Media Streaming Grows Up

This is mostly a blog about leadership and management, but I'm also somewhat of a geek and I like my technology. I've been hunting around for a good media streaming device for some time now and it's been a frustrating journey. Some time ago I ripped all my DVDs to ISOs and stored them on a central machine along with all my music and shows with the intention of being able to view or listen to media anywhere in the house.

My first foray in to this was with the Netgear MP101 and it did exactly what it was supposed to do (stream music) and we still use it in the kitchen today attached to the Denon mini Hifi. It didn't stream video though, so I moved on to try the Kiss DP1500. The DP1500 was a great idea, but essentially bug-ridden and in the end very limited. It was supposed to play nicely with Windows Media Centre, but whereas WMC would find and play ISOs, the Media Extender piece of the Kiss box wouldn't. Something to do with DRM I think. Anyway, I gave up for a bit on the idea and instead started to think about getting a fully blown HTPC, but the other week I spotted a piece of news, the news was about a piece of kit called a Boxee Box.

Needless to say, the moment I understood what it was and how it operated, I placed my order. £200 is quite a lot, but then when you compare it with the £700 or so I was planning to spend on an HTPC it's actually very cheap and achieves the same end.

Reading reviews and feedback on forums I got worried, there was a lot of negativity around, but I needn't have worried. This device does all I need and a lot more.

It has an HDMI out, so it plugs straight in to my TV, it can play almost any content I throw at it, particularly video. It intelligently sorts your media collection and finds appropriate graphics, it links nicely with on-line services like YouTube and iPlayer, it plays ISOs, it has wireless and wired ethernet, an optical out for audio, USB slots and an SD slot. The interface is clear and is easily readable from my sofa. The remote is wireless rather than infrared and contains a full keyboard on the flipside. There are some downsides, but on the whole in comparison with other streaming devices of a similar price range, I'm very happy with the result. Even better is that the Boxee software is being continually developed and updates are frequent. It makes a change as well to find a development team that actually listen to what's being said on the forums and react quickly to requests or reported bugs.

The final test of any technology like this though is whether my wife wants to use it and does so without shouting for me. I was working from home the other day and the boys were being extra boisterous, but suddenly it all went quiet. Without reading any manuals or having any tuition from me, my wife had negotiated her way to and got playing a movie on the Boxee Box and the boys were happily watching it. That's real success in my book. Also being able to download and watch a missed episode of Lie to Me on the TV rather than gathered round a laptop was also a big tick in the box.

So, there we go, the Boxee Box.

It's been a while since my last post, but it's not the typical holiday break that has stopped any sign of blogging, it's more the speed and breadth of the work my team are doing that has kept my attention over the last few months.

My team are delivering the simplification of a vastly complex infrastructure that is complex simply because aquisitions have been made that have never been asymilated in to the central mothership so we have multiple systems doing the same thing for different groups of people. In some ways, that's actually helping me achieve my goal because we've been able to choose the most fit-for-purpose existing technology to use as the basis for a single system per service objective and discard the rest.
It sounds so easy doesn't it - "discard the rest", and if it was just the throwing away of technology it would be easy, but instead it hides a whole raft of difficult decisions that affect staff, budgets and our customers both internal and external. This isn't helped by the fact that our old mothership isn't exactly forthcoming about what we currently use in their estate which means we don't actually know what we need to extract and set up on our side of the fence, it's a great big unknown unknown.

On top of that with every month that passes, my company has to pay large amounts of cash in the form of a Transition Services Agreement (TSA) back to the old mothership for their services that we still use. Every month that I don't migrate a system or kill off a system, the bill keeps coming in This means I have a highly visible programme of activity that people want to see completed as soon as possible. The drive is therefore to deliver, detailed planning is for wimps! That does make the construction of business cases relatively easy: if you know you can save £250k/quarter by removing a dependancy on a suite of systems in general capex is forthcoming.

So, that's why things have been a bit quiet of late!

Unified Communications = Emperor's New Clothes?

I've just come back from a Unified Communications conference, I was speaking. Unfortunately I was speaking last which means I spend the whole conference worrying about my presentation. It's not that I mind presenting, but the last thing I want is to boringly repeat what everyone else has said previously.

This time, I realised that wasn't going to happen. Most of the talks were about what had been done using the big-boy tool-sets from Microsoft and Cisco. My talk was about what I'd done without spending any money or at least very little.

