Recent press and television broadcasts (Tonight with Trevor McDonald, Friday, May 12) merely confirm what I have been thinking for a while. SatNav, what do we think we’re doing with it?

Today’s Computer Weekly carries a letter outlining the sorry story of the Clifton Suspension Bridge which sees a steady stream of juggernauts approach toll-booths that are too narrow for them. Similarly, today’s Times carries a piece relating to how the ambulance service, who I believe should have known better, followed the SatNav route which turned out to be longer, but more scenic…not that the injured party was overly keen on the passing scenery whilst en route to hospital.

Ever since the first affordable, mass-market SatNav kit hit the market, folks have become so obsessed with it. I even know of a situation where an employee (in my last job) used TomTom to find his way to his base office…an office that he drove to plenty of times before the arrival of “turn right in to Arden Grove, you have arrived at your destination”. What’s worse, the offending employee was on a conference call using his mobile ‘phone at the time…everybody on the call realised the faux pas!

I have been driving now for nearly 20 years, never have I needed more than a road atlas and some brief instructions on how to cover the last couple of miles…of any journey. Of course, today, I use MultiMap to give me the last couple of miles, and why not? It’s free, unlike the millions of SatNav units that are being sold world-wide. Fair enough, the profusion of devices has bod well for the likes of ARM whose chips can be found in millions of SatNav-capable devices world-wide.

We’ve become so reliant on SatNav, what on earth will we do if the underlying positioning system suffers from overload or fails? There you are, you’re merrily driving along, under careful instruction of your chosen SatNav device and “puff”, that’s it, no more directions, silence, what do you do? Where do you go? Hint: the hard shoulder is for emergency use only, your SatNav giving up the ghost is not an emergency. And if you’ve got a celebrity voice-over installed, say Richard Wilson, you can imagine what he would say when the positioning system fails to respond…”I don’t believe it!”

I’ll tell you where you go. You go back to basics. You learn about maps, you learn how to use them. At the end of the day, it’ll make you a safer driver. SatNav devices are bound to cause serious accidents, if they haven’t already actually caused any. After all, it’s all very well listening to the nice lady “in 50 yards, take the next left” but there’s also that little animated screen. Now that’s clever. Not only are we privy to an audio broadcast of where to go, that little PocketPC screen can show us where to go. And it looks very neat, very impressive. Nice, graphical depictions of roundabouts, the route ahead, speed limits, etc. It’s nice to watch, but then, so is the road ahead of you and all around you. I’d rather you watched what was going on around you and ahead of you because one day, I might be crossing the road ahead of you. I’ll be the one with the generic MP3 player and I will be wearing headphones, listening to my tunes. It’ll be dark at the time, I’ll be wearing black for your benefit. And if it isn’t me, it might be somebody you care about.

Worried about unemployment in your locale? Stick SatNav devices in to taxis and suddenly the local equivalent of the knowledge is no longer required. Anybody can drive a car with a SatNav device fitted and start calling themselves a taxi driver. Wouldn’t you prefer a local driver with local knowledge who was capable of answering your questions about the locale?

The bulk of the SatNav population have forgotten where they’re going, just plug a post code into the dashboard toy, listen to the instructions and you’re off. Suddenly we’ve become a nation who can’t read maps, who can’t drive past the end of our own driveway without the basic TomTom, or worse a celebrity keeping us company. That said, I find the thought of John Cleese providing directions more than amusing.

Should we be leaving the SatNav devices for those folks who really need it (such as the military and emergency services)? The same technology that we’re using today, has been used by the military for many years. They’ve used it to find their way around unknown territory during close knit battles, it has saved countless lives. And here we are, using it to get us to the chip shop, the office or our mother-in-law’s house.

My brother-in-law has a talent for drawing:

This is one of many drawings/artistic jobs that he has done for us, each has turned out really well.

He drew Monty, the dog above, from a photograph.

Perhaps it’s time he took this up professionally?

Further to my posting about the tax on personal use of the Internet whilst at work, it seems that the power of The Times has forced the Treasury to announce that the tax will affect so few people that it makes me wonder why they even thought it up in the first place.

The chances of anybody having to pay a tax charge on personal use of a business computer are virtually zero.

The full article can be found here. And there’s more here and here.

