Adventures in home working

National Semiconductor recently decided to give all of their employees an iPod, according to their press release:

Our employees were vital contributors to our most successful year in National’s 47-year history, and we wanted to equip them with the tools to help us create more value for our customers

This is pretty original,  I’ve heard of companies giving their employees similar gifts for great performance, but never the whole workforce.  It seemed to me a pretty bold move, especially when you consider how they plan to use the iPods, once all their employees have them:

We’re looking for new and more effective ways to communicate with our employees — and the iPods will help us do both,” said Brian L. Halla, National’s chairman and CEO.

I got more insights from a Podcast by Podtech:

National Semiconductor announced Monday it’s just given every one of its 8,500 employees a 30GB video iPod. But employees won’t just be catching up on soaps or rocking out at work. Jeff Weir, the company’s director of Worldwide PR, said the company will be podcasting corporate messages, product information and the like – right into its employees’ earbuds.

I really liked this idea,  I think the iPod could a great corporate communications channel and this certainly seems to the the vision of the company as I listened to the podcast, however I was a little disappointed the more I heard:

1. There was a lot of focus on the delivery of broadcast quality training and corporate communications, produced professionally from a studio,  this ruled out a lot of potential content
2. The idea of letting individuals within the business podcast was not being considered
3. The idea of routinely recording audio and web conferences and making them available had not been considered
4. The idea of ad-hoc communication via podcasts, for example letting managers podcast weekly status reports etc was not on the agenda
5. Microsoft channel 9 type video blogging that would increase cross company awareness had not been considered

Overall it seemed an opportunity missed and many of these additional use cases could have been achieved just by providing managers with an iPod and an external microphone.  Even so it seemed that National Semiconductor would have generated a lot of goodwill with it’s employees and that’s worth a lot right, wrong:

1. Even though National spun the iPods as a reward to the employees, those leaving the company were asked for them back, which generated a lot of negative press
2. It seems that a lot of employees didn’t seem to understand the importance of the iPod as a necessary part of the new way of doing business at National and decided to give their iPods away or sell them on eBay,  as soon as you can no longer assume everyone has an iPod it’s value is reduced.

Would I have done the same?  Not on reflection, instead I would have given every employee a Windows Mobile 5 Phone (assuming they were a Microsoft Exchange user), and a 2GB SD card and a USB cable for work and home.  I would have also made it clear that it was a company tool, that they had to use until they left the company at which point they could keep it.  That way I would have:

1. provided everyone with a platform for mobile email, calendar and applications
2. reduced my phone handset costs
3. still provided a great platform for podcasts
4. not had the problems with people leaving, because they could take it with them

Although I guess I would have created myself another problem – who picked up the bill for the mobile data usage!

I believe that consumerization will have a big impact on the enterprise,  I for one gave up on the idea that my company would meet all my IT needs long ago, and regularly make personal investments.  In general I consider my personal tools to greatly enhance my productivity, way beyond the level that my company makes possible.  That said I don’t think it’s possible to take a top down approach to personal productivity and knowledge management as I know for certain by observing many highly productive people that there are many different approaches that suit different personalities.

The best companies will figure out how to blend top down enabablement with bottom up productivity and innovation.  It’s great to see Gartner recognising this at last, in the past Gartner’s TCO model for PC’s has promoted the idea of “stop users fiddling with their desktop”  now they seem to recognise that at least for some users that fiddling was actually productivity tuning and process innovation!  Here is an encouraging quote from Jeffery Mann, a research VP at Gartner:

When I talk with customers about how to achieve a high-performance workplace (HPW), one of the hardest things for them to deal with is the need to loosen up on some control issues, and how to do that without losing control completely. This is natural. For the past several years, CEOs and CFOs have been asking CIOs to reduce costs, reduce risk, ensure compliance and generally take tighter control of users. This has resulted in locked-down desktops, strict TCO and ROI procedures, and tight IT procedures all around. The result is that IT has collectively become “The Abominable No Man”’ in many organizations, better at refusing or blocking any initiative than facilitating it.
We cannot stay on this trajectory. The complexity of the business and IT environments is too overwhelming to pursue the myth of total control. There are too many variables and influences to permit anyone to control all inputs. Even if we could, that would be a bad thing. Real innovation is coming from unexpected and not totally understood areas, such as Web 2.0 and consumer-oriented collaboration facilities. To block access to these is counterproductive and, ultimately, futile. Increasingly, many users see access restrictions as similar to network faults: a minor irritation to route around.

