Category Archives: Technology

Fight the gap

I spent Wednesday at Microsoft as part of the launch of e-skills Big Ambition initiative which aims to increase the number of girls in ICT.

The figures are depressing, whilst the number of women studying technical subjects has increased in recent years, the number of women studying ICT has fallen and it continues to fall.

What is it about my world that makes it so unattractive to women?

We had some great speakers on Wednesday who made it plain that it was possible for women to succeed in IT, have a great job and manage to achieve a winning work/life balance. The audience of 170 13~14 year old girls were obviously inspired by what they had heard as only 33% said they would consider a career in ICT at the start of the day but that had risen to 81% by the end of the day.

Part of the day was a workshop where the girls came up with new ICT product ideas which they presented to a panel of judges, of which I was one. The ideas were fun, well thought through and there was a real sense of excitement about the whole process.

So how do we preserve that sense of excitement and engagement? How do we make our world visibly appealing to a wide range of people?

Why is ICT such a monoculture? Not just in terms of gender or ethnicity but mindset as well. People will talk about how it attracts people into maths, physics, logic hence it is mainly a world of inward focused people whose minds run on linear paths.

But that strikes me as a description, not an explanation. In ICT we spend much of our lives working with people, not machines. Trying to work out what it is that people want to do. Testing our assumptions with them. Training them how to use the systems. The machine bit, the “logical” bit is the easy part, ICT is not an exercise in hermeticism, it’s about making things happen for people.

The more we can do to encourage a broad swathe of people into the profession the better. I am sure that one of the reasons why so many corporate systems are ugly, inefficient and hard to use is that we have allowed ICT to become a world of stereotypes.

It’s down to all of us in the profession to challenge those stereotypes and encourage diversity. Not for moral reasons, though those are important, but because else we will simply be unable to deliver the critical systems which people need from us.

Oh and someone asked me about the “dream job” line on the Big Ambition website. My dream job? IT obviously 🙂

Breaking rocks

There was an interesting post on Slashdot this week about someone who went to load their official Cisco VPN client CD only to find that it was in fact a bootleg music disc. These things happen,  suppliers outsource to third parties who subcontract to others who find slack in someone else’s JIT delivery system.

Then I read this piece and cogs slowly, rustily start turning in my mind.

Complexity adds risk. If I have just a single rock then my risks are limited, the rock basically sits there. I could lose it or drop it or trip over it or break it but that’s about it. If I have two rocks then not only have I now doubled the number of those risks but I gain new ones as well – one of the rocks could fall off the other for example or I could lose one rock behind the other.

So complexity breeds risk, so far so obvious. Companies outsource and there is now an added creator of risk to mispress CDs, government buys from the cheapest supplier and there is now an added creator of risk to mis-sell hooky gear, you can name your own examples.

We work to try and mitigate these supply or delivery chain risks but there are two additional sources of complexity which we do not always consider.

The first is that risk mitigation can itself be a source of risk. Recent events in the financial world are a classic example of this. Some people thought that they had cracked the secret of achieving high returns without high risks. IT supports the creation of complex and often opaque financial risk management tools which make Black-Scholes seem like basic addition. Combine this with automated trading engines and we create a vast cybernetic plate-spinning engine which works until the first plate starts wobbling.

Paul Samuelson said “Business is the management of risk”, for me this means that unless you are willing to manage your risks then you should not be in business. And management does not mean magical thinking.

The second source of emergent risk arises out of the complexity of individual systems. Think for an instance about how you are reading this piece. You are using a computer whose hardware you trust, whose operating system you trust, a browser you trust, a network connection you trust, a network protocol you trust, a website you trust, a web server you trust, web server hardware you trust, and network hardware you trust.

That’s a lot of trust isn’t it?

You’re quite sure you want to come in?… Very well

Jeremy Gould’s very interesting exploration of social media adoption has just reached part 5 – Experiment.

I am very keen on experimentation, my whole vague concept of entrepreneurial government relies on experimentation.

The problem is that my world is deeply averse to anything which might lead to blame or which has any connection to the concept of “risk”. Problematic when you are experimenting!

So some hints on how to get your experiment through the dread CIO challenge, which is like Dragon’s Den only with real dragons, and they have guns, and ADH*bang!*

Security

What, if any, data do you propose to collect or share? Who owns it? Is it personal data either in DPA terms or Hannigan? How valuable is it? If we lost it which page would it appear on in the paper? If your proposed host is offshore then are there any implications? Do you even know where the site will be hosted?