According to a piece in today’s Times newspaper, employers may find themselves having to record their employee’s personal Internet usage (including e-mail) or both parties may face a “new” stealth tax. Stealth, because it was sneaked in to the recent budget without any hullabaloo, blink and you might have missed it.

Unless the personal usage is “not significant”, in which case the tax is ignored, both employee and employer will be taxed. Obviously there is clear debate about the use of the term “not significant”, however it is unlikely to be within the bounds of reasonableness, a word clearly not in the Labour Party’s dictionary, as events surrounding Prescott’s Promiscuity, Clarke’s Convicts and Hewitt’s Heckles, all of which are now in the public domain, can confirm.

Personally, I use my employer’s e-mail facility to manage what I need to do “as a whole”. I send e-mails from my office to my personal desktop such that I can manage my time better. I don’t want to find myself reading newsletter after newsletter whilst I’m at work. I receive notification of the newsletters at work, sift through them at a content-level (i.e. scan them), then I forward the relevant ones to my home PC where I can spend a little more time reading them and surfing. Now, if Gordon Brown wants me to read the newsletters whilst I’m at work, that’s fine, but he should find some way of compensating my employer for around 6-8 hours per week. IT is a fast moving game, how else can we keep on top of it without constant learning?

And who’s going to pick up the cost of implementing a system that can accurately monitor personal vs corporate e-mail/Internet usage? Sure, there are products on the market that claim to do this, however in my experience unless they are set up correctly, they tend to get in the way of real work. Less able firms, with absent or inadequate IT direction, will struggle with this ruling, perhaps opting for a “personal blacklist” whereby overtime known “personal” addresses and domain names are blocked. I would take umbrage to this kind of mentality for a number of reasons:

1. I use my blog to record information that I think might be useful to others…it’s also my way of ensuring I have some information “to hand”. I refer to some of the code samples and links on my blog a couple of time per day, it helps me with my day job.
2. I communicate with a number of people (using e-mail) to organise social events (personal) and to conduct job-related business, the “personal blacklist” wouldn’t work in this situation.
3. I send myself e-mails between my home computer and my office e-mail address that act as reminders, things to do etc. I also use shared tasks, shared calendars, etc. between my home computer and my office computer.
4. The previously noted “newsletter” scenario.

I think it’s fair to say that those of us who find it useful to mix personal/business like this, do so because we find ourselves more productive as a result. A taxation of this kind would see my productivity take a hit, I would have to change the way I work because of a tax introduced by Government I didn’t vote for. Taxation doesn’t win votes. Taxation encourages emigration. When it’s votes that count, you can’t help but want to reduce emigration because emigration not only affects the number of potential votes, but it affects the economy too.

The recent scrapping of the Home Computing Initiative, whereby employees could purchase a PC via their employer with some for of tax relief, this is yet another blow to the promotion of IT uptake in the UK. I know of a handful of employees who would rather “ask a friend” for a little help with their office PC than go to some corporate helpdesks – more so for the “lesser done, easily forgotten” tasks in popular word processors or spreadsheets.

This is another fine example of the Government hitting on the masses, whereby we’ve seen taxation on travel (airport taxes, etc.) and massively increased fuel prices. I am surprised that there is no obvious taxation on the sending/receiving of SMS/MMS text messages as the sheer profusion of them sent every day seems to be an easy and obvious target.

What’s next Gordon, a tax on the office Biro that I use for personal business inside and outside of office hours?

With the current Government’s inability to differentiate between public and private, I refer to of course the aforementioned threesome, how can they possibly be trusted to enforce a IT tax like this?

During 2005, my last employer asked us to answer about 60 questions that revealed personal values (roughly speaking, the things that are important to us and guide our thoughts). Yes, it’s a little airy-fairy, but when the data from all of our staff from all of our offices was collated and presented graphically, it was rather interesting.

Firstly, there was a radar diagram representing a “Schwartz Chart”:

I believe that Schwartz, Shalom H. and Wolfgang Bilsky were responsible for this work. The Schwartz Value Inventory (SVI) contains a number of motivational domains. These domains reflect either an individualistic or a collectivistic interest dimension, or both, and they can be grouped into two dimensional structures composed of four higher order dimensions (openness to change, self-enhancement, conservation, self-transcendence) that are basic and bipolar. More can be found be following the references found here (worth reading if you want to make sense of the screenshots in this post).

