On many occasions through my career I've heard people tell me that they have given up with planning, because external factors would always
intervene which would break the original plan.

This is a bit like saying that you won't plan out a route on a map before a car journey because there will probably be a road closed somewhere along the route, which means that the route planned will have to change, so what's the point? As long as we know the destination, we'll get there somehow...

Planning, particularly in projects, is a continuous activity, not some process of divining the future. If you think that your first cut of the plan will be the one that gets you through, you're either very lucky or rather naïve. But planning is only one element of the necessary skills of the project manager, and for most projects probably of lesser importance.

If we come back to the idea of route navigation, the idea of maps these days is an increasingly old fashioned one. SatNav has taken over the windscreen of so many people's cars that the complicated origami ritual of refolding an Ordnance Survey roadmap is a skill that's being lost. SatNav not only can plan your route, but many these days also have the intelligence, data and processing power to be constantly replanning based on current flows of traffic ahead. The perfect project planner?

Well, not really. Planning, as well as being a constant activity, also needs to be a collaborative activity. That's one of the early keys to another chest in the project manager's armoury - influence.

My wife hates SatNav. And the reason, I think, that she hates it is because it is in no way participative in it's planning process. The smooth voice barks orders, and the driver needs to blindly follow its automated commands. You have to give up complete control to the authoritarian master.

How many project managers have you worked with who've taken that approach? And how much, exactly, did you hate them?

At the end of November I am going to be reaching the decimally-significant age of 40. Rather than having a rather public mid-life crisis, I seem to be dealing with my departure from the ranks of thirty-somethings by embarking on a series of miniature personal projects which have no particular significance and are significantly cheaper than a sports car.

#summerlookup is the first, and I've another photography-based initiative for the Autumn, but I'm also about to embark on a musical adventure that is much more closely related to my impending birthday. Over the next few months I'm going to be compiling a mixtape (or, at least, it's Spotified 21st century equivalent), comprising a track from each of the 41 calendar years I've been around.

The first few years are likely to be songs that I got to know later in life, but a level of research is going to be required throughout. With the madness of Wikipedia I've already just found out that my birthday marked the day in which Hendrix's Voodoo Child was toppled from the top of the charts by Dave Edmunds' I Hear You Knocking. How upsetting...

I'm dreading the mid-80s through to the early 1990s as these were my formative teenage and student days and the choice is going to be overwhelming. And also 2004, because I can't think of anything from that year that sticks in the mind. But I'm sure that there will be something.

The rules (because this sort of thing obviously needs some rules) are that there will be one song each from 1970 through until 2010, the song needed to be released in the year in question, and finally that this needs to be a compilation that makes some sort of musical sense when listened to from start to end...

I'll kick off with 1970 very soon. You can follow the sonic adventures here.

At the end of last week I had an interesting insight into how online, collaborative documents might change the way people in different organisations work together.

I had a small software development requirement and needed to quickly get a quote from a prospective supplier. I had briefed our account manager, and he arranged for a technical consultant James to phone me. In advance of the call, I quickly knocked out a specification document, and shared it in
Google Docs with James. I still had the document open on screen, and within a few minutes of having given him access, could see that James was viewing the document. A few minutes later, and because I had given him the rights to share the document on to others, I could see that a further two people at the supplier were viewing the document.

That small piece of information is a significant difference from what has come before and the world of file attachments. You send, and then can get no further feedback. As I increasingly point out to people these days, probably not even a bounce back if you've mis-addressed the message, and the reason why there's no read receipt in Gmail is because it never meant anyone had actually "read" anything.

In this new world, the document became the focus of our collaboration. James' team made comments on the document (which I could watch them do) and when we caught up on the phone it turned into just an extension of our document-based conversation.

For many, many years I have heard how documents should be 'living' objects, but have rarely seen it happen. Often, it's because the technology has limited people to think in terms of old world published (and therefore static) analogies. However, it's also fair to say that much of business convention is tied to those analogies (how, or more importantly, when, do you "sign-off" a multi-authored collaborative document, for example?).

In that old world, documents weren't ever anything but abstracts of the world around them - minutes, for example, aren't what happened in a meeting, but what was agreed that happened. Those types of documents are very different from those that can be generated in services like Google Docs (or, for that matter, using technologies like Wikis). It's this sort of subtle yet profound change that makes for interesting times ahead.

Project achievements included:

- decommissioning of the London secondary machine room
- starting the evaluation of new laptop supplier
- setting up for the final stages of the London networks project

Additionally:

- good sessions with the European CEO...
- ...and his US equivalent
- beginning to see the benefits of Google Docs when working inter-organisation
- and The Times interview appeared on Tuesday (page 7 of http://np.netpublicator.com/netpublication/n43027614

Next week in one word: dependencies

As yet another briefing session with colleagues gets postponed due to client work commitments, it gets me to thinking about how client-centred organisations can make the time to improve and innovate.

I saw a presentation recently about how Google innovate. At the centre of their philosophy is the 20% time - one fifth of all the time that Google engineers have available is to persue personal projects. From that, commercial products spin out. But R&D time in a product-centric organisation can be fairly easily accommodated (as Google's sliding shipping dates testify!).

Move that into a client-centred organisation, though, and it becomes problematic. My team has a half-hour, all team catch up every two weeks. It has to be in the middle of the UK working day in an attempt to allow both my New York and Hong Kong team members to try to attend via WebEx, but even that "0.6% time" is frequently interrupted by pressing, urgent issues.

When you are providing paid-for services to your clients, it's very difficult to be able to interrupt work for staff development, training or service innovation initiatives.

Maybe technology can help here - and for those willing to learn and engage, asynchronous collaboration tools from Twitter upwards can provide ways of enabling time at the times it can fit into individual's diaries. I'm about to launch a group to help people to share experiences of using the Google services. It will be interesting to see, first of all, who signs up, and then who might actually contribute...

An interesting way to understand the power relationships that exist within organisations is to look at the trump cards that are played - whose name is used to be able to try to ensure action on urgent tasks? "X says that this has to happen today!"

In privately-held organisations, especially where the head of the operation has a large stake in its ownership, it's their name that will often be bandied around. The two companies that I have worked for like this also were client service-focused businesses, so important clients' names would also be used and, for a double-trump you would hear "the owner says that the client says that..."

Coincidently, I wonder if a distinction between whether a company has clients or customers might be "does the client actually get referenced by name to justify decisions?". I can't see rushed actions being taken by South West Trains because Matt says that it feels like the aircon isn't working properly again...