Procurement

How do you propose buying the service? Is it below single tender level? Is it on a framework? Whose? Why this company? SME? How is the service priced? What does it look like if we have 100 users, 1,000, 1,000,000?  How much is the fish!? How much is the chips!? Does the fish have chips!

Audience

Who is the audience for this site? Does the site need to be accessible? (the default answer is always yes) Multilingual? Global? Moderated? Will they expect a reply?

Technology

Is it new tech? Have we or someone we know used it before? Is it tech trial or a product trial? Are we locked in if we use it? How much training is needed to use it? To support it?

Purpose

The most important question of all – “What does success look like?” If you cannot answer that then give up now. I am always depressed at the number of events/projects I attend where people find that question hard to answer.

This list is not exhaustive and nor am I trying to put people off experimenting. We need to try and yes, we need sometimes to fail, if we are to learn. But I am well aware of my own failings around bright shiny baubles to recognise the need for an appropriate degree of rigour.

And now to get back to my own experimenting. Now, where did I leave that account manager?…

Long Week Words

The tool shapes the hand.

A posh way of saying that if the only tool you have is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.

I am writing this on a Nokia N800, a little internet tablet, kind of like a Linux based iPhone but without the phone bit just wifi, Skype and Gizmo, Firefox and access to a large repository of free software.

The thing I have found most interesting about using such a device is how it shapes my approach to the internet. The internet is no longer something remote, locked away behind a computer that will take ages to boot, but it is now immediate, personal, readable!

I am not a big fan of the ebook concept, it threatens to leave the past mutable and the present controlled, but as I type these words and my brain nods sagely I can feel my paws twitch as they dream of an infinite library.

Spreading tales like coffin nails

And no birds do sing

Someone asked me the other day why I was not on Twitter? I mumbled something about the fact that the last thing a fox needs is more sources of distraction.

But sitting in the Japanese takeaway waiting for my order I have had time to reflect.

As an outsider Twitter seems to do 4 things – it helps reduce the essential loneliness of existence and connects us with the rest of our species (which reminds me of Italo Calvino and Mr Palomar but that’s a fox distraction); it is a quick and easy way of broadcasting news and status to friends, assuming we have either news or friends; related to that it helps us socialise by allowing us to tell people which bar we are in; finally it acts as a web of connections, hares sit up and dart hither and thither and sometimes it’s a hare worth following.

All good things but again, as a fox, is the upside greater than the risk of vastly more shiny baubles cluttering my view and distracting me still further?

Hmm perhaps I should join but just go for a 140 character name?

Battleship Row

I have just finished reading “Sacred Vessels: The Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the US Navy” by Robert L. O’Connell. Naval history is not a particular interest of mine but I found the book fascinating.

Battleships, like dinosaurs, have an ability to capture the minds of small children. They are huge and dangerous and, without getting tiresomely Freudian, they do symbolise power.

The problem is the potential gulf between symbol and reality, the battleship as signifier rather than combatant.

And that brings me to IT and social networking.

The battleship was the logical consequence of decisions that were rational and coherent in their own world. The bigger the ship, the greater the firepower and the armour it could carry, so the only counter was an even bigger ship or even more ships of an equivalent size. This then led to a constant spiral of growth as battleships became larger and more numerous.

Battleships also had the benefits of being a visible symbol of national power, of keeping an industrial base and skilled workers in work, and preserving a rigid hierarchy of authority – naval officers would start out in a small ship and then work their way through an orderly career path of destroyer, cruiser, battleship.

The problem was that the world where the battleship made sense was a world where planes and submarines and torpedoes and fast surface craft did not exist. Experience showed time and again that the battleship was a target, much more than a successful weapon.

It would be easy to mock those who clung to the romantic vision of the battleship long after experience showed that it was just a very big target but we all do similar things. Letting go of beliefs when the evidence changes is a difficult thing to do.

I wonder if our current battleship is the office? Or rather the bureaucracy which we embody in the office?

The office bureaucracy has many benefits. It is a visible symbol of an organization’s power and status. It provides work for large numbers of people. And it provides a visible hierarchy for people, from the post room to the board room, there is a place for everyone.

Hmm, it all sounds kind of familiar.

So are social networks and IT things that fit inside that model or are we among the disruptive change agents that mean that the office bureaucracy will go the way of the battleship?

I din’t have the answer but I find the question intriguing.

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.