A Belated Welcome to 2010

Well after being away for a while it is timed I returned to work the general run of the mill of things. I have had just over a month off for the Christmas period, something I do every year as I don’t get chance to take time off at any other point. So what has changed?

I have had the opportunity to really reflect on my new contract, and exactly what it is likely to require of me in the next twelve months. I had originally been worried by exactly what had to be done given the relatively short time scale available. However, I am now more than confident that everything should run very smoothly given that on the whole, I am working with some very able and determined people. I am also lucky enough to have spent a couple of days (even though I intended on longer), at the BETT show this year, about which I will write more about very shortly.

Phone Box Experiment

I just came across a link to something I thought was quite amazing. A man named Rob is camping out near a phone box in the middle of nowhere, and answering any calls he may receive (telephone number on website). Watch the introductory video on the website, and you will then be directed at a live feed direct from location.
View the site at http://phoneboxexperiment.com

My Introduction to Second Life

Although vaguely aware of it for a while, I have recently been properly introduced to “Second Life” by a good friend of mine, Brian Smith. Essentially Second Life is a virtual world, more complete and accurate to life than I would have imagined it to be. The world is not loaded with the installation of the application. This would be impossible as the content and features seem to be forever changing. Instead a relatively small download is required to be installed, and the content as you move through the world is streamed directly from the internet (much like Google Earth). Fundamentally it is a facility for you to meet, interact and socialise with other people from all over the world, through your Second Life avatar. However, even after spending a relatively small amount of time in this virtual world, it is clear to see that its possibilities and potential range much further than this basic form of interpersonal communication.

First of all, Second Life is big. It is much bigger than you could imagine, and certainly bigger than I thought it could be. At first it’s not obvious how to get around, other than walking around the small introductory island on which you will start. Second Life is made up of thousands upon thousands of islands. Anybody can buy an island and turn it into whatever they want. For example, why not turn an island into a huge clothing shop? It is possible to design clothing and accessories for Second Life avatars, which you can then sell from your virtual shop, to other users. There have been reported cases of people making more than $1,000,000 a year from this virtual environment – amazing. There are bars, discos, and many more things to be discovered. One thing of a particular interest to myself, was the IBM data centre, which you can walk around just as if really there.

The thing that really amazed me though was the functionality to hold virtual meetings within Second Life. You could either buy an island and set up your own meeting room, or hire one of the many that are already available. These meeting rooms are set up with screens at the front for PowerPoint presentations, and video content, and there are chairs to sit and watch. If you are equipped with speakers and a microphone, you can even hear, and ask questions to, the meeting host. Fascinating technology – and it works really well. I hope to soon learn more about the power of Second Life, at which point I’m sure I will report back with anything I have found interesting.

Social Media Vs. Workplace Professionalism

We are nowadays, more frequently hearing stories of disciplinary or other action being taken on individuals, or groups of individuals, by their employers because of comments or content posted on one of the many popular social media websites in use.

There was a story a few weeks ago about a young woman who was asked to leave her employment after posting derogatory comments about her boss onto the FaceBook site, forgetting that she had previously added him as a friend, meaning he would be able to see everything she had written. Then just this weeks, reports of a woman in Canada losing her sick-pay, being paid for depression, because she posted pictures of herself on the internet, again on FaceBook, looking happy. Her medical insurance company came to the conclusion that from looking at these pictures, she was no longer depressed. In a world where more and more people are fully aware of the technology available, and how we use it, it’s not very surprising that more and more people are being subjected to online vetting. It’s well known that when applying for a lot of jobs, HR departments will often perform an internet search to see just who you really are, delving into FaceBook, MySpace, and anywhere else you may have an online presence. These are both real world examples of just what an impact social networking can have on our professional identities.

I think there is another matter though, and it is all to do with workplace productivity. It’s something that I have thought about a couple of times before, but today witnessed something which really got the message across to me. I have been sat in a meeting room in a project planning brief. The room had about 40 people contained within it, all sat in groups of 2, 3, or 4 discussing different aspects of an upcoming project. The chance to have influential people from IT, people from Marketing, people from HR, all in the same room, on the same day has been a wonderful chance to really make some decent progress. However, every time I glanced up across the room, almost every screen I could see either had FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, or another social networking site open. If we take it that there were 40 people in the room for 6 hours each, that’s a total of 240 total man hours. I would love to know just how many of these hours were spent off task, rather than devoted to work. I myself found it so strange, that I immediately opened up Twitter and began to give a running commentary of the events as they unfolded – from the cleaner bursting in, to the lunchtime menu.

