I believe it is a common misconception that people don’t like change. I think that what people generally object to is change being blindly foisted upon them. If I get to work and I’m told “Hey this has changed and you now do this” I’m less likely to embrace the change as I would if I got to work and someone said “Hey, you know that change we’ve been working on - let’s kick it in today”. I don’t mean involving people in a purely superficial way either but really engaging people (and I’m not talking about team building weekends either!). If you give a new user a computer, what is the first thing they are likely to do? You got it, change something. Be it the wallpaper, the icons, the screen saver time out and hopefully their password. We all like to do this because it makes us feel more comfortable and in control. There may be technical reasons for not doing this (allowing users to set screen savers on thin clients) but on the whole giving a sense of control adopts a positive attitude to change.

We are changing all the time, everything around us is experiencing constant change. However, if you decide to blindly change something without involving people (even those on the periphery of the perceived change) you can bet that trouble will ensue shortly after. Of course communication is the answer but it needs to be handled sensitively. Talk to people, keep people in the loop even if they are not directly involved and if something is confidential then keep it that way. When we are at work we want to be part of something, to feel that our voice counts for something and that we are making a difference, even if we’re not seemingly directly involved. I’m not talking about going over the top either and blasting people with memo’s - just talk to people like their opinion matters.

What do you think?

A similar discussion can be found on my other Blog at Creative design by committee is OK - but who wants OK?

“Hey you – want a copy of the latest blockbuster or a full copy of that latest software package? Keep it under your hat - nudge nudge - but there is someone who knows someone who can sort you out if you know what I mean”. Grr, I don’t know about you but this sort of thing just grates on me.

More and more these days I have been noticing an uneasy hushed silence as I enter a room. I believe this is because I seem to be the only one endlessly reminding people that copying (or buying copied versions of) software, games and movies is not legal. I’ve lost count of how many times I have had to remind people that downloading or ripping music that you haven’t payed for and don’t own is not legal (unless it has been offered free!). Of course I can’t be sure that anyone is actually doing anything wrong because I haven’t seen it with my own eyes but drop into a conversation that you believe that copying DVD’s is wrong and it seems that conversation runs dry pretty quickly. I used to enjoy car boot sales but stopped as they seemed to be overrun by dodgy DVD dealers. What reply do I always get - “Those mega-corporations have loads of money already and we aren’t doing any harm”. Really?

Two unusual things have been added to the list recently - the other day I had to ask if a video clip being played in a Power Point presentation was licensed for public viewing and then I had to remind someone that copying pages from books using a scanner needs a license. I was even harping on about Second Life (Is Second Life just a den of iniquity?)at the back end of last year as I noticed how simple it was to get online and be dumped in the middle of mature content.

Last week Microsoft and their Ultimate Steal offer became a talking point as a number of people I know are part time or distance students. There even seems to be some confusion over Student versions of software as it would appear that even small children (five and under) that go to Nursery can apparently get full bundles of software for a fraction of the price of the retail package. What a three year old child will do with Microsoft Access is beyond me but I imagine that Mommy and Daddy or Granny and Grandpa might find it useful (I just hope the child understands when they grow up!). Ok, software licensing is a nightmare at the best of times so I guess it can be understandable if someone misinterprets the license agreement from time to time.

The worrying trend is that I seem to be becoming a minority. I didn’t set out to be the one waving the moral flag but as many of these activities are being ‘enabled’ through technology I am left wondering if IT have actually become the new moral guardians.

So Dixons issues a profit warning due to poor Christmas sales – not a surprise really. Dixons, at least in my little world, has an image of being quite expensive plus the days of nipping into one of their stores to look at potential purchases are long gone – so too has the impulse buy. We tried a high street retailer online service at Christmas but they couldn’t even get a simple order right and we ended up having to cancel it at the last minute because they seemingly couldn’t tell a black iPod dock from a white one – needless to say they aren’t high on our preference list anymore – not when there are a myriad of online vendors who can supply the same product quicker, cheaper and more reliably. The thing that never ceases to amaze me though is that these companies always seem to get the cash bit right – the money came out of my account almost instantly – if only service followed through as efficiently?

And in recent news, the Highways Agency is outsourcing its IT infrastructure. Outsourcing is one of those things that goes in and out of fashion. Initially, some high ranking bod in the upper eschelons of power decides that outsourcing is the way to go and let’s face it – it is very hard to argue against it if your core business activity is not IT related – and suddenly the contract is worth far more than the poor IT people, who have struggled thanklessly for years, could ever get their budgetary hands on. Then, after a few years a sense of detachment occurs, communication barriers breakdown, and the IT operation ends up being bought back inhouse under a new realm of empowerment – not that that is ever likely to happen in this case!

