Project achievements included:

- signing our network provider contract
- facilitating one of the most complex global meetings I've ever done
- Mac builds being generated in Casper
- big steps towards finalisation our service hours
- lifting the mist on our event management web requirements

Additionally:

- kept a steady ship (mostly) during a time of business hyperactivity
- interviewed for The Gemalto Review
- experimented with HulloMail cloud-based voicemail
- and Memeo Send
- prepared first draft for my workshop at Google Atmosphere (and checked the train times!)


Next week in one word: capacity

Giving some thought to the changing information security policies that are needed to cope with the increasingly collaborative-based tools that are emerging in the cloud era, and it got me wondering... if the telephone were to be invented today, would it pass muster with one of the more officious information security departments?

Imagine the conversation:

Potential Telephone User: "I'd like to get one of these new telephones, please."
InfoSec Team: "Hmm. We'll need to have a think about that."
PTU: "I really need it. All of my clients are using them, and I need to be able to talk to them. I have to have a phone number!"
IST: "You want to disclose your identity to others outside of the organisation? I don't think so!"
PTU: "You what?"
IST: "And have you thought about the implications of having no password on the phone. Anybody could be picking it up and communicating with your callers."
PTU: "They'll probably just take a message on a post it for me."
IST: "Post Its? Information left out in the open with personal information on it? Are you crazy?!?!"
PTU: "Sod it. I'll buy a mobile."

I'm pulling together some content for a workshop that I'm going to be running at the second European Google Atmosphere event that's taking place in a couple of weeks time at an impressive Chateau just outside Chantilly in France. When I spoke at the London CIO event in the early summer, we had just about completed our first phase of migration, and we were planning how to approach the gradual deployment of Google Docs and Sites across the business.

At the end of the summer we now have about 120 people using Docs to various extents in the business (about a third of our permanent workforce), and we are starting to see people getting to grips with it and finding ways to make their own working practices more effective as a result. It's the first green shoots, and whilst nothing earth shattering, there is much more to come I am sure.

The presentation is focused on developing a business case for a move to a Cloud-based service, and has got me thinking about what a business case should look like (and what our own was like). It also comes after seeing reports like this one on CIO.com, and having conversations with CIOs contemplating a move to Google driven by the potential cost savings.

I'm of very strong opinion here: if you drive a project to move to a service like Google Apps (or Microsoft BPOS, or whatever else) on grounds of cost saving alone, whilst you probably will save some money, the project will fail.

Why? Well, because if you start from a premise that you just want to save money, what's in it for the business, or the people using the tools? A sense that their core tools for communication aren't so valuable and, maybe by proxy, they aren't worth very much.

The CIO.com article talks about four reasons why existing Google Apps clients are looking to move away. Three of the four reasons are directly as a result of a cost-saving driven approach (the final one, because of Google's slightly gung-ho approach to release management is the one that I can relate to...).

Drive a project with good, positive business objectives (ours were to improve relationships with our clients, improve engagement across the business, and to get value for both the company and our clients), and cost savings may well fall out. Drive on a simplistic measure alone, and you might not get what you bargained for...

Project achievements included:

- positive movement on the group positioning project
- final numbers on the networks work
- additional groups identified for Google Docs piloting

Additionally:

- feedback to the head of the US business following last week's visit
- feedback to my IT Programme group about progress in the past 12 months (lots!)
- started conversations about CRM strategies
- and wrapped up the #summerlookup project

Next week in one word: autumnal

I wrote last week about the dangers of confusing measurements with objectives. It was with a mix of anger and bemusement that I watched a news item on the BBC last night that perfectly illustrated by way that the coalition government has shafted itself in pandering to the readership of the Daily Mail.

The government has set itself a net immigration target of 100,000 each year (for want of a better comparison, that's about a Watford's worth of people). Recently released figures show that it's currently running at 200,000. That means that the country is currently expanding at the rate of two Watfords per annum. Which, if you know Watford, is obviously a slightly daunting prospect.

It turns out that there are two main reasons for this. Firstly, because there has been a massive increase in students coming into the country. Often they are paying up to £35k per annum in fees, and overseas students now provide 15% of the UK's Higher Education funding (according to the BBC last night). Seeing as the whole of the public sector is being told that it is about to see its funding obliterated by up to 40%, one can only congratulate the Universities on taking pre-emptive, market-focused strategies.

