Office Jotter

My main hobby is photography, so I’ve been interested and dismayed to see how police forces around the country are increasingly bullying amateur and professional snappers in the name of security. It’s never happened to me, I’m glad to say, probably because I seldom take pictures in cities and large towns (for the simple reason that I don’t visit them often).

You’ll no doubt be pleased to hear that I’m not going to rehash the arguments for and against the relevant legislation. I will though mention one recent news item that caught my eye. It’s on the Web site of Amateur Photographer (AP), probably Britain’s oldest photo magazine.

According to the article, the Metropolitan Police Service says it would take it “between one and two minutes” each time to search the relevant records. It reckons the total cost of this would take it beyond the current threshold of £450 (£600 for central government), so doesn’t have to comply with the AP’s freedom of information request. You can almost hear the “Naah naah na naah naah”, can’t you?

The idea of a cost limit was put in the Freedom of Information Act to save public bodies from having to deal with frivolous requests. As here, it is sometimes used as a pretext for continued secrecy, typically to conceal incompetence or to save embarrassment.

This assertion from ‘The Met’ is unbelievable. Scotland Yard is Britain’s oldest and largest customer for the Memex search system. More than 30,000 of its officers and 12,000 other employees use this software to gain near-instantaneous access to criminal intelligence. (That’s intelligence as information, not as an indication of intellectual capacity.)

In effect, The Met is saying it doesn’t have a computer-searchable record of the search and arrest records its officers are producing. What are all its information inputters and OCR scanners doing with their day? Has it wasted the many thousands of pounds it’s spent on Memex systems over the last 15 years?

Even if the search and arrest records for last year, say, still aren’t computerised (which is unlikely), you can bet they’re in the queue. The marginal cost of an FOI search on them once they’re scanned would therefore be minute.

The Metropolitan Police is apparently charging administrative time at £25 an hour. The FOI limit of £450 thus equates to 18 hours of its staff’s time. I reckon that would leave it at least 17 hours and 45 minutes to print and bind a computer-produced report on its search and arrest records and deliver it by hand to the AP’s offices. They’re all of 9 miles away from New Scotland Yard, mind, so it might be a bit of a scramble. Perhaps it should just email the report instead.

PS The eZ Systems CMS software on The Met’s Web site produced no hits when I searched its news bulletins just now for “photographer” and, separately, “photography”. Looks like Scotland Yard’s limiting that supply of information, too.

A friend who has physical difficulty in typing had reported success with using Dragon NaturallySpeaking dictation software. I have no problem typing but liked the idea of the promised increase in speed.

I bought the software from Amazon, who delivered it first thing next day. Installation was a bit tricky until I read the small print on the Web site and then all went smoothly. I’m running it on an IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad, under Windows XP SP2.

There is a headphone/microphone set supplied in the box but I found it uncomfortable to wear. Fortunately, I already have a Plantronic headset that I bought for use with Skype. That works fine and doesn’t hurt my head.

The program is faster than I expected and more accurate. It allows me to dictate at just under conversational pace. There are still mistakes while we get used to each other, as you’d expect. If you use a word or expression it doesn’t know, the software guesses, much as a person would. NaturallySpeaking learns from corrections you make, so accuracy improves.

I used the software for most of this posting and would liken it to painting your text on to the page. For a slow (but touch) typist like me, using the keyboard is more like chiselling out words from a piece of rock. The blank page can be as obdurate as any lump of granite.

Not just direct dictation

NaturallySpeaking will format pages and also understand the commands for widely used software such as Google Desktop, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook Express and Internet Explorer. This, of course, makes it even more useful for the physically handicapped. This demonstration shows some of the possibilities and the ability of the software to respond to natural speech.

The “Preferred” version of the software, which I bought, will also work from recorded sound files. I keep close to hand in my car a small and light Olympus voice recorder. If I think of something interesting or see something I want to remember, I make a note of it at the time. Converting those voice jottings to text is another chore I look forward to automating.

Recommendation

As a visit to the maker’s Web site shows, the medical profession is a major user of dictation software. (Perhaps the old jokes about doctors’ writing are true.) My experience with the program suggests any professional or employee who produces much text can benefit from it, too. It is streets ahead of the software the PC user was being offered a few years ago in terms of speed, accuracy and ease of use.