At a first glance, this would seem like a very unprofessional attitude and using such sites during company time could even be considered time theft. However, I find myself much more productive if I can send off the odd tweet, or update my FaceBook status. Now I’m not saying I agree with people who sit all day on these sites – but it was a strange experience watching a room of professional people, working hard and making good progress, at the same time as being in contact with colleagues, friends, and family, all over the world. Technology is a wonderful thing, but we should be careful to prevent it from consuming our time.

CS New Media

I have recently had several web hosting requirements, and not knowing too much about this area, took the recommendation from a colleague and contacted CS New Media. If anybody has any requirements from something as simple as domain name registration, to hosted Virtual Private Servers, to a full Reseller Package – please do not hesitate to use the wonderful services on offer from CS New Media.

At first, I did not know exactly what I needed in order to get the job done, but Carl from CS New Media was more than happy to provide me with advice without forcibly trying to sell me anything, and this was long into the evening on a Saturday night. I have since had an e-mail management problem (which turned out to be my own fault for mistyping an e-mail address). A quick e-mail to CS New Media saw the problem resolved within the space of five minutes.

I will now recommend CS New Media to you all, and to anybody else that requires any web services, and encourage you to visit them on the web and see what they will be able to do for you.

Money Well Spent?

I will shortly be meeting a client that we are currently in the planning & preparation stages of a network wide Windows XP to Windows 7 migration project with. This will involve not only the migration of nearly 300 workstations and laptops, but also 5 new HP servers running Server 2008 to replace the existing IBM equipment that is currently still running Server 2003. There are a few other elements to the job as well including several weeks (split over different staff members) training, and a forward support contract; by no means a small job.

The client however, has several different applications that they rely on for their work. There are newer updated versions of these applications available for not a lot of money – so the recommendation was put in to upgrade these at the same time as the network overhaul (especially as most of them will not run on Windows 7 and are no longer supported so never will). Simple? No of course not.

Rather than take the easy option, the client is refusing to spend any more money updating its business centric applications. Rather, would prefer us to rewrite / package/ tweak / do whatever we can to make these older applications work with Windows 7. Their reasoning behind this? “People will just want to keep using what they always have done”. Read between the lines and I think that the actual reason is “We don’t want to spend any more money”. It will come to no surprise to you, but most likely will them, that the costing involved in adapting older, non-supported applications, rather than purchasing newer ones, will be much higher and hence they will end up paying a lot more in the long run.

The best example is the accounting “package” that they are currently running. Package is used in the loosest sense of the term as the system is basically a Microsoft Access 97 database with some, admittedly very clever, visual basic thrown in to boot. I am by no means a database expert, but have been reliably informed by one of my consultants that there is no chance this can be made to work with Office 2007 (which the client is updating to); something to do with the database engine off the top of my head. It has also been deliberately made into a complete nightmare to reverse engineer. It was created by an employee who feared for his job, so kept the inner workings secret and nobody knows how it really works. It has not been written properly, and will not allow easy deconstruction for repackaging. When said member of staff left the company, the system has been retouched here and there by people who evidently didn’t really know what they were doing.

Again, rather than pay for one of the many excellent, and often cheap, accounting and finance packages available, the client wishes us to write, from scratch, in Access 2007, something that looks and feels exactly the same as the old system. This will not be a problem for us, but it does seem that on the whole, and in the long run, they will be wasting an awful lot of time and money.

Project Management: Day 2 (A Meeting of Revelation)

Well I have just got out of a meeting with a few different people that are involved with different aspects of my new role, a meet and greet occasion if you will. I have come to the conclusion that with yesterday’s conclusions, I have hit the nail on the head. It would seem that the client wants to develop themselves both technically, and professionally. It would also seem that they want taking to the cutting edge of everything, without having to spend any money or put any effort in. The more time I spend thinking about this; the more it begins to look like a big tick-box exercise.

It is all too common for clients to want wonderful things doing on a shoestring budget – this is something that anybody working IT & Project Management unfortunately must get used to. However, this time, they seem completely unwilling to help their own progression whatsoever. For a while it would seem they have drifted along, fire fighting some issues, ignoring others all together, and not planning or developing anything. This is not acceptable and is something I must make every effort to change, once I have figured out a way to do it quietly – after all if I just let them know that they may have to start working for a living, I’m sure I would have a revolt to deal with!

After a very quick drink last night, I began to outline, for my own benefit, exactly the areas that I think need the most attention. As I did this, I became glad that I am not working on this project to make friends. This I feel would be uneventful. Here is what I came up with:

- Procurement: The current procurement procedures (and I use the term procedures very lightly you understand), are a complete mess. Nobody seems to know who is responsible for what, how things should be correctly ordered, audited, or integrated into the existing system. Speaking only on behalf of the IT Systems, this has led to a very fragmented network, with no standardisation or automated management ability.

