adoption curve dot net

This has been kicking around at the back of my subconscious for a while, partly born of frustration with organisation systems like GTD. It’s not that there’s fundamental flaws with them, so much as there are fundamental limitations to how organised I can be. That’s partly why I don’t have a lot of time for 43 Folder-style blogs – the constant striving towards GTD nirvana strikes me as too reminiscent of Catholic attitudes to sin. By any objective standard I seem to be reasonably well-organised, as far as it’s possible to be self-aware of this – but comparison with the true devotees of the One True Way To Organisation just leave me feeling depressed at how slovenly my pile of “stuff to look at” has become.

Then I came across isochrones – geographical maps with a temporal overlay – so they can answer questions such as “how long will it take me to get to point A from point B?” The best examples I’ve seen were produced by MySociety, and were “heatmaps” of travelling time via public transport which you could also overlay housing costs. These enabled you to ask multi-variable questions like “where can I afford to live within an hour of work?”

I started wondering whether there are implied isochrones around daily activities. If you look at someone’s desk – or pretty much any space, for that matter – the more important something is, the closer it’s kept. My iPhone is generally never more than an arm’s length away, because it’s my primary means of communication and access to my email, calendar, contacts, to-do list and the kind of photographs that would in earlier times be kept in a wallet. I might not be able to lay my hands on a pen unless I’m at my desk, because I tend not to physically write anything when I’m not sat down.

And when it comes to work, the same patterns apply. Working materials are directly in front of us, and the more useful the article the more likely that it’ll be within easy reach. That also applies to the tchozkes that we surround ourselves with, too – photos of the kids are usually pinned up in clear view. [I can't find the reference at the moment, but when the UK's Department of Work and Pensions embarked on a pointy-haired programme of "efficiency improvements" by enforcing at HR-driven-disciplinary-point a "clear desk policy", the thing that *really* upset people wasn't the fact that they were being told to keep their pencils in a drawer. Instead, it was the insistence on tidying away the kind of personal items that soften the right angles of work environments - the photos, the monitor pets, the post-it notes with shopping list-type scribbles. Oh, and being told where the right place to keep a banana was.]

Unimportant stuff gets pushed away. If you suddenly need to find something that you’ve not used or thought about in weeks, the chances are it’s going to be *under* something. In fact, if it’s in clear view, the chances are you’re going to overlook it, because we’re almost conditioned to expect finding something lost to be more complicated than it turns out to be. Reference materials are filed, if you’re lucky and organised. But either way, immediate personal space is populated by the important and relevant.

All of which is a (very) roundabout way of wondering if we could take this one stage further, and use proximity as a metaphor for urgency in an organisational tool. What if you could use physical – or virtual – distance as a means of organisation? Imagine a system where tasks existed in a (probably pseudo) three-dimensional, and gradually encroached as the urgency became greater. The larger something loomed, the more important it is – and reprioritisation would be done by “pushing” items away, back into the future as it were.

I suppose that categorisation could probably be overlaid, as well – imagine work tasks raining down from above, while personal stuff sneaked in from left field. Switching context from one to the other could be as simple as moving your head to the side, to bring a new context into view. And if physical location could be tied into this somehow, you’d have a situation where the context of tasks could be directly related to where you were at that moment – so work tasks would only rain down in work, and the list of things you were supposed to pick up from the shops would only appear when some kind of near-field trigger alerted the system to the fact that you were entering the mall.

Would it work? I’m not sure – three-dimensional interfaces haven’t exactly been a roaring success outside of the games industry. And interacting with the physical environment would be dependent on the sensor infrastructure being in place, which seems unlikely any time soon – at least not until Jacqui Smith turns the UK into Minority Report. It would be fun trying, though.

I’ve been playing around with making things Twitter again, inspired by Tower Bridge and my previous efforts with the Shipping Forecast. The bridge has been very “successful”, at least judged by the off-Twitter attention that it got – I’m not completely happy with the Shipping Forecast though, because I think I’m trying to push too much information into 140 characters.