Publicly-listed firms operate in the interests of shareholders. The shareholders are often a faceless, nameless (usually institutional) bunch, so trump cards are unlikely from that direction. Senior board members names are usually used but, particularly for companies who are losing their way, 'the analysts' (the sage-like banking researchers who with almost six sense divination have significantly less insight than the average octopus) are frequently used to play trumps on short-term decisions.

The public sector (from my exposure) trumps with 'the minister'. There's going to be an awful lot of that going on in the coming months and years, and I can only pass on my sympathy as a member of an electorate that screwed up earlier this year. We should all be very sorry, and probably will be.

The health service and education are both basket cases when it comes to trump power. In the NHS, senior non-medical managers and consultants both wield significant power, often it feels just to spite the other. In no other sector do so many suppliers have so much weight behind them. The higher education world is even worse, where (with obviously many exceptions) senior academics can be extremely unaltruistic and ironically distinctly non-collegiate. In either sector, one can imagine dozens of trumps being played on a regular basis.

Different models of commercial organisation also have different structures of power... I started my career at an accountancy partnership (KPMG) and names would be thrown around, but usually with a fairly clear understanding of the power hierarchy and relative weight behind each. I'd be fascinated to know if and who are used as trumps at John Lewis, a partnership model that I have always found very inspiring.

Understanding these trumps is a good grounding in where power lies in any particular organisation. And if you find that most of your decisions are being justified by a trump, either you've become CEO or you've run out of influencing techniques...

Project achievements included:

- Sydney office upgrade work completed
- Google Docs deployment continued
- budgeting for 2010 Capex

Additionally:

- analysis of the 2010 IT Survey - a short paper coming soon
- met with our new Adobe account manager
- was a guest author on the Google Enterprise Blog
- tried an iPad

Next week in one word: times

We are starting to get into detailed discussions about data and content management strategy across the business, and the thing that is unbelievable is our capability to produce vast amounts of data. As Moore's law has exponentially increased processing power, the net result has been bigger and bigger file sizes, and more and more of them.

Not only that, but the traditional barriers to regulate the creation of new content (mostly, film stock and processing costs) have all but disappeared. For example, the number of photographs that we take to record one of the events we work on has probably increased five-fold. And the reality is that the digital storage of content on technology models is substantially more expensive than the old ways of storing reels or sheets of celluloid in tins. According to research by AMPAS from 2008, up to 12 times more expensive.

At present, on average, our London office generates around 150GB of data every week. That's from about 200 people, and excludes most of the moving image material. To support that growth we have around 12TB of high-availability, high resilience NAS storage, a few 10s of TB of nearline archive, and about 90 TB of offline storage (which is where most of our moving image archive resides). The offline storage costs about £100/TB as a one-off cost and the NAS £30,000 per year (for our external costs). If you include all of the surrounding costs of staff, power and so on, that figure probably rests at about £100,000. By comparison, I could get 16TB of storage from Google each year for about US$4,000, or from Amazon for about US$2,500.

It seems that the business has gone through cycles about every three to four years where we run out of space, panic a bit, and then invest in a new technology platform that at the time appears to solve the problem forever. Except that in about three years time it's full to bursting. This is M25-theory. If you build more capacity without regulation, you generate more demand that eventually creates a feedback loop of uncontrollable consumption. Compare that to the M6 Toll Road... still, to this day, a pleasurable driving experience because it is empty (or is it because it speeds you past Birmingham?).

A technological approach to the problem would be to find cost-effective ways to find more space more cheaply. That's certainly something we will do, and the economics of storage now seem to point to the need, above everything else, to invest in bandwidth to get to cheap storage.

However, in isolation, that's the equivalent to just adding a new lane to an over-busy highway. Tolls are required to regulate demand, and by increasing the use of pay-per-use infrastructure services, that scalability of cost becomes something that is equitable. On-premise models of charging for services are inherently nonsensical because the lumps of costs that a firm had to endure to introduce or enhance a service were usually massive multiples of the charges doled out to consuming business units. If one department decided they didn't want to use a particular service, that cost needed to be reallocated across the remaining consumers. Cost actually had no relation to usage.

Moving to scalable charging models alone, however, is unlikely to lead to a desired change in behaviour. Often such models just end up with profit centres scrimping and saving and having inappropriate services as a result, and cost centres hoovering up resource "because that's the cost of our operation" (if you want evidence of that, ask a CFO to quantify the business benefit of his ERP system...)

The changes that we are going to need to make are to introduce more rigorous processes of librarianship. Whilst at a consumer level, data volume issues are seemingly solved, at a professional level the boundaries of affordable data storage are constantly being pushed. 4,000 line video from Red Camera doesn't upload to YouTube too well. We have to be able to make decisions about what is worthy of our archive, and also what is the swarf that has been generated along the way and should now be discarded. Software will help us - and a push for 2011 will be content and asset management - our ability to make valued decisions about what is worth storing is crucial too.

Yesterday, to the amusement and bemusement of many in my team (a small crowd formed), I spent about forty minutes in the presence of iPad In response to requests from one of my clients, I wanted to find out what would iPad be like as a presentation tool.

The device is sleek, shiny, slightly bulbous and a bit heavier than maybe one would ideally like (prediction: iPad 2 will be thinner and lighter). The screen is great, but in a well-lit office with skylights the viewing angle was susceptible to reflected glare. Overall, I do worry that all of these tablet type- and smart-phone devices are going to turn us into a nation of hunchbacks. Whilst the human-computer interfaces I'm sure now are ergonomically sound, the physiological impact of them is yet to be seen.

IPad without network (as I realised in the Dixons store in Heathrow recently) is a sleek, shiny doorstop. Connecting iPad to the test WiFi network in the office posed my first challenge. It's probably because I'm used to the Android touch screen interface, but I hadn't realised that the enter key on the on-screen keyboard had re-named itself "Connect", and I was looking for a non-existent confirmation button on the dialogue box that came up to enter the wireless access key. It is this kind of subtlety that lends weight to the claims of Mac or Windows users that they can't use the other platform (using a Mac always makes me realise how much I right-click in Windows, for example).

Once connected, I had one mission alone. Not for me the delights of multi-touch piano or the infamous Fart gadget. I just had to try and get a presentation to be presentable on screen, full-screen. First step - a Google Docs presentation, for this, my friends, is the future.

