NHS or ICO: which is crappiest?

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

The news that the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has determined that yet another NHS trust is in breach of the Data Protection Act comes as no real surprise to anyone who has been following the myriad security breaches suffered by the NHS during recent years. But what does surprise me is the apparent lack of concern that the ICO has failed, yet again, to really do anything about it.

The University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust is quite a big name, yet ironically the data that it lost was contained on a very small thing: an unencrypted USB stick. Oh sweet Jesus H Christ, you heard that right, the NHS is still allowing staff to use unencrypted USB sticks to shift data around on. I’m sure that there will be some who disagree with me and point out that the NHS trust in question was following the NHS Connecting for Health guidelines on data security and forbidding any such thing. Unfortunately folks, my definition of ‘allowing’ stands: if you have a policy which says one thing but comes with no real world method to enforce that thing, then when someone breaches your policy you have for all intent and purposes allowed it to happen. See what I mean? And so it was, that this particular NHS trust allowed a medical student working in the burns and plastics department to put data relating to the treatment of more than 80 patients around on his own USB stick for ‘research purposes’ which was, as I’ve said, not encrypted at all. Said student then lost the USB stick, and all the patient data upon it.

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It’ll be worse before it’s better…

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

I used to have this verdant, green lawn. However, if you looked closely much of the green was moss. So, a couple of weeks back I fed it “weed and feed” which killed most of the moss and I have spent much of this weekend raking it out. The trouble is I now have a lot of brown earth and not much grass. The idea is now the moss has gone the grass will (eventually) grow over the bare patches the way it couldn’t over the moss.

So what has this to do with IT? The whole process reminded me of bug fixing a project that has gone bad. Once a system is well out of hand fixing the bugs gets tricky because they interact with other bugs and you end up with temporary fixes and work arounds until the other bugs are fixed which in turn create their own problems… The “best” approach (for development) is to clear them all out and start afresh. The problem is you end up with system much like my lawn – a bit bare.

This doesn’t go down well with users, however they will sometimes live without features for a while IF they believe they will be replaced with fully working ones.

Marketing usually really hate the idea – they’d rather have a healthy looking a system even if the healthy look is only from a distance. Still, I have often said the you could display everything about most marketing departments’ enthusiasm for openness on one screen of a smart phone … in a very large font.

Governing by compromise

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

Referendum day! If you haven’t cast your AV vote yet let me encourage you to do the right thing (although the nature of democracy is your right thing might not be my right thing!).

AV is a sensible step towards the way we agree on everything else – only kids say “I want this and if I can’t have it I don’t care”, grown ups should be saying “I’d like this but if you really don’t I’ll settle for that but what I really don’t what is the other”.

I have to say I have been well unhappy with the No Campaign. Statements like it will cost £250M (for counting machines that most places say they won’t use and could be used now anyway), it will favour smaller parties like the BNP (it may favour smaller parties but not extremist parties like the BNP) and Australia are trying to get rid of it (some states may be, the majority aren’t) seem to be bordering on the “lie” to me.

Avoiding extremists is exactly what AV does – the BNP only get in if the vote is split between main parties. Most people don’t want the BNP and would not place them 2nd – I’d like this but I really don’t want that.

Only with first past the post do you get the 98% arguing over which Indian restaurant to go to being dragged off to the Chinese by the 2% who agree on which Chinese THEY want.

If one person wants Dell PC’s, one person wants HP, one person wants Lenovo, one person wants NEC, …. would you buy Macs because 2 people do?

Should marketing equal moaning?

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

I rarely give up time to interview marketing executives. It isn’t personal, it is just I prefer to hear about the facts of a product/company/innovation rather than the perfectly sugar coated version I could read in a press release.

However, John McHugh, chief marketing officer at Brocade, is the exception. Arguably one of the best speakers on the tech circuit, he is always high on my list to talk to.