So my latest attempts are four stock market indexes – the FTSE-100, the DAX-30, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nikkei 225. They tweet every hour while the relevant exchanges are open, so don’t manage your portfolios with them – but I liked the idea of having the doom and despondency of the markets flit past every hour in my peripheral vision.

I also thought it was quite important that they’re twittering in the first person, and have some national characteristics (or should that be stereotypes?) Follow them here (FTSE), here (DAX), here (DJIA) and here (Nikkei).

One of the things that I try and emphasise when talking to clients is that a website is much more than it first appears. It’s better to think of a site as an application in its own right, in the same way as you’d think of a web browser, or an inventory management system, or (if you really, really have to) a spreadsheet.

On a technical level, that means using REST techniques when building the site. It’s too big a subject to go into detail about here, but the basic idea is that you have a very simple set of common actions that you can perform on the objects in your system – create, read, update and delete – and you “expose” those actions through a consistent set of site addresses. So an address of “http://something/1″ that arrives at the server is automagically assumed to be a “read” action that’s aimed at the object 1. That’s a drastic simplification, but it’s good enough to get the basic drift.

That’s important because it provides consistency – if it works for object 1, it’ll also work for 2 and 3 and beyond. And that makes interfacing other sites with yours very much easier.

It’s also important because it makes your site extensible – which means that you can hook other systems into it at a later stage, and you’re not necessarily going to need us to do it for you. Anyone who knows about the basic principles of REST will be able to figure it out.

While it’s clever at a geeky level, it’s also a bit arcane if you’re thinking in “website” terms – and particularly if only you’re thinking about interacting with a site in a browser. This makes explaining it – and justifying why it will make building your site slightly more expensive in the short-term, but a much better investment in the long-term – a bit tricky at times.

A conversation earlier today reinforced this – there’s a potential client who are looking to redevelop their website – but they seem to be struggling to think of it as anything beyond a simple electronic brochure.

So I got quite excited when I stumbled across something the Guardian are doing with their RSS feeds, because it’s a tangible application of exactly these principles. They’ve taken the same REST approach and applied it to their feeds, but done it in a way that makes sense in the browser or RSS reader.

For the Guardian, it starts with a consistent addressing structure – so the UK news section is accessible via a simple “www.guardian.co.uk/uk” URL.

Then the same applies to getting at the associated RSS feed – tack “/rss” on the end, and you’ll find the same (and full) content but formatted for consumption in an RSS reader.

That’s an example of a “destination”, but there’s also the option to do the same thing by “theme” – so content that’s about politics will show up at “/politics“.

And this gets remixed further with the actual topic, so political news about Labour will show up at “/politics/labour”. Again, if you want this in RSS form, just tack on “/rss” to the end.

This is very, very clever, and got me rather excited at the simplicity of it all – but it doesn’t stop there. You can start to combine various topics together SIMPLY BY CHANGING THE URL – if you want to see everything that’s related to Labour and the environment, change the URL to “politics/labour+environment/climatechange” and the results are now a mash up of the two topics. Tack “/rss” on the end, and you’ve got a machine-readable format.

So why is this so interesting, and why should you care if you’re not an RSS geek like me?

Well, simply that the Guardian has just given ME the ability to create a customised feed of news to fit my requirements. They don’t know me, and they’ve got no way of knowing what my specific requirements are – nor for that matter are they likely to have the resources to satisfy them if they did. But that doesn’t matter – if I can figure out the options that they’ve exposed, I can create something bespoke for myself – which greatly increases the value of their service to me, and makes it far more likely that I’ll stick around.

The crucial point here is that they’ve gone beyond thinking of the website simply as a publication, and are thinking of it in terms of being a service or application in its own right. They’ve got no way of predicting exactly how people are going to use it, and to a certain extent they’ve got little control. But what they ARE doing is making their core service much more useful to me, which massively increases its potential value to them.

Now instead of thinking in terms of news content, think cinema listings, or train times. Or imagine exposing your product information and inventory in this way – “tell me about the specifications of all the blue left-handed widgets”, but done through a simple web address. You start to get a glimpse of the possibilities that might be out there if more sites worked this way. It might make the initial build slightly more expensive, but the long-term possibilities are greatly increased.