Although maybe not quite yet on iPad. The presentation, by default, seems to render as one, very long, HTML page, which you can swipe down a screen at a time. With no obvious way to take the browser full screen (a la F11 on a Windows browser), you are left with a browser bar across the top too. OK, but not slick... And remember that this whole exercise is to try and make us look cooler than the opposition.

Next up... A PDF presentation. Now with this I can't quite work out if I was unable to escape from the Google docs environment, or if it's just that the PDF viewer on iPad is a bit crap, but overall it had a similar visual impact as the Google Doc... It had a navigation bar permanently across the top. I don't know why, but I'm also kind of loatheD to recommend that anyone uses Adobe software on Apple devices at the moment.

And so onto a PowerPoint file in native format. At this point, trying to pull the ppt file from Google Docs, I realised that Google gave the option to switch between Mobile (the default) and Desktop modes. In mobile mode, you just can't get to any source files... the Google service renders a presentation in Docs. Switching to Desktop mode means that a native Docs presentation renders much better (identical to on a proper computer except that the chat function doesn't work because it needs Flash). However Desktop mode also allowed the download of the PowerPoint file which then opened up into Keynote. At this point, at last, we were up and running with a full-screen presentation.

But with one problem.

For about a year I have been trying to convince our creative community that we need to ditch our in-house fonts for all of our own work, and rely on using 'standard' web fonts for everything other than logos. (Clients, obviously can have whatever they like, but enlightened companies like Ikea have already made this step). The reason is because these days we never know where our material might render.

In Keynote, for example, on iPad. Looks like that if I am going to have to provide some of the darn things, at least I can use it as a strong lever to get some better Web-centric typography standards in place...

I wrote a few days ago about the Client Experience model, a way of thinking about the elements of your organisation's client service over and above your core offer.

In it, I gave the example of how EasyJet used the TV programme Airline to help manage down the expectations of air travel amongst their potential customer base. I believe that, as we enter a new, consumer-product led, commoditised world of IT, that our industry needs to find ways to do the same.

Yesterday I had the first request for an iPad from a general (non-Digital content producing) area of the business. Our competitors are starting to turn up to presentations with iPads and are looking cooler than we do with our laptops. Working in an aesthetic-led industry, 'looker cooler' is very, very important. IPad's (do you capitalise the 'I' of iPad at the beginning of a sentence?) use in a business context, though, opens up a huge can of worms.

Firstly, like mobile phones, iPads are revenue-generating devices for their vendor, not a piece of distinct capital investment. Whilst Total Cost of Ownership is a concept that has been well known in IT circles for many years, there's TCO and then there's TCO. A big lump of capital cost (into something that doesn't have any real value after you've bought it) plus an ongoing subscription (because, if these devices are going to be really used on the road, a generous 3G data allowance is going to be a requirement) is a whole new game. At least we get given mobile phone hardware for free...

Secondly, there's the "me too!" effect that starting to deploy iPads will have. Apple know how to market - and if you want evidence, just look at all the doey-eyed marketing people lovingly gazing at their latest iPad/iPhone/iPod/iBand in an agency near you. Start deploying a few, and unless you have a strong mechanism to control demand, a floodgate of requests will open. "Me too!"ism had, when I arrived at Imagination, bloated our annual mobile phone spend in the UK to double what it needed to be (and with a poor service being delivered because of the huge diversity of devices which were attempted to be supported).

It is the support of these devices that becomes the real challenge. Apple devices are famed for their ease of use... except, that is, when they maybe aren't designed with the best ventilation, the right wi-fi aerial, or with ease of handling in mind. If you are a home user and you experience such issues (or challenges with getting data in or out of a notoriously closed environment), you speak to Apple, and Steve usually tells you to, in as many words, eff off.

In a business environment, you tell your IT department that it doesn't work and that you want it fixed. Now. Because an important piece of work for a client relies on it.

Now, in the old world of IT that would be fine, because all of this would be happening in an environment where change is controlled. Sure, Windows XP is ugly, stupid and full of problems, but we haven't got around to changing it for ten years so we know how and why it's ugly, stupid and full of problems.

The supplier-controlled, constantly changing world of consumer devices is one where, if you want to use it for business purposes, two things are going to have to change. First of all, if things break or don't work like you thought they should, well, tough. Just because it's your IT team that are getting told to "eff off" by Steve (or Sergey, Larry or Eric, for that matter) isn't going to make them able to fix it. If you are taking the device into a risky situation, you're going to need to learn to think on your feet and accept those risks.

But secondly, and more fundamentally, if the devices aren't designed to be supported by a corporate function, it's going to be impossible to support them cost-effectively in that old model. Which means that, if you are going to want to use this cool stuff, you are going to need to invest the time to learn to use this cool stuff, because if you don't, and are expecting someone to come and press all the buttons for you, you're not going to to look cool. You are going to look like an uncle on the dancefloor at a wedding.

Wearing socks and sandles.

I stumbled across an article from last year by Rob Gray at Google in the early hours of this morning (that's early as in "woken up by the eight month old" as opposed to "up all night" these days...). In it, Rob talks about seven tips that Michael Porter identified for new CEOs. It struck me that many of these rules, however, are just as applicable to new managers at any level in the company hierarchy.

One of the most rewarding pieces of my career to date was time that I spent in the middle of this decade working with first- and second-line managers at one of the UKs big telcos. Some of the people I worked with were relatively new to work generally; graduate scheme members thrown in at the deep end of management with call centre teams, or burly, surly gangs of field engineers. Some would swim, and some would quite obviously drown.

Alongside the youngsters, however, there were long-serving staff who, twenty or so years into their careers were making their first steps into management. It was with these (mostly male) management freshers that I coined the "my manager is a ****er theory." It goes something like this...

For my generation and before (and possibly after, too, but we'll come back to that), work tends to culturally be seen in terms of hierarchy, and of "us and them". I guess that this reached a politically sensitive peak in the industrial strife of the 1970s and 80s, but its legacy remains to this day. (Personally I blame the political indoctrination of 'Carry on at your Convenience", but that's another story).

Whilst political trade unionism is now the exception (if it ever really was the rule), the 'us and them' thinking tends to manifest itself in an unrealistic expectation of what management is capable of, and a crisis of confidence as a result when someone steps into a management position. In this cultural world view, managers tell us what to do, have ultimate authority, should always be right, and are therefore ultimately ****ers when they eventually show themselves to be fallible mere mortals.

