I love old technology!

A little while ago, I mentioned to a team member that I was considering to buy a new CD player. My Yamaha CD player broke years ago and have used my wife’s Pioneer since then. The sound quality was not as good and as audiophile, I like to get the optimal sound (for as much my wife permits it).

My colleague joked that a CD player was old technology and that many of our younger colleagues wouldn’t even know what a CD was. Storing everything on a NAS device and connecting this to the home theatre is the way to go.

Though I enjoy the progress in this technology, my problem is that I first of all like my good music played lossless and therefore don’t want MP3’s for that. And for the same reason, I want a good quality CD player that transforms the digital to analog sound with a good definition and, due to my house interior, with a certain warmth. I don’t want to use a PC for playing my music with a mediocre quality. I already had that. (I am one of those people who still has a turntable and still play my old vinyl LP’s – have Bill Bruford’s Earth Works on it right now; also just love those album covers from the old days).

So I bought a new Marantz CD player at Len Wallis (in Sydney) and I am extremely happy with the results. I know many people, including my wife, won’t hear the difference but for me it similar as wearing glasses versus not wearing glasses. With glasses I can see things clearly, without things become blurry. Thanks to progress in technology, I think my Marantz gives me a better sound than my old Yamaha did in the past. Maybe it is old technology, but it is definitely improved technology and technology that can’t be beaten my the modern stuff (yet).

New technology is released with a rapid speed on a daily basis. The question is whether we need to acquire all this new technology. As a business you need to think whether an iPhone is that important and brings all the benefits. Don’t forget there are many teething problems. You want a collaboration system and social technology in-house. But is it so much better and how well is it developed? Wiki’s in SharePoint 2007 is rather primitive. But should you then implement other tools and how well does this integrate with other systems? Staff might spend a lot of time with the new technology, but what is the business benefit?

There is still so much you can do with plain old proven technology. If there is important information to be written down and communicated and relevant people are currently not doing it, would a new tool resolve this? MS Word or PowerPoint are very simple a proven ways to document information and there are usually already many ways to communicate it to stakeholders.

Another issues with new technology is that you need to spend so much time on it to get it working and I do not always feel that this effort weighs up against the benefits. The most extreme example is for me still the Windows Operating System. That took years before it finally become a useful end-user tool and that can be used effectively at home.

In general I like the advancements in technology and like to follow it and use it when I see a clear need for it. In many other cases, I prefer to wait until the teething problems have been resolved and you can actually gain the benefits.

Anyway, buying my new CD player is one of the best decisions I made recently and Percy Jones rolls very nicely out of my speakers again.

Lost in SharePoint administration functionality

When selecting a software product, you always need to be cautious with just comparing features. SharePoint for example has many features, but they are not always that easy to use. One of the key problems I found with SharePoint is the ease of use for administration functions. As site owner for example, you can grant access to people, but to use these features is not that easy. Even people in our IT team get confused. Another example is the use of the “MySite”. It gives every user all the features of site administration, but you too easily get lost. Sometimes I feel that there is too much that you can do.

In the screenshot above you work according to the breadcrumb in the context of the site Oracle Financials, but you are confronted to manage groups for a much broader context. Initially you come there and ask yourself “if I add people to those groups would it only apply to this site or would it affect all sites that use those groups?”. The uncertainty is what annoys people.

What bothers me is that the whole page changes and that the context only relies on the breadcrumb. A pop-up window or at least keeping the top and left hand sides the same would have made me more comfortable.

We found that tech savvy users already picked up on many of social features such as blogs, but I can very well understand that the majority feels lost in the use of it all.

My biggest problem is the way it is presented. The breadcrumb on top displays the context to what your work applies, but the breadcrumb is small with small fonts and you also get on the left hand side data elements that you can manage outside the context of the breadcrumb.

When we selected SharePoint it was not primarily for its social features but primarily for document management and its integration with Office. Though I actually played around a bit with this before recommending SharePoint, there are always aspects which you miss during the evaluation and only run into when you really start using it. Luckily there are always upgrades so the magic word is SharePoint 2010.