- Staffing Structure: Again, the current state of the staffing hierarchy is a complete mess. I made this point very clear this morning and nobody could think of e decent argument – so I think I got my point across. When something new has been bought in without consideration or consultation (due to the lack of procurement procedure), a new job role is normally created along with it. People are bought in on the cheap with the hope that they may have the beginnings of a clue what it is they are doing. Nobody, again, is aware of who is exactly responsible for what, or even who. I can see about a 30% overhead on staffing that could be eliminated immediately. This is going to be a harder point to put across. The meeting his morning was a prime example of both unorganised structure and organisation, there were at least 3 people present who had no need to be there other than to get out of doing something productive themselves. Ironically enough, I did note that these three were the only ones with any real input (albeit irrelevant).

- SLA’s: There is little or no sign of any service level agreements (SLAs) that may greatly benefit the department and company as a whole. I have worked closely with several companies forming and implementing SLA’s (including for educational establishments with the FITS Framework), so this is a key area where I feel I will be able to improve upon.

As I mentioned earlier, I am so very glad that I am not here to make friends, and although now only working through my second day, know that hard times are ahead in the not so distant future. I have another meeting this afternoon with a few advertising specialists. Quite what this has to do with my role and how much use it is going to be to me I will wait and see.

Project Management: Day 1

Well it’s day one of my new contract, and I have been presented with a Dell Inspiron 1750. This is used, not as an example of the amazing technology I get to have experience with, but one of exactly how much of a challenge I believe I will soon be facing. The laptop is reflective of the current procurement procedures and management, and hence, exactly why I have been bought in to advise the IT Services department on their decisions, management, and operational procedures.

Let’s start with a quick overview of the laptop, before we get into the business trivialities it presents. It is the first laptop with a 17” screen that I have ever spent any real time with, and as predicted, it is far too big. It’s perfect for home use and if you never plan to take it anywhere further than to the other side of your desk. For corporate use, the benefit of the extra screen size is far outweighed by increased size, weight, and decreased battery life and portability. I can see this machine either staying at my desk in London, or at home. I plan to continue traveling with either my 15” MacBook Pro, or even my smaller 12.1” Sony Vaio.

Now down to the heart of the matter. The Inspiron is a strange choice to have made for a large scale corporate network, regardless of how big the screen is. Dell does a fantastic line in business machines (with the less aesthetically pleasing, but fantastic to use Precision and Latitude range). This would be where my money would have gone if buying a Dell laptop for a business environment. The strange purchasing decisions evidently did not stop here either, with the lower end of the range being bought (coming pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Edition). Not only did whoever put the order in, pay extra to have Windows Vista installed, rather than Windows 7, but having the Home Edition of an operating system will all but stop the laptop interacting with the company network correctly. The first thing I did was make my life easier, by installing my copy of Windows 7, and joining the company domain.

The exact thinking that must have gone into this purchase mystified and intrigued me, so I did a little bit of investigation. The results of my investigations were not quite what I was expecting them to be. The company is currently running with a Windows Server 2003 based infrastructure. I knew this part already, as one of the things I am here to oversee and project manage is the transition to a Windows Server 2008 based system.  However, some of the IT Management have been arguing that because 2003 cannot properly support Windows 7 as a member of a domain (which it can; but that’s another matter), there was no point in bringing any of the new mobile equipment onto the network. For a start, even if this was to be correct, why pay extra for an antiquated operating system? And secondly, a network incapable of properly supporting Windows 7, will usually be in a similar state for Vista as well.

I can see that the next 18 months is going to be a very interesting and time consuming experience. I’m sure that I am going to deeply upset a few people very quickly indeed – things need sorting, and soon.

BETT 2010 Awards

So it’s coming close to the time of year again when hundreds of different educational technology companies, and thousands upon thousands of perspective purchasers, people working in schools/colleges/other educational establishments, journalists, Edu-IT specialists and consultants, will all gather together in London for the largest trade show of its kind. If you fit into any one of these categories then you are really missing out unless you pay a visit.
BETT 2010 will be taking place from the 13th to the 16th of January (with Saturday the 16th being the publicly open day). I have been lucky enough to be able to find the time to visit for the past two years and it has been a thoroughly enjoyable and worthwhile experience. If at all possible, it is far too much to see all in one day and so a couple of days at the event should make for a more relaxing visit.
Anyway, each year the show offers awards to “Reward creative and innovative products for learners and teachers”, and the finalist’s shortlist for 2010 has now been released. You can see the shortlist here http://www.bettawards.com/ and find out more about the BETT show at http://www.bettshow.com/.