If you tried dictation software then but were disappointed, it might be worth giving it another go. Unfortunately, Nuance doesn’t offer a trial version but the basic edition of the latest release (NaturallySpeaking 10) costs less than £50 from online discounters. A comfortable headset will add perhaps £20 to the total. You should be able to swing that small a purchase on increases in your productivity and, if relevant, that of the people who have to edit your writing.

NaturallySpeaking doesn’t, of itself, improve your spelling and grammar but using it makes it more likely that you’ll check what you’ve written. Also, if you’re a bad speller, as opposed to a bad typist, the software will probably do better than you at this.

A further benefit is that using this software reduces the likelihood of repetitive strain injury (RSI) arising or recurring.

Company background

Nuance Communications might be an unfamiliar name but you will probably have heard of some of its constituent parts and products. These include Dictaphone, ScanSoft (for imaging) and, recently acquired, Philips Speech Recognition Systems. In 2003, the company made a distribution deal with IBM for its ViaVoice speech product.

You can find out more about Nuance and its range of products and markets at its FAQ page. It has yet to release its trading figures for the current fiscal year but its combined quarterly results suggest a turnover of about $865 million. Nuance has, however, traded at a loss in its previous three financial years (see this Yahoo summary) and might do so again this year. This is unsurprising given its history of growth by acquisition.

The company has too many large customers and partners to disappear but if I were an investor I would be getting fidgety for profits. Research and development spending has increased every year since 2005, so product evolution at least looks assured.

One for one and none for all?

Work in an organization is mainly a group activity. Despite this, much computer software treats human work as though each member of the organization acts individually and autonomously. It ignores the force-field of dependencies and obligations within which each employee must operate. Also, it treats atomistically the data and information flowing to and from that person.

Much of this focus on the individual is a carry-over from the design of operating systems for multi-user computers. The notion of the virtual machine gives each user the illusion of being the only person on the machine at that time. This is ingenious but has been in some ways a cul-de-sac. The rise of the personal computer has emphasized this computing isolation.

Underlying it are attitudes to work design and human behaviour that have scarcely advanced from those of Henri Fayol, F.W. Taylor and Henry Ford. How many systems designers get a good grounding in modern principles of organizational design and development?

Groupware helps

Some progress has been made over the last two decades through the increasing use of collaboration software. This has gone under various names, such as groupware, workgroup computing and computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW). The underlying idea with all these is that of working together — co-labouring. Implicit is the notion that each user’s identity is important to other users.

The difficulty comes when you look at what gets included within that category. Workflow software was for instance often classed as groupware. This is erroneous since it mainly enforces predefined sequences of actions by individual users. It is akin to passing a baton rather than genuine team working. The workflow system sometimes wouldn’t even tell users the name of other users, just their role in the overall process. Rebadging workflow as business process management has not changed its nature.

Electronic mail qualifies, since it allows two people to collaborate. It is less good at some-to-some working. The same is true with instant messaging.

Some-to-some collaboration is possible mainly through text conferencing, such as online forums, video conferencing, voice conferencing, shared editing and shared screens.

Unified communication (UC) is a current favourite topic but is intrinsically only as collaborative than its constituent parts allow it be. UC lowers the cost of providing multiple communications channels but does not change their modes of operating. Email, telephony and the various types of messaging and conferencing work the same whether ‘unified’ or provided separately.

A working definition

Boiling all this down, collaboration software must:
- purposely tell each user who else is on the system (these days called ‘presence’)
- allow those users to work together in at least a one-to-one fashion and, preferably, some-to-some. The latter implies that one-to-some and some-to-one working are also possible.

Depending on its purpose, collaboration software works in real time (or near enough) or asynchronously. Real-time tools include video and voice conferencing, shared screens, online whiteboards and instant messaging. Asynchronous, or store-and-forward, communication is typified by email, text conferencing, shared diaries and voice and video messaging.

Desirable for either mode are:
- a means of recording an exchange or session, to aid recall, allow wider publication and provide an audit trail
- some kind of meta-communication, such as annotating, tagging or indexing
- secure working, using the software’s own tools or those in the operating environment, possibly both.

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I will expand on some aspects of these musings in a few days.

…New to me, anyhow.

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I was browsing this news item (picture above) when a rash of pop-ups appeared. They were advertisements, put there using software from a company called Vibrant. Whenever my cursor went over a double-underlined word or phrase in the article, a small window opened with some advertiser’s text in it.