Strange as it may seem public sector organisations have apparently been losing data and now MP’s are calling for stricter powers and punishment for data security breaches. It also seems that these data losses may now be linked to job cuts with the unions indicating that job cuts on the horizon may put more data at risk. I would have thought that at its very core any public body that deals with public data would make the security of the data paramount and everything else would ripple out from there – haven’t they read the data protection act? Don’t these systems have auditing or authority control systems in place and if not why not? We are constantly being told, and as IT practitioners we are constantly telling others, to be vigilant in protecting our personal information online but what is the point of this if our important personal data is regularly being mislaid – we may as well put all our personal data onto MySpace. It certainly sounds like a good case for the national identity card – put all the data into one place then police it like crazy.

With two very young children in our household Christmas means the house is now filled with huge blobs of plastic toys - sometimes I think that friends and family either think we live in a warehouse or that they have some wicked sense of humour. I am often also gobsmacked at the almost thesis worthy way in which these toys are attached to the packaging materials which means either severed fingers or so much twisting of little plastic wire seals that the fun of the toy is lost by the time it is opened. Fortunately Santa way busy opening all their toys on Christmas Eve (and came armed to the gills with batteries) so they were ready to play come Christmas morning.After playing with these blobs of plastic for a few minutes each then raising an almost cynical eyebrow my two (nearly three) year old daughter reverted to the two things she likes best: my portable DVD player and my PDA. My PDA is an aging HP IPAQ 4350 and since I loaded some games on it and a basic drawing program she has been hooked. She can power the thing up, retrieve the stylus from the device, understand how the stylus works in relation to the screen and load in both the game and the drawing program. For the game she knows she has to navigate several screens of information to choose the game from the game collection and she also understands the concept of how the game works. She even asked me recently if she could print out her pictures for heavens sake - a few years ago I was teaching rooms of employees the relationship between moving a mouse and an onscreen pointer! For the portable DVD player she knows how to switch it on, open the DVD cover, open the DVD case and get the DVD out of it (by pressing those little plastic button things). She can then power it up, navigate the menu and play her Peppa Pig DVD. By the way - I just love the episode where daddy pig fixes the computer by “switching it off and on again”.

I almost fear for her potential level of applied IT knowledge by the time she gets to the ripe old age of five - she will probably be redesigning our home wireless network or explaining to me how badly implemented our home data backup solution is!

If there truly is an IT skills crisis then perhaps employers are looking in the wrong place – maybe they need to contact their local school instead?  Happy New Year!

So thinksecret.com will no longer be published according to their post Apple, Think Secret settle lawsuit. An amicable settlement? Is this a win for the big Apple or for the lowly Blogger – may be will never know. John Naughton from the Observer talks about this short but sweet statement in his article User-friendly Apple shows a blogger its ruthless core. For something like a Blog to really catch the attention of a huge corporate only re-inforces my point that Blogging is a worthwhile activity and not, as some naysayers might have you believe, a complete waste of time. Personally I find Blogging a great addition to my everyday activities and it has certainly improved my life in a number of areas, both at work and socially. If you are thinking of starting a Blog yourself, but have reservations, you should read Why Blogging is not a waste of time.

Doing the job I do - sometimes I get sent some odd things but imagine my surprise when A missile launcher arrived in the post this morning. Mind you, on the flip side, I am still waiting for my prize to arrive from the Adobe Creative License Tour ‘Prize Draw’ back in November but as the months slowly tick by I am running out of people to contact at Adobe as well as any enthusiasm I had for the prize at the beginning – I just hope the book arrives before the next major release of Creative Suite otherwise the book is going to be out of date – and there was I hoping to give it a good read over the Christmas break. Now I may have to try and re-install Windows Vista instead!

While we’re all tucking into our turkey dinner this year and snoozing after the Christmas pud, spare a thought for all those heroes whose work and efforts often go unrecognised. The skeleton staff’ support staff, call centre staff, field engineers, shop staff, petrol pump attendants, media people (especially the writers), emergency services, and public servants who are all there trying to make our lives a little bit easier while we lay around on the sofa waiting for the Queens big speech. Talking of those public servants who have been taking a hammering recently: I missed the post on Saturday and the Postman left a missed delivery card - this was an important present that I had been working on for ages (courtesy of Snapfish who managed to get my late order out before the big day) but to my surprise the Postman redelivered the package on Sunday morning. If someone you know falls ill over Christmas or New Year, or has one too many ales, and ends up in the waiting area of a hospital somewhere think of all the people that are making that happen - the ones you see and the ones you don’t. There is all this ubiquitous technology around us that is put to great use and that we take for granted every single day - but behind that technology are people - people who are working hard and whose work is often also taken for granted.