The usability comes hand in hand with good understanding of the working of the system and the associated terminology. We see for example that social media has a huge uptake, but when I started with this blog, initially I found also a bit confusing in how Blogger worked. First of all you edit posts in the blogger domain, but your blog is published to the blogspot domain. Then there is the terminology of a post versus blog, the concept of RSS, the role of feedburner and finally all the ways to syndicate the content to other sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. I have this blog now also published on MySite within SharePoint. Because I syndicate it from Blogger, I need to pull in an RSS feed and still wanted to make it look within SharePoint as if it was a normal SharePoint blog. You can’t just create a standard SharePoint blog and let it feed from an external blog; I had to create a sub-site to MySite with on the main page a RSS webpart. That took a little while to figure it out, but I’ve got it working now. At least trying all this out helped me better understand some of the intricacies of SharePoint.

All in all, I am on the one hand disappointed of how intuitive systems such as SharePoint are designed but on the other hand impressed how many non-techies are able to use this modern technology. To master it all requires quite a bit of time.

Recruitment Agencies and those annoying phone calls

I am one of the those people that regularly, almost daily, receives phone calls from recruitment agencies to see if I need more contractors for temporary assignments. We call those people agency temps. In other places they might be called freelancers.

I find these conversations always a bit awkward. The recruiter knows that I receive those calls regularly from many different agencies and that I most certainly already have an established base of recruiters I work with.

On the other hand I need the agencies at times so I do not want to close any doors but also do not want to give away whether I have a need now or in the near future. Before you know you have your mail box full with resumes and your phone red hot while you're not really certain whether you need someone or not. Even if you need someone, you need to limit the number of recruiters you deal with to a minimum.

In general I am more loyal to a recruiter than to an agency. If a person has proven to be able to find the right candidate, the agency the recruiter works for is less important.

The use of recruiters for temporary IT staff seems to vary per country while the philosophy of when to use temporary staff versus employment seems more similar. I noticed that in the Netherlands that there are less freelancers in IT than in Australia. I think primarily because of different taxation rules. Some cultural differences play probably a role as well. Where for example the Dutch rather have the certainty of a permanent employment, in Australia I see more sole traders then in the Netherlands. It seems to be easier to start your own business here in Australia. Even if you contract temporary staff in Australia via a software house, half the time the people are not permanently employed by that software house.

As mentioned in my earlier post, I prefer permanent staff. At least to facilitate the amount of work that is guaranteed required by the team. As far as I know this is the general logic for resourcing your team. Peak work is covered by temporary staff.

It is important to put good effort in the selection process for temporary staff because peak work often slides from one peak to another. You contract someone for a specific project and before it is completely finished you have another project at hand creating another peak. It sounds a bit contradictory but is demonstrates the challenge of resource planning.

This way I have however often been able to retain good temporary staff for long periods and reduce my recruitment needs. The consequence is that when recruiters call me, I actually hardly ever have a need increasing the burden of their calls.

But I do need them. When you look for people with skills that are widely available in the market you don't want to cull through 500 resumes. And when you look for skills that are very scarce you need every hand there is for the search. It is important to work with a mix of recruiters that specialise in different areas. I was lucky to have contracted in the past some very good Oracle EBS functional and technical specialists whom I would like to call upon in times of need. When I find that a recruiter personally knows many of those people, I know that this is a person to stay in contact with. You can't always contract those same people again but if the recruiter has the right network he can find someone else with those good qualities.

Though recruiters sometimes claim otherwise, you should not rely on them to assess suitability for the role. To assess the technical skills you should possess those skills yourself. (Therefore I believe for example also that when outsourcing you should have at least have some skilled staff in house to assure you select the right vendor and assure that you keep receiving quality services.) And when you have emergencies at hand, you need to be able to contact someone who can provide the required skills fast. Therefore, having relationships with software houses is important and you don't build those relationships only by calling them when you have an emergency.

For certain skills I sometimes prefer to resource from software house. Because they have technical skills in house, they can assess much better the skills of the candidate. And if you have experienced that their own staff is highly qualified then they will usually provide that same quality in people for your temporary assignment.

I prefer this in general also above outsourcing. Only when you clearly can control the quality of the services provided or when it really does not make sense to bring the skills in house, I prefer the outsourcing option.