When someone then steps up into a position of management, they are then confronted with the cold, hard reality of being nothing but human. For some this results in an extreme delivery of Theory X-style authority. But for most it just leads to a period of extreme self-doubt; "I am coming to realise that maybe I, too, have become a ****er".

Now this cultural positioning, whilst not unique to British work culture, is not ubiquitous across other employment markets. Australia, in particular, seems to just not really have the hierarchical expectations (as evidenced it would seem by the safety record of Qantas, for example). It will be interesting to see whether "Business 2.0" will lead to a dismantling of the British expectations of management, as democratisation and transparency of decision making could both happen in the workplace.

Underpinning all of this for me, though, is a basic challenge for managers. Good leadership tends to come from helping teams to achieve their potential. If you spend all your time just telling people what to do to try and achieve that, chances are you've turned into a ****er.

Project achievements included:

- Shanghai office services (mostly) deployed
- and the Sydney office upgrade started
- Google Docs released to the first pilot users
- and the start of sessions with pilot groups on what they might be able to achieve with the new tools
- potential advisers for the managed printing services project identified

Additionally:

- the Computing article at last made the light of day (even if they did spell my name wrong)
- a good lunchtime chat with Phil Dickinson which triggered a hopefully interesting article here
- a reader survey (which some people have actually completed)
- received an invitation to Google Atmosphere in Paris in the autumn
- and had a weird excursion into the plans for new gTLDs at proposal stage at ICANN

Next week in one word: specifying

For the past ten years, I have always made an assumption that, no matter what investment an organisation has made in process-centric software, most of the day to day logic resides in Excel spreadsheets. Millions of pounds invested in ERP and CRM, and its the spreadsheets squirrelled around the place where the business really happens.

There are a number of risks associated with this. First of all, there is no audit trail in spreadsheets. Secondly, there is no ability for more than one user to access the same file at the same time, so files tend to multiply.

In the new world of browser-delivered business applications, multi-user, version-controlled spreadsheets might not only address the problems of Excel described above, but may even end the need for bespoke development. To understand why, one needs to look at why Excel has emerged into its powerful yet clandestine role that it has today, and also at how organisations could be making decisions about technology investment into the future.

Why is Excel so powerful? Well, generally because organisations have made huge investment into process-centred IT into which business processes are hard-baked. Changing your business process then involves making fundamental changes to software, which costs money, takes forever, and is outside of the control of the business unit which is trying to change. In steps Excel using which the business remodels itself, and the process-centred system festers, being used only half-heartedly.

When I worked at the BBC, there was a project which, having been specified around a set of processes which involved a single supplier, was shot to pieces before it even launched when a regulatory change scaled the suppliers from one to in excess of 200. The hard-baked processes documented were out of date before the system arrived.

However, there is something more fundamental to consider here: if you are going to encapsulate business processes into software, which should you choose, and what software approaches should you take?

There are two, two-by-two matrices (the consultant’s favourite!) that I’ve seen to help address this question - John Ward and Joe Peppard’s, and Geoffrey Moore’s. I’ve tried to pull the two together to something that has made sense for me.



Business functions loosely fall into one of four categories, based on two dimensions - whether something sets you apart from your competitors (“Market differentiating”) or not (“Non-differentiating”); and whether you have decided that that function is a “Core” activity (in that it generates value for your and/or your clients) or not (it’s basically a cost). Ultimately, what is seen as core activity is at the heart of an organisation’s strategic direction.

The four quadrants determine different approaches to how technology support should be given:

Non-core, non-differentiating functions are basically your cost centres - transactional activity that every organisation needs to do to exist, but don’t offer any great benefit. This includes accounts payable and receivable, payroll, IT systems management, often facilities and so on. In all of these areas, the first question that should be asked is whether the organisation should be doing the activity itself at all? In most instances, these are areas in which there are economies of scale to be made, and opportunities for services to be improved through finding partners for whom this is their business. Running an email system these days is best left to a Cloud provider, for example. Running payroll is best left to the professionals....

Non-core, potentially differentiating functions are basically a company’s R&D activities. Here, there is potential opportunity to create new services or products but, unless you are in the game of software development, it’s unlikely that much above standard collaboration and office tools would be required.

Core, non-differentiating functions are the things that you and your market competitors all have to do, but are unlikely to set yourself apart on; in my company’s case, this is mostly about the generation of content - and here we buy in tools (mostly for us from Adobe) to perform that task. CRM might be another example, and packaged solutions (or SaaS) are the route forward. Especially if it’s a process-based activity, there is almost certainly a product out there already these days.

The final box is the interesting one - in previous models, the area where bespoke software development was seen as a likely approach. My argument would be that for most organisations these days, with the exception of those who are involved in either software development or heavy number-crunching (hedge funds and so on), market differentiation on your core functions comes from your people, and whilst enabling them to exploit collaboration tools effectively will be of huge value, there is little software development to be done.

One final thought on this for now. I wrote recently about the merging of the transformational elements of HR and IT roles. Looking to the future, the goal for this kind of transformational, collaboration function should be to help an organisation improve its ability to deliver in the top left-hand quadrant: at best, to actually be in that top left-hand quadrant. Helping people to use collaborative tools in innovate ways to set out from the competition; recruiting the right (not necessarily though just “the best”) people; helping teams to function at the best of their ability.

Thanks to Phil for the conversation at lunch yesterday that help me to gel some of this stuff together (I think!).

I seem to be getting anywhere between 50 and 150 people visiting the site on any one day... I'd like to find out a little more about who you are (if you'd be good enough to share that with me). No motive other than to satisfy some of my curiosity, and maybe shape some articles in the future.

There is a short, five minute survey available at http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/326546/mattballantineblogsurvey. Be good to hear from you...

A nice catch up with Phil Dickinson this lunchtime, and a wide and varied conversation over a sandwich on Charlotte Street.

One connection that we made during our conversation was a fundamental difference that current Web2.0-type services that stream updates (such as Twitter, Facebook or Buzz) have from the Old World. In the Old World, if something was worth writing down, then it probably meant that what ever "it" was meant that the recipients were expected to both read and then action upon "it".

In the Twitterverse (Jeez!), if you try to read, let alone action everything that is posted to which you have subscribed, then you will go mad. These media are there to be grazed. It's casual conversation stuff, "water cooler moments" (or "fag breaks" as it used to be in more nicotine-obsessed times).

