The business case for wireless PDAs and Smart Phones
Yesterday I was working on the business case for wireless PDAs and Smart Phones for my companies senior exec’s, probably VPs and above. I found it pretty enlightening. I am not going to share the business case, but I did have a few interesting observations to share:
- The incredible ROI you get if you can allow and executive to release time during the core working day, by using otherwise unproductive time to process emails. (the business case identified may more benefits)
- The risks that a always on device brings in terms of Work Life Balance
- The risks that information overload and constant interrupts can have on mental health.
Whilst I think there is a good business case I included this caution after presenting the ROI:
However, there are some cautions that also apply to the analysis:
- It will take several weeks for executives to attain the levels of improvement described and for an effective usage culture to develop
- The case partially depends on the availability of otherwise “unproductive time”
- Whilst such time exists, there are alternative uses for this time for example networking before meetings, making phone calls, thinking etc. These activities may have as much or greater value. The spreadsheet …
Inspired by listening to talks about the Microsoft Research project, 
I have just upgraded all of my servers and everything seems to be working fine except for skype. When I click on the Contacts Tab the contact list is not reliably displayed. If I close skype and then open it again then it is displayed once, but from then on the tab changes to show focus, but the actual contact list area continues to show the content of the previous tab (whatever that was). In the screen shot I have attached you can see that contacts tab has focus, but the start screen is displayed.
Today in our little town we were celebrating the fact that after much campaigning we now have our own town council which gives us a more effective voice at the Borough Council, celebrations were mainly of a musical nature, and this picture is of one of the local bands. The town was buzzing, helped by the fact that its was a gloriously sunny day. We walked home along the beach playing football, which regular readers will know means that physically I am on pretty good form today.
In recent years we have seen a lot of money spent on appropriate development, which has successful regenerated the town centre and this year we are hoping to see further investment in our promenade gardens and in our town centre park. This picture is of my mum and the kids in one of the beach side cafes.
On Saturday I started to pull up all of the strawberry plants that had rooted from runners last year. I ended up with several hundred plants in a big heap. I decided that it would be a good idea to give them away, but my wife thought no one would be interested. I took this as a bit of a challenge, I am one of those people who likes to think the best of others (which is an extension of having a positive outlook) my wife in contrast always expects things to go wrong and tends to distrust those she doesn’t know. Anyway I bagged the plants up – 15 plants to a bag – and to make the challenge more interesting decided to give the plants away but allow for donations.
I have been pretty pleased with 
Michael 
Where I live we have a micro climate, we always get better than average weather, a lot less rain than just a few miles inland. But this Winter has been amazing, in fact it feels like we have missed winter altogether. the last month it has only rained a couple of days and most days we have had at least some sunshine. I took this picture of the flowers as we walked along the beach promenade on Sunday, the picture was taken with the built in camera in my Treo 640*480, but good enough for the odd blog posting.
I just got the following invite from Microsoft, it looks like a great event, hopefully someone will pay for me to attend 
After an initial abortive attempt at using