So to all those who may be at work on Christmas day and those whose work often goes unacknowledged but is so important especially at this time year - thank you for making my Christmas merry.

Best wishes to you all and Merry Christmas.

Sex, Drugs and the Spam Patrol - How many plasters until the next loophole?

I imagine that some genuine hard working companies must really struggle to ply their trade online due to Spam. Replica watch manufacturers, legal pharmaceutical vendors, Bling (whatever that may be) vendors, electronic postcard providers and financial institutions must get a really hard time online, oh and don’t even get me started on honest lottery providers or online game developers. Since I wrote the last two sentences 53 emails have been stopped by our Spam filter and are awaiting further analysis. But what exactly qualifies as Spam? Spam, at least in our business, is becoming a universal word to describe pretty much any undesirable incoming email - but the term undesirable is somewhat indefinable and used very loosely to cover a multitude of different things that can, and frequently do, arrive at our mail gateway.

I have no idea whether any of these ‘Spam’ mails are genuine online retailers who simply wish to electronically ‘drop a leaflet through the door’ to make us aware of their products or whether they are villainous rogues with dark intentions. This is primarily because our email filter has automatically picked up certain trigger words (amongst other scenarios) and stopped the stuff at the border so we can all rest easy. As for their ultimate fate at the border patrol, these emails are destined for the big ‘waste of bandwidth’ cyber-land-fill somewhere in the ether.

I feel really sorry for the budding entrepreneur who steps into the dragons den with their great new idea of making medicinal aids available for purchase online or who have great plans to start a new kind of Euro sweepstakes service via the Internet; because these people’s communications are (hopefully) never going to make it into our business.

That said, the trickiest Spam we have to deal with at the moment are those that arrive with non-english language content. Up until recently it has been fairly easy to analyse emails that arrive in my native language, but some emails have recently starting appearing in different languages - something that even the Spam patrol is struggling to deal with. How long before we have to include ‘must be multi-lingual’ in the IT security job specification? Or are we heading for a time when we can no longer keep the door, le porte, die Tür, orドア secure?

I even wonder if this Blog post will ever see light of day due to some of the words used within, oh and by the way, the 53 is now 124. 

With Christmas looming up and the New Year on the horizon many peoples thoughts may be turning to what 2008 may mean for developments in technology, so here are my 5 finger in the air predictions for the 52 weeks ahead:

• The Octo-Core CPU driven by the need for high powered servers for virtualisation tasks will make its debut
• The Pico-Projector will appear in mobile phones and handheld gaming devices
• Unified Communications will stop being a buzz-term and actually start being useful
• The Budget ‘back to basics’ laptop will appeal to the masses of non-techies driving a change for simplicity in computing devices
• Server OS development companies will rethink the GUI and look for inspiration in their text based roots

No doubt I will be hiding in a corner cringeing come this time next year wondering how on earth I could have been so off the mark with my predictions! So, what are your predictions for technology in 2008?

Am I the only person in the world who likes Mondays?

Most people I talk to can’t wait until Friday - personally I can’t wait until Monday. Does that really sound so strange? People often look at me in horror when I tell them about my love of Mondays. But. there is something fresh about Mondays, something new and something optimistic. On Mondays I draw a line under all those outstanding jobs and set my schedule for the week ahead. Key data backups occur over the weekend and are checked on Mondays and I often visit our off-site storage facility with the weekly IT archive box. My user base also seems a lot quieter on Mondays, maybe something they did at the weekend?

On Mondays I find time to check the budgets, do the paperwork and scan upcoming schedules for maintenance renewals and even get some time to check some of those email newsletters that seem to come through the email system with an ever increasing ferocity. Catching up with technical Blogs also happens regularly on Mondays and software development also comes a lot easier earlier in the week (on Monday afternoons in particular) and I am often at my best coding away in Cobol or C# (or whatever else I happening to be working on – at the moment it’s Java with MIDP). I also get a lot less support calls on Monday than any other day of the week.

By Friday however I have a snowy mountain of requests on my desk, a phone full of voice mails and a full email box; I can often be found early on a Sunday morning either at home remotely logged in or (more often than not) at work sorting through outstanding requests and prioritising new requests – did I say that I was a one man IT band with a userbase of almost 200? I wonder what the biggest ratio of support people to users is?

So, my questions are:

• What is is about Fridays that everyone likes?
• And am I the only one who likes Mondays?