Author Archives: Mark

Vista Oddness

So I come back from 2gether08 all keen to start writing up about the two days and my Vista laptop refuses to find my wireless LAN.

So,  I run through the standard checklist.

1. Is the wireless LAN up? Yes, both Linux and XP boxes find it.

2. Is the wireless card in the laptop working? Yes, it finds the wireless LANs and can connect to a neighbourhood LAN.

3. Is there an error message? No, but eventually I drill down into the confused Vista network dialogs and find a line saying it had “connected with limited access”. So time for a quick search, the Microsoft KB article is not hugely useful and talks only about bridged LANS, which mine is not. Further articles do not identify any consistent fix. Things that have worked include changing the SSID or deleting the LAN details and starting again. Such varied “fixes” smack of coincidence, voodoo or a confused OS.

So I took the opportunity to redo the wireless settings on my router and change it to WPA2/PSK. I changed the settings in Vista and while I was pondering next steps it suddenly found the LAN.

So I suspect that there is a problem with Vista’s network preference settings which can occasionally corrupt. This is likely to be an intermittent problem so you might just want to keep an updated Registry savefile to hand but the fix seems to be to get Vista to recreate the settings, either by changing an entry in the wireless setup on the machine or by just deleting the settings and starting again.

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Feeling valued

Being a CIO is a lot like being a doctor. There is a similar sense of professionalism, a common commitment to making things better, and then, there’s the blood on the floor…

But the thing that is most similar about us is that we both get cornered at parties or events by people who want to tell us about their problems. “I have this pain in my left shoulder” vs “I can’t get my wireless router to work”.

Yes, Virginia, CIO’s do know about technology.

Recently a friend asked me to spec out a replacement laptop for their family. As I idly clicked away on the Dell website I found myself adding things to the laptop configuration which I would never use myself but which “normal people” would need. By the end of this the cost of the laptop worked out double that of the last laptop I bought myself.

And I belatedly had a revelation, this 100% surcharge represented the value of my experience and knowledge.  So I now know that all my years in IT, all my expertise and skills, everything, is worth a grand total of … £427.53.

*sigh*

Where is Vista machine?

The blogsphere (blogland? blogosity?) thrives on drama. It drive traffic, boosts egos and sells advertising.

One common source of drama is Vista in the enterprise. I am not going to get into the drama itself but instead here is a short note on what drives enterprise adoption of software and systems.

There are three things which CIOs want from software:

  1. It should work
  2. It should be supportable
  3. It should be affordable.

Who could argue with such tenets? But when you unpick them you begin to understand why the world is the way it is and why, alas for drama, logic tends to be the main driver.

It should work

Even in my organization we have a lot of enterprise systems which we need to work. Some of them are off the shelf applications, some are bespoke internal applications and some are external systems which we need to use for line of business or cross-cutting activities.

If I change my desktop operating system then I need to retest all of those enterprise systems to make sure that they still work. Even in my organization where we have long since moved all bespoke applications to the web we still need to ensure that they work with the combination of browser, OS and security controls we have to put in place.

Let’s assume that I have 50 enterprise systems, each to be tested. They will vary in complexity and scope but you would do well to start with an estimate of 50 person weeks to test those systems.

Of course you could do some in parallel and of course you would look to drive down the time needed but remember the basic rule of management – “hope for the best, but plan for the worst”.

And don’t forget that many organizations have enterprise systems that are infrequently used. How often do you run year end financials?

It should be supportable

When someone has a problem they phone the Helpdesk. Fine, who does the Helpdesk phone?

If I install version n.0 of something then is there sufficient body of support for it or is it like the old story of the teacher who said that the key to success was to be 3 pages ahead of the class? Telling the business that the supplier is fascinated by the problem they are having with the profit forecast spreadsheet is not support, resolving the problem is.

So there will always be a lag between release and adoption. The length of the lag then depends on appetite for risk and how important that system is to your business. We adopt security patches very quickly, new desktop wallpaper not so much.

And then one of the ways we try and reduce the support overhead is to standardize on a standard image so every desktop, every laptop is the same as each other. But we have to build, test and then install the image. Fine, the supplier will do the latter but it still relies upon us to be confident that it will work.

So factor in the time to build, test and distribute the image alongside the time needed to test enterprise systems and time marches on.

It should be affordable

Moving to a new desktop costs money and uses resources. Even if the update was free there are still hard and opportunity costs around doing the upgrade.

If I am moving to a new desktop then I am not doing something else. What matters most to the organization? How do the costs of supporting the old world compare to moving to the new world?

So, despite our love of drama the reason for slow enterprise adoption of systems is usually just the result of cold logic.

You could replace Vista in the example above with Linux or OSX and the logic remains.

And as a final piece of context, I am writing this entry on a Vista laptop before posting it to the site which was set up in OSX and which I usually read on Linux.

I am sure that someone will mention enterprise agility and organic implementation at some point and I will return to those later.

2gether08

I am off to 2gether08 next week and, following an email from the organizer, I have been musing on who should attend such events.

From what I can see the Central government delegates are mainly a mix of digital people and a couple of us from the IT world.

So where are the policy colleagues?

