It was a night on a typical weekday. I relaxed on my couch, and Phyllis my wife trying to upload some photos to Facebook, she had been on it for well over half an hour now.

Haven’t you finished yet? I asked casually.

It’s going, it failed once before, now I just have to make sure I have no other windows open, and it will work.

You sure about that? It’s never failed on me. Naturally like all helpful and somewhat sceptical nerds her response received the typical retort. I leaned over to peer over her shoulder.

Look, it’s all going fine, leave me to it, don’t you touch anything! Phyllis put her hands out, covering the laptop’s screen, at the same time shoots back one of those sharp stares that all sensible husbands ought to know better than to interfere.

This brings me to the topic of today’s post. Yes, why can’t I just trust her to it? Is it paranoia? Is it the fact that I know I can probably do it faster than her, and her reasons to me made no sense? Is it the feeling of hurt that she knows I just can’t trust her with it?

I think conversations like this take place everyday and at a greater scale, conversations like this occurr in boardrooms and stakeholder meetings.

The divide between the IT and business in most organisations are still there. The mistrust is obviously not always ill-founded. We all remember occasions when someone from the business side had this brilliant idea and only to be turned away because the voice of doom (wait replace that with the architect) said ‘you wanted to do what?!’

This attitude has to change on both sides mind you. I draw an example from my current work, where I work very closely with my business stakeholder. He has a report to present to the business, and I am here to prepare that data. What is the best way to present the data? He is best placed to answer that, but he can’t answer that alone, he needs to know what data is available for him to use, and timeliness of it too, and that’s where I come in. We had 2 weeks to hammer this thing right. I released about 4 versions of the report to him in 2 weeks, each time seeking direction, and deciding what to keep and what to lose.

He is informed every 2-3 days, after the presentation of the report, I always touch base again to see how the last report is received with the business. This rapid and regular feedback cycle is key to us bridging that trust gap often seen between IT and the business.

There is clearly benefit in us co-operating, and invariably this helps the business to ‘care’ about how I get things done, because there is direct benefit in getting involved. I do borrow many good practice Agile development in this respect, and part of that Agile story involves a lot of talking and listening. This is part of that journey between business and IT that both side need to partake.

So Phyllis you should trust me with it

~Paul

Recently I was given a number of sites to look at.

I felt the time dial winding backwards. A cursory glance of the source revealed that it complied with HTML 4.0, hang on or was it xhtml 1.0 transitional? Anyway it probably didn’t matter.

There were some standard meta tags in the header, fairly vanilla, I assume to make the search somewhat easier, which means that the search was not based on the content of the pages but just with the infos in the meta tags. (I could almost hear someone say how 1990 is that?)

It was a fairly standard affair as for the layout, a header menu, a side bar of navigation links, a copy-right info down the footer, which are of course done with a minimal of table and div tags. It had no dynamic content as far as I could tell, no javascript doing asynchronous pull of info, no flash widgets no nothing.

The search seems to be calling a CGI routine which seems to pull a standard export of crawled content. Again, no page ranking, no what others have clicked on, no similar pages, no sorting of content by say the newest page to the oldest, FYI the first link was from 1990, while the 2008 link was on the 9th. The search layout and styling is not consistent to the main landing page, in fact I should say it is completely different

And here is the clincher, this site is open to the general public, you would have thought they could make this at least a little bit friendly and a little bit more … well ‘up to date’.

That aside, in this day and age, if you have even but a tiniest presence on the web, then you are your own social media company. Everything that you put up there is a direct representation of you, whether you like it or not. So be it you are a private company, a government agency or a self-starting entrepreneur, you need to be aware of what is going around you. A half-hearted treatment on any site just won’t do. (Ahem, especially those important government sites) Your site is the new social marketing tool for yourself, your agenda, your goals, and social it certainly needs to be.

This blog for example, I had friends telling me what I write up here during casual catch-ups, its content, its presentation, I as myself is in full view of the general public, to their critique, their scrutiny, and most important their support. (Maybe that’s what I think too long before writing anything hehe)

~paul