Author Archives: Mark

He’s Frank

No, not or even.

This Frank is our attempt at trying to pull the world of work together. I suppose you could call it a portal but I do not really like the portal concept, work portals tend to be either overloaded or underfunctional. Too often they provide a nice frontend but the second you click on anything the horror emerges and it’s hello VT52 all over again.

Most enterprise systems tend to the user hostile, after all how would consultants make their money if systems were easy to use and implement? So how do we square the circle and come up with an enterprise front end which is user friendly, powerful, simple and drives usage?

Hence Frank. At the moment Frank is ideas and some bits of technology and demonstrators but we aim to go PoC in mid-September and I plan to document the journey here.

Oh and the name is not an acronym, we hate acronyms, it is in memorium.

“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that”

An interesting report into the blockers behind the adoption of social media in government is quoted as flagging up IT as one of those key blockers. I will ask the guys at Huddle for a copy of their report as we use Huddle and I recommend anyone looking for a quick and easy project collaboration tool to take a look at their service.

I find it interesting that the pitch of the article is that we in IT are against social networking. Ok, so it’s another thing to manage and another possible path for information to leak but we could have made all these arguments about the telephone or allowing people to speak in the office.

Personally I think that the problem is not so much with my fellow CIOs but rather with the fact that social media is inherently disruptive. We work in bureaucracies which have grown over the years and where information and social networks are both power and inherently built into the very fabric of the organization. Tools which allow you to recast information and social networks in an agile manner strike at this traditional worldview and in my world we do not necessarily have the same market pressures which affect other classic information/social network businesses like newspapers or retail.

Anyway, I’m one public sector CIO pushing on with our own social media developments.

Quick, quick, slow

An interesting post on Daring Fireball about the speed of Javascript on the iPhone.

It’s always dangerous to generalise from such things but if I run the test on my N800 “Diablo” running Firefox then I get the following results – 0.394, 0.078, 0.353, 0.65, 0.250.

Apart from the string allocation figure the results are about 0.5x those of the iPhone with the latest Webkit.

Unlike the iPhone, the N800 does support Flash but to be honest I tend to turn it off save when accessing particular sites as Flash ads reduce the overall web browsing experience.

If I generalise wildly on such only mildly related benchmarks I would guess that Flash on the iPhone would be completely possible and would support most sites but it would still have to deal with those blasted Flash ads which both slow the browsing experience and which are very irritating indeed on a small screen.

Number 1

We normally use Base 10 to count, 0-9. Sometimes we use Base 2, 0-1, or Base 16, 0-F, when working with computers.

But any number can be used as the base for a number system. Those of us old enough to remember log books will be familiar with that. And the fact that you can readily convert between bases, “10” = “A”.

So take a circle, the circumference of a circle is given by 2πR  where R is the radius. Now, if we go for Base π then the circumference of any circle would be expressed as 2R. By definition, 2R = the diameter of the circle so in Base π the diameter and the circumference of a circle are the same.

But the diameter is a straight line and as such can be expressed as a square, put 4 matches in a straight line and you will see what I mean.

So the circumference of the circle can be expressed as a square.

Hence it is shown that you can square a circle.

QED. 🙂

When my fox stands next to your hedgehog

I was musing again on the joys of project management yesterday and was talking about project reports. Does anyone actually read project reports? Aside from when you are at a project board meeting and want to “contribute”?

Foxes are too busy leaping from shiny bauble to shiny bauble whilst hedgehogs read the report, ponder on it, check their assumptions and the evidence base, ponder some more and then wait for the right moment to contribute, by which time the project is long since gone. 🙂

That’s why I am now looking at blogging projects as a way of making them live, real and connected.

And yes Zara, I do read project reports!

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“Stopped animals from starting as drunks”

Genres are interesting things. They represent a strange combination of evolution, stereotype, ego and cultural attractors.

There are genres in film, books, music, games…

Some of these are ones I like, some are ones I hate and some I simply cannot understand.

But these all represent progress, or at least the development of the initial concept.

So where are the genres in IT?

There are some embryonic signs but the bulk of IT systems/applications regardless of purpose look the same, behave the same and to be frank irritate their users much the same.

If we do not have genres in IT then what does that mean? We don’t have genres of tools so are we nothing more than an expensive hammer?

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Still life, with robot

My vacuum cleaner gave up the will to … vacuum recently so I went off to look at replacements. There were lots of fine machines on the market but they all had one basic drawback, you had to push them.

It’s 2008, the flying cars and silver string vests may be but a lost dream but surely we have got beyond pushing machines around?

So I looked around and ended up buying a Roomba. This little machine wanders around the place on its own, so no need to push the cleaner instead it finds its own way around the place.

And I have to say that I am a happy customer, twice a week it sets off on its own and I come back to a nice clean floor.

That’s nice but why the post?

Well I am very conscious of how I have been describing the machine. It has a charging station which it sits in and which it returns to when it is done. This I find myself calling its “house”.

Similarly when it somehow managed to unplug its own charging station I referred to it as a “suicide attempt”.

When it started bumping into the telephone I described it as “having a fight with the telephone”.

My descriptions were automatically anthropomorphic. Fine, I think and speak in metaphor as a default but it is still odd that I treat it as a living thing in how I describe it and in how I assign intention to its actions. Actions which are just simple responses to the environment.

I am not alone in this.

I find myself wondering, as we continue to kill off the natural world, will our relationships with technology become more and more based on the pathetic fallacy? An attempt to recapture those prelapsarian days?

And that is why, oh Board, you are not getting iPhones.

St Thomas Aquinas’s Gantt chart

I was sitting on the bus last night reading an excellent book on theoretical physics. One of the threads of the book is the basic question of the purpose of physics – is it to describe reality or just to be a logically consistent hermetic exercise in scholasticism?

As I looked out the window as we went ove Battersea Bridge I found myself thinking about how the same question applies in other worlds, not least in IT project management.

A quick search on Amazon reveals 8,794 books on IT project management, a subset of the 40,853 project management books available in total. And amongst these books are familiar friends – PRINCE, ISEB …

But are project management processes a reflection of reality or are they just an exercise in crafting a set of logically consistent processes which end up only weakly engaging with reality? 

In my world one of our great weaknesses is to assume that because we have a problem documented we have a problem solved. We have a Gantt chart therefore we have a plan.

This is not about not following processes, it’s not about ignoring best practice or common causes of project failure, it’s a deeper question about how do we ensure that our processes accurately reflect reality, not waste time and effort trying to make it work the other way round.

Idle thoughts of an idle fellow

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen”, some of the most famous words in philosophy. “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent”. A catchy saying.

Wrong, but catchy. Life is elision.

But as I blog, I think of those words. The question which sits in my mind is “What is a blogger?” Or to be less universal, “What am I blogging for?”

Not, I think, for ego, not, alas, for Umberto Eco’s “ideal reader“.

I blog I think for two reasons, the first is that words in serried ranks are a way of putting thoughts in order and creating links. The second is that I feel that I am or should be part of the public space. What are we public servants if invisible, unconnected, absent? But can we be visible? What becomes of the “world” if we become part of it?

Heisenberg’s Civil Service?