An analyst from Forrester opened proceedings, and at one point he said that unless you had a single unified interface then you hadn't done Unified Communications. I fundamentally disagree with this. It isn't the interface that counts, it's the user experience. At work, we use all the elements of Unified Communications, they're just not wrapped up in a pretty package with a Microsoft or Cisco badge, instead they're mostly free or open-source. The only exception to this is the Telepresence system we use for the board - that was just a JFDI, fair enough.

There was also much talk about how to justify the cost of implementing UC, and how you could demonstrate ROI, but in my view, what's the point? I'm finding it far easier to implement something for free, get take-up in a viral manner and then once its established and a necessary part of the company culture, then if it's really needed go asking for money.

One presenter talked about being more efficient because he could bring a specialist on to a call by using IM or roping him in to the conference call. It may be effective for the presenter, but for the poor specialist who's just been disturbed and drawn in to a conversation he's had no preparation for, it's anything but effective or efficient.

I feel a bit of a heretic, but surely as IT leaders we should be providing a toolset that enables our customers to communicate in the manner they wish in a cost-effective manner rather than worrying about whether it happens to come under a banner of Unified Communications.

Process for Process Sake

I've just come back from a trip to India to see one of my outsourced teams. I always find these experiences very interesting and this trip was no exception. We ended the week with a dashboard containing over 40 actions that would significantly improve the service if they were all completed. In addition, I got a real appreciation for the off-shore skill sets in my team and also the opportunities for utilising other skill-sets in the off-shore company's capabilities, particularly in the process re-engineering space. I hope they got a sense of being part of my company and making a difference.

Many times I've heard that the Indian outsourcers excel at following process, but if needed to go outside that process service dips quickly. Whilst not seeing this slavish following of process within my outsourced company, although the BPO team were definitely process geeks par excelleance, it was very evident in other places.

A great example was in the security checks at the hotel entrance. The security team were required to check every car for bombs. One security guard was equipped with a mirror-on-a-stick for checking under the car whilst the other was charged with checking the car. The security guard equipped with the mirror checked under the front, but not the sides or rear. The security guard who checked the car, just looked in the boot, didn't open or check anything (at one point we had 45 small white boxes all containing mugs - presents for the off-shore team - all about the right size to carry a grenade) but he didn't open and check a single one.

It was clear that the most important thing for the security guards was to complete the car-checking process, not actually be effective in ensuring the car didn't have a bomb on board. Process successfully completed - check, actual likelihood of finding a bomb: zero. All our bags were x-rayed on the way in to the hotel so perhaps it didn't matter that much. What was interesting though was that whichever hotel we went to the process happened in exactly the same way, quite clearly a fantastic, repeatable and quality process, but with very little benefit.

It takes me back to a presentation I gave a while back on incident processes. To emphasis why the process was required I used an example: Nobody ever buys a drill because they want a drill, they buy a drill because they want to make a hole, probably in a wall. Similar having a process for process sake is pointless, the process must properly beneficial otherwise don't bother.

The other thing that struck me about India was the absolute contrasts: Hot (outside)/Cold (inside), High Tech/Low Tech, Throw-Away/Make-do & Mend, Chaos/Order, Quality/Tat...

Must go back, see more.

Being an avid biker made the roads very interesting because there are thousands of motorbikes. Best I saw was 2-up with the pillion carrying a bicycle!!

Just Learn to Type... PLEASE!!!

So, a bit of a hobby-horse this one. Why don't companies make it a pre-requisite to have at least a reasonable level of typing and Office suite capability? Or, at the very least ensure that the new essential recruit has some relevant training.

Eh?

Ok, let me explain myself. I have what I consider the massive fortune of being able to touch-type at 60wpm. PAs shudder when they see me touch type because it's certainly not classical touch-typing, but it's still very effective. I can even do what many men can't - I can type and listen at the same time! I scared my CTO the other day with that one!

I can type an email, review it, cogitate on it, edit it and send it in about 1/3 the time that the majority of senior managers/directors can. This gives me more time to do other things, to think, to lead, gaze at my navel, whatever.

I had one manager who if you received an email from him any more than 2 lines long meant he had put his heart and soul in to it because it would have been painful and long to create. I never took his emails for granted! But he spent so long typing that it left him very little time for anything else.

However much we like it or hate it, typing and the ability to use the basic office suite effectively and efficiently is critical to a senior manager's success.

Surely if everyone could type fast, everyone would just write more? Possibly, maybe it would generate more emails, but I still believe they would be more effective overall.

As for office suite knowledge, I think I can illustrate that very easily: I had a call from a function the other day demanding Office 2007 because Office 2003 just wasn't letting them edit their documents the way they wanted to. I went and had a look. As I suspected it was a lack of knowledge of their existing toolset that was the problem, not Office 2003 letting them down.