Glyn Moody points to a Russian press release which is announcing that Russian schools are switching over to open source software, and contrasts that with the virtual monopoly that Microsoft enjoys in the English education sector. As he points out, that’s primarly down to the virtually-total Microsoft centricity of Becta, the educational technology quango. In that respect, they’re a microcosm of the wider UK public sector.

There’s a golden opportunity coming up to change some of this, though – the Department of Children, Schools and Families is about to kick off a pilot home-access programme to ensure that all school-age children have access to the Interwebs at home. Given that it’s aimed primarily at low-income families, you’d think that low-cost options like open-source would be an ideal solution.

I’m not holding my breath, though – the process is being run by Becta through an “approved supplier” list due to be announced in January. And I’m fully expecting that it will consist of the usual RM-and-Microsoft suspects, flogging cut-price Vista and Office packages.

On the left:

The government has committed the UK to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by the middle of this century.

Climate Change and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said the current 60% target would be replaced by a higher goal.

And on the right:

The government is fighting to head off a backbench rebellion over its plans to exclude aviation and shipping from the UK’s greenhouse gas targets.

They are being left out because there is no system for sharing responsibility for international emissions.

From the BBC: “Patient files ‘more accessible’”

The health service is to invest £300m in the next 10 years in information and communication technology.

The investment will mean that anyone in the health service, whether they are in a GP’s surgery or a hospital ward, can access a patient’s records.

I sincerely hope that it’s NOT going to allow ANYONE in the Health Service to access a patient’s records…

[Crossposted from the Headshift blog]

A few posts ago I mentioned some models of human motivation that might help answer the question, “why would anyone bother contributing to social media?” The best known model is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but as several commenters pointed out, it’s a pretty simplistic model that doesn’t really stand up to much close scrutiny.

There’s any number of alternative models to choose from (intriguingly, most of the research seems to date from the early Sixties for some reason). But before looking at any of those, it’s worth considering another theory that has a bearing on the way in which social media gets adopted in organisations.

In 1960, Douglas McGregor extended Maslow’s model and came up with what’s become known as Theory X / Theory Y. In the neat bipolar way beloved of social scientists, he divided managers into two camps – the pointy-haired Theory Xers, who think their employees are work-shy layabouts that need to be coerced into action, and who avoid responsibility in search of security above all.

The flip side are the cuddly Theory Ys, who look benignly on their teams as self-directed responsibility seekers, creating innovation at all layers of the organisation.

Diagnosing which camp a person falls into has become known in Headshift circles as the “Facebook test” – if mention of the ubiquitous social networking platform causes foaming at the mouth and mentions of web blocking software, the chances are that you’re dealing with a member of the Theory X camp. To them, social media is a Waste Of Time – give employees access to Facebook and they’ll spend all their time poking and throwing sheep at each other.

Theory Ys tend to have been there, done that when it comes to Facebook and the like – in fact you’re just as likely to have connected with them on LinkedIn as you are to be talking to them face-to-face. I’m exaggerating both cases to make a point here, but the underlying rationale remains.

The truth, as ever, lies somewhere between the two extremes. There *are* people who will “abuse” access to social media, in just the same way as people have “abused” web access more generally, or email, or the phone, or their typewriters and so on back to the days that a few sneaky flint axeheads were tucked inside furs. That’s human nature, and it’s going to take more than a few years of Web 2.0 to change that.

But the fact that there’s a long-term trend here tells us something else – it’s not the tool that’s at fault. If your teams are slacking off on Facebook when they should be doing whatever else it is they’re supposed to be doing, isn’t that a management issue? After all, if they were spending all day gossiping at the coffee machine, you’d probably deal with it by asking/telling them not to, rather than banning hot drinks.

It’s not a new issue. Going back ten or fifteen years, email in organisations was by no means universal – and I remember distinctly a conversation at the time with a finance director who banged the desk while declaring that email was a waste of time, and would be used in his firm over his dead body. Fast-forward to today, and a refusal to countenance email would be professional suicide in most businesses.

