TechnoBoffin

Thoughts of Dr J - Harbinger of Change - Thoughtworks

[technoboffin]

Today we’re publishing our second quarterly progress report on the commitments made in the Government Digital Strategy. ...Read more Today is the 2013 International Day of Persons with Disabilities.

It's old but this is worth looking through

[technoboffin]

Whether you're testing your mail filters to make sure nothing gets through, or you've set up a new webapp and need to make your service will stand up under the onslaught of tons and tons of email, Mailbait is a service that's simple to use: type in an email address and click run to instantly fill.

Don't use it to DOS anyone

[technoboffin]

Your Wi-Fi network is your conveniently wireless gateway to the internet, and since you're not keen on sharing your connection with any old hooligan who happens to be walking past your home, you secure your network with a password, right? Knowing, as you might, how easy it is to crack a WEP password How easy to reaver? With Homebrew installed.. brew install reaver That simple- be pleased it takes 4-10 hours!

[technoboffin]

What does it mean to have a good experience? Think of your favorite restaurant, the interior of your car, and the software on your phone; how do people craft these experiences? What details, planning, and design go into the process? Worth checking out

[technoboffin]

Social Media Primer- Part 3 - Where are your audiences?

3. Where are your audiences?

Who do you want to talk to and why? How are you expecting your audience to find you and then find you attractive enough to interact with?

A simple list of where you'll find your audience:

B2B - LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogs

B2C - Facebook, Twitter, tumblr, YouTube, Beebo,

Specialist - Forums, small network sites

To understand the difference in the audiences, you need to know who uses the technologies and what for.

LinkedIn - (aka Facebook for Grown-ups): This is all about being a professional, posts will always be work focused, with a lot of activity around creating networks of people with common interests.  The majority of interaction happens in Groups, and these are mostly focused on specific business topics.

If you're not on LinkedIn, why not? It's the only place to recruit and be recruited for a start, so over 220 mil

  Twitter: This is all about reaching widely and reaching now. It is a constant stream of what is happening, being thought, and spoken about now. It was dismissed as trivial, but it has become the zeitgeist made digital flesh. Interactions here are timely, fast, short, but relationships and networks are built here, from shared experiences and shared ideas. Posting the right things here is a great way to become a leader.  One of the best B2C places to post, especially announcements, vouchers, and special deals.

  Blogs: This is all about delivering longer analysis. In the wake of Twitter, the link aggregator/sharing thought stream blogs have mostly died. Blog postings are expected to be longer (at least an A4 page) and well written (at least with full sentences and paragraphs) and offer opinion or analysis.  A good blog is the best way to become a thought leader. Blogs (and bloggers) are likely to be followed by aggregators and the aggregators can amplify any message. 

  Facebook:  This is all about connecting and maintaining connections with your friends. This is not the place for B2B work - it is largely informal and postings range from party photos, to what I ate, to where to eat. As a B2C network it can work as a Fan Page, which allows some interactions with the consumer. Acknowledged as a massive time waster for many people.

  Tumblr/Posterous: This is all about sharing in narrow focussed memes that then are amplified within and across medias. Tumblr and Posterous are home to ‘blogs’ such as “Anti Hipster Manifesto”. Posts are “RePosted” and the messages amplified. This is not a professional space, although a few brave souls have tried to convert it to that.

  YouTube: Anyone can upload a video to YouTube, share, post a comment or a video response. This makes YouTube a very democratic channel, much like Facebook. There are few quality videos. This is not the place to post things professionally, or if you do use it for video hosting, ensure the entry points are from outside YouTube.  If you want to play the viral video game, YouTube is the B2C space for this.

  Beebo/MySpace:  Moribund areas of the internet. Millions will still have accounts and never use them. MySpace is still used by a few bands to stream music. If you are on any of these networks (almost) no one is hearing you.

  Flickr: Undoubtedly the best image sharing social space on the Internet. Photos can be shared with everyone or just friends, and commented on, liked and re-shared.  Data mining of the Flickr data can be very interesting if you are involved in image creation, most manufacturers can measure uptake of new technologies through the metadata with each photo. Interacting with the photo fanatics on here is a B2C proposition.

  Vimeo: A pioneering video sharing space that was an early adopter of HD format and HTML5. Their Terms and Conditions meant you could only upload content you had created, Vimeo became the place for professional video artists to share videos. They hold a number of short film festivals. Seen as the professional version of YouTube.

