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Colonies, Librarians, Bloggers and Tweeters

This evening I attended a fascinating talk given by our local history society on a local colony of artists who lived in Cranbrook, Kent, England in the 19th Century.  Their art can now fetch well over £100,000 a piece.  Below is one of the typical paintings – that could number an estimated 1,500 – though only 300 have been catalogued by the local historian giving the talk.

What was interesting is that so little is known about the colony locally – and that many paintings were bought by industrial entrepreneurs from the Midlands and North of England.  It is only because of the interest of a few local folk that some of the pieces have found their way back to the local museum and local collections.

The Naughty Boy by George Bernard O’Neill

The reason I was there was that local history society recently asked me to design a simple, low-cost website for them.  The chairman, secretary and other committee members are now adding content to the site – and it was from a discussion with the archivist did it suddenly hit me how differently people think about putting information onto the web.

The archivist is an ex-librarian.  For her, everything can be classified and should be put into order as part of a logical taxonomy.  Already the categories on the site are developing into several layers.  She reflected on the fact that, perhaps there were now too many layers for some categories.  It reminded me of my early days of (IDMS) database programming (before relational databases), when you had to put data into classes and categories.  I had a simple rule then that more than three layers was too many.  It still somehow holds true today.

On describing this blog (where the categories are simply a relational tag that you clump ideas together with), she became nervous.  The way that her librarian-mind worked was that each book, each chapter, each page, each idea had, somehow to be classified in a single tree.  The idea that each idea, or article could be classified by several different classes – and that you leave it up to the search engine to work out how to get you there was a difficult one for her to feel good about.

It was a similar lack of familiarity or unease that I have, perhaps, with those who Tweet.  Sure, I tweet a bit.  Occasionally.  Once every so often.  When I am feeling I have a gap, or when I have a slot at the conference when I want to broadcast something interesting.  But I am by no means a regular member of the Twitterati.  Tweeting somehow gets in the way of the flow of life.  You become an observer or a journalist rather than living in the moment.  I respect those who tweet regularly – but, for me, it is too high a frequency to engage in all the time.  I suppose others will leave an historically-interesting pheromone path of phrases and words for others to analyse in the future.  Like writing a daily journal.  But that life is not for me.  I prefer blogging one a week (or once every six weeks when I am busy – as has been the case recently).

And so it is was with the Victorian artists in the Cranbrook colony.  They left no diaries.  No documentation of their progress.  They lived and worked and played and painted in the moment – by all accounts to make a living first and then to enjoy life.  Some were richer than others – but all of them exhibited at the Royal Academy year-after-year and were successful in their own ways.  Yet now, 150 years on, we know very little about them.

At the end of the talk, someone reflected that the mid 19th century countryside existence in rural Kent perhaps harked-back to the pre-industrial, less smoky, less satanic mills existence of England that had been lost in the North to the industrial revolution – which is why so many of the paintings went North.  Who knows.  There are no tweets, no blogs, no journals or otherwise to confirm or deny such theories.

Just the paintings themselves – which hold a fascinating set of visual cascading stories, moral values and pure artistry that are contained in the outputs from this unique colony of artists that lived so close to where I now live.  Art for Art sake, Money for Godsake.  10cc (now on a brilliant tour of the UK) said it all.  It was the same then as it is now!

Funny about the word colony.  It is what they called the far-flung corners of the British Empire.  As well as being the collective noun for a load of bees!  There you go!  The bees don’t tweet either.  They buzz.  A bit less now we are going into winter.  Makes you think!

Picture from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranbrook_Colony

 

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Two-Speed Engines and Wonky Gearboxes

I was with a client yesterday and drew attention to a recent article Two-Speed IT: A Linchpin for Success in a Digitized World from BCG Perspectives on how some organisations are being forced split in two with the pressure of the internet.  The BCG paper describes a “two-speed IT” – but in many ways, the IT is only part of it – and BCG have taken the two-speed analogy far further with other thoughts on organisations, economies and governments.

It would appear that, in order to survive, successful organisations now need to have (at least) two speeds or engines  within in them.  One is there to cope with traditional “industrial speed” business and the other need to cope with innovation and customer interactions at “digital speed”.

There is no finer example than Telefonica-O2 – which has recently split itself in to two companies.  One which manages the more traditional “industrial” network and handset business.  The second (called Telefonica Digital) was set up to manage innovation and all the different aspects of interconnecting the network business to new technologies and services.