The second reason that the net immigration figure is down is because emigration has fallen. That's right - too few Britons are leaving the country for the totals to add up.

So this leaves the government in a quandry. Stop students coming in and run the risk of the university system collapsing, or run campaigns for Brits to leave the country to hit the target. And for what? For achieving a meaningless target that in the great scheme of things is totally irrelevant (as it ignores EU migration, because we have free transit now for people as well as trade), and misses the overall point that if it weren't for immigration Great Britain would consist of nothing but a few tribes of cave dwellers and a lot of woodland.

I have an alternative. Shut Watford. I love the football team, Cassiobury Park is very nice, but other than that it wouldn't be a great loss. Now, if any of you know anyone at the Daily Mail, just tell them that Watford causes cancer, and the whole nasty mess will be resolved in a matter of weeks.

So, there we go. Three months, 48 photos, and what have we learned?

Well, that there is some interesting stuff to look at if you just raise your gaze. And that I seem to have a slightly unhealthy interest in trains (blame 20 years of knowing @tallnohair and 20 months of knowing @commutr).

All the photos (bar the one with the chap with the iPad) were taken on my HTC phone, so they're all a bit cruddy. The only one I wish I had taken with a proper camera, though, is the one of kite flying on the Isle of Wight.

Anyway, a nice little journal of my 40th summer. You can follow my musings as I approach my 40th Birthday at 41-4-40. Thanks to co-father-to-be James Duncan for the slightly drunken dinner conversation that led to this project happening in the first place, and to @ferrar, @commutr and @_francois for taking part too.

My delightful, nearly ten-month old son yesterday ate his first blackberry. Unfortunately not the bramble-variety (he loves those, particularly with apple and pear). This was one of the larger, Canadian ones; my life's slightly aged 8000-series. Oscar somehow managed to tooth and gum his way through the keyboard. Whilst the on button still works, nothing else does any more. He was slightly grouchy for the rest of the day... it might have been indigestion.

I had my old Nokia N82 sitting in a draw at work, so I brought that home for my wife to use instead. The BlackBerry was syncing back to Mrs B's corporate account, so all of her contacts appeared to be safe and sound in Outlook. They were exported to a csv file, and then I booted up the Samsung netbook that I've been trialling in recent months (not as good at the equivalent HP), and set to download Nokia PC Suite to sync the contacts via Bluetooth. Except that PC Suite has, in the past 12 months, been replaced by the Ovi Suite. Well, a bit of rebranding by Nokia is fair enough I guess in the face of the iPhone/Android pincer movement that has surrounded them in the past few years.

Ovi Suite is a 90Mb download. The uncompressed installation probably three times that or more. That's an awful lot of program for something that basically just allows you to ship data in and out of a phone. I remember the days of the early nineties demoscene when people were getting elaborate 3D graphics out of 4k. Whilst I'm not saying that everything needs to be written in machine code by any means, 90Mb for a phone sync tool looks like lazy coding in the extreme.

Another example - a simple painting tool from AutoDesk that we've been looking at called Sketch Book Pro. They do an iPhone version of it that can't be more than a meg or two. The Mac installer - 140Mb.

The problem with lazy coding is it is just a symptom of a poor approach to software design and delivery. 90Mb of the sync tool, running like a dog, and no doubt with the ability to have a 3D animated background to turn this "destination software" into a cosy Jack Russell puppy lookalike (through the magic of embedded, uncompressed AVI no doubt). Meanwhile, they've forgotten something. There is no import function. You can't, in this bloated monstrosity, actually get your contacts data into the phone through any route other than typing them in.

If they are lucky, Nokia might find themselves manufacturing Wellington boots again in the next few years...

Project achievements included:

- exploration of tools for creative collaboration
- the Dearborn office enabled for Google Docs
- and initial scoping for network and server refresh

Additionally:

- some great time spent with people across the New York and Detroit offices
- catching up with my old boss from Reuters
- experiencing the build up to the Woodward Dream Cruise

Next week in one word: homeward

Another trip comes to a close, and it reinforces for me once again the importance of being able to meet, face-to-face, the people that you are working with at least once in a while. Whilst the progression in tools to help us collaborate with others in spite of geographic dislocation has been dramatic in the past couple of decades, the trust that we need to build in one another to help us get to grips with the task at hand seems so much easier and quicker when you are in the same physical space.