  Baidu: If you are interested in connecting with the Chinese market in any way, Baidu is the place to do it. Most social networks are censored from China, and Baidu is the only large social network. A mix of Google and MySpace in design.

Specialist networks: If your audience spend most of their online time in a forum dedicate to their pursuit, then that is where you must be.  Being anywhere else is a waste of time.

Checklist:

Where is my audience?

Am I in the same space?

What social media do I need to be engaged in to meet my audience?

Do I have the time to be in all these areas?

Which area will be my priority? My second? My Third?

[technoboffin]

Typography is extremely important in any design. It’s a key factor in legibility. We have more control over web typography than ever before and we should ensure our designs are clear and easy to read. Over the next few months we will be testing different typographic designs. Worth checking out

[technoboffin]

I’m back

It’s been a while - I’ve been fighting the good fight of UX vs Taleo (more about that at some point) and working for HR within a corporate (again more about that).

But I have a massive backlog of interesting links, thoughts, ideas, and general technoboffin geekery to post. 

[technoboffin]

Where Children Sleep presents English-born photographer James Mollison’s photographs of children’s bedrooms around the world – from the U.S.A. Worth checking out

[technoboffin]

Gil Zamora is an FBI-trained forensics artist with over 3,000 criminal sketches under his belt. Dove (through Unilever's U.K. office) and Ogilvy Brazil hired him to interview and draw seven different women—two sketches of each. Worth checking out

[technoboffin]

Photoshop has completely revolutionized our visual culture. Artists now use Photoshop to create complex imagery that would have been impossible 20 years ago.... Worth checking out

[technoboffin]

"Microsoft has pulled a Windows 7 security update released as part of this month’s Patch Tuesday after discovering it caused some machines to become unbootable."

I read this and wondered what on earth had happened at Microsoft. What little glitch had been thrown up that missed their testing.

Then I wondered more what happened to their communications department, because the messages haven't been as clear as usual.

[littlebigdetails]

letterboxd - Uses famous movie quotes as their Captcha during sign up.

/via designedinorangecounty

[technoboffin]

This I love- much nicer than the usual garbled words, and really stays on brand and engages with the target audience. Could you ask for anything better?

[technoboffin]

Social Media Primer- Part 2 - Who are your audiences?

2. Who are your audiences?

As well as knowing where they are, you need to know who they are.  If the people you are telling things to receive the message at the wrong time of day, or just aren’t interested, your efforts are lost and wasted.

·      Knnow who follows you. Analyse the data from your follow list, understand where they are from, their age demographic. Find and weed out the spammers and dummy accounts.

·       Know what time of day your followers are active. Are your followers working people (peaking at 9am, midday and 5pm) or late in the day users (peaking at 10pm?) or are they able to be online almost all the time (rare). If you post outside of these hours you may miss your audience. Remember most people’s feed of information moves so fast that for a message to be seen an hour later is a rarity. 

Know what your audience is into - follow them as well. Look at what they do, follow, discuss and get involved. That way you’ll be aware of the times and concerns of our followers. If you list is too huge to follow, follow a small selection to get the same effect.

Keeping the followers list clean and clear is important. If you are sending your message to thousands of spammers and only a few “real” accounts you cannot easily engage with your audience.

Social Media is not about one-way traffic, it is about engagement.

Time of day is very important in building engagement. Look at a your followers (or a selection of them) and see the time of days they are most active. Think about how their online activity times relate to the actions/engagement you are driving them towards  e.g. posting a voucher for free delivery for takeaway food at 7pm is missing a sector of the audience, who will get the voucher the next morning.

Think about the volume in your followers list. You want to get your message to the top of their reading list just as they start to become active. Then you become one of their possible engagement points during this time. If your post arrives when they are engaged with other activities (tweeting conversation with friends, posting and watching videos) the pull to engage with you will be less.

Catching the engagement window is like catching a wave surfing, it is all about timing, getting that moment that gets you noticed before other distractions crowd in.

This engagement can happen off line also. If you are facing huge social network reaction against you, find the leaders and invite them in for a chat/coffee. They will come, as they will love the attention, and they will give you their undiluted opinion (although it will be softened by being face to face).  If you then show them that you take their complaints on board, and make changes to address them (visible changes) they will become advocates for you.

This worked very well with Heathrow Airport and the Mumsnet community- building up a picture for the management of what it is actually like taking a family through the airport- and one of the first changes was family lanes on security.  