Of course it’s not about no control.  In my view it’s about IT progressively withdrawing to managing only those things that are business critical and enabling security and connectivity services, and even then considering whether they need to manage applications and data or whether they can get away with just controlling a standard web service, RSS feed, or email feed.  In Gartner’s words:

Does this mean we should throw open the doors to every virus-laden, spyware-filled download we can find? Or post sensitive information on any blog site we care to? Of course not. Loosening control does not mean giving up all control. It could mean enabling four or five different products in a particular technology area instead of just one (but not any). Innovative IT managers are experimenting with virtualization to shield experimental trials from sensitive corporate processes. In some cases, it will mean trusting employees to do the right thing, something businesses are accustomed to doing in other areas (like contract negotiations or travel expenses), but not done often enough within IT policies.

I like the idea that Jeff presents here of providing a choice of applications,  as this fits very well with my opening point about the different ways that people like to work.  As we see more applications that can interact with standard web services like RSS in a predictable way we will be able to move in this more flexible direction.

A few weeks ago I had a planning session with Microsoft where we discussed requirements for the version of windows to follow Vista.  During that meeting I used newsgator as an example of my ideal service, it embodies in principle – and increasingly in execution – all that I see as good in the new world of service enabled software.

I thought it would be useful to describe some of the characteristics of the newsgator approach:

• A loosely integrated client and services platform
• The services platform only asserts itself when it can add value to the user,  otherwise it gets out of the way and lets me get on with the job
• An eco-system of different client software optimised to address different platforms, user-types and user preferences, some supplied by newsgator but others just integrated with the services platform using their APIs
• Different installations of newsgator online enabled software are aware of activities on the other clients, for example my work client is aware of what I have already read or subscribed to at home
• Each installation of a client can optionally have a different configuration, so my work client could be configured differently to my home client if that’s what I wanted 
• A complementary web interface for when an optimised smart client is not available, or for when a web interface is the optimised solution
• All of my configuration data is held by the services platform and be easily extracted and moved some place else, in fact other systems can use it in place as it is all url addressable
• All (actually nearly all but they are moving in the right direction) configuration data is held by the services platform, so that once I have authenticated to it from a freshly installed client it seems like my environment again
• Higher performance than would be possible with a client only approach

In summary, the approach provides me with considerable freedom of choice, great performance, optimisation without sacrificing flexibility and openness, pretty inspiring!

Now if Microsoft can do the same thing by utilising Windows Live to make the experience of multiple personal PC’s, work and personal PCs, a household of PCs, PCs and Mobiles, multiple identities, sharing data, PC migrations and upgrades etc more seamless and deliver freedom of choice, great performance, optimisation without sacrificing flexibility and openness then I will be very impressed. 

It’s interesting that watching Ray Ozzie perform at the Financial Analyst meeting recently he definitely seems to have a newsgator-like vision for the eco-system of Microsoft products and services, and some of his recent innovations around the use of Live Clipboard and RSS and Simple List Extensions seem to indicate that he sees the value in delivering these innovations using standards so there may be hope.

The only thing I really need to round off the newsgator experience is for every bit of configuration data to persist server side (flags, snippets, saved searches etc) and applications that stream down to my new PC automatically with no possibility of conflicts with other applications and no administrative rights to run or install, for that I guess we need them to be .Net ClickOnce applications or wait for Microsoft to build Softgrid like virtualization support into their operating systems and Softgrid like streaming into their packaging approach and yes I do know that Microsoft has just acquired Softricity!

This would be a vision for Software as a Service that would really appeal to me!

I have often used the word seamless to describe some of the refinements that I have been seeking in the end user experience,  although recently I have tended to substitute seamless for integrated without really knowing why.  Well today I read a post by Dean Bubley titled Redefining semalessness in which he says:

[seamless] ignores the fact that at the “seam” lots of things change. Bandwidth, latency, price, maybe ownership, control, security, context and lots of other things. While the user should (in some cases like an ongoing voice call) have minimal interaction, the device itself and its resident applications need to be fully bearer-aware to enable a good user experience, especially for data applications. Moving from a low-latency to high-latency connection has a huge impact on software that has complex “hand-shaking” procedures, for example. And moving from an unlimited-data environment (eg home or office WiFi) to one that is tariffed per-MB clearly needs intervention. If I have anti-virus software, for example, I don’t want it downloading 5MB of stuff unannounced, especially if I’m roaming. And I want the music application on the device to recognise I’m at home on WiFi, and default to getting MP3s from my PC hard drive, rather than defaulting to the operator music portal.

