Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.
Tags: Communication, Interfaces, Social Media
In case anyone hasn’t noticed, it seems that everyone has to deal with a lot more information these days. This whole internet idea, if it takes off, could really make it difficult to stay on top of things. Why, then, are people shifting to technologies that make it harder to keep up?
I recently received an email from a major corporation. In the email was a link to a video, which contained An Important Message For Our Customers. Since I like this company, I decided to watch. The video was a four minute clip of the company president making a speech. It took four minutes to watch a man read a message to me that I could have skimmed in fifteen seconds. What was the point of the stretching the content to be sixteen times longer?
I can see the marketing meeting: “Let’s just email this out over his signature.” “That’s too impersonal; we want to engage our customers.” “We could dress it up with HTML and make the email look really sharp.” “Still not good enough.” “Maybe a podcast?” “I don’t know… how about a video?” “Great! That will really connect with people!”
I appreciate this. Really. But I don’t have time to watch it all. Imagine if every email you received were converted to a video clip of someone reading the message to you. You’d never get anything done! Imagine the cacophony in the cube farms!
I see blogs going the same way. People who used to write a blog are now reading the blog and sending it out as a podcast. Some people are going the next step and converting it to a video. This may be cool, but it makes it harder for people to absorb the information. The content is the same, but the wrapper is much, much bigger. In the parlance of information theory, the signal stays the same, but the noise has gone way up, and you’re burning a lot more bandwidth to send the same message.
There is a delightful minimalism to Twitter. You can skim hundreds of tweets in just a minute or two, stopping to absorb ones that catch your interest. If you had your tweets read to you, you’d never get through a fraction of them.
If you are trying to convey an idea to someone, you must do it in a way that makes it easy as possible for that person to absorb the idea. There is a place for audio and video. If you are conveying instructions, a video may be the perfect vehicle, far more efficient that trying to explain the same idea in prose. If your message involves sounds, audio is the way to go. But the vast, vast amount of what we send back and forth is perfectly captured as text. Wonderful, simple, written words, perfected several thousand years ago. Our brains absorb written words at an amazing rate, far faster than if we were listening to them or watching someone recite them.
As in all things, respect your audience. Send them information in the form that works best for them. Use audio and video where it truly adds value, and rely on the written word for everything else. Your audience will thank you, hopefully in writing.
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Technology.
Tags: Customer Service, Leadership, Listening, Software, Technology, Tools
Of the many aphorisms that I enjoy using, one of my favorites is
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I pull this one out when someone is using some system in an inappropriate way. People get so comfortable with their favorite tools, they use them for everything even when a better solution is readily available.
This is an easy accusation for an IT person to make. Most software systems are so complicated that it is easier for a user to twist an existing system into an unusual solution than it is to learn some completely arcane new system. People just want to solve problems and get on with their jobs and lives. I know this is hard to believe, but they don’t look forward to exploring and mastering that latest version of some new desktop application.
Those of us in IT would do well to listen to our own advice.
How many times, when asked to help solve some problem, do we immediately reach for a computer? Typically, the answer is “all of the time.” We’re in IT; we know how to make computers do interesting things; therefore every problem can be solved with some technology-based solution.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Many problems do not exist for want of a technology solution. In fact, many of the day-to-day business problems we encounter are rooted in process, flow, and data collection. While you can certainly throw software at all of those areas, you can also fix a lot of issues by talking to people, understanding their real needs, and proposing ways to change things in a non-technical way.
Within IT, we have developed a broad range of skills that are not rooted in technology. Process analysis, data management, project management, user interface design, audit and compliance, risk management: the list is long. Why, then, when someone is gracious enough to give us the opportunity to help, do we reach for the hardware? We perpetuate the perception that we are nothing more than geeks, when if fact we have so much more to offer.
I’ve been on projects where the real solution was to have a user interface designer rework a paper form layout. I’ve seen errant projects saved by sharing good project management skills. I’ve seen business processes reworked by applying disaster recovery discipline. In all of these cases, not a single line of code was written in pursuit of a solution. Instead, IT people spent time listening, sharing, and collaborating to help users do their jobs more effectively.
People in IT chafe at being known solely for their technical expertise, yet we fall into our old habits when confronted with a problem. We need to follow our own advice, set down the hammer of technology, and look for effective non-technical solutions to many of the problems we’re asked to solve. We’ll grow in our ability to be of service, and we’ll begin to build a better reputation with our end users.
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.
Tags: Customer Service, Interfaces, iPhone, Microsoft, Users
You can divide the technology at any company into two areas: the enterprise stuff and the end user stuff. The enterprise stuff includes all the “heavy iron” in the data center: the servers, storage, networks, monitoring systems, databases, firewalls, and what not. This is the domain of the IT professional, where we get to do deep analysis and evaluation of technology, cost benefits, and strategic value. The user stuff includes everything a user touches: desktops, laptops, phones, email clients, web browsers, and PDAs. Our ability to manage this technology hinges less on technology and more on what happens outside of work, in the user’s home.
We all have early adopters in our organizations: people who try out new things at home, way before they are actively considered at work. (I suspect that most readers of this blog fall into that category). These people provide wonderful free evaluation services, figuring out what works (and what doesn’t) so that we can make better decisions for our companies.