I found this distracting and an affront, so I looked on the Vibrant Web site. This prates about the company’s standards and ethics but doesn’t tell you how to turn the blasted things off.

A quick Google gave the answer, from a year ago. I use the Firefox browser and found that one of its add-ins will do the trick. It’s called Adblock and I already had it installed. It needed an extra something, though, which is a set of filters devised and maintained by the pseudonymous “Rick752″. I recommend them to you.

Installing them is easy. Go to his Web site and progressively click on the links on the left side of the home page. When you’ve done, you’ll find your browsing simpler and less prone to distractions like those above. If you’d like some reassurance on that, read further down Rick’s page for examples of what the filters can do.

Pages will have an unfamiliar, denuded look at first but you’ll get used to it. As the dog food adverts put it, you’ll be getting 100% raw nourishment. You’re not being deprived of anything significant.

Special pleading

Advertisers might think differently but I don’t buy their argument that this is doing financial harm. I still have the freedom to flip channels when the TV ads come on and to turn over the page in a newspaper. Nobody (so far) has made it compulsory to look at roadside billboards. I expect the same freedoms on the Web.

A sense of proportion is needed, as well. Around 3 million people use EasyList regularly, out of the more than 1.4 billion people connected to the ‘Net (see here). That’s 0.0000002%. If your business model would be damaged by the absence of such a tiny segment of your potential market, you’re in the wrong business.

The entire combination — Firefox, Adblock and EasyList — is free. It is a fine example of and testament to the community spirit that still exists on the Web, despite its insidious commercialization. (None of the above works on Internet Explorer, by the way.)

Postscript

This all may be old news to you, in which case I’m sorry to have wasted your time but pleased you’ve got the message. It was news to me and, I imagine, will be for a lot of other folk.

There have been 27 million downloads of AdBlock, yet, as I mentioned, ‘only’ 3 million of EasyList. There’s a bit of leeway to be made up.

Microsoft Unveils Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Release 2

14 October 2008
Today, Microsoft Corp. debuted Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Release 2 (R2), an update to the award-winning Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. Microsoft representatives demonstrated the new release for the first time before an audience of telecom and IT professionals at the VoiceCon tradeshow in Amsterdam. Customers will be able to purchase the release, currently in private beta testing, beginning in February 2009.

To me, the main point of this announcement is Microsoft’s assertion later in the press release that Office Communications Server (OCS) Mark II will do more than a private branch exchange (PBX) at lower cost. Such claims need proof, whoever makes them.

This is a long item, so I have put the complete text in the Critiques section of this site.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: An Update on Virtual Worlds

1 September 2008
For the last three years I have been quite intrigued by virtual worlds and all the various capabilities we group under this term. I believe they are ushering a new paradigm for user interfaces, as well as a whole round of innovative, more human-oriented, intuitive applications.

While many are excited by these possibilities, others remain skeptical. Virtual worlds continue to be most popular in video games and massively multiplayer online environments. Despite our high expectations, the number of virtual world applications in serious areas like education, business, and health care remains small. Some think that this is just one more example of the kind of hype that the IT industry comes up with from time to time.

Count me among the sceptics. IW-B is a thoughtful and well-informed observer of computing developments, and clearly among the optimists, but even he is having a hard time coming up with anything much.

His suggestions are:
– an online museum
– a course in astronomy
– “scheduled events” (large meetings, in effect)
– training
– watching sports from the player’s point of view
– walk-throughs of planned buildings and other architectural designs
– managing complex engineering systems.

This has a certain familiarity. Compare what IW-B is saying with these words:

…you could visit a stadium and sit in your assigned seat and see what the view is like before you buy the ticket. Or you could inspect a piece of furniture from all sides and pay for it through the Internet. You could visit museums and walk through them or play 3-D games.

They came from Jay Kidd, who at the time was working for Silicon Graphics (remember them?). The quote is from San Jose Mercury News, 31 March 1995.

Admittedly, Kidd was speaking before the World Wide Web was in general use (the article refers to “30 million estimated Internet users”). Also, the bang-per-buck of computing power and storage and of networking capacity has gone up enormously in those 13 years.

Even so, it seems we’re still waiting for the equipment, or the software, to become affordable enough for systems based around virtual worlds to become commonplace. And until they look likely to do so, makers of enterprise software won’t be interested in writing the application programs to exploit them.