This is a really great insight and demonstrates a key issue,  that one really needs to think things through from the end users perspective,  and not just from a technology perspective.  In my personal case I actually go so far as to have different user accounts that I use on my different devices, and replicate different data to each, because each device is setup in a way that’s optimised for it’s usage context, so whilst I want some things integrated I want control and I certainly don’t want someone else deciding where to put all of the seams.

The Inescapable data blog has two recent posts (here and here) that describe some of the gathering momentum around home working that are worth reading.  I am a great fan of home working personally,  although I have some short term reservations about how home working is often implemented by companies.  I think new processes, tool and cultural norms will rapidly mature to make home working a more satisfying experience in the medium term.  I think the nail in the coffin of the office will be when companies start to give employees an allowance that they can choose to spend on a company car, company PC, company phone, company desk and company office space all of which are optimised for the company or they can choose to spend it on creating an optimised personal environment that addresses their work and home life in a more integrated fashion.  I know which one I will be choosing. 

In fact I run an allowance system of sorts myself at the moment,  I gave up long ago expecting my company to invest as much in the tools of my trade as I would have invested if I was given the choice.  So when I started working from home I took the money that I was saving in fuel, personal broadband and other incidental travel and office related expenses and stuck it in a dedicated bank account.  I now draw on that account – without guilt – whenever I need/want to invest in my personal effectiveness and I am much happier as a result,  I no longer spend every day wishing my laptop had more memory, or wishing I had a second display, or a better headset,  I just buy them!

Rob Boothby has written yet another excellent paper on the subject of web office, which is his term for a collection of web based tools which are rapidly disrupting established business systems for knowledge workers, key elements of the toolkit include not surprisingly blogs, wikis, social networking, search, podcasting/event recording, web email, instant messaging, presence and IP telephony.  Rod concludes the paper with 5 compelling reasons why business needs to take this seriously:

There are five reasons why any senior executive needs to start thinking about Web Office now:

1. Web Office technology will make partnering and out-sourcing more efficient by creating a platform that can seamlessly support virtual ad-hoc teams. Thus, it will quickly reduce your costs.
2. If you have any competitors using Web Office technology, they are going to have a significant productivity lead over you. Web Office will be as big and important as email, and you wouldn’t imagine running a business today without email.
3. Your new hires are already using this technology. The MBA class of 2006 has lived and breathed the web since they were in high school. If you don’t provide company endorsed solutions, they will end up using tools that are available on the open Internet until you do.
4. Most importantly, Web Office will help you to increase the pace of innovation within your organization. As I explained in my last paper “Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators”, constant innovation is the only business strategy capable of producing a stream of above average profits. To achieve constant innovation, senior executives need to bring everyone into the effort. Web Office is the ideal tool to help achieve that goal.
5. Web Office is cheap. You will get a lot of bang for your buck.

I keep hearing people describe IT as increasingly commoditized and they are often discussing PC’s and office products at the time.  This gets me frustrated because in my experience these particular technologies are anything but commodities.  Although there are very many definitions of commodity I used to think that Peter Cochrane was getting close when he said:

It seems to me that we find commodity items and services useful by definition! But when the price has fallen sufficiently, we no longer value them. That is, we tend to take things for granted and at some point consider their availability as good as free. Water and electricity are two good examples. We turn on the tap for a drink and flick a switch for light without even a second thought.

However I now think this style of thinking takes us to a dangerous place, its very similar to thinking about the purchase cost, rather than the total cost of ownership.  I think a much safer definition of commodity goes as follows:

A commodity is something that has a total cost of replacement that is very close to the purchase cost of the replacement, ie ownership has no value and ceasing to own has no penalty.

Now this definition might seem a bit too subtle,  but let me give you some examples of commodities and see if it works:

I can switch electricity and telephone supplier in the UK simply by making a short phone call.  I can replace my fridge by unpacking it, sliding it out of the kitchen and sliding in another one and re-packing.  These seem to fit my definition is commodity pretty well.