If you take a tweet at the value of an old-fashioned memo, you're in trouble. Equally, if you issue out tweets as commandments, you'll be highly frustrated.

Since lunchtime, it's also struck me that this is where email is causing no end of problems. Some people seem to see them in the old context of read and action; others as info-grazing fodder. Conflict thus ensues...

The creative world and the software programming world share more traits with each other than maybe either group would like to think (although comparing creatives to geeks will probably upset more creatives than the other way around). One of the things that comes out of this is a lot of "push" influence that can ultimately lead to management challenges.

Another 4-day week, so an early weeknote...

Project achievements included:

- completing presentations to the board about Google phase 2
- seeing the deployment of group-based permissions
- describing a potential crm service
- client reference meetings for the networks project

Additionally:

- Google video and Computer Weekly article published, interviewed for The Times and wrote guest Blogger article for Google enterprise blog.
- found out how well video chat can work
- saw quite how bad the iPhone aerial issue is
- continued to get no joy from lenovo
- planned a trip to the US offices

Next week in one word: summery

So, following on from the theory, what have I actually been doing with the client experience model?

A couple of points to note: first of all, if your underlying product or service is a pile of crap, there is only so far one can, to coin a phrase, 'polish a turd'; secondly, this is a continuing process, and we still have much to do.

Managing the promise of what we offer has been a big challenge. The IT department that I inherited was one that was shrouded in secrecy. As a result, there has been a breadth of expectation about the services that can be offered, much of which hasn't been made.

Recently we have been doing work to define our service offering in a way that is easily (I hope) digestible by everyone in the business. There are four elements: core services (devices, networks, security); software services (which are what you use the core services for, and split loosely into collaboration services and creative tools); service delivery (keeping all of the top two running); and projects (infrastructure ones that make changes to the core services, and business change ones that add or alter our software services).

Publishing a team structure that explains who does all of the above, and some basic commitments on availability and response (opening hours, service levels for incidents and requests) forms the basic elements of the IT Promise. I have deliberately kept away from the language of things like ITIL, but used its key principals.

Further down the line, a clear service catalogue is the next big step. But, in the meantime, I have been taking the above out (literally) on the road to let anyone who is willing to listen know about it.

Managing the perception of our service has also had it's challenges. The team was split into two offices at either end of a basement corridor when I started, and the comparisons with The IT Crowd were not difficult to make. Moving everyone into a single office space, providing good meeting room and
workbench facilities, and generally smartening up (including a clear desk policy) have helped to make us appear more like the professionals that we are.

There is still work to be done in many of our interactions with our clients, but we are steadily improving with an influx of very people-centred support analysts. A new helpdesk system later this year which will replace a somewhat ramshackle bespoke effort will also help, and we are running some workshops with volunteers from around the business to make sure we implement process that fits need.

Providing a lightweight, but coherent and effective project reporting and team structure framework has also greatly improved not only our ability to deliver, but our client's trust in our ability to deliver, and recent projects have been seen by many on the board as exemplary.

Proving the quality of services back to the business was probably the easiest area to start implementing - it's all about being unafraid to tell people about the stuff you're doing, and realising that they might actually be interested. Monthly project and service delivery reporting at board level, meetings with key managers on a regular basis, and presenting to anyone who will give me the time have been key (as well as sharing all of this in the team as well). An annual staff survey has been another great way of picking up on trends and being able to feedback. I surprised quite a few this year by actually emailing everyone who had comments for suggestion or some negative feedback- and the workshop volunteers for the service improvement work came from people who commented on the survey that our helpdesk service could be improved.

Recently I have also been working with our PR team to get publicity on our work externally as well. This is virtuous for both internal perceptions of how we are doing, but also for the company profile in general. Computer Weekly this week provided more positive messages.

Still, we have much to do, as all of the above runs in parallel to the fundamental overhaul of our services. But factoring our client's perception is also having some impact on our project scheduling. From a pure technology perspective, it would have been preferable to refresh our core networks before moving into cloud collaboration services - but that would have left no visible change in the services that actually mattered to people for far too long. The calculated risk of moving to Google in advance of refreshing much of our network infrastructure was one that had to be taken. Now we have the credibility and trust to be able to make major decisions about the underlying infrastructure.

I mentioned a few days ago that I would talk about how organisations might better manage their clients’ experience. So here we go...

Unless you want to take the chance that your client will only ever find out how well you can deliver a service (over and above your core product or service proposition) by how you deal with cock-ups, there are three key stages of the client experience that you must manage.

First of all is the promise. If your client thinks that they are going to get something different from what they actually receive, then, no matter how good what you provide is, there is a strong possibility that they will be disappointed. A good example of this is how a decade or so ago EasyJet allowed cameras to follow what were often moments of pain and anguish for their customers in the TV series Airline.

I was never really clear what Stelios (the founder of EasyJet) was up to in agreeing to take part in the show - it always appeared to show the firm in a fairly poor light with customers being turned away at the gate when late, and given short shrift when requesting refunds or transfers to other flights.

However, seen in the light of helping to manage the expectations of customers down, it makes perfect sense. Before the rise of budget airlines, air transport was assumed a luxury purchase. In the EasyJet budget world, there was no room for luxury on a 99p flight to Alicante, and the programme Airline frequently illustrated the point.

The second step to manage the client experience is in the way in which the perception of service is managed as that service is being delivered. Something that people in the engineering world often get wrong (and this is one area where I would say Google still have a lot to learn) is that just providing a high quality product is rarely enough. Whether it's the greeting you receive at a hotel reception desk, the liveried uniform worn by the sales assistant, or the call to say that the problem has been fixed, there is a stack of the superficial that makes a tangible difference to how clients feel about the service they receive.

In some instances, the surrounding warm and fuzzy feeling is more important than the technical service. In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell talks of insurance companies researching the premiums that should be payable by doctors finding that the bedside manner (or lack of) had more correlation with likelihood of a practitioner being sued than any objective measure of the quality of medical advice received.

The final part of managing the client experience is making sure that you evidence back to the client the quality of what has been delivered, because if you don't, you leave it to them to find out only when it fails. In recent years most supermarkets have adopted this approach in the way in which they structure their receipts.

In days before, discounts and BOGOFs would be liberally scattered around the printed receipt in the order in which the checkout assistant scanned the items. These days the 'money shot' of discounts is saved up until the end of the transaction, and then usually highlighted on the bill with words like 'today you have saved'.