This is one of the things I find odd about my world. Whether or not web 2.0 is as transformational as some people might pitch it, it is clear that it is already having an effect on how we work, how we communicate and how the public sphere operates.

These strike me as being potentially deep issues for the future of not just the Civil Service but the wider democratic process.

So my dumb question of the day is simple, who owns the policy responsibility for strategic thinking in our world?

2gether08

My Life in the Bush of Hedgehogs

The getting of wisdom can be a very slow process. As I have staggered through my brilliant career I often wondered why I find myself as the odd one out at so many meetings and events and why it took me so long to focus on my strengths as opposed to continually trying to make up for my failings?

Thinking about the old Russian proverb made famous by Sir Isaiah Berlin made me realise what part of the problem was. “The fox knows many things whilst the hedgehog knows but one, but what the hedgehog knows it knows in depth”.

I am a fox, this does not make me better than a hedgehog. A world full of foxes would be people in caves having wide ranging conversations about everything under the sun while freezing to death because all that rubbing sticks together to make fire is very … well dull really.

But as a fox I am forever leaping from idea to idea, usually doing little more than skimming the surface but always aware that there is more and more out there to see and feel and do. This makes me very bad in meetings as I lose focus and can be disruptive but very good at creating new things.

Any effective system needs a healthy mix of foxes and hedgehogs. Management theory adds to the complexity with Belbin and Myers-Briggs et al but foxes and hedgehogs do well enough for me usually.

My world is divided into three parts – frontline services, corporate services and policy development. Supposedly the first two parts are specialist whilst the last is a generalist area. Which I would see as 2 hedgehogs and 1 fox. But why then is it that when I meet with policy colleagues from around the Whitehall world that they are almost always hedgehogs?

Can you have a generalist hedgehog?

The Slow Thoughts of the Machine God

In true purple lorry style the Singularity seems to have been everywhere recently. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the Singularity starts from the simple observation that whereas machines double in processing power every 18 months we humans are as smart/dumb as we are ever going to get. So if you draw two lines – one for machine “intelligence” and one for us humans  and our level of intelligence then they will cross at some point, at which time the Singularity will occur and we humans will no longer be the most intelligent lifeform on the planet.

What happens postSingularity tends to depend on whether you are a Extropian optimist who sees it as the first step on a rapid ascent to the noosphere or a techno pessimist who regards it as proof that the Terminator series was science fact, not fiction.

If you are me then you wonder if intelligence is just a question of speed. Is it like the sound barrier? Is there a point at which the hamsters on the spinning wheel inside the machine accelerate and pass through the intelligence barrier and suddenly the machine is sentient?

If not, then what is the singularity?

And if it is just a matter of speed and there is no intelligence barrier then any universal Turing machine must be considered sentient. Slow, yes, but still as “intelligent” as its faster kin.

So that means that Sinclair Spectrum you had as a kid was capable of “intelligence”, if only the software had been available. Each thought may have taken a week, the firing of the virtual synapses might have been more like the rising and setting of the sun. But, it is still a computer and thus still capable of “thought”.

So, should we consider all computers as prospective sentients? This is a matter we need to fully and carefully consider before we add to the number of computers in the world as they may be our rivals or future masters.

And that is why, oh Management Board, you are not getting the new iPhone.

Wisdom of the crowd vs Regression to the mean

I am a big fan of Last.fm. Over the past couple of years it has become my default way of finding out about music. The way it learns your taste and (somewhat) challenges it is great and I have enough of the trainspotter about me to be interested in the charts it creates of the music I have most listened to in the past week, month or year.

Last.fm, like everything in this world these days, has a social networking component, part of which allows you to join groups. I belong to two such groups, one for readers of Metafilter, the other for people who shop at PostEverything.

So, two groups, one aimed at a mainly American technology aware, socially minded group of people; the other for people who shop at an esoteric online shop for “interesting” music.

And when you look at the charts of most popular music in the two groups you find … a large degree of similarity. Radiohead … check, Coldplay … check, Portishead … check.

There is nothing surprising in popular music being popular. But it got me thinking about taste and popularity and the connection between chart position and tag clouds. One goes up and one gets bigger but both tell the same story.

And the concept of popularity always makes me think about the story of how architects define paths on campuses by letting people walk across the grass, organically creating links and these emergent paths are then used as the basis for the formal paths.

This is often quoted as an example of the “wisdom of the crowd“. The way in which a decision taken by a group may be smarter than that taken by individual members of the group.

But you can also think of it as an example of “regression to the mean“. The tendency of distributions to collect around the mean point. This is just a natural reflection of the fact that most things are around average, by definition, but we humans like stories, we like to think that what we are seeing is something real, not just a statistical artifact.

We see this time and again in life. A football manager is acclaimed one season as a genius and accused of failure the next, when you look at the stats all that has happened is that they won slightly more games than the form book would indicate in year one and slightly less in year two. Whenever things are at an extreme we either proclaim a new paradigm – “The Bubble is eternal!” or start looking for reasons to explain something which may just be noise.

I find myself thinking about what this might mean for social media and engagement. If we create a more agile public space, one which is as frictionless as possible. Where people can rapidly engage with and shape policy, is there a risk that we conflate noise and reality?