It's not to say that meaningful social relationships cannot be fostered in an online world... it's just that there is a big difference between a social relationship and a social relationship with people you need to work with. Moreover, the need to discover common interests and shared ground can happen naturally in small talk that is so hard to replicate on digital platforms.

It's been a good few days, meeting my colleagues in New York and Detroit. Many ideas have been spurred as a result of the conversations that have come from different perspectives than those I usually hear in London.

There are two things that I associate with Detroit - music and motors. The home of Motown Records, the source of house music, and the location for the big three US auto manufacturers - Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.

The motor industry has been decimated by the economic turmoil of the past few years. It's a simple equation... In times of recession, people stop buying cars. But it seems that the US auto industry could be going the same way as that in the UK: whilst local firms struggle to keep up, foreign ones come in and set up in new locations to manufacture in new ways.

Apparently companies like Toyota and Hyundai are manufacturing in enormous volume in the US now, but they've set up in cities elsewhere from Detroit, and with non-unionised operations. The hulk of auto building in Detroit struggles to change direction to keep up.

It's a funny mix, though, because the City is full of the trappings of the wealth that were generated in times past. The Dearborn Inn Hotel, opposite what was once the Ford Airport and now the Ford test track, is country house opulence. Neat, tended lawns are everywhere. And yet at 9 am this morning, the roads appeared empty. A conversation with a colleague yesterday about his journey to work in the morning - about 30 minutes... but it used to take an hour.

Actually, it should probably be the SouthWest Airlinesization of short-haul air travel, as they are the people that invented it.

After many years of air travel being viewed as something of a luxury or prestige purchase, it seems that most flights under three hours now are a no-frills, budget experience where everything is a charged-for extra. Having just checked in for my flight to Detroit tomorrow morning, an additional $23 was charged for checking in a suitcase.

It seems to me to be a fairly unusual model that the airlines are adopting. In most markets, prices go down whilst the quality and specification of what you get goes up... think motor cars, think consumer electronics, think about actually most consumer goods. In the airline industry, the headline price is (sometimes) going down, but the spec has dropped through the floor. O'Leary at RyanAir is still pitching the concept of "Pay-per-Pee" on his flights...

Oh well. Such is the lot of the modern traveller.

An interesting insight into the market demographic of Delta passengers, though, comes from their terms and conditions for checking-in fragile or bulky items for the hold.

Fragile or bulky item examples given are a saddle, antlers, Hawaiian pineapples or military duffle bags. Pity the GI who's been on a hunting holiday in Honolulu.

Whilst it's really important to know that, if you are trying to achieve something, you're making progress towards the objective. However, increasingly we seem to be in a world cursed by a plague of measuring things that are easy to measure.

There was an article in Advertising Age today which came up in conversation with a colleague. There are some interesting comments, and one in particular pointing to the meaninglessness of companies using number of friends on Facebook, or number of tweets on Twitter as meaningful indicators of anything (other than, of course, the number of friends on Facebook and the number of tweets on Twitter).

The Web2.0 world is a great environment for measuring things that are easy to measure. Since the early days of the World Wide Web and the fashion for hit counters, through increasingly complicated web usage monitoring, through to the social networking world, simple to generate statistics have taken on the confusing identity of objectives in their own right. At one stage at the BBC, budgets for some of the websites on bbc.co.uk were being set by the number of hits in the previous year. The bigger the number, the more the budget. No reference to whether it was useful or valuable content.

It also strikes me that customer contact centres have fallen prey to this in the past. Imagine a world where the main statistic you can generate is how many rings the customer had to wait before the phone was picked up. Then, you set a target to reduce that wait to, say, four rings. You can measure it so you achieve it. Then some bright spark suggests that if you get an automated system to pick up the calls automatically you can smash the target... and customers now go immediately into "Press 9 to lose the will to live' worlds.

All the while, what the customer is looking for is their issue to be resolved effectively and in a timely manner. But hey, that's damn hard to measure, so we stick to the things that are easy, even if they are stupid.

The Tribeca district of New York is a relatively low-rise area of the island, and historic. Many of the buildings date back to the 19th Century (which is real history in the USA), and many of the streets are cobbled. This is a major issue if you want to get a new fibre optic connection installed.