If all three of these element are in place, managing the clients experience of the service you provide becomes a far easier challenge. Each missing brick makes the job harder, and if you only rely on the quality of your product... Well, if things fail, you'll probably lose your clients if you're in an open market.

Next article, I’ll talk a bit more about what sorts of things we’ve been doing to put some of these ideas into practice.

Google have been impressed by what we've achieved in the past few months in our efforts to go Google - so much so that they've made a video about it. You can find it here.

A bit of a project for the summer months. I've often noticed that we miss fascinating bits of architecture, strange historical artifacts, and other wonderful things in our day to day life because we rarely look up above the horizontal.

So in the next couple of months I am going to try to take a few moments out every day to spot things that I haven't noticed before. Photos will be posted to Twitter, hash-tagged #summerlookup. Feel free to join me!

If you ask people in general about what companies they see as offering great client service, you will hear an interesting set of responses. Some modern firms get mentioned (like, say, Amazon) where the quality of service is easily measurable (for example, do they deliver when they say they will?) and transparent to the consumer (order tracking and so on). The other category of candidate firms tend to be those that handle problems well. M&S used to feature highly, as did John Lewis - both retailers with a history of straightforward and lenient returns policies.

Ask people about bad client service, and things tend to be much more straightforward. Companies that handle problems badly.

This isn't just conjecture - these were questions that I asked of hundreds of people in my years as a consultant. The upshot of all of this is that if you provide a product or service, you must ensure that you manage the experience around it well, otherwise you'll be dependent on handling mistakes for your clients to find out how good you are. And that might just be too late...

I'll talk a bit about how that client experience might be structured at a later date - I mainly want to get what has been the worst client experience I have had in many, many years off my chest.

Lenovo (and previously IBM) have been our supplier of choice for Windows laptop machines for quite some time. In April we ordered a batch of 25 devices through our reseller. I had been relatively happy with the quality of the devices being supplied until recently, and our Lenovo account manager had been one of the best people we've been dealing with in recent years. Warning signs were there in the Spring, however, when a series of supply issues started to emerge.

The batch of devices we had ordered arrived, and as we asset tagged them, my team noticed that on a number of them (13, to be precise) USB ports were mounted in such a way that inserting a USB plug took quite substantial force. I got in touch with our reseller, and requested to return the faulty devices. Lenovo got back and said we would have to return them for repair.

I don't know about you, but if you've spent £850 on a laptop, sending it for repair before you have even used it seems a bit of a rum deal.A baker's dozen, even more so. I refused, and requested replacements.

Other than reasonably regular emails from my account manager saying "things were being escalated", nothing happened until last week, seven or so weeks after the initial order was received. The response was a detailed technical description about how, even if it did take some substantial force to insert or remove a device, it was within the specified force (in Newtons) to comply with USB specifications, and therefore there wasn't a problem.

Seven weeks of silence, and then a science lecture. I responded that it seemed Lenovo were leaving me little choice but to find an alternative supplier.

That received no response, and, to make matters worse, it turned out that the manager concerned then went on holiday. Probably he needed a rest after measuring too many Newtons.

Chasing again this week, and it wasn't until yesterday morning that I was called by a colleague of the Newton-measurer, and that call was to tell me that there was nothing that he could do for me. I haven't had many more pointless phone conversations in my life. Later yesterday afternoon I was contacted by the manager's manager. Who also told me that there was nothing that they could do for me with regard to the devices that had a problem (but weren't faulty).

As I have pointed out, at length, we've been paying premium prices for Lenovo equipment over the years on the basis of the promise of quality manufacturing and service associated with a major manufacturer (let's be honest, one called IBM). If all of the units had been identical, then it might have been a reasonable case to suggest that they were built to specification, but there was substantial variation. Holding down a laptop with two hands to plug and unplug devices (which on well-travelled laptops happens frequently) is a broken motherboard waiting to happen.

But even worse than the product quality, has been the way in which they have dealt with it. Seven weeks of complete silence, followed, essentially, by a lecture that I am wrong, and that they are to do nothing to try to resolve the situation other than tell me that I am wrong. One would expect this from Steve Jobs, but I can't buy MacOS devices from anyone else so I have to put up with it. Lenovo are in a very crowded marketplace.

The crowning glory of this whole episode was this morning. After promising that someone would get back to me with a proposal for delivering some sort of client satisfaction, Newton-Monitor-in-Chief left that to the poor (and now with one less client) account manager. And the "satisfaction"? That Lenovo weren't to do anything. At all.

If anyone from Lenovo gets to read this, you are more than welcome to leave comments.

Project work this week included:

- preparing for network provider client reference visits
- continuing to present the Google Phase 2 project to Group Board members
- seeing our cloud-hosted BES go live (eventually)
- observing the Shangai office fit-out from afar

Additionally:

- presented at the Google CIO event
- responded to more clients' feedback from the 2010 IT Survey
- saw myself on video (more on that soon)
- saw one of our core hardware providers (Lenovo) fail to deliver so as to lose us as a customer (ditto)

Next week in one word: references

One amusing moment for many at yesterday's event was the assertion that the HR and IT roles in organisations are increasingly becoming one.

This seems obvious to me, but only if one understands the transformational aspects of those disciplines, and not confuse them with the transactional. And one also acknowledges that the HR world has as strong an image problem as the IT world does.

Five years ago I took part in a team coaching exercise with the board of a government agency. We had the five members of the board together in a hotel for a couple of days, and started the event with a warm up exercise. Each member of the team was asked to write down a type of car, and that car should be, in their eyes, representative of how they saw themselves in their role.

These cars were then drawn anonymously from a hat, and one by one the team were asked to guess who had chosen which. Out of a hat came a VW Beetle. The four male, middle-aged, middle class men all thought that this was the choice of the female, slightly younger HR Director. It wasn't until the Ferrari came out of the hat that we actually discovered the car that the personnel head had actually chosen.

Back to yesterday's assertion - if it's the routine, somewhat plodding transactional side of HR services (disciplinary procedures, administering performance management processes, recruitment processes, policy creation and enforcement etc) merged with the technology aspect of IT (running boxes, setting up user accounts, etc) then a process hydra of epic proportions would be born (and go on to scare small children no doubt).

However, bringing the organisational development, leadership, team building and other transformational aspects together would be an entirely different beast. I've been bandying around the concept of the "Chief Collaboration Officer" recently - the logical extension from CTO through CIO... and that, potentially, is what was being envisaged at the Altitude event yesterday.