His strong presentation, brutal honesty and slightly brash nature that leaves his PR team nervously shaking about what he will say next, is a dream come true for a journalist.

One of my favourite qualities of John’s is his willingness to tear down his competition. It isnt always just for the sake of it; he always has the info to back up his criticisms, but it is always entertaining.

Other networking companies face the largest attacks, along with his ex-employer HP, but whether in a keynote session – which he has led at Brocade’s Tech Day Summit rather than the company’s CEO – or over a drink at the hotel bar – another staple location of his – conversations always lead to the mistakes of others.

As I said, this is brilliant for a journalist or just for someone looking for a fun evening at a tech conference, but it begs the question, is this the right approach to market a company?

When people leave a discussion with McHugh, they don’t leave thinking about the positives he promoted about his own company. Instead they remember his view of the overall industry, along with the slip ups of rivals.

All companies do it, focusing presentations on slides of how their product beats other ones hands down. It gets confusing when rival companies both claim to beat each other and, lets face it, we prefer to independently test things ourselves than rely on their figures, but why put such a focus on the flaws of others than the benefits of yourselves?

The Larry Ellison’s of this world, willing to leap onto any bandwagon to insult another firm’s efforts, may get the company some column inches but it annoys a lot of people and takes away from the products they release. It is kind of like Charlie Sheen – no one cares about the acting, just his latest mental breakdown rant.

McHugh is a far more likeable character than Ellison and much more factually aware. But I think Brocade and other industry leaders need to be aware their products should be the bigger person and speak for themselves without the need to insult rivals. It might not get journalist’s attention as much but we aren’t the ones buying your products.

Saying that, I am off to interview some other executives now and I won’t complain if they start telling me about the mess Cisco is in. Sorry, I am still a journalist…

Massive Amounts of Big Language Abuse

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

IT and the US are both major sources of corruption – of the English Language at least. HP has just acquired Vertica
http://www.vertica.com/

and I was going to blog of the IT business implications but can only get as afar as
“Customers Can Analyze Massive Amounts of Big Data at Speed and Scale”

Where else could you read “Massive Amounts of Big Data”? You only have to look further down the page before you hit a “monetizing”. Eugh!

Anyway, hopefully this is part of HP’s commitment to high value, high return software rather than low margin hardware.

Fixing meeting dates – a doddle?

Friday, February 11th, 2011

Has anyone used http://www.doodle.com ? Seems a great way of scheduling a meeting without sharing outlook calendars or sending a thousand I can do … can you? mails.

Being an old cynic I’m reluctant to enter all my invitees (is that a word?) email addresses – if they get a ton of spam I’ll feel responsible. Am I being unreasonable?

Having had a bit of a google I’ve found several similar tools and this rather nice slide show comparing them

http://www.slideshare.net/umhealthscienceslibraries/online-scheduling-tools-doodle-and-more

I’m rather taken with http://www.slideshare.net/ itself too!

So has anyone written an app that lets you chuck all your phones in a heap and it sorts out your next available evening / weekend / work time meeting in a range of dates? Should be do-able unless someoen has one of these.

It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere…

Monday, January 10th, 2011

One of the advantages the UK has for business is that its time zone overlaps with both the US and China. In the (not uncommon) situation where management and money are in the US and much of the actual work is in China the UK is ideal for middle management.

As it is I’ve had calls with China from 8:00 this morning (15:00 Shanghai time) and I am still emailing now at 21:30 (13:30 US Pacific) as I promised to send an update “today” and there is plenty of “today” left over there.

Before you get too sympathetic you should remember I’m a home worker so although I started at 8:00 and am working at gone 9 I did knock off at 6 and have a few hours with my family before popping back to work to finish things off. Yes, best practise is to keep to office hours or work can spread all over the day and indeed all over your life but I normally mange a more 9-5 day and on these odd occasions when it can’t be done I’d rather be working late from home than late from the office.

So if you have a distributed team including the US and China think about employing some management from a UK home.