Last autumn we requested a new internet connection from our ISP. It would require a new fibre optic cable to be laid, and the permit acquisition process began. Authority from New York City, authority from the last-mile provider, and authority from the landlord of our (predominantly residential) building were needed. Gaining the permits was left to the ISP, and by April, and a number of visits from engineers and contractors with tools but not the necessary paperwork, and we found ourselves looking for a new provider.

We're still awaiting the new line, nearly a year later. As I will happily tell anyone who will listen we got a new Internet connection provisioned in the supposedly far more bureaucratic city of Shanghai in less than eight weeks (although, to be fair, a number of the things you might want to access over that internet connection will bounce off of the Great Firewall).

Part of the challenge of getting the new line in appear to be because of the historic nature of the cobbles of Franklin Street. Although, bizarrely, those cobbles are now festooned with spray paint... the feral markings of the utility companies who mark out where to (and not to) dig. Our soon-to-be-former ISP failed to get the cancellation of the original order processed in time, and so contractors dug up cobbles all the way to within 20 feet of our office. Our hopefully-soon-to-be ISP are now delayed whilst they try to track down where the cobbles that were lifted and stored now reside. Replacing them will be extremely expensive...

Arrival in Manhattan via Newark was strangely underwhelming. I think it must be the comparison with recent trips to Hong Kong and Shanghai, but New York looks somewhat spacious, with big gaps between the skyscrapers. Or it's just the cumulative effect of a long journey and heavy rain on arrival that made it look so spread out?

Waiting in line seemed to be a feature of the journey out: three people in front of me at check in at Heathrow seemed unable to cope with the idea of a single bag weighing less than twenty-three kilos; the slow crawl through immigration at Newark (I thought that the chip passports that so many of us carry these days were supposed to carry biometric data, but the border control needs to collect another set, including photos and scans of every finger and thumb); and then the queues for the toll booths on the highway (where the car in front didn't have the $1.80 required, so all manner of bureaucratic form filling to let her pass).

But now settled at the hotel, and looking forward to a couple of days with colleagues in our Franklin Street office, to be followed by a few days in Detroit.

On Sunday I'm off to the land of the free and the home of the brave. Or New York city and then Detroit, to visit our offices in the USA.

I have visited New York a few times, and it's a great place to be (for a short period, at least). I've never been to a big US industrial city, and so I'm intrigued by what I will see in Motor City, as it's a place that has undoubtedly seen great hardship in recent years as the world automotive market has gone South.

Observations throughout... stay tuned.

Project achievements included:

- another tranche of BES user migrations
- some great early observations from our Docs and Sites piloting
- contracts finalised on our managed network project
- great progress on a company-wide positioning initiative
- steps towards the start of the managed print services project

Additionally:

- invited to speak at a Google event in Dublin in October
- committed to attend Web2.0 in San Francisco in November
- gave an overview of the ERP project

Next week in one word: America

Some good conversations yesterday, firstly with an academic researcher we've been working with recently, and then at lunch with former-BBC colleague Dan Merriott.

Some links were made in those chats that haven't quite lined up for me before now. A number of years ago I was introduced to Ken Blanchard's Situational Leadership model, the basic gist of which is that as people you have working for you gain skill and confidence in the work that they do, the amount of control and direction you need to give to them as a manager and direction drops. If it doesn't drop, you're not delegating tasks well, and they become demotivated by your control-freak tendencies.

What I hadn't made the connection to until yesterday was the way that control-freakery can lead to secrecy, and (contradictory to what the control freak expects) actually much less control than they would have if they significantly slackened the reins.

Think about your own experiences of working for a control freak (and if you are lucky enough to have never had the experience, play 'let's imagine'). How much of your time becomes acting in a clandestine manner to avoid interruption so that you can get the job done? How much of your time is spent making up stories to describe what they want to hear about what is happening? How damn stressful is the whole experience?!

Compare that to the experience of working with a powerful delegator (I fear more people might need to play 'let's imagine' this time around). Working for someone who let's you get on with the job is more likely to lead you to want to seek them out for guidance, mentorship and support. Disclosure (voluntarily) of information is much more likely to be truthful. Stress is much lessened.

There's never a situation where only one style of leadership is always appropriate, but over-reliance on directive, controlling approaches is a common issue, I fear, in most British organisations. Approaching it from the perspective of how to exert the most control (by being less "controlling") is something to think about...