I’m with O2 – and it was disappointing that even after splitting itself in two, the industrial part of the business, they still managed to knock-out my service for 24 hours in the early summer.  Even more reason to believe in the importance of  creating and adapting organisations so that they can take both the expected and unexpected demands placed upon them.

A better example of success is probably BT’s execution of the Olympic Games.  I am sure the stories will start to come out in the next few months, but I heard at a conference recently that there were over 50 severe attacks on the Olympic Network that could have brought it down – had BT not had the right protection in place.  In the industrial network game, true success normally means not failing!

As many of you know, I like to draw analogies, and I thought that this client that I was working with had a problem of shifting from first gear to second gear.  Somehow, they had all the parts to make very solid machines for the industrial age, but they were not thinking of designing and creating smaller, lighter, more nimble components to put in the small engines of the digital age (for new organisations such as Telefonica Digital).  To use a truck-car analogy, they were still assembling large-scale gearboxes for big trucks – (where each component takes days and weeks to manufacture and assemble) – whilst missing the market opportunity to provide new, smaller gearboxes (or even components) that will allow emerging digital organisations to engage with the bigger industrial engines of the past.

 

 These new gear boxes are going to be smaller, cheaper and faster to assemble.  It might even require a new, separate  organisation to design, market and support them.   The possibilities were very interesting.

So I was charmed by the Queen of Coincidence, when, whilst I was preparing for the client presentation, a good friend, Jo, sent me this brilliant recording of a telephone conversation between a guy who has just bought a BMW with a “wonky gearbox” – Listen and enjoy!

Please click here to listen to the WONKY GEARBOX STORY

Sometimes we simply get this whole technology thing completely wrong by not reading the instruction manual!

 

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The Answer Lies in the Space Between

We are in recess.  In the gap between:

  • The wet weather and what’s to come
  • July and September
  • The Olympics and the Paralympics
  • The Euro Crisis and its eventual resolution
  • Taking off the honey and extracting it
  • Writing an action on the “to-do” list and doing the things you need to do so you can cross it off
  • Birth and Death
  • …X…. and ….Y….

Yet with all the tensions in life and all the things that we are somehow in the middle of completing, I find it more and more interesting to search the space between.  And to settle, for a moment, here and now, into a state of  stillness.  A state of mild contemplation of what the gap looks like between these different tensions.

If you have had your holidays, I hope they were good!  If you are not going on holiday, hope you have a future one to look forward to!  And if, like me, you are still to go away, then enjoy the experience and the space between going away and coming back!

The answer, after all, lies in the space between!

 

Image Copyright iStockPhoto: Illustration 000019183913

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The Shapes of Stories and How to Write Them

A good friend and regular reader, Anthony, sent me the link to a great anonymous blog a few weeks ago – Farnam Street.

Yesterday, they pointed to a brilliant set of rules on how to write a short story by Kurt Vonnegut:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

There is another video which is even more worth watching on the Shape of Stories:

It got me thinking about how we all love stories, the ups and downs of life, the drama unfolding, the game(s), the chase, the great ending!

Please share any insights or thoughts you have on this great subject below!

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The Lords’ Verdict

For those who have followed this blog for a while, you will know I presented evidence at the House of Lords’ inquiry on the present UK’s government’s policy on Next Generation Broadband.  So it was at midnight on Tuesday, the Lords published their report which can be found <HERE> entitled “Broadband for all – an alternative vision”.

Lord Inglewood was interviewed in a video:

“Our communications network must be regarded as a strategic, national asset.  The Government’s strategy lacks just that – strategy.  

The complex issues involved were not thought through from first principle and it is far from clear that the Government’s policy will deliver the broadband infrastructure that we need – for profound social and economic reasons – for the decades to come.”

The report has had a mixed response.  Supporters of a truly open-access fit-for-purpose National internet Infrastructure applauded.

Other analysts were eless complimentary:

Matthew Howett, lead analyst of Ovum’s regulatory practice, said many aspects of the inquiry’s report are “simply odd”.

“With nearly 50 recommendations and no indication of costs or how they should be met, it’s likely to be dismissed as nothing more than a pipe dream,” he said.