Back to Work!

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

Happy New Year! Here we all are back at work and isn’t it fun?

The working from home thing really is quite tricky to get back into. I could quite easily potter up stairs and slide back into bed. In my previous incarnation as a home worker the phone would have been bringing away with a holidays worth of bugs and support issues. Now, as most of my “issues” are driven from the US, mornings are quiet. In any case issues are now logged on a web database so it is up to me to log in and look for them. Sometimes it would be easier to be chased rather than rely on my own self discipline.

However, most of the time I prefer not be chased so I’d better knuckle down and get something done or I’ll be chasing a new job…

If you manage homeworkers, this is a good time to touch base and re-engage some interest. It is what normally happens in an office – a bit of chat about the hols and then talk about work and finally do some work.

What I learnt at my father’s knee pt 1

Friday, November 26th, 2010

My dad died this week. Not surprisingly I’ve been thinking about him a lot. He taught me an awful lot – some he meant to teach me, some I just picked up as “the way to do things” like you do, especially as a kid where you define “normal” as what happens. The things you are taught without meaning to be taught can sometimes be a problem later because you don’t realise you learnt them, you think you (and everybody else) was born knowing them.

I think the hardest part of any marriage / relationships is that coming together of two cultures, two sets of unspoken (because they are so obvious they don’t need to be spoken) expectations, ways of doing things, world views, rules. If your family never wrapped Christmas presents and your partner’s family always spent more on the wrapping than the gift expect a lot of hurt and confusion Christmas morning! You aren’t going to appreciate all the time and trouble of the wrapping and the gift might be a bit pants, your partner will never get to think about the gift they’ll be so shocked you didn’t care enough to wrap it.

The worst of that is that because these things are so basic you may never talk them through and never even understand them yourself.

Anyway, enough of bereavement and couples counselling, what about IT? The same applies. The basic stuff sometimes gets left unsaid because it is too obvious. At a techie level we are quite good at defining the minutiae because we are used to dealing with machines that don’t have any common sense so we know there are no assumptions but the higher you go, plans / road maps to management (everyone knows this must run on Linux too) or even just using higher level languages (obviously dates will sort numerically) you make assumptions – and they make an “ass” out of “u” and “mption”, hmm did I do that wrong?

Work for me Earls Court!

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

Unlike some of my lucky colleagues – OK, Tom is the exception as he is at an airport – I am not working from a comfy sofa with Jeremy Kyle on the TV and an endless supply of snacks from the fridge.

On this Work Wise Week, I am working remotely from the 360 IT conference at Earls Court.

The show is filled to the rafters with important IT vendors, top experts and a plethora of public and private sector executives ready to rant when it comes to infrastructure, so I shouldn’t really complain. However, I don’t think it is quite ready for the world of remote working.

There are lists and lists of reasons employers can come up with for being against remote working and many I would bat aside.

Over lunch, I talked to ESET about the security aspects of home working and they agreed it was an issue but one the industry was looking to address with an array of products.

Then there is making sure your employees are actually working, not just watching the aforementioned TV. Trust me, working remotely is hard work. Running around a trade show, lugging a laptop around and trying to find somewhere to sit and work is not an easy task.

No, the issue I have and often have at such conferences where I work remotely is finding reliable WIFi.

From what I can work out, there are about three different WiFi choices at Earls Court today yet there wasn’t one working in the keynote theatre, a pain when you are trying to work as you go.

The one on the show floor may have worked but it was far too noisy to work down there and the one in the press room, whilst working most of the time, gave lots of people bother meaning they had to swap it to a fourth WiFi connection late in the day.

Overall, I have managed, but I may have gone slightly grey under these layers of hair dye.

I do like my reliable connections at home and work. Don’t get me wrong though, I am more than sure with the number of providers and the range of wireless technologies coming into force, in the future it won’t always be as difficult to maintain a stable connection.

Until that day comes though, I better go and buy some more hair dye…