For new working your staff need new contracts

Did you know that the design of the Space Shuttle was constrained by the width of two horses?  This sounds completely irrelevant however it is significant in the way that we currently work in the office of today.  The reason for the constraint was that the booster for the ship is transported by rail, and thus its dimensions are influenced by the width of the track.  The width of the tracks heads down a long line that ultimately started with the width of a Roman road being created to allow the passage of two horses.

Legacy decisions have a big influence in IT as a whole and many of us juggle these day to day.  Sometimes these legacies are barriers to new ways of working and yet they are totally outside the influence of the IT department.  One of the key barriers to Mobility, Social networking and ultimately the cloud sits with man management and the HR department.  As with the two horses this barrier is deeply ingrained and difficult to work around, as it is rooted in people and their perception of the world.

I am talking about the view that an individual attending a place of work is working.  All I have to do is attend a place of work for 7.5 hours a day and I am working, even if I sit doing nothing all day.  To counter me doing so I have a manager that drives me to fill my time noting if I am sitting cross legged reading magazines and chasing me up.  Herein lies the first barrier to new ways of working, I have to be under the managers nose so that he can see that I am not working..

Suppose though he can see me sitting on the compute typing away seemingly engrossed.  10 years ago he was happy that I was working, but now he suspects I am on Facebook or Twitter wasting my time so has to come and look closer.  Herein lies another barrier how do you tell "good" Facebook use from bad...better to do without.

So the attendance method of judging working drives us to a place where we must reduce mobility and ban social media. It also slows the adoption of the cloud through non PC devices as productive use cannot be determined from other uses.  It is clear then if we are to reach the mobile and social future in the cloud that we envisage HR has to start thinking of other ways to write employment contracts.

When I first wrote of this four or five years ago it was to highlight a method called ROWE.  Results Only Work Environment envisaged a way of working where you were paid for the results the employer wished for rather than for attendance.  In a clear indication that the import of this need has not yet been understood ROWE has withered away, but it's underlying ethos still applies.  Definition of work through the required result would let us stop worrying about what people are doing and just view the result.  If they choose to stay in bed till 11 in the morning and read Facebook during all the rest of the daylight hours it does not matter if the expected report is competently delivered for the laid down deadline.  This of course includes getting all of the necessary input from others, so to a degree the way of working can also define itself.

Once free of attendance management organisations can begin to fly.  The barrier to getting there though is huge and I for one feel my own concerns about working in that way on a personal level.  It is pretty scary because it forces responsibility for your own output onto you, rather than leaving it with your manager.  This strips away your shield and makes you feel on the spot, yet this is exactly why it could revolutionise our businesses and our lives in a positive mobile and social manner.

Windows 8 thoughts

Having gained some distance from Windows 8 now I am seriously beginning to wonder about what the true purpose of this OS is going to be.  I believe that the Metro App part of the system is probably going to be the make or break, not just for the operating system but possibly also for the company.

I say this because the underlying "desktop" part of the windows 8 system is really just windows as we know it.  We can use the applications that we are currently using on our current windows machines here, in much the same way as we always have with little interference from touch etc.  Metro, however, is touch focused and the real kicker will be if people develop metro applications for corporate functions such as Finance and HR.  Now when you start thinking that through questions appear, for instance: do you want the excel spread sheet you work on every day to have finger fat dimensions?  Or do you want to see as many numbers on the page as possible in a not very finger friendly view?  My suspicion is that you will do business in the "normal" desktop way to maximise information availability and that Metro apps will be reserved for Angry birds and weather applications etc.

If by some quirk of fate finger friendly business applications develop then it will be a race as to whether they are implemented on IOS or Metro first.  The truth here is that IOS is currently a much bigger market and it has a strong business fashion driver too.   Not only that I think that usable windows desktop tablets will be significantly more expensive than even the new iPad3.  In this race I think IOS will win.

We could truly be seeing the last few years of windows PC's, but my I think that actually this is a dual market we actually need a different tool to work on compared to the tool we consume information on.  For my part I am still really enjoying using my windows 7 tablet, and I thank the iPad for driving the convertible tablet to its death.

Windows 8

So I decided that in the Samsung Slate 7 I had the perfect device to test windows 8 out.  I made a system image then went ahead and did the upgrade, really to see what the difference would be.  If I was being honest I expected it to cause me issues and I was not disappointed.

Unlike the touch elements of the iPad the touch elements of Windows 8 were not particularly intuitive.  Initially I struggled to get anything I wanted to do done, but gradually I discovered the gestures that would give me the control I needed.  With a little work I manage to tease the device back to a setup that will nearly let me use it as my day to day computer, but I am still not quite sure if I will use it at work tomorrow or whether I will restore the windows 7 image.

Perversely my problem is the touch!  It does work brilliantly if all I want to do is consume media or browse the web.  Alas where it fails is in making the creation of new documents as easy as the windows 7 pen/touch combination.  The reason for this is that the handwriting input box is now huge, non re sizable and worse the touch stays active while it is in view.  This means if you touch any part of the screen with any part of your hand everything falls apart.  Using this on the train, as I usually do every day, is going to prove quite a challenge.

The Dell tablet I used a while ago had a great solution to this.  There was an option that allowed the touch to be turned off as soon as the pen was detected.  It stayed off until the screen was double tapped with a finger restoring the touch sensitivity.  When I got the Samsung this was missing and I struggled with the tablet so I wrote my own program to allow me to turn touch off.  This made everything work well for me, but alas this program does not work for Windows 8.  Not only does the program not actually do anything if you turn the touch off in the registry then you completely loose the ability to have the keyboard pop up (which could be a Samsung driver issue?).  If Windows 8 had the Dell solution built in by default then just by using Ritepen 4 the computer could become useful again.

So now I am not sure whether the Pen/Touch powered computer of my future vision is ever going to come.  I am however going to keep my hopes up and assume that as Windows 8 moves to release it will mature and become the operating system of my hearts desire.