Odd it was for me that so many Peers took the time out to learn about the industry and the pros and cons of various options for technology and business models.  It was a piece of work that involved many hours of  their time to see the problem from different perspectives.  It challenged the status-quo and came up with an alternative vision for what the UK’s national internet access infrastructure might look like.  It was bound to be unpopular in certain quarters as it threatened the status-quo.

Sure, the government and BT’s in-house analysts might dismiss the ideas as pipe-dreams, but one wonders where the whole BDUK process is heading.  It might be the Games in London – but this particular game will go one well into the Autumn after all the athletes have left London.

It is definitely time for the status-quo to be challenged.  BDUK is at best a strange construction and at worst a totally bonkers policy for a government set on Localism and Community Engagement.  The Lords’ report went to the heart of this matter and has suggested a framework for a truly revolutionary approach to fixing the monopoly of BT’s infrastructure – particularly in the middle-mile.

At times, I think of giving up banging this drum and doing something more conventional and toe-the-line.  Yet at one minute past midnight on Tuesday, I had a new surge of enthusiasm that the ideas that we have been working on for several years now are getting some traction and that a body of revered and highly intelligent Peers actually understood what many on the fringes of the industry have been saying for a while.

If only the Government could stand back and listen to some of the concerns about the current vision and understand that they have alternatives that are better, faster and cheaper that will help the UK’s international competitiveness, we  might actually come up with something that really does get the economy back on its feet in a fairer way, based on an infrastructure that no single part is too big to fail.  Surely there is a lesson here from the banking system that is staring us in the face?

Come on, Jeremy.  Put the bell head back on the stick, put the bell down and start listening again.  Unless, of course, you get reshuffled – in which case it is round-and-round we go!

Source of quote and more on this story at:

http://www.cbronline.com/news/lords-uk-broadband-strategy-heading-in-the-wrong-direction-010812 

http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=475352&G=1&C=4&page=3

 

 

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Anticipation on the Start Line

It has been an unusually busy and hot week for this time of the year.  I was in London today and noted a calmness and lack of buzz which is, perhaps due to the fact that many have started their holidays.  Yet the over-shadowing anticipation of the start of the Olympic Games tomorrow is plastered-in-pink across the underground and railway stations.  And Boris’ announcement to “get ahead of the games dot com” has become as familiar as the announcement about the sequence of train stations down the line from London Bridge to Ramsgate.

I was therefore struck by a poster from BA which I noticed first today and it got me thinking:

I am proud to be a Brit.  I was very excited by the Games being held in London.  Yet I do not find I am overly-excited by the fact that the games are now on the starting line.  This might be partly due to the fact that I applied for several hundred pounds worth of tickets and received none.  It might also be due to the fact that the disruption in London over the next six weeks is going to affect my business (quite by how much I am not sure).  However, the poster above somehow hit a nerve.  I am going on holiday in France (driving) – so am not flying anywhere.  Yet even if I wanted to sing the anthem, no one in TEAM GB would be listening.  I don’t feel part of the Games.  If anything, I feel they are a virus taking over the city that is where I work and sometimes play.

That, in itself, got me thinking about “The Game”.  You are either a player, a spectator or somewhere else altogether – neither playing nor watching the game.  In so many things we do (and play at), we are spectators.  Yet we often forget that there are many who are not interested in watching what we watch – and are most definitely not interested in watching us play our particular game.  As the world becomes more populated, it is interesting how the Olympics has such reach – and will have so many spectators.  Whatever sport interests you, perhaps the greatest spectator event will be tomorrow night’s opening ceremony.  The anticipation of the flame being lit.  The anticipation of a well-rehearsed once-in-a-lifetime show of Britishness.  Let’s hope it does not rain.  And that there are enough Brits in the audience to sing the National Anthem!  Good luck TeamGB – even if I won’t get a chance to see you in the flesh.

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Paraprosdokians, the Second Mouse and the Last Laugh

A friend, Peter, kindly sent me this earlier today.

Please laugh – then pass the link on to friends:

There is a figure of speech called a

Paraprosdokian

.

in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected.

It is frequently used in a humorous context and here are a few examples:

 

“Where there’s a will, I want to be in it!”

“Do not argue with an idiot.

He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience!”

“The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it’s still on my list!”

“Light travels faster than sound.

This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak!”

“If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong!”

“We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public!”

“War does not determine who is right – only who is left!”

“Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit.

Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad!”

