De-humanising the workforce

I recently had a Twitter conversation with a colleague in direct messages which followed on from a post I had made in regards to me saying "Finding it quite bizarre to find I am a virtual commodity". My post was referring to the fact that I had just opened an account on Empire Avenue and my social presence was being traded like shares. However his reply was "It could be worse, how about non-existence?"

However my cynical mind had already been encompassing the concept of being a resource whether virtual or otherwise and my realisation that corporations attempt just that trick. My response of "In some respects the dehumanising is precisely that" was a tad too much for my colleague who was not expecting the depth of philosophical argument at the time of the morning especially not being fortified by the caffeine levels requisite to that mental challenge.

But it comes down to this. In many areas (not all, as some are more enlightened than others) the workforce has been completely dehumanised. Even the language has changed to reflect this paradigm. Once we talked to Personnel, now we bow to Human Resources. Because that is what we have become. A resource. The concerns for our welfare are almost intrinsically linked to the bottom line. We cease to have a human face and become a number, an object that can be deployed and redeployed at will.

Part of the company that I work for went even further by ensuring that we were going to be 'agile' and mobile as a workforce and then they proceeded to ensure we did not have a fixed desk to work at. Attempts to personalise any area or even reserve an area were dealt with from being frowned upon to the very active censuring of any attempt to be human. Ostensibly this was to help us become more efficient but when you arrived at a building and had to search for 30 minutes to find a free desk that was not only available but had working phone, network and power as well, this revealed the lie of it all. Not only that but the 'drawer' you were allocated as storage could be on another floor! This may have worked for the development teams inured in this methodology but for the rest of the peop ... sorry ... resources the 'one size fits all' approach just didn't work.

After a while the dehumanizing approach lent itself to the way that we did job descriptions and how we managed work. We were all templated into a 'job standard' which, by its inflexibility, allowed the company to define what you could, would and should be doing. A good idea you may think. Unless you want some creativity in your company to ensure it doesn't stagnate.

But what about the effect on morale? Take-up of the voluntary redundancy terms in the company was high year on year even when they reduced the attractiveness of the terms. But maybe that was the aim. Less resource

Builders houses

It is fair to say that I have quite some history with the internet and the web. I once delivered a talk about the likelihood of the web being the ubiquitous interface to applications and systems in the near future to a large room of developers in 1994, the vast majority of which scoffed at the concept. Following closely on that I started teaching HTML to those who had previously scoffed and worked on one of the first intranet servers in the company (now one of the largest intranets in Europe).

As with builders and their houses about the only web site that I hadn't ever worked on was my own. And that remains the case to this day.

I purchased my own domain way back in 2003 and the hosting to go with it. I have also worked on others sites and built and maintained them for some years but never my own.

Don't get me wrong. I do maintain a social presence and am active in many social media contexts. I just found it hard to start to create a site that defined my presence. And why is that? Because I realised I don't have a cohesive presence. I am a mishmash of iconoclastic opinion, socio-politically concerned thinker and casual gamer as well as many other aspects to me and my approach to life. To create a site to reflect all these aspects is quite some task especially given the wrap around them. Add to this a concern about privacy (one of my bugbears), an aversion to the self-conscious egotism of many of the so-called pundits (another bugbear) and the obnoxious bloggadocio (the only term I have any gratitude for from the appalling Socialnomics book) of people having such wonderful lives that they find so much time to be able to tweet and blog extensively about it and shame us all that we are not as active and fortunate as they are.

This task is onerous not only because I have an aversion to that depth of self-publication but also a need for people to understand that I do have more than one dimension. Also because technically, reflecting those division of myself is something that most solutions are incapable of representing.

Enter the popular incumbents for self-publication: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal! Massively supported and extensible with a host of possibilities to alter and shape to fit my needs ... or at least that's the theory. The principal problem is that all of these solutions are predicated on the idea that the user/author/ego will want a theme that runs throughout the site that is consistent with the ideas behind it. Erm ... no ... I want each sub-section to change because they are a different side to me.

Then you can have additional modules that will incorporate your other aspects via integration with other sites that have content by and for you. As long as they are consistently displayed in the pages where we want them to be.

But hang on. If I want a page that looks at my book reading, my music tastes etc. I don't want the integration to happen in a side bar, I want it within the section in the middle of the page. I don't want it superceded by any content I add subsequently or any verbiage I may decide is suitable for that type of content. So can I do that? No.

But, my friends argue, surely you want consistency for the site? Cohesion of ideas and themes so people can navigate around easily? Actually no I don't. I want people to be aware of the different side of me that they are confronting.