There’s partly an issue of demographics at work here, as well. Anyone under the age of about 25 has grown up immersed in an online world, and to them it’s part of the furniture. It’s the older generations (which I’ve got to put myself into, seeing as I was into well into double-figures by the time I had my first email address) who are having to make the adjustments. So when the Generation Y kids come into the workforce, they’re often taken aback that the kinds of tools they’ve taken for granted are regarded as something exotic or dangerous.

The question for organisations is whether they’re going to take advantage of the possibilities that social tools provide – while managing around the occasional downsides – or whether the response will be to put barriers in the way. And if your unspoken message is that you don’t value the new kinds of skills that the next generation of your employees are arriving with, what effect will that have on your ability to find and retain the best people?

[Cross-posted from the Headshift blog]

mashup*, who bill themselves as a “membership based community of executives, entrepreneurs and investors affected by and working within the commercial application of digital technology, products and services” put on an event last night looking at “Data and Government 2.0“.

It was held at the splendidly-named Speechly Bircham, which despite sounding like a character from The Avengers is actually a law firm with rather swish offices off Fetter Lane.

There were a range of speakers from different parts of government and the public sector, including a few who are right at the heart of government. William Perrin heads up the Power Of Information Taskforce in the Cabinet Office, which is about as close to the seat of power as it can be. He had a number of examples of the Power Of Information- for example, tax advice being handed out on Moneysavingexpert.com which is crowdsourced community self-help around information that you would normally expect to come from HMRC.

One of the major issues that he faces is turning around the culture of government – getting across the idea that these kind of innovative projects don’t have to be huge, in fact many can be done for a few thousand pounds. If one of large usual-suspect systems integrators had tried to build Theyworkforyou.com, they’d have charged somewhere in the region of £8-10m for it, and would have given up 12 months into the project complaining that it was impossible.

Steve Palmer is the CIO of the London Borough of Hillingdon, a large council in North-west London and generally considered to be one of the more advanced public sector organisations in terms of the way that they handle their information. One of his major issues is that he’s dealing with the legacy of past abuses of data – he made the point that Hillingdon weren’t able to use the Electoral Roll as the basis of their smartcard rollout because it’s less than 70% accurate. That’s at least partly due to people being reluctant to be on the Roll in the first place after they’ve been sold off to private companies for marketing purposes.

From the non-government side of things was Mike Bracken of the Guardian – and formerly of MySociety, the group who have done more than any other to force the pace of change and shine some bright lights in some very murky areas. His point was that local governments in particular are still stuck in a mindset of websites, when what’s actually needed are APIs rather than service. Rather than trying to anticipate the needs of ordinary people – and often getting it wrong by thinking in terms of the type of measures that SocITM find appropriate – it’s better to allow access to data and let people take it into their own hands.

Also speaking was John Sheridan, Head of e-Services in the Information Policy and Services Directorate of The National Archives – he spoke about the “Unlocking Service“, a site which acts as a conduit for requests for data and funnels them to the appropriate area of government. The idea of having a one-stop-shop approach seems to me to be a good one, although personally I’m still troubled by some of the concepts of Crown Copyright in the first place. It seems that a lot of the current work is “fiddling around the edges” of a system with more fundamental problems.

The so-called trading funds – the Met Office, Ordnance Survey, Hydrographic Office and so on came in for a bit of a kicking from the floor when the questions opened up. The problem for many in the audience was that by taking a very narrow view of the value of the data, the trading funds were missing the bigger picture – while it’s (relatively) easy to quantify the revenues that you can make by charging for information, it’s much more difficult – and hence doesn’t get done – to look at the wider societal benefits that might accrue by allowing open access.

I came away from the evening with the feeling that we’re beginning to see a change in attitude in certain sectors of government around the way they handle and grant access to their data – but that progress is at best uneven, and there’s still a long way to go. Partly that’s a legacy of the obsession with competition and markets that’s been a hallmark of the government behaviour of the last thirty years or so – but the kind of rapid innovation that Web 2.0 technologies make possible may be starting to change that. Whether the likes of the Ordnance Survey will ever be convinced of the public capital of the data that they own remains to be seen, but the trends seem to be heading in the right direction.