“Evening news is where they begin with ‘Good Evening,’ and then proceed to tell you why it isn’t!”

“To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism.

To steal from many is research!”

“A bus station is where a bus stops.

A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station!”

“Whenever I fill out an application, in the part that says, ‘In case of emergency, notify:’ I put ‘DOCTOR!”

“I didn’t say it was your fault, I said I was blaming you!”

“A clear conscience is the sign of a fuzzy memory!”

“I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn’t work that way.

So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness!”

“You do not need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice!”

“You’re never too old to learn something stupid!”

“To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target!”

” Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car!”

“A diplomat is someone who tells you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip!”

“Hospitality is making your guests feel at home even when you wish they were!”

And the final words of wisdom:

“The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese”.

“While the eagle may soar, the weasel doesn’t get sucked up by a jet engine”.

Hope you enjoyed – please pass on as you smile!


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Goons, Flying Circuses and UK Comms

At the end of a very busy few weeks, I managed to miss the announcement that OfCom, the UK Communications Regulator had published its annual review of the UK Communications Market.  Just under £30 in paper format, it is free to download online <HERE>.

The summary on page 11 (which I have copied below) for me, says it all:

It is fascinating how many of the things that OfCom measures are moving so slowly: take-up and satisfaction of Digital TV; listening to the radio; Internet penetration and usage and satisfaction; mobile take-up and satisfaction etc. etc.  This smacks of a mature market and a set of industry measures that somehow miss the next wave of development needed to make (some in BT would sake keep) the UK truly competitive.

If the truth that “What gets measured gets done”, I fear that Ofcom sits in a world of complacent self-satisfaction – not challenging itself to measure the key drivers behind the next wave of technology upgrade, not worrying about how to reposition the UK’s digital infrastructure to create jobs and make the UK more competitive, not concerning itself about how to use its extensive skills in economic analysis and drivers to cover the final 25% of the UK population that is not online.  The only new measure is satisfaction on the speed of postal delivery.  Hardly a measure that is ground-breaking!  What about a “new” measure for the speed of traffic in Central London?

With the current very strange (nearing on ridiculous) process that is being run out of DCMS to gather suitable (politically-guided, politcally-correct) evidence for the up-coming Comms Act, neither the Government nor OfCom are creating the right environment to tackle many of the REAL challenges that face the UK comms industry in the next eight years.  Nor are we getting enough debate on the REAL issues so that the government gets the necessary buy-in for the changes.

It was therefore refreshing to attend a seminar run by the Public Services Network Governing Body (PSNGB) on Thursday.  Finally, I can see a new model emerging where the industry (as represented by the PSNGB Trade Association) combined with a part of government (run out of the Cabinet Office) create a new way of working and a new way of thinking about Government ICT procurement.  Excellent organisation, excellent objectives, excellent vision to transform public services so they look like the commercial internet.  The trouble is that we can’t use this network for commercial gain – as Europe has a set of crazy procurement rules – some of which are tying the well-intentioned  DCMS/BDUK programmes up in knots!

Another organisation that I have found that is trying to get some momentum behind the final 25% is the phoenix that has risen out of the ashes of the”Race Online 21012″ campaign.  They have chosen the interesting campaign title of “GoOn” – which many will read as GOON.  I many ways, Monty Python and his Flying Circus would do a better job at getting the UK’s Communications Industry better organised for the challenges that lie ahead in the run-up to 2020.

The current circus is no longer amusing.  The self-satisfaction on measuring things past, the arrogance to think that what is being done now will suffice and the closed-shop thinking being conducted on the Comms Act needs to be challenged loudly.  I wonder if the House of Lord’s review will carry the weight that is needed to rattle the cage?  Or maybe that is simply another act in the Circus?  I hope not.  In any case, it is definitely time for a reshuffle after the Olympics.  The Future of the Telecoms industry needs to be debated and taken more seriously than it has in the past year – over-shadowed by the Olympics, Digital Rights and the Future of Museums.  The only way to do that is to get it out of under DCMS’ brief and move it to a more enlightened part of government – perhaps back to BIS, or, more radically under DCLG, a Ministry for Infrastructure or the Cabinet Office.

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Lessons from the Past

“The budget should be balanced,

the Treasury should be refilled,

public debt should be reduced,

the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled,

and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt.

People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance.”

Cicero – 55 BC

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