And then I look and stop and realise that while I may have an aversion to the self-important egotism and blogadoccio, I am quite willing to inflict myself on the world in that fashion

So I stop ... until the next time

Polishing the turd

It can hardly be said that Microsoft is often early to the game in their developments. Normally they are behind the curve but with the vast resources that allows them not only to play catch-up but often overtake. The incentives for applying these resources usually comes when a competitor achieves a significant success in a market area they had dabbled in but had not concentrated on. Witness the web browser, the web development area, the office suite and even the operating system. Developments in these areas came largely from acquisitions and then concentrated development of the product.

One of these key areas that MS has dabbled with over the years has been with mobile devices and more recently smartphones. However this is starting to become a little embarrassing for them as their flagship Smartphone/PDA OS is pretty much a clunker. Whereas the likes of Apple with their iPhone OS, Google with Android, Nokia with Symbian and now Maemo producing interfaces that are actually usable, the latest incarnation of Windows Mobile 6.5 needs a lot to make inroads. Earlier this year it seemed that the lessons had not been learned at all as the previews of 6.5 showed some efficiency improvements and some added functionality but the same horrific, finger unfriendly interface rolled on. So much so that the leading hardware and software companies compete to produce an interface that disguises the clunker that is the WinMo interface. This is a practice commonly known as polishing the turd.

Possibly in bygone days when not many alternatives existed, this practice would have been understandable even if not forgiveable but to insist on doing it in the face of so much attractive and functional competition borders on insanity! The iPhone is really not a device but an attractive lifestyle toy to browse the App Store. Yes ... the attraction of the iPhone is the apps. Same with Android. The base functionality is all very well but the attraction of customising and adding fun elements with little cost and providing a new level of personal interaction is what pulls people in. So what do MS have to offer? Well so far bugger all. A handful of application stores run by 3rd parties with complete confusion over what can be run on what hardware and what version of the OS. Dependence on the network providers to provide OS updates to the devices sold (most are VERY bad at doing this) and different provider dependencies. A bit of a mess really.

That said, I own a WinMo device. Have done for many years and I have an investment in the software that populates these devices which integrate nicely with my desktop applications on my Windows machines. I have not had much reason to change this because the investment in the applications runs to hundreds of pounds when you add it all up. But now I am looking further afield and contemplating a move because the equivalent applications on the other platforms (Android or Apple) are significantly lower in cost and I don't have to worry about the updating as that will be done for me.

So MS ... here's your challenge. The rivals have all laid out their (app) stores and are now raking it in and the turd you are polishing is losing its lustre. Will you rise to meet this challenge or believe your established user base can wait as long as you can eke out the timescales for the next 'great' version (Windows Mobile 7 I believe)? As a long term user of your product I can tell you that my patience is wearing thin. I am all ready to move away and will not look back. You really don't have long before that particular market is a lock out for you. You have been warned

The peril of 24 hour news

The internet has been responsible for some remarkable advances in our way of life and the immediacy of communication is one of those things that have revolutionised the way we receive news. As we started to expect faster delivery of news the TV channels stepped up creating 24 hour News channels. Now we have access to images and information around the world and news delivered fast.

But this also brings with it a very large down side. There is often not enough news and when it is there it doesn't develop fast enough to fill a schedule.

So what does this mean? Well simply that these news channels have to fill the gaps and the ways that they do this are not necessarily beneficial. One of the methods used is what I call rolling speculation. This is where a news story breaks and only a limited amount of information about the event is available. So of course you want to maintain momentum with a story and you can't really keep repeating the very scant facts afforded to you so what do you do? Take what you know and create scenarios about what could have happened/could be happening. Of course as more details are released this speculation is adjusted. The problem is that this supplemental information is used to modify the expectations of the speculation rather than to supplement available fact. Soon the entire news is based around a channel's speculation rather than what is actually happening.

Another problem is where a story doesn't quite fit the political/corporate stance on the situation. The newsreaders (who in themselves are a problem but we'll come to that) force questions that try to subvert the facts to the position they want to espouse. For instance many of the experts in the e-Coli and petting zoo situation said that closing petting zoos is not necessary but the newsreader questions were always attempting to elicit the response that they SHOULD be closed. This is opinion and not news.

And on to Newsreaders. Yes that was a deliberate capitalisation. Many of the screen pundits seem to think that their presence alone lends weight to the story. That they themselves are the news story rather than the method by which the facts are conveyed. In certain cases such as Kate Adey they became the news simply because they were so good at telling you the news in such a way that their delivery was respected. But they themselves were not the news, just that they were very good in delivering it.

But in this narcissistic self-obsessed world, the 'me' generation obviously require their own self-obsessed purveyors of opinion masquerading as fact and that is what the news has become. Sadly the majority of this is delivered by the state organ, the BBC.