Now lets look at my PC, which is often referred to as a commodity,  unfortunately by my definition we have a problem,  the replacement cost is very considerably greater than the cost of replacement,  not only might I have compatibility issues to resolve but I will have data to transfer, application licences to find, media to find, software to install and configure etc etc.  Whilst the hardware might be a commodity the working system is anything but.  When looked at in this way commoditization looks like a great way to go though,  I would love to replace my PC and for all of the “state” to just transparently restore itself to the device.  With enterprise management software we are getting closer to this situation,  but we are a long way away from it in the home.  As data volumes increase and the state definition becomes increasingly complex I also think we will also continue to struggle in the enterprise.

I recently had a discussion with Microsoft planners about requirements for Windows beyond Vista and this issue was high on my wish list.  In fact I said to them that my high level requirement was for Windows to meet my definition of commoditized, and for loss and upgrade events to cost me little more than the purchase cost of the replacement device.  A more concrete suggestion was to be able to treat everything like data, ie I can just copy my PC to another PC, or to a USB memory stick and ironically Microsoft’s acquisition of Softricity might be one of the stop gap technologies that makes this more practical.  However I think the long term solution will need a lot of work by the whole industry, Graham also comments on this. 

In a previous post I described the fact that for many people you can describe their IT needs in terms of 4 layers,  this is important because it means that if you try to provide a new IT system that meets a need in layer 4, when the persons needs in layers 1 – 3 are not already met then you will struggle to motivate people to use it, because their focus will continue to be on meeting their needs in layers 1–3.

If this is true then this model has important implications for how you meet needs in the lower layers.  Let me explain;  you really need to meet needs in layer 1 in a way that makes it easy to then meet needs in layer 2 and you need to meet needs in layer 2 in a way that makes it easy to meet needs in layer 3.  You may think this is so obvious that its not worth mentioning, however, obvious though it may be – over the last 10 years we have consistently failed to do this in the enterprise deskop services management. 

To illustrate lets consider some examples:

About 10 years ago the industry invented the idea of a standard desktop environment for all,  with a locked down standard image delivered to a small range of PC’s with a small range of approved peripherals.  Software was delivered to these devices from a central repository using remote software distribution technologies.  This was a good solution to the tier 1 need, ie:

Initialy a person is motivated to get access to a computer and software that is reliable and has good connectivity.  Until they achieve this they achieve this they are unlikely to worry too much about anything else

What we didn’t consider was the fact that as soon as we met this Access need all of our users would rapidly move on to want to meet their tier 2 need:

Once they get access to a reliable computer they will seek to maximise their personal productivity, which will often express itself as a desire to control their IT environment, customising it, installing additional software, and generally making investment decisions that match their personal priorities.

Oh dear, we solved their tier 1 needs in a way that minimised the control they had over their environment, therefore forcing people with very diverse business requirements and personality types to all use the same standardised environment.  In some businesses even the monitor size and resolution was standardised.  In addition whilst we had good software delivery tools the cost and lead-time to get a new software product evaluated, tested, packaged, purchased and deployed was so long and painful that many people gave up before they even started.  What happened, a whole load of frustrated employees who either left the company, started to use their home PC’s, started buying PDA’s, or bringing their laptops into work etc.

So what did we do next, we decided we had solved the needs of individuals and needed to move onto solving the needs of teams, where I contend our users were actually focussed on Personal Voice! 

their priority will start to turn to control over their personal voice, ie how their contribution is seen by their managers and peers and other stakeholders.

How did this happen,  well – we failed to listen to the users and listened to our customers, and many of these customers were strongly motivated to focus on managing the costs that they controlled and in many businesses that didn’t include the lost opportunity costs associated with delivering end-user productivity.  So not only did we fail to fully deliver personal productivity, but we skipped completely the need for Personal Voice and went straight to addressing team/knowledge management needs.

Then we hit a problem,  the team/KM systems didn’t get used very effectively because the people who were meant to be using them were focussed on trying to sort out their personal productivity and were concerned that if they put all of their effort into making other people a success their personal voice/contribution would not be heard.  Had we done things in the right order it should have gone like this:

Once people feel they have control over their personal voice, their priorities will switch to the success of others, or to the teams of which they are members.