This isn’t actually my radar diagram; if I can locate it I will update this post (I can’t seem to put my finger on it right now). To arrive at this diagram a number of employees were asked to complete a questionnaire comprising of about 70 or so questions. The questions were then used to determine the plot points on the radar diagram. The plot points relate to such things as: peace between people, broadminded, honest, honouring older more experienced others, respect for tradition, and so on, leading up to social recognition, meaning in work and choosing own goals:

Conservatism: national security, reprocation of favors, honoring elders, family security, respect for tradition, wisdom…
Intellectual Autonomy: curious, broadminded, creativity…
Affective Autonomy : enjoying life, exciting life, pleasure…
Egalitarian Commitment: social justice, world at peace, responsibility, freedom, equality…
Harmony: world of beauty, protecting environment, …
Mastery: successful, capable, choosing own goals, daring, independent ,…
Hierarchy: wealth, social power, authority…

There is a lot of moderately useful information present in the radar diagram. Further, it does demonstrate three things:

1) The organisational average (light blue, area)
2) The participant’s positioning (orange, line)
3) The standard deviation across the whole organisation (dark blue, line)

Secondly, there was a Values Categories Chart:

Now I realise that you probably can’t read these in detail, don’t worry, they are purely for demonstration purposes, I won’t be testing you on them later on.

During 2006, before I left this employer, we were asked to answer two questions based on the previous study:

1. “What should be the most important values in [your employment]? And Why?
2. “Choose 5 Values which you think should be the core values of [your employer] and will differentiate us from our competitors”

Here are my first-cut answers:

Question 1
I believe that the most important values that we should be nurturing and promoting are:

Creativity
We must think out of the box. Regular, lemming-like, thinking just won’t do at all. If you stifle creativity, the morale of individuals and teams takes a hit and folks leave. Thinking out of the box, seeing the bigger picture and beyond will help us discover better, more efficient ways of delivering excellent service that is innovative, daring and award-winning.

Daring
Risk needs to be managed. Instead of stomping down on daring creativity and daring innovation, “these risks are too great”, open your eyes, accept that some risk is good. Risk that is accepted in a positive fashion will see teams and individuals work harder and smarter to ensure that they can achieve the dare and thus enjoy the success of a job well done. Stamp down on the dare (risk) and it will just serve to de-motivate.

Innovation
Yes, some jobs, bread’n’butter jobs may not require much in the way of new thinking. However, the importance of new ideas, fresh creativity, taking a little risk for large gain all promote innovation. Clients like new ideas, they like to see folks “doing something out of the ordinary”.

Learning
Very few jobs are so simple that they require no learning (perhaps with the exception of some benign admin/overhead tasks). Individuals and team members should be given the opportunity to learn such that they can provide a better service that is more creative, more innovative and more daring.

Capable
Demonstrable evidence that the individual and team are able to do the job in hand.

Influential
As individuals working on a client project, we need to be capable of influencing and motivating; peer-group awards and qualifications suggest individuals are influential in their given sphere; team awards are even better. Don’t ignore awards from external organisations, if an employee has “done a good job” and been awarded for that job, recognise it.

Successful
Without influence and success, individuals and teams will struggle. A track-record has its place. Success comes from many places: being helpful, being influential, being positive, being supportive, being polite, being encouraging, being community-oriented, the list goes on.

Helpful
We (not just IT) need to be seen to be bending over backwards to help our clients and fellow workers. And if we made a mistake, it’s helpful if we admit to that mistake right away and bring a solution to the table during that admission.

Broadminded
Similar thoughts to creativity – parochially-minded individuals need not apply. We need to be willing to accept new ideas, new thinking, what worked before might not be best now.

Choosing own goals
Don’t tell individuals and teams how to do their jobs. Let them get involved with the client, the project manager, let them prioritise activities in conjunction with the client. Don’t force them to accept stretch targets that you know they are unhappy with – promote communication from the ground up, it will increase morale and give the project a better chance of succeeding.

Question 2
Five core values:

Daring
Innovation
Capable
Influential
Broadminded

—

I don’t know what became of the study, I left this employer just after I submitted my answers to these two questions. The study itself took rather a long time, spanning some seven or eight months (until my departure) and saw some staff hearing the phrase “disciplinary action” in order to gee them up into completing the original 60 or so questions (not me I hasten to add!). Who knows, may be the answers to the two questions provide some insight into who I am?

[Originally written January 2006, not posted. Revised April 2006]