Yes, you can see it bothers me. But if we senior leaders don't sort it out, before long Generation Y or whatever they're called now will come in and trounce all over us because be assured they will be able to type, and type fast and they'll have been using the Office suite since Year 1 at school. You can't survive in the on-line world if you can't type fast and that will come to the office without a doubt.

And no, voice recognition is not an option. Face up to reality, Go and find Mavis Beacon's Typing Tutor and learn to type, you will never regret it.

Oh, this post written and published in about 20 minutes.

Blocker or Enabler?

I was printing off some documents for a meeting the other day when I realised that yes, technology is a fantastic enabler, but it can also be a devastating blocker.

Why did I think this whilst printing out a document? Oddly it was because the printer was making me late for a meeting. Erm, actually, let me re-phrase that: my dependance on technology had made me late for a meeting, no actually, let me try again: my process for ensuring a successful meeting failed because it did not allow for the technology not quite working according to plan.

By this stage you may be wondering what I'm going on about. I needed a presentation printed out, I printed it a few minutes before the meeting expecting the colour laser printer to spit it out in a few seconds and I'd be at my meeting in time. Instead, firstly it ran out of paper, secondly it decided to re-calibrate half way through and then near the end it decided to clean itself. In the end I was 10 minutes late for the meeting. My expectations of technology had led me to be late for the meeting, I needed the print out to do the meeting. Fortunately my team waited patiently for me and I cursed the technology rather than my lack of organisational skills.

Then I thought about this in a larger context. How often do we have expectations of technology far in excess of it's capability and we end up with technology blocking rather than enabling. Is the NHS National Programme for IT a case in point - an assumption that technology was the answer and therefore used to solve a problem that wasn't actually, at its core, a technology issue thus ending up with technology being a blocker to successfully resolving the problem.

So, the question is how often in today's business arena is technology seen as the panacea when the problem should be looked at as a business issue of which the use of technology is just a part rather than the whole solution. When technology is the seen as the panacea, it becomes a blocker to solving the problem and can waste many millions. We as the people running technology in a company must ensure that the company we work for understand this and we help them use technology as an enabler, not a blocker.

Desktop Virtualisation - Fully baked or a damp squib?

Silicon.com had a piece recently about desktop virtualisation, apparently, it's all going to kick off this year. Is it? Is it really?!

In my view, it's a long way off and I'll explain why:

We have off-shore facilities that need access to our main CRM platform and historically another part of the group has provided this functionality using Virtual Desktops. We also have off-shore developer capability that also use Virtual Desktops.

I'm currently looking to take over this functionality, and having looked at the pain that it produces, the last thing I want to do is replicate it. It seems to be continuously unreliable, it is slow, fails at inopportune moments and usually does a great job of over-promising and under-delivering and is staggeringly expensive to expand or upgrade.

When I tell people the price for additional machines, they look at me as though I'm mad and I don't blame them: £600 for a basic virtual machine and £1,200 for a developer standard machine. The usual response I get is that they could go down to the local PC store and buy a machine for a lot less than that. And I wouldn't blame them!

How can virtual desktops get lift-off when the price point still isn't right. Surely a virtual desktop needs to cost less than £50 for a good spec virtual PC before we can really say Virtual Desktops have arrived. Anything else will just not make financial sense.

Also, in general so many things can get delivered by browser nowadays, the need for virtual machines is diminishing anyway. A basic PC with Windows and a browser costs so little nowadays, why would I want a virtual machine and all the hassle associated with them.

As for my remote developers, the best thing I can do for them is use a VPN or MPLS connection out to their office and create a LAN extension giving them direct access to our development boxes. Job done, lots of money saved.

So, why are Virtual Desktops supposed to go big this year. I've no idea, I've really no idea.

Not Management

A friend of mine has a very good idea for an on-line commercial business. He's sold the idea to a number of companies, even got some seed investment, but he can't bring it to fruition himself because doesn't have the technical skills to bring his dream to reality. A year or so on from the original idea, he's still unable to bring his unique proposition to reality.

Why? Two simple reasons:
- A lack of leadership & people management and
- A lack of detailed requirements.

Without these fundamentals his project will not succeed.

To keep costs down, my friend decided to rely on volunteer developers, working in their spare time inspired by both the idea and the promise of shares in the company. He also handed all responsibility for website development to the developers and left them to it having given them only a high-level idea of what the website was supposed to achieve.

