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...

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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!).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

Without doubt, the most challenging part of the move to Google Apps has been the reaction from some to the fundamental way in which Google Mail structures the information that is presented to the user. Individual emails are threaded together into logical conversations, and you don't put emails into folders, you can place labels onto conversations.

Reading a review of the new Microsoft Exchange product this morning, it is very notable that threading has been adopted as the default view on Outlook Web Access (the browser-based version of the MS collaboration product). This reflects what I am convinced of - threading makes more sense, and makes information easier to handle.

If you look at an email product from the early days of GUIs, you'll find that (accepting the improvement in graphic layout that 20 years of UI design has given us), remarkably little has changed. The picture above is of MS Mail, which from memory (along with Schedule Plus) was the predecessor of Outlook. It's a lot less fussy, but there are folders, and there are individual emails.

That was a layout that was designed in a very different (very email light) world. And not much had changed in traditional email clients...

The problem is, if the technology doesn't evolve, then we as users have to adapt and create working practices that help us over the limitations of the technology. And even if those adaptations are laborious and time consuming, we own them, and often find it very difficult to give them up. And then when we try to use a new tool in a way that tries to fit with our old practices, a world of pain emerges.

Imagine, for example, getting a sat nav, and then trying to use it in exactly the way in which you would use a paper map. That's the sort of challenge that many users are facing with the new tools that can save them time, but take even longer to use than the old tools if you don't let the software take on some of the drudgery...

An interesting morning at the Ovum event. When talking with peers and people from the analyst community it becomes more apparent how radical to some much of what we are doing is at Imagination.

The slides from today's presentation are available below. Not sure that they will make much sense without me blathering along to them, but feel free to drop me a line with any questions.