These early adopters can make or break a product. Vista was killed in the business market in large part due to the early negative reactions from these leading-edge home users. Even though Microsoft made huge progress in improving Vista, that early stigma never wore off.
Microsoft learned their lesson. The early adopter feedback on Windows 7 is almost universally good. Not coincidentally, I’m beginning to pick up positive buzz from other IT executives about their plans for Windows 7. Give Microsoft credit: they don’t quit and keep trying until they get it right.
The iPhone is a different story. Users are adopting these devices at home and love them. They come to work and want to use them with enterprise email on our networks. Unfortunately, many IT people (myself included) do not believe the iPhone is secure and manageable enough for corporate use. As a result, we’ve got a lot of cranky users who can’t use their iPhones at work. While this provides an opportunity to teach people about security and systems management, it still leaves users feeling disappointed.
Gone are the days when corporate IT led the way in bringing technology to the masses. Now we are followers, led by the consumer market and ever-more-savvy end users. To be successful and to stay ahead of the curve, we need to pay attention to what our users are doing and constantly ask them “How are things at home?”
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.
Tags: Best Of 2009, Communication, History, Internet, Social Media
In the beginning, the internet was about sharing and collaboration. Before the web existed (imagine that!) people used the internet to share and refine ideas, collect information, and make it easy to learn about new things. The interfaces were primitive by modern standards, but the information flowed and great ideas were born.
The early internet was organized by topic. That is, there tended to be one place you could go to find out everything about that one topic. If you were interested in a particular subject, you could find a mailing list or a Usenet newsgroup devoted to just that topic. Everyone that shared your interest came to the same place; anything important regarding that topic generally found its way to that spot.
The Usenet newsgroup hierarchy was the pinnacle of this structure. Endlessly tweaked and debated, wrapped in a community-designed change protocol, the newsgroup structure neatly found a home for everything, like a Dewey decimal system for the internet. Interested in movies? Go to the rec.arts.movies group. Some obscure operating system? You’ll find it in the comp.os tree. On and on, every conceivable topic was parked somewhere.
If multiple sources arose (a competing mailing list, or a similar newsgroup) they were quickly merged and consolidated. Gateways existed to route messages between groups and lists; the Usenet social order realigned errant groups with great fervor. The focus was on accurate, consolidated information. Who provided that data, while interesting, was of secondary importance.
As the web evolved, this topic-centric model evolved with it. People developed pages that became reference points for specific topics, and everyone linked to those pages. I developed a page on creating transparent GIF images that still circulates today, although rehosted on other sites. The Internet Movie Database (which I also had a role in creating) supplanted the rec.arts.movies group.
With the advent of social networking on the web, the internet is being reorganized by person, instead of by topic. Now, people develop a central repository about themselves and what they know (or don’t, which is the real problem). It is easy to learn everything about a person, and much more difficult to learn about a single topic. For example, my recent cell phone acquisition caused me to search the web for everything I could find about a Samsung Epix phone. Long ago, there would have been a newsgroup called comp.phones.samsung.epix that provided everything I needed to know. Now, there are dozens of blogs that contain conflicting or incomplete information. Collating these sites and finding what I need is much more difficult, if not impossible.
This person-centric view eliminates the most important part of the old model: peer review. Before, a single errant posting would be immediately corrected by the collective audience, and the data that remained was usually detailed and accurate. With the experts now isolated on their own islands of information, this review and collaboration has diappeared. Except for concerted efforts like Wikipedia, we’ve lost the essence of the original internet: a collectively managed shared information resource. The new individually managed information resources are far less useful.
The ego-centric internet is just a reflection of the ego-centric, celebrity-driven world that we live in. We’ve lost something as a result, I think. But somewhere, Andy Warhol is smiling.
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Technology.
Tags: Security, Users
Many are predicting that 2009 will be a big year for The Cloud, wherein many companies will move many of their applications to the cloud, away from premise-based servers and storage. A lot of the conversation about this revolves around network speeds, processor virtualization, and storage aggregation. Although all of that is important, I’m more concerned about security. More specifically, who in the cloud can see my data?
When I host an application internally, I have extremely tight control over access. Not just who can use the system, but how the administrators can access the system and the underlying data. We have layers of controlled access with specific checkpoints and audit trails. Every access must be justified, documented, and audited on a regular basis.
When I shift a system to the cloud, I typically retain the ability to manage end-user access, but have no control over administrative access at the other end. Of course, the hosting company will swear up and down that every precaution has been taken to keep anyone from ever seeing my data. In reality, I have no idea what they really do behind the scenes, and I have no way to completely verify their claims.
The recent Twitter hack is a great example of this. An admin at Twitter used a plain word (“happiness”) as their password. This was hacked by a person using a simple dictionary attack, trying every possible password until they broke in. Once inside, they had immediate access to the Twitter management tools and proceeded to gain control of a number of high-profile Twitter accounts. Fortunately, Twitter is a lightweight application with no important data that could be compromised. Still, people were embarrassed and disrupted by the penetration.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. A system is only as secure as its weakest access point. When you move your systems to the cloud, your data is only as secure as the worst password used by the least experienced administrator.
I believe I’ll wait a bit longer before moving to the cloud.
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