Part 2 - Who are your audience- Checklist, and Technoboffin answers as an example:

How many spammers are in my audience?

There are a number of spammers following me on Tumblr and a smaller number on twitter. I manually clear my followers lists each day (because I have 1 to 3 followers per day). 

Can I remove spammers from my audience?

On twitter yes, on Tumblr this is a little more difficult. I don't follow back any spammers.

Can I say who and where my followers are? Does my follower list meet my demographic expectations?

My twitter followers are mostly UK based, and mostly in the digital industry. This meets what I guessed my demographic would be. My digital fame still awaits me- one of these days I'll go bloody viral :)

What times are my users most active?

My twitter account is mostly from midday (unless the tubes in London are impacted, then it kicks off a little earlier) until about 8pm or so. 

What activities are my users engaged in at those times?

Commuting to work, getting morning work underway, working, lunchtime, then evening and or travel home. 

Should I have an offline meeting with influential online voices?

I do coffee occasionally with what I consider influential online voices, generally because they are as funny over coffee as they are online.

[technoboffin]

The endless job hunt continues- but one of the brighter parts of my day is reading the @Bubblejobs posts.  This posting I especially liked- as I'm being sent LinkedIn profiles of people I am interviewing with- and so many people make these mistakes. Always amusing when they then ask me about my Social Media knowledge.

[technoboffin]

Social Media Primer- Part 1 - Who are you?

Social Media Primer and Digital Marketing.

Digital marketing has roots in traditional direct marketing, with changes to the scale and scope of the engagement, specifically the speed and the reach of the message. It is about connecting with customers/audience through digital platforms (although those connection points don’t always have to be digital).

Where traditionally messages about brands went from small group to small group, the digital technologies afford a larger potential audience. If your customers are engaged and enthused by your messages, they can tell more than the four people they met in the shops, influential voices can reach millions online very quickly.

Social Media is the methods and tools used for digital marketing.

What does it do?

Good digital marketing gets your customers involved and engaged in your brand. It builds brand equity in the digital mind space, and builds a concrete, two-way interaction between brand and consumer (B2B or B2C).

What it does not do?

Automatically give you a new audience.

Just because you appear on a social media platform does not guarantee you an audience.

What is this primer?

Focussing on the following questions, to cover a basic guide to getting a started with social media.

Who are you?

Who are your audiences?

Where are your audiences?

What to say?

How will you interact?

How do you measure success? 

Note: originally published in a two part format while at prospect.eu

1. Who are you?

The currency of social networks is you and your words, pictures and deeds. Your social value, in other words, is you. You need to develop a personality for your brand that works in the digital space and is true to your values and what you believe in.

Have a single persona for your organisation. Unless there is a burning external need for your marketing to be separate from your sales department, present a single unified identity on social media. If your most active followers are your internal departments, this does not look good from outside your company.

Interaction Styles

Your audiences and the people who read your posts will know you by your online behaviours and your engagement. There are a number of styles of behaviour in the social media space but they can be largely grouped into 4 categories: RTs (re-tweeters), Streamers, Aggregators and Creators.

  There are three styles appropriate for a business or professional user, the “stream of consciousness” style being inappropriate for a business account. These styles are applicable across all of the social media platforms.

The RTer

Follows a large number of people, from the leading voices to the interesting oddities within one or more areas of interest, and RT’s (or reposts, or reshares or +1’s) links or tweets that are interesting. There is no attempt to comment on the information (over one or two words - usually Great!!)

Pros:

Very easy to build up followers (a large number of people auto follow accounts who RT them)

Low energy expenditure

Keeps your account live and active

Simple to train users

Consistency of message generally not a problem

Can almost be automated

Cons:

Almost no personality

No “pull to follow” 

The Aggregator

This at first glance looks like an RTer, but is different on closer inspection. The aggregator follows the brightest and the best and brings them into a single place, and publishes from there. This is common amongst the commentator accounts; some of the most obvious are @SocialMedia411 and @boingboing. They post links to others content but they always provide a nugget of analysis, explaining why the writing or analysis is particularly on the ball (or not and disagreeing).

Pros:

Easy to build up followers (most people follow one or more aggregators)

Reputation builder

Creates a “pull to follow”

Can have a personality

Consistency generally not an issue

Easier to manage

Can have a focus related to your business

Cons:

Takes some time reading articles and choosing best/worst

Building followers can be slow

  The Content Creator

This is the hardest type to be. You can spend hours crafting an article together to find it gets only half a dozen readers. But you get to spread your voice and your message to the world, and suddenly you find your reach is wide, and you have active listeners and participants.