I’d love to have inexpensive access to fast immersive interfaces like that portrayed in Minority Report. Also, I’d want them for real work, not time-wasters such as playing games or watching sport. For now, my best chance of seeing something like it on my PC is to play the DVD of the film.

By the way, IBM, for whom Irving Wladawsky-Berger works, set up a virtual worlds group at its research centre in 1989. This future has quite a history behind it.

Finding old news

No, I didn’t get that 1995 article from the Web but from my own news archive, which goes back even further. I found it using ISYS Desktop search software. Unlike most mass-market desktop search products, this builds a proper inverted index and therefore permits complex queries, aided by a customisable query interface.

Actually, I didn’t need to do anything especially complicated. I just asked for mentions of “virtual world” within the same paragraph as “199x” (’x’ being a wild card). This entailed entering each of those two terms in the appropriate fields on the search form. I then looked at the four entries with the highest relevance score, selecting the one above as the most apposite.

Just to see if I could get it from the Web, I Googled on a phrase from the article and found one mention.

Whether I could have done so as my starting point is unlikely. So far as I’m aware, no public Web search engine lets one easily carry out a search even that simple. I’d be delighted to be proved wrong.

I’m getting myself back in the industry-watching saddle after my sabbatical. No doubt for the next few days I’ll have the mental equivalent of aching thighs and a sore tochas. (Stop sniggering at the back there.)

I had during the year kept an eye on products and trends in enterprise-wide search and, less closely, in collaboration software. Otherwise, I didn’t take much notice of what was going on in computing. That seemed to me the point of a sabbatical.

To catch up, I’ve been looking through back issues of the main magazines and scanning RSS feeds. So far I’ve seen nothing new in the landscape or, indeed, much that’s changed a great deal.

There has been the normal regime of takeovers, deals and failures, with new products being announced almost daily, but no revolutions took place while my back was turned. Everyone looks to have been as busy at being busy as before. The so-called recession seems not to have made much of a mark so far.

Those topics that do stand out after a year away are continuations of pre-existing themes. They include, in no particular order:

1. The seemingly unstoppable rise of Google. There are more mutterings than before over whether the company is, in its own phrase, doing no evil. Also, its reputation has been dented by failings of security and business continuity.

2. An increasing emphasis on business intelligence software (BI). This is surprising, as it is a class of enterprise software that neither produces nor controls anything saleable. The main thing to be said in its favour is it gives managers the illusion of being in charge. They’re always grateful for that.

3. Possibly linked to the above, people seem to be losing interest in business process management (BPM), which can exercise control. That’s a shame, especially after I had written a book on the subject. I hope the two things aren’t connected.

4. Cloud computing is a hot topic. In different guises and under varied names, the idea has been around for decades. Faster communications and more open systems make it practicable these days. It also is vulnerable to security lapses and network failures.

5. Facebook, Twitter and other manifestations of social computing have a grip on the popular fancy. Questions of censorship and identity theft are current concerns with this.

6. Interest in virtual worlds is high, at least among journalists and consultants. Whether this will translate into widespread use is the question. It’s not as if the organization as portrayed on a manager’s screen weren’t unreal enough.

7. Reducing the impact of computing on the natural environment looks to be a concern that is real. Motives are mixed, as you would expect, and include regulatory demands, pressure from trading partners and concerns about public image.

If you think I’ve left out anything, or overstated it, do please let me know. Commenting is enabled (you’ll need to register first time) or you can email me. My contact details are here.

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What’s it all for?

Broadly speaking, computer software does one of four jobs:

1. It enables the computer system to run. This includes operating systems and software for database management, system management and networking.

2. It helps human beings operate the system. Examples include programming languages, graphical user interfaces and Web browsers.

3. It solves the problems that computers themselves create, such as exchanging data among dissimilar systems, converting among different protocols and managing security.

4. It does actual work. Among this honourable and useful band are accounts packages, spreadsheets and programs for graphics, word processing, production control and supply chain management.

There is an astonishing amount of time, effort, money and press attention devoted to stuff in the first three categories. These are all either overhead or infrastructure for the user organization. It sometimes hard to tell them apart.

The last category — software that makes a positive contribution — is also the kind that people usually engage with in their work (excepting computer staff, of course). This is mainly the kind that interests me. The rest is plumbing.

As with my consulting work, this blog will therefore concentrate on software that interfaces with human beings. I’m not saying the other three categories are unimportant, just that they do not grab my attention. I shall also, as always, look at the social, organizational, legal, linguistic and commercial aspects of computing.