Unsurprisingly deadline after deadline was missed. My friend was getting more and more frustrated. He had to persuade his seed investors not to demand their money back, very embarrassing. Finally on the way home from the golf course one day, we talked about the situation and managed to make him realise why his vision was failing to appear.

Simply, he had never given the poor developers sufficient detail in the requirements, had not controlled or managed them and had never controlled the direction the project was going at the hands of the developers. He listened and nodded, hoped it would all work out and got madder and madder, but would not acknowledge it was a management issue, simply put, he told me that "I don't believe in management".

I persuaded my friend to allow me to take control of the development. Up front, I told him there were only two possible results now:
1) Our developers would be reined back in and would follow detailed requirements we would provide. Or
2) The developers would entrench and then throw in the towel.

Either was acceptable. With the first result we got the website my friend wanted. The second result meant we could move on to pastures new using the newly detailed requirements that my friend had produced.

So, my friend and I took time out to develop the full requirements and logical map of how the website should work. We quickly had a far better idea of what the website was going to do than at any previous time. This logical diagram was given to the developers and openly discussed - many further requirements were formed. By the end of the session we had a decent set of documents that described the website and what needed to be achieved to make it a reality.

Now the developers had the detailed requirements, we had them constrained sufficiently to drive delivery. Initially we broke the whole thing down in to smaller portions, prioritising the work and agreed delivery dates. Every workpackage content and delivery date was decided by the developers - there was no chance that we could be blamed for setting unrealistic deadlines or deliverables.

The developers got going, time past, but instead of ignoring them as my friend had in the past, we did daily update calls and dug in to the detail every time. In the end and very much as I suspected, the developers threw in the towel. My friend saw this as a disaster at first, he thought we'd failed, but then he began to realise how far the relationship had fallen apart. My intervention brought about a dramatic conclusion, but helped bring issues out in to the open and mutually they discovered they were un-solvable.

Having seen the management in action my friend has acknowledged the need and he's also improving his ability to provide detailed requirements. We've found some professional developers who are better equipped to deliver specific work packages to deadlines and will be working full time, not part-time. Yes, the website has been delayed, but now it's far more likely to be delivered rather than never see the light of day.

I guess the point is, however small your dream or business is, never forget that to deliver that dream, you're going to need other people. Fundamentally that means leadership, people management and project management as a minimum. If you're not good at it, find someone who is. Don't bumble along believing that it'll all be fine. My friend learnt the hard way, please don't do the same thing.

Leadership and the Technician

Why does the best technician still frequently end up as the person promoted to run the team? I really would have thought we, as an industry, would have worked this one out by now and stopped this automatic process because the best techie is frequently by far the worst candidate for the job.

Most typically this can be seen in teams that are populated by uber-techies: network teams, Linux sysadmin teams, etc. The techies look upon the uber of uber-techies in the team as their silver-back gorilla. The senior management team spot it and reward that uberuber-techie by following the Peter Principle and promoting to incompetence. Indeed it's a double wammy because the promotion also reduces team productivity: the uberuber-techie is no longer doing uberuber-techie things, instead they are stuck in a world of people management and task allocation, sitting in management meetings bored out of their brains and generally not very happy with the result.

How wrong can it get, literally brimming with wrongability.

If I've not seen a spark of leadership capability, and frequently I don't, bringing in an outsider to manage the team is by far the best option. The only problem with this method is that the techie team usually fails to realise what's good for them and resent the imposition of someone with a management/leadership skill-set having had mis-guided expectations of promotion from within. So, if you do bring in an outsider, you MUST have methods in place to recognise the silver-back in your organisation and use techniques other than promotion to leadership to give them their continued growth outlet.

I've got one chap who's very happy being an uberuber-techie and just wanted to choose his own job title and get good salary increase each year. Well, that's an easy one - done and done! Others have aspiration to leadership, but have yet to demonstrate the skills, again that's not a problem. Provide them with opportunities to see if they really do have those latent skills - this can be done in minor, reasonably safe ways, for instance by providing project management opportunities or sending them on a leadership course or whatever. Finally if a non-management route to increased responsibilities is available then many will recognise that uberuber-tech is what they're good at and give up on the idea of leadership.

Simples!

The end of the Office?

The recent bad weather has again given my team the opportunity to test our remote access capabilities. Yet again we've proved that remote working works well for us. Just like in Feb 2009 we suffered no ill-effects from having half the team snow-bound - we had the tools in place to enable people to do their job remotely and everything continued as normal.

These enforced remote working periods have all been relatively short periods - mostly just a few days. Whilst I've said that we continued to function as normal, as the length of remote working increased the short-comings of our set up started to show. Right now, I don't believe it's ready for frequent or long periods of remote working and certainly not adequate for a permanent remote working solution.