Pros:

Personality plus

Able to spread word about your business

Become acknowledged as the “go to” for a subject

Creates a “pull to follow”

Cons:

Building reputation/followers slow

Takes time and effort

Training for staff needed

Consistency hard to maintain

  Part 1- Who are you? Checklist, and Technoboffin responses as an example.

What is my online persona? 

Technoboffin is smart, widely read, and picking around the shore of the technical and design opinion ocean. A beach comber of interesting bits.

Is my persona a mix of types? (Content creator and Aggregator is a common mix- but needs to be clear how much of each type) Am I an RTer, Aggregator or Content Creator, or a mix.

Technoboffin is a mix of Content Creator and Aggregator - about 50/50 is my aim, but it depends on the time I have.

Does it align with my brand persona? Technoboffin is the thought place for @drjharrison- it is cheeky, intelligent, catholic in it's influences, enthusiastic and very much like talking with me over coffee.

Do I have the resources to meet the commitment of my persona? This can be a real headache at times. You try and queue a lot of posts, but end up with either feasts or famine. 

Does everyone representing the brand understand the persona? As Technoboffin is handled by one person- yes. 

[technoboffin]

Hacking your photoshop to remind those who set our perceptions what they do.

[technoboffin]

Keeping the peace between IT and Coding teams

The DOs and DON'Ts of creating a good relationship between your Coders and IT

In 2006, R&D Developers at a Fortune 100 company were building code for a new variant of a programme. They found the native virus checking to be an annoying obstacle to their work, and were allowed to become Local Administrators on their machines to disable it. A virus entered through a malware web address visited during testing and spread through the LAN into all unprotected machines. The clean-up took thousands of man-hours. In reaction to the security breech, the IT department released an improved virus checker that could not be disabled by Local Administrators, and it was rolled out to the R&D Developers. The new virus checker increased build times 400%, resulting in thousands of hours of lost productivity in the two weeks it took to uninstall. The new virus checker could only be uninstalled with intervention from IT, and a year later the company was still running two virus checkers with a large population of unprotected machines on their network.

This sobering story is just one example of many where your Coders and the IT department clash while both are trying to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. It demonstrates just how tricky managing the relationship between your IT department and your Code developers actually is.  Get it right and you can sit back and contemplate your coffee.  Get it wrong and you’re at risk of losing countless hours of productivity. What can be done to ensure that it doesn’t go wrong? 

There are seven keys to making the relationship work for both sides. As with the best business advice, the keys are in and of themselves very simple. It will be in practice that the “how” of these keys become evident. And like any tool, they will be more effective the more they are used.    

1.    Accept that it will always be a fraught relationship

These two factions are the competing übergeeks within your organisation - they both love their computers, codes and networks with a passion.  Set clear ground rules in the relationship.

Be Open: both sides need to clearly state their needs and priorities

Be  Clear: While both developers and IT speak geek and computer fluently, this can get in the way of real communication. Try to have conversations without acronyms.

Be Reasonable: If something breaks your work, it’s important. If something means a small change to your ways, it is less important. 

Be Respectful: Both developers and IT play vital roles for the company. Get them to be respectful towards each other, this may eventually build to respect. 

2.    Understand what your Code developers need

To write the software that is often the backbone of your company, Code developers will have some very specific needs and wants. 

Installations: Developers will need to be able to install their developer software, script languages, scripting tools, and a multitude of programmes. Different development teams will have different installation requirements; the testing and documentation teams will differ markedly from the code developers.

Updating system files: Developers will want to change all sorts of system files. Registry and hosts file changes are often needed to test software.

Creating multiple versions of key files: Developers often need to have several versions of Java installed. They may also need different versions of  .Net.

The Code developers require these to fulfil their roles as a developers - they don’t want to spend time managing their machines and doing “IT work”.

3.    Understand what IT needs

To maintain a good corporate IT environment, the IT department will have some very specific needs and wants.

Standardised Environments: IT needs to have a known, small set of machines and Operating System variants to maintain.

Managing the environment: IT wants to prevent users changing their machines in ways that will introduce new variants for testing. 

Knowing the consequences: IT wants to be able to roll out changes to the computing environment fully cognizant of the implications

IT wants the above in order to fulfil their role as an IT department - they don’t want to spent time managing problems and resolving complaints.

