for a car that does 200mph on a fuel consumption of 100mpg then you either have to wait for something to come along that can do that or compromise on one of those figures.  When buying a car you can usually customise various things but only within a manufacturer controlled range of configurations, this too is true of services. 

If you have a long list of things that have to be changed about a service that are not yet on the vendors option list then either you are not realistically compromising or you are looking at the wrong service.  If this is the case do not be tempted to persuade the vendor to modify the service for you, walk away.   It’s really important that you trust this service and that it just works, persuading the vendor to do things they have never done before is not a great way of achieving this.  I have seen this happen too many times now and I have not yet seen it work out well.  If you cannot find a service that matches your requirement and you are certain you are not being too uncompromising then the market has not yet matured to a point that suits you. 

It is worth noting here that sometimes staff with technical skill can focus on options that they know a cloud service will be unable to provide simply to obstruct the concept.  You need to be sure that the requirements you are unable to meet are business requirements not technical ones.  You can be sure that if business users themselves go out to buy IT services they would be unlikely to look under the hood.   They will assume that the service does what it says on the tin

1984 controlling the users

In corporate IT the main topic of conversation is always management, how will we ensure everything is managed and safe.  Inherent in that discussion is how will we stop users from doing things that they should not?  This is often enhanced by security discussions and user indiscretions, all driving IT to put in place restrictions on what can be done to ensure people conform.  This all adds up to IT departments controlling all aspects of business users digital life.

This is something society can learn from, if we put chips in people so we know where they are and develop technology that can control their actions and ensure they can do no wrong .  We can use this technology to fully monitor them and ensure that they are truly under control and carrying out only the designated tasks in exactly the manner they have been told. That way the world would be a much better and safer place, wouldn’t it?   

Not to me and probably not to you we'd be giving up too much, although there will be some that will be nodding thinking it is a great idea anyway.  The truth is it is in our non adherence to the current way of working  that we discover new and better ways of working.  These ways of working can only come into being if the freedom to change is there, but this does not have to mean anarchy.  It means we have to develop ways of management that can change quickly and respond to new thought, even if we do not believe the idea will work as new ways of working can come from failed experiments too.

Alas most IT departments are not able to act in this flexible manner, technical staff are too often very opinionated about what is right and surprisingly unwilling to change.  This escalates through the organisation and it seems the bigger the IT organisation the slower and more unable to change it becomes.   For example in one organisation I worked for the process for creating a collaboration site involved an official online request which prompted the receipt of a document which had to be filled in and returned prior to a three week SLA on delivery of the site.  The rationale behind this is site management but compare this to the process involved in creating a Google site and you start to get the picture.

This is what makes consumerisation and cloud computing attractive to a business, they see it as a flexible and rapid way of working.  They feel they can come up with new ideas and ways of working that will propel them forward, but underneath they miss that these systems are actually every bit as standardised and restricted as corporate IT, you get what the system delivers and nothing more.  If you have ever wanted to use a flash application on an iPhone or iPad you will already know that, but you probably still think you iDevice is the coolest thing around.

So here is the real trick, you need to provide IT to your business in a way that is managed but feels like it is completely free and cool.  To do this you need to give way on the little things that really don’t matter, like creation of collaboration sites and compensate by absorbing the complexity of managing them.  This applies to the use of consumer technology in business and so much more, you may KNOW that something will not do the job but don’t stop it on this basis allow your business to find it out for themselves.  Set up a small scale pilot, be enthusiastic and supporting , if it goes wrong you can easily clear up if not you learn something too and the business is pleased with your supportive attitude.  Win Win.