Picking flaws with recruitment agencies is something of a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel process at the best of times, but since the financial climate has become cloudier it seems that desperation has begun to set in.

I never, ever, ever – and I mean ever – deal with an agency that sends me an unsolicited CV. It’s rude, it’s unprofessional and it betrays a certain lack of competence on the part of the candidate if they’re allowing themselves to be represented by an agency that pulls stunts like this. Sending out teasers isn’t quite as egregious as attaching full CVs, but it’s still not cricket as far as I’m concerned – especially if I’ve told the agency “stop doing this” in the past.

So today’s unsolicited broadcast from <name redacted> is something of a classic. Let’s count the ways – firstly, it’s unsolicited, despite me telling this individual twice in the past to go away and stop sending me spam. Secondly, it’s completely inappropriate for my organisation – an MCSE helpdesk person, however talented, is going to get very, very bored in a Mac-and-Linux-only environment. And thirdly, it’s just – well, crass, really. I cringe to think of the kind of organisation that this would get a response from.

Here’s the email, with names removed to spare too much public embarrassment, although I was sorely tempted to hold the firm concerned up to public ridicule.

From: <redacted>
To: tim@headshift.com
Subject: Do you need a female in your IT team?

*****HERE COME THE GIRLS!!!*****

Too much testosterone in your IT department?

Too much talk of football and cars?

Do you think a woman’s touch is need on your helpdesk?

Right now I am in the very exciting position of having not 1, but 2 female
IT Support Engineers looking for work

<female name redacted>
<female name redacted> is an MCSE 2003 qualified helpdesk engineer with
4 years experience working for 2 separate companies. She has experience of
1st & 2nd line support for up to 250 staff, logging over 35 calls a day with a 70%
first time fix rate. <redacted> thinks its time to move on and get a bit more
experience so is looking for a firm that can improve her IT skill set as well as offering
her career progression. <redacted> is looking for the £24k mark

<redacted>
<redacted> has more experience than <redacted> and is packing more of a punch technically.
<redacted> has a solid grounding in service desk support and has also managed
a small helpdesk team. She has supported a wide range of Microsoft networks
and products dealing with everything from MS office support in a legal firm
to hardware support in a marketing company. <redacted> can interview with 2
days notice and is looking for around £27k

Both of these career women are keen to move so if you want to know more about either
<redacted> or <redacted> call me, as I know these two are going to get
snapped up. Just think to yourself “How often do experienced MCSE qualified female
IT support Engineers come on the market?”

Please call or email me to find out more about <redacted> or <redacted> or to discuss
any other IT related roles you may be struggling to fill.

Remember, I spend 10 hours a day, 5 days a week speaking to and recruiting
for IT professionals in London. I have candidates from all walks of life an
d for all situations

We specialise in roles including PC/Network Support, Software and Web Development
and Design and Senior Appointments, both on a contract and permanent
basis. To find out more about <male name redacted> or <male name redacted>, or to
discuss your current IT requirements and how we can help you, please contact me on
<phone number redacted>.

Kind regards,
<female name redacted>

<male name redacted>
<firm redacted>
<phone redacted>

I wish the two women well in finding new work, but I can’t help but think they’d be better off with another agency.

A neat example of the differences between the UK and Sweden:

Sweden’s Foreign Minister calls his new Mac ‘a new world’

Former Swedish Prime Minister (and now Foreign Minister) Carl Bildt has, “after much reflection, examination and discussion” decided to switch to a Mac. (link)

This being the UK, we’d have some Ministerial nonentity regurgitating a press release written by a Microsoft marketing-droid about the value placed on the strategic partnership between them and the UK government. Neatly glossing over the fact that it’s virtually impossible to use anything other than Windows and Internet Explorer in UK government thanks to endemic Sharepoint and a Microsoft monoculture.