I hope to see you along the way.

It’s all gone Fasolt and Fafner

Crowdsourcing: And the Rheingold Goes to …. Dell

19 August 2008 When I do media interviews or public talks, I’m almost invariably asked two questions: 1) Are there any big companies engaged in crowdsourcing? and 2) Who is using crowdsourcing effectively? One would think I could provide one example that would answer both questions, but that’s surprisingly difficult to do. As I say in my book…

No, we’re not talking about Wagnerian opera but the commentator, Howard Rheingold, who foresaw years ago much of what goes on today in the social use of the Internet. Jeff Howe, whose blog I’ve quoted from above, does the decent thing and acknowledges, even highlights, Rheingold’s originality.

That’s generous of Howe but note the early mentions of his own interviews, talks and new book. He thinks you ought to see him as important, too, and also wants to sell you something.

His Web site, like those of many US commentators (including Rheingold’s), is testament to an immodesty that seems to come naturally to Americans. It’s just normal business to them but to many Britons, including me, it’s tedious boastfulness. I’m no shrinking violet, heaven knows, but even I don’t go that far.

Not entirely off-topic

My main hobby is photography and I use an RSS reader (GreatNews) to keep track of blogs about it that interest me. One I had expectations of but have given up with is from Scott Kelby, an expert on Adobe Photoshop.

As one does, I subscribed because I was hopeful of picking up useful tips and links. Fat chance. Kelby’s blog is almost wholly about him and his latest workshops and books. He is also very careful not to give you anything he could sell you. Photoshop hardly gets a look in.

It reminds me of the story of the conductor, egotistical even by their standards (probably von Karajan, then), who in the post-concert party was raving about ‘his’ performance of the featured symphony. “How did Beethoven get on?”, asked some critic.

Compare Kelby’s site with the admirable Strobist blog. It’s run by David Hobby, who, despite his surname, is a professional photographer. Strobist does one thing only but does it well — tell you how to use flash lighting with your camera.

Hobby has a light touch (no pun intended) and, unlike Kelby, is self-effacing. You have to dig a little to find out about him. The content of his blog is always fresh, relevant, directly useful and often amusing. It’s no wonder a quarter of a million people read it.

Another photography blog is Photowalking. Its author, Trevor Carpenter, defines this as “…the act of walking with a camera for the main purpose of taking pictures of things you may find interesting”.

What’s new or different about that? Photographers have been doing this, on their own or in groups, since the arrival of hand-holdable cameras, about a hundred years ago.

The site itself is unobjectionable. It provides useful contact information if you like to pursue your hobby in the company of other (American) photographers. What I find noteworthy is the way its authors have hijacked a commonplace activity and remorselessly propagandise about it as though it were something special.

This the revenge of the pigeonholing nerds. Like sociologists and marketeers, they love putting a label on the ordinary and unremarkable. Also, I must admit, announcing that one is “going photowalking” sounds so much more decisive and mysterious than saying “I’m going out for a stroll with my camera”. 8-)

Back to business

All of which meandering leads us to the main topic of this item, “crowdsourcing”. Linguistically, it’s a ugly term, embodying that silly modern verb, “source”. Nobody buys, purchases, finds, locates, tracks down or simply gets anything any more — they source it.

Conceptually, it seems to me another example of putting a label on the ordinary and unremarkable (and remorselessly propagandising about it). Moreover, unlike the ‘photowalkers’, Howe seems to be grouping all sorts of disparate activities under the one hat, possibly to try to legitimise his idea.

Of course, the idea will receive support from the people who constitute Howe’s crowds. We all like to think our views count, that we have some control of the forces around us, that we’re not nobodies.

The problem is that those supporters, as well as the crowd itself, consists only of people whose computers can connect to the Internet and who are comfortable with using both. Nor is it necessarily representative of the views of the majority of them.

As for the “wisdom of crowds”, this is arrant rubbish. Crowds are like adolescent children — hyperemotional, impatient, prone to violence when thwarted and with the attention span of a gnat. Wisdom is the last thing you get from them.

I might deal with this subject again later. Another day, another rant.

…and the reason is that I’m no longer on active industry-watching duty. I am taking a sabbatical for a year or so, with the result that I shall have little time, if any, to keep this blog current.

See http://www.rogersrambles.org for details of what I’m doing instead. See you there, I hope.

Best regards,

Roger