We've been doing some initially trialling across the business with Google Docs and Google Sites, and here's a brief summary of thoughts and observations so far...

Team working tools will only have an impact in teams that have a sense of team
This might seem a bit bleedin' obvious, but it is fundamental. If you are trying to get teams to work more effectively, they need to have a sense of team before technology will help. Forming, Storming, Norming and then Performing... Collaboration software won't help if the team hasn't at very least reached the norming phase. In fact, it might become counterproductive as software services become the scapegoat for team management and co-ordination issues.

Google Docs isn't a replacement for Microsoft Office
Thanks to Paul Rigby at Ingensys for banging on about this... It does similar things, but if you are just looking to Google Docs to be a replacement for Office, you'll be disappointed. It doesn't have all the functionality, it doesn't output to print particularly well, and if you import Office documents into Docs, unless they are really simple, they'll probably be more hassle as you try to unpick the formatting.

However, it does do things that you couldn't dream of doing in Office. Collaborative authoring is the way forward if you have people who need to author collaboratively (not everyone does). See here and here for earlier observations about this.

Innovation has to be led by the users
Because it's different, Docs needs to be experimented with. You need to have a mindset in your users that is open to experimentation (and that some things won't work for them). People who expect to have tools delivered on a plate with detailed instructions are going to struggle with exploiting Docs and Sites. And don't just assume that this will be in the older part of your workforce...

Text and spreadsheets don't do anything for visual people
Again, file under bleedin' obvious, but a design organisation's folk are that interested in numbers and the written word. Demoing a collaborative spreadsheet doesn't engage them... showing a collaborative drawing tool does.

Google Sites is a bit of a red herring
I'm not convinced that internal publishing of web pages is anything but hobby activity for most people in most organisations. But collaborative documents are for everyone...

(Likewise, I see things like Docs as the death of Wiki's, which look horribly old fashioned to my mind with markup language and all...)

Using Docs as a file share is OK...
But 1Gb of data isn't what it used to be...

Having said that, using Docs to publish out PDFs to the planet quickly and cheaply is remarkable. Combine it with a URL-shortening service, and it rocks (see http://tinyurl.com/ImagRHC1 for example).

Beware the clients' InfoSec team
If you are a client service organisation, your clients' Information Security departments may have concerns over the use of Docs and Sites (it's in the Cloud, so must obviously be extremely dangerous and bad. If you are suggesting to use the service, then don't approach their InfoSec people directly - convince your immediate client, and then get them to get the authorisations. An external supplier approaching an InfoSec team will always be on the back foot. Your immediate client is more likely to get their security people to actually think about the issues in detail, and have to justify any decisions they come to.

At the Google CIO event at which I spoke recently, Robin Williamson gave a talk about the companies nine principals of innovation. One of these central rules (the best known being the 20% innovation time) is "morph, don't kill" innovations.

Williamson, who is one of Google's European senior engineering people, gave examples to illustrate this from the product history of retail aggregation services that Google have tried, starting with the now defunct (yet beautifully named) 'Froogal'. Last week's announcements from Mountain View about the fate of Wave were covered in the press as the death of a product, but one can already see the morphing of technologies into other product lines such as multiple concurrent authoring in Docs. (As an aside, the end of Wave as a stand alone product isn't a great surprise - when I asked folk from Google what is was for, I was never able to get a coherent answer other than something along the lines of it being a bit of an experiment).

The announcement, however, has got me thinking about the difficulties that most organisations have in either killing or morphing failing initiatives.

The disciplines of iterative software design which have now, it seems, seem to have become the most common approaches in use today have at their core the idea that you can't tell at the outset how a software project deliverable will turn out, so plan for that. However, even in iterative (or agile) methods the escape route to prevent further flogging of initiatives that are obviously dead horses can be a challenge.

This isn't, to my mind, an engineering challenge, but one of psychology and culture. If you pull together a project team to perform a task, you need them to have task completion focus. However, the sometimes talked about fifth stage of team development (Forming, storming, norming, performing and) Mourning acknowledges that the end of a project forms an emotional challenge for team members in having to face the sense of loss of no longer having involvement in either team or task. Combine this with the strong sense of corporate failure often associated with the closing down of a corporate initiative and it's easy to see why so many IT projects fail at a scale that could have been prevented with a bit of judicious early pruning.

Britain in the sun... ah, but if only.

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, its 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!