A good day at Millbank. The event was videoed, so that might be available online soon, but in the meantime,
here's the slidedeck.

I guess that I just don't understand economics as well as the former Selfridges shelf-stacker and data entry guru George Osborne.

In my simple world, if something goes catastrophically wrong (say, like the world banking system), then I would be looking to try to make some changes to that system to stop it doing it again in the future. How wrong I must
be... Obviously what is needed is to make sweeping cuts to the public services, whilst raising indirect taxation, to make sure that those who (some may argue) got us in to the mess in the first place (the 'collateralised debt is a triple-A investment' ratings agencies) take kindly on the economy.

Or, if you'd like an alternative interpretation of what's going on, take a look at Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine'.

Rant over.

Meanwhile, it has got me thinking about the dangers of macro-economic forecasting. There is a darker side to the whole cloud revolution that I haven't really spoken about on these pages, but has important consequences for those who think that it is only private-sector enterprise that can save the economy.

In the UK, there are an awfully large number of people who work in technical IT jobs. If they aren't supplier side (and even for many of them that are), there are some substantial career issues on the horizon. Namely, that Cloud will probably make many of those roles redundant.

Now there are extremely valuable jobs that will need to be done in the new world of helping organisations adapt to the new technologies. However, the skills profile of most IT people really don't match to what will be required in the years ahead.

Simply put, the five-year fixed-term that the government is now so slavishly working to seems to take little account of the fact the five years is a very long time in the modern world, and that job markets and industries can be subjected to colossal change in such a period. Five years ago, Apple didn't do mobile phones...

Focus on the public sector alone seems to be making huge assumptions about the underlying industries that make up the private sector. Putting aside the knock-on effect that average 25% cuts are going to have on private sector suppliers, in five years time we could have witnessed dramatic contraction in many industries (not least IT) because of evolution in markets.

But hey. As long as Standard and Poor are happy...

I'm going to be speaking at the Google CIO Summit being held in Millbank Tower tomorrow (see here for info from "my PR people" (how much of a novelty is that?)).

The talk is only short, but then followed a bit later by a Q&A where I will be joining people from The Telegraph and from one of our key clients (co-incidentally) Jaguar Land Rover. We've recently launched our annual IT survey, so one of the key things that I'll be able to talk about is initial responses about the successes of the Google project thus far in numbers.

I will post the presentation up here after the event.

I was interviewed last week by a journalist from Computer Weekly for an article that he is writing about Cloud Computing, and security.

One trend that I have noticed in recent months is that some of our bigger clients are blocking access to file sharing services like YouSendIt and DropBox. The driver behind this I assume is to try to prevent staff from using these services to circumvent information security policies. This, for me, is typical "wash ups and midgets" behaviour (especially when, as a result, clients become totally reliant on extranet services that are provided by my team that have only limited bandwidth because of the way in which they are currently hosted.

Information, to coin a cliché, is like water. If you ignore its passage, it will find a way out somehow. Best to provide adequate pipes and channels to prevent leaks springing up inconveniently. The problem with blacklisting services like YouSendIt is simple - there are more services like it springing up every day, and companies who try to block these channels will be chasing their tails.

What companies do need to do is provide adequate training, policy and guidance to all of their staff about how they can share information in safe and secure ways.

Project work this week included:

- launching the 2010 Imagination IT survey (and surprising some by actually responding to their feedback)
- signing off the hosted BES service
- short-listing network service providers

Additionally:

- interviewed by Computer Weekly about cloud security
- met with my old boss from the BBC who is over from Beijing for the week (nice to see you, Tim!)
- did the first presentation to London staff about what is happening in the next 12 months in Imagination IT
- finalised a presentation for the Google CIO event in London next week

Next week in one word: altitude.

I have been clearing through some old books recently, and came across The Meaning of Everything by Simon Winchester which tells the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.

I read the book a number of years ago, but one thing that stuck with me was the way in which the OED built improvement into their approach.

The for the first edition of the OED, the editors began, logically, at the letter 'A', and then worked sequentially through the alphabet. For the second edition, they started at the letter 'M'. The reason behind that choice was that they figured that by mid-alphabet the original editors had probably got their act together.

For round two, starting revising (many decades later - edition one took 71 years to create) from a point where the quality would probably be fairly good, thus allowing the second edition team to get up to speed with their processes by the time that they got to the content that probably needed most work.

It still strikes me as how clever, in that it is so obvious, this approach was.

Last week I wrote about my concerns about the way in which Apple is decreasingly a computer company. This week whilst away on holiday, I read this article in Wired UK about how Steve Jobs has Adobe in his sights.

So, let's just recap. The computer platform that most of the creative industry seems wedded to (MacOS) is produced by a company that seems to be totally consumer (rather than business) focused, and is also in a very public feud with the manufacturer of the software on which most of it's business consumers rely? And some people say that I'm mad to consider even raising the question of moving away from Apple...

Additionally:

- Padstow is nice...
- ...but a little over-dominated by Mr Stein
- ...but he does do very good fish and chips

Next week in one word: preparing

Projects work this week included:

- planning the Google Phase 2 board communications
- delivering a highly successful presentation to the European MD
- working with Ovum and Google on a couple of case studies
- sitting on the sidelines (where I should be) as my team ran the first supplier presentations in a major procurement exercise

Additionally:

- shared Asia experiences with the team...
- ...travel tips with the Group FD
- and marvelled on how, when they work, there's nothing quite as persuasive as a live demo.

Next week in one word: Holiday

This week saw a notable shift in the balance of power in the technology world. Apple (according to the somewhat dubious valuations accorded by the global stock markets) is now worth more as a company than Microsoft.

The two companies, who began at a similar time in the 1970s, have seen incredibly opposite trajectories since they first emerged from the hobbyist microcomputer market. In the mid-1990s, in the days before the Internet (www) explosion, it could be argued that it was only the direct investment by Microsoft in its ailing (and Steve Jobs-free) competitor that kept Apple in business.

Today the tables have turned. Microsoft appears to be a fading star (one of those ones that expands massively before turning into a black hole). Unless something dramatically turns around for them, it seems the Web 2.0 world will leave them staring at lost license revenue.

Apple, on the other hand, are in the ascendant. In a week when their next great hope, the iPad, launched outside the US, their reinvention as the arch consumer media products marketing engine seems complete.