4.    You have to treat the Code Development environment as a special case

IT must know and understand what Coders are doing and are planning to do. 

Work with the Coders: Help deploy Code development software. That means IT is aware of updates and changes and can plan around them. Note: this suggestion will upset both Coders and IT, because Coders considers IT to be inflexible and IT will worry about the amount of updates. Resolving this requires a light touch, both in terms of process and technology. If it takes 12 to 16 weeks to package and test a release, Code teams will look elsewhere, as this timing is too slow for them. 

At the same time, IT will chafe at the idea of installing non-standardised software, which may be open source, have a small support group, or be outside corporate guidelines. IT will also resent the workload on the packaging team, and may seek to deprioritise any Coder packaging work. 

Testing on Code Development Machines: Ask Coders to create automated testing of the most common steps in development (get SDK, get binaries, build, run). Have IT learn to use this and run updates through these tests. Note: this is again a big ask but a huge win. If IT can spot issues that could impact Coders in the early testing phase, a solution can be found prior to any roll out to the production environment. Catching potential problems early keeps them from becoming actual problems. 

Deliver updates on a schedule: Coding teams agree to take tested IT updates on a standard schedule (same day each month). This means any overnight work (builds and automated testing) can be planned around potential reboots. Note: both Coders and IT will always want to cancel or change this because of an “urgent need”.  To manage this, ensure that only staff reporting to the CEO can stop this agreement. If it is important enough to get the issue discussed at this level, it is important. 

5.    Coding teams will hate talking to IT (and vice versa)

If you spend your day writing code, being walked through your settings when you know the command line shortcut to the same place is very frustrating.

If you spend your day walking people through the trouble shooting process, having someone argue with you about your methods at each step is equally frustrating.

It’s all about respect. Build on this quickly:

Ensure Coders problem's are handled by your most knowledgeable IT staff at that level

Ensure IT staff handling Coder calls have an understanding of what the Code Development teams do everyday.

This comes down to documenting, training, and up-skilling your frontline IT staff. 

6.    Coders will hate talking to Code tool Developers

When you create and maintain tools within your Coding department, you must maintain a small, focused support desk. This will take over the triage, training and some testing functions for the Coding Tools Development team. 

Depending on the number of Coding teams to support and the number and complexity of the tools, this can be handled by a small team (less than 10 people). Don’t try to put in full IT processes - a light touch process and issue tracking tool will be sufficient. 

This support team provides a catch-all point for the Code developers and the issues are then passed on to the correct Coding Tool Development team or off to IT.

The IT department won’t be able to up-skill all of their staff to understand the Coding tools and processes. Note: they will try, but you need a team focused on supporting Coding tools, and this team need to be able to go through the processes for development of your code. If the support team can’t go through the code development processes, how can they confirm issues and test patches?

The Coding Tools Developers won’t have the time. If you are trying to create patches and updates, the last thing you want to respond to is “How do I…?” questions and “It broke when I did this…” emails. Note: they will try, but will get frustrated at the interruptions in their workflow and provide less than ideal support - often referring to ‘functions as specified’ as a solution.

You will need a strong manager with both a developer and a support background for the team. You need someone who understands both sides of this schism. They do exist, generally in telecoms network third level support teams.  For the other members of the team, this can be an ideal starting role for junior developers as they get exposure across the organisation. 

7.    Manage the relationship

Even if you follow the above six keys to the letter, success is still not guaranteed. This is a relationship that must be continually managed and guided. Someone has to keep checking and smoothing the friction points.

Create a team of people equally respected (or equally hated - both work) by Coding and IT departments. This team must have liaisons in both departments from the mid-grade to the CEO level, and must be able to escalate issues through management levels.

The team must be close enough to the Code developers to be able to understand how code is developed, built and tested. 

It must be close enough to the IT department to understand ITIL, especially change management and problem management.

Get the team right and the rest will follow. 

These seven keys will lead to a functional relationship between your IT and your Coding departments. 

Our Fortune 100 company eventually repaired their Coder/IT schism. A test plan was agreed between the camps and the virus checker settings were updated with input from the manufacturer until there was no more interference in the automatically tested Code Development machines. A roll-out plan was created to incrementally roll out to Code developers and any issues arising were picked up immediately (there were two, both due to hardware issues). In 6 weeks, a standardised virus checker was working on all machines in the company.

Original version publish at Prospect.eu.