In my next post I will provide a rough sketch of how to address each of these layers in a way that considers the needs of the other layers.

For the last few months I have been considering individual motivations which is pretty tricky as people are motivated by many different things, however I have made an attempt to develop a simple model that does seem to reflect the IT related motivations I see in many people.

The diagram on the right provides a summary of the model, which goes as follows:

Initialy a person is motivated to get access to a computer and software that is reliable and has good connectivity.  Until they achieve this they achieve this they are unlikely to worry too much about anything else.

Once they get access to a reliable computer they will seek to maximise their personal productivity, which will often express itself as a desire to control their IT environment, customising it, installing additional software, and generally making investment decisions that match their personal priorities.  For example Joe’s priority might be a high end laptop with Office Professional and Firefox whilst Emma might want a desktop with 2 large TFT screens and be happy with Star Office provided she can have Adobe Photoshop.  Even though Joe and Emma have very different desires they may in fact do the same job, but being different personalities with different skills and work styles the environments that for them deliver maximum productivity are very different.

Once Joe and Emma have control over their environments their priority will start to turn to control over their personal voice, ie how their contribution is seen by their managers and peers and other stakeholders.  Personal voice has been pretty difficult to achieve and I believe that lack of achievement of this need has stalled many IT projects that relied on people working together effectively as teams.  Enterprise Blogs and related technologies seem to me to be a great way for people to express their personal voice and I think their popularity on the Internet reflects a lot of frustration within the enterprise.

Once people feel they have control over their personal voice, their priorities will switch to the success of others, or to the teams of which they are members.

Of course these steps will not be true for everybody nor are the steps binary, ie they actually just reflect the fact that people will be dissatisfied if they are asked to focus on higher layers before their needs at the lower layers are pretty well served.

By now of course most people will probably have figured out that what I am describing is closely related to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but I am not a psychologist so I am not really qualified to do any analysis at this level.  I just wanted to share my simple observations.

Brian Madden provides some useful insights into the affect of Microsoft’s intention to acquire Softricity.  I for one believe this is a really big deal as it will bring virtualization technologies into the mainstream.  One of the things that has held virtualization back is the fact that every enterprise has had to package it’s own applications.  With Microsoft behind Softricity it’s likely we will see a good proportion of enterprise desktops with the Softricity client installed and once that happens we can expect software developers to provide Softgrid packages as a matter of course and this will be a very big deal indeed.  Mainstream use of virtualized applications will mean that applications will increasingly be seen as similar to data, ie we will be able to copy them from machine to machine as we upgrade or move offices, it also probably means that we will hopefully see some innovations around licensing, with more applications being linked to the individual than to the device.

I am really excited about the prospects because whilst Java and .NET also promise easy application provisioning/installation, minimise dependencies on the client operating system and don’t affect the integrity of the operating system we still have tens of thousands of legacy applications around which are crying out for Virtualization.  Until this announcement by Microsoft virtualization was just not a big enough market for many of these legacy application suppliers to take notice of.

Softricity also brings some great management products to Microsoft, in particular their streaming and Internet facing software distribution and metering technologies.  These will be great solutions for enterprises that need to deliver pre-configured applications to un-managed or partially managed desktops and we may well see software developers streaming their applications directly to users, and automatically maintaining them with the latest patches and upgrades, a sort of thick client version of the previously only web based Software as a Service trend.

Brian Madden doesn’t think this is too big an impact on Citrix as a company,  but I do I think it will drive Citrix into an even smaller niche as enterprises see client side virtualization as meeting some of the needs that they currently use Citrix Presentation Server for and of course it disrupts or kills Citrix’s own virtualization product.  The comments on Brian’s blog post provide an excellent discussion on the impact.

A few weeks ago I was raving about Altiris and their SVS product,  now I see SVS having a very limited life.

One final point is that this is great news for Microsoft provided they aggressively drive adoption as widely as possible because it will greatly simplify the application compatibility issues that hold people back from deploying new operating system versions, it will also reduce the testing lead-times for Microsoft.  This dual affect with probably increase adoption rates, re-invigorate windows as a platform and provide Microsoft with more time for innovation.  It also probably means that Microsoft could provide many of its own applications (Office 2007 etc) as a service.