Which leaves me wondering... How serious are they about manufacturing computers these days? Apple seem to be a marketing company, specialising in media content and distribution channels, with a legacy personal computer company tacked on the side.

As with many organisations in the Creative sector, the most important business computers in Imagination are high-spec, high-cost Mac workstations. If you put the history aside for a moment, this increasingly feels like a retail company buying its EPOS systems from News International or Disney.

Actually, given the Pixar connection, maybe I am buying our core business systems from Disney. Cue 'Mickey Mouse Organisation' jokes...

Projects work this week included:

- meeting with my clients in the Hong Kong and Shanghai offices, selling the Google Phase 2 story
- helping with supplier meetings for services for our new Shanghai office

Additionally:

- valuable time with Todd - my IT Manager for Asia
- explored a bit of Hong Kong
- decided that two weeks of travel for work is just a bit too long
- walked on a glass floor, 100 storeys up in the air

Next week in one word: home

Shanghai isn't as different a place as I was maybe expecting. There again, I've seen little other than the Airport and Pudong - a business district that has emerged from the fields in the past 10 years.

The buildings are tall, and somewhat "space age" in a Buck Rodgers kind of way. There's a definite look to Chinese high-rise architecture that is different from anywhere else in the world. But the buildings are also very spread out - as a colleague noted, Shanghai is to the space of LA that Hong Kong is to the crampedness of New York.

Internet browsing is also a bit of a hit-and-miss affair as well. The "Great firewall" appears to be a series of blocks on DNS services - Facebook no, Google (search) yes, Picasa no, Flckr yes. All of that can be avoided if you can find some way of tunnelling out - whilst Facebook might not be a big deal for building out our business in Shanghai, we are looking seriously at using Picasa for some of our content management, and not having access would be an issue.

BlackBerry also can provide a route out which bypasses the local filtering, but it also has been a bit hit and miss in terms of actually getting a service in the first place.

This morning is the last day of my trip - this afternoon we will fly back to Hong Kong, and then I get a flight (BA strike permitting) back to London just before midnight.

The trip has be ably assisted by:

the HP NetBook (hasn't let me down),
Google Apps (ditto),
TripIt (mostly useful),
the BlackBerry Curve with LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter and Google Maps (good once I was able to get data connections),
OpenOffice (hardly used at all),
my Android Hero (barely used - no way that I'm paying for roaming data)
and a half bag-full of various power adaptors (please, one day, let there be standardization...)

Until you actually get to spend some time working in a different environment, it's very difficult to get a handle on the subtle differences that exist between cultures - whether they be borne of nationality, industry or company.

There are striking differences between the ways in which people in our Sydney and Hong Kong offices operate, even though there are a reasonable number of expats in both locations, and that we work in a company with it's own very strong culture that comes, in large part, from the owner-managed nature of the business.

In Hong Kong, the office stays relatively quiet. In Sydney, people quite frequently converse from one side of the office to the other. In Hong Kong, the day starts relatively late, and goes on well into the evening. Sydney starts early and finishes closer to "on time". Hong Kong, lunch is an important event that people make time for. Sydney sees a sandwich grabbed at the desk.

When you are working remotely from your team, it's all too easy to not pick up on these subtleties, and that can form the basis of conflict without either side really realising what is going on. Whilst technology is undoubtedly making the world smaller, actually spending time with people and finding out how they tick is still so very important. Getting the time and budget to do so, though, becomes more and more of a challenge in so many organisations.

Shanghai tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how that, very new to the company, operation works.

That's quite a view from the office window. Especially for someone who usually is in a basement office with no windows!

I'm reading the Malcolm Gladwell essay compilation What the Dog Saw, and the piece Open Secrets I've been finding particularly interesting.

At it's core is an observation from Gregory Treverton that there is a distinction in the world between puzzles and mysteries, but misidentifying one as the other can lead to substantial challenges to resolution.

A puzzle is something where the answer lies in finding out and piecing together the necessary information, whereas a mystery is solved through the subjective judgement of expertise. The example with which Treverton illustrated this distinction was that the location of Osama bin Laden is a puzzle (find out more information about his location and you can find him), whereas what would happen after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was a mystery (and the voices who warned of chaos seemed to be drowned out in the political noise of the time). Treverton comes, it may come as no surprise, from the "security" world.

Gladwell's argument is that if you mistake a mystery for a puzzle, gathering more and more information to try to discover the solution becomes counter-productive. Analysis paralysis sets in.

Now compare these two states to the two worlds of IT projects - infrastructural projects, and those involving business change. Most infrastructural projects (networks, capacity provision, etc, etc) tend to fall into the category of nice, logical puzzles; ones, in which, the stereotypical computer scientist can excel. The Problem-Solution paradigm works well with a puzzle like being able to reduce network latency, or deliver a authentication system.

However, it seems to me that most business change projects fall into the mystery category, but too often they are approached as puzzles. When you think of it in this way, the traditional requirements analysis/solutions design approach to IT projects could appear to be doomed from the outset. But if it is mystery that we are dealing with, whose judgement should be looked to in terms of defining answers?

Well, how about the people who are subject to the mystery in the first place? IT's role becomes to facilitate business units defining business change for themselves, using technology to help where it can.

The East Hotel in Tai Koo where I'm currently staying is only five months old, and shows a cool sophistication that puts many of its European counterparts to shame. It's also, without doubt, the most gadgety place I have ever stayed.

Some of it is a bit gimmicky - at reception you sign your name on a screen-enabled Wacom tablet (which had lost it's calibration when I was checking in, causing a bit of mucking around to recalibrate).

Some of it verges on the gimmicky - there is no guest information book in the room - just an iPod Touch (tethered on a long security cable). The room service menu is clickable - and you can place your order direct from the iPod.

Some of it, though, shows a real attention to detail that is admirable. The LCD TV screen has a patch panel next to the desk, and you can plug in an HDMI, RCA or VGA source. And not only that, but in a drawer next to the desk are all the cables that you might need to do that. In a cinch, the NetBook that I've been using on this trip was plugged into the 30-something inch display, and I've just video conferenced home to catch up with my wife and son.

The only criticism is that the network connection is a bit flakey... but it's not charged at £12/hour like the hotel in Sydney, so you win some, you lose some.

You've got to admire the refreshing honesty of the connection process to the East Hotel's wifi networks (shown above). Arrived safely in Hong Kong to a wonderfully hospitable welcome, and a beautiful (and only five-month-old) hotel.