Professional
year 2008
Technically
2008 has been the year in which the future got a great deal
closer. Closer because many of the things I have been working on
seem to have made great strides forward.
In
October 2007, at the last CKO summit, there was a presentation of Gen
X & Gen Y and their attitudes to technology – whilst compelling
as a presentation there is more. Are these geners really adept at
technology in a useful way or is it just playing about. But this is
very old school thinking so I decided to use 2008 to experiment.
The
experiments were looking at whether and when the connected world of
web 2.0 and the attached communities could bring useful work into the
organisation. After
all we all work for Google now
(by which I mean that whenever we use Google for content services so
Google use our content and our activity patterns for their business);
working for Google is quite good and their technology is so good they
don’t have to pay me to use it [a challenge here for the
internal systems]. It is clearly worth the reward of no cost content
and information services, and of course requires no additional effort
than what I need to do for my own interests. Hopefully you get the
idea.
I
chose 2 opportunities for the Web 2 experiments – the Not For Profit
sector and the University. In NFP I conceived a fellowship scheme for
the TFPL conference ebic,
sponsored by Nokia. We had a terrific session in which the NFPs –
using open source Web 2 systems – had engaged volunteer effort in
commodity technology. No longer specialist technology and a directly
employed workforce. The university experiment, Twoler,
will run through 2009 but provides the students with their university
environment as RSS where hopefully they will develop mash-ups which
are useful within the University.
There
is a third experiment, my
local village history group,
who have enjoyed a hard earned success catastrophe – with a
collection of many hundreds of items [documents, photographs, audio
diaries etc]. Their problem? How to present, catalogue and archive
this growing quantity of information.
Enter
Drupal! My Christmas letter has discussed Drupal in the past but I
mention it again because in version 6 they have made tremendous
improvements. The top of my list is the integration with Reuters Open
Calais [Claire if you read this far my hearty thanks] – Open
Calais linked to
Drupal or WordPress is just fantastic!! It is a semanticaly aware
system that pulls, from any text, key elements and concepts. So, for
Meldreth, I put our many hundreds of history documents and hundreds
of pages into Drupal connected to Calais – voila I get all
the key terms extracted. This incredibly rich list will then be used
to develop the site taxonomy, information architecture and structure.
Brilliant!!
The
other technical star of the year is the Nokia E71. Since I won my
first Psion series 3 (and it is worth reading stephen
fry on the subject)
I have had a so called PDA. After the keyboard of the Psions (3&5)
I did not really take to the stylus and scratch of the IPAQs. So back
to a keyboard and Palm (650) but then growing disappointment with the
750 and build quality. The e71 is my first Nokia – a superb phone but
also a superb package with everything I need contained in one simple,
robust and small package – and a keyboard.
The
e71 is not just gadget envy. It is an always on, always with me,
device and changes my relationship with systems. Combined with
systems like ping.fm it means I can keep in touch (and updated)
across Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and my own blog. It is increasing my
dwell time on these systems and persuading me to use twitter. Because
I can copy all my messages to a database of my own it increases my
confidence and willingness to add content. A trivial change from
the technical point of view but with very important consequences for
use.
Why
so? A few years ago Gordon Bell (of VAX fame) started a research
project of ‘mylifebits’,
my technological reality is much closer to ‘my bitty life’ where
different systems, different access methods and different access
places completely scramble my brain and fragments my data streams.
Now – integrated from my e71 and at a price I can afford there is
some semblance of coherent thought.
My
other big interest is innovation where, sadly, the landmark event was
less successful. My key ‘gig’ was to the right set of companies but
the wrong set of people. They were looking for a checklist of how to
innovate rather than any attempt to understand the nature of
innovation.
This
led to one of the more interesting lunch to discuss why companies buy
quick fixes and tools when more considered and thoughtful approaches
are required (or why companies won’t buy my experience based,
theoretically inspired solution and go for the 25 year old branded
consultant with an off the shelf methodology). In short do you buy
systems thinking or six sigma? It led me to think more of some of the
very shallow learning cycles established by businesses today – and
the focus on solutions rather than problem definition.
One
casualty of the year, and the overwhelming drudge of restructuring,
has been the knowledge anarchists. After talking with Victor Newman
we hatched the idea of getting the anarchists to produce something
(even money) and hatched ‘book in a day’. The idea being that the
anarchists could meet and argue, as usual, but that the topics chosen
would turn into chapters of a published book written by each lead
advocate. A useful experiment in any case but also a more than
interesting approach to knowledge capture (and a KM technique capable
of branding). It’s not happened yet but will happen in February 2009.
I
usually manage a book recommendation and this year it is Tim
Harford’s
the undercover
economist – the
author is an FT journalist and blogger and the book provides some
simple truths about economics. One of his examples is to work through
the carbon footprint of a CD – where the process of getting it from
an Asian factory to the shop is efficient relative to driving to the
shops to buy it. Few people seem to apply such rigour (and systems
thinking) to the problems they are solving opting, instead, for the
quick fix on a very narrow problem definition.
Finally
my technical year would not be complete without mentioning the study
tour to Vietnam arranged by Harvey Nash and written
up here. Worth
reading? I was a 25 year old software engineer hungry to learn and
gain experience I would head for Vietnam – large teams, growing
company, code development, good standards, learning together (for me
deja vu of CAP in 1980)
All
that remains to do is to echo my invitation for coffee issued last
year, to thank everyone who dropped in and to wish you an exciting
and technically challenging/rewarding 2009. if you are interested in
‘book in a day’ drop me a line, it will be arranged in
February 2009, venue Central London.
If
you are in Central London with time to spare head for the Telecom
Tower and give me a ring on 07808 235873