It's not the tools that enable my team to do their job that are missing, it's the peripheral capabilities that you take for granted in an office environment. Most are based around the need to work with others and communicate and share information whether formally or informally.

For instance, how do you edit a document in a meeting with half the attendees working remotely? Yes, of course, you can use Webex and teleconferencing. It's all possible. But if you've not planned in advance it can be a bit of a nightmare - recently I attended a meeting where half the meeting time was used up whilst people joined the online and teleconferencing element. The inevitable rush through the document was anything but satisfactory.

People quickly miss the office interaction, casual conversation, walking around, impromptu brainstorming or whatever that can happen in the office environment to get things resolved. Remote working tends to introduce a formality that you just don't get in the office, it stifles many aspects of day-to-day office activities that are essential, but often taken for granted.

It also means that managers and leaders have to systematically alter the way they manage their people - they have to trust a great deal more and enhance performance management and measurement and get far better at consistent and regular communication - it's very easy to forget someone when they're working remotely and people can quickly become accustomed to doing the minimum to get along which would not be possible in the office and productivity slips away.

How to resolve this conundrum? Create and use an on-line virtual office. Your team can join it with their avatars and bobs-your-uncle, you've got your office environment back. You can achieve the social interaction and spontaneity that you get in the real office and resolve many of the issues described above. Once more you have an environment where people can interact spontaneously, managers can once more manage by walking around chatting with individuals more or less like they would in the office. It's obvious when someone's taken a lunch-break or in a meeting - they're not at their virtual desk, just like in the real-world office. Meetings can be held in virtual meeting rooms with virtual projectors sharing documents or presentations just like they would in the real world - no more long-winded sign-in processes, you just virtually walk in to the meeting room and get going and how wonderful, there's no limit on the number or size of meeting rooms!

There are a few of these types of environment on line, but I've yet to come across anyone who's actually used any of them and found it successful. We'll see, but surely this must be the way to go? How much could you save off the bottom line if you could close the vast majority of your office-space going on-line for the rest of it. How much travel would you save if all your meetings with clients were in the virtual office, plane rides to see the overseas offices would be a thing of the past, everyone could be in one "building" - no longer would teams have to be split over multiple locations. Taken up by the majority, this would decimate the office rental market, change the look of our cities forever, save companies millions, remove vast amounts of traffic from our roads and reduce everyone's carbon footprint... By that score, we should all start immediately. I for one am going to explore it further and see where it gets me...

ISPs and the DEP

Rory Cellan-Jones blogs here about who's winning the file sharing war, there are some wide-ranging and sometimes wild comments following the blog itself. Personally, I come down on the side of Charles Dunstone, the traditional ISP provides the highway along which data passes, nothing more. If a customer is doing something that infringes someone's copyright, then it's between the copyright owner and the customer, not the ISP.

I'm also struggling to work out what this current proposal and activity will achieve except another round of technology escalation. Every time the record industry attempt to block, stall or stifle file sharing, the technically minded come up with a way round it and file sharing goes on as normal after a short hiatus. Eventually the peer-to-peer networks will become so sophisticated in their obfuscation techniques that not even the ISPs with their deep-packet inspection tools will know what is file sharing traffic and what isn't making it impossible to traffic shape or know when or how someone is infringing copyright.

Does a piece of technology exist that was supposed to protect a system, service, copyright or device that hasn't been broken? Blu-ray was supposed to be secure, but it's now possible to rip a Blu-ray disc, it's somewhat complex, but completely possible. Only yesterday there was news that the PS3 had been hacked. As long as the copyright owners continue on this escalation route, so will the hackers and crackers and it'll be the hackers and crackers that win, not the copyright owners. That is unless the copyright owners change their model.

Actually, let's be specific here, it's the corporate monolithic copyright owners that need to change, there are many private copyright owners, particularly in the music industry, who are coping quite happily within the file-sharing domain, in fact making a tidy living out of it simply because their overheads are much lower, they get a greater margin from their efforts, they're able to specifically target their market and they provide bespoke products for their market. In other words they're providing value add a price point and regularity that the corporate monoliths cannot hope to achieve. These artists may not be making millions, but they're certainly able to live off their artistic achievements as long as they don't rest on their laurels and expect a CD to do their work for them.

Considering how long this file-sharing "war" has been going on for, I'm amazed that the basic lessons still don't seem to have been learnt and the large corporate copyright owners continue to point the finger elsewhere rather than understand they have only themselves to blame.