BOFConsultants

A is for Address Book

Mike — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 14:39:28 +0000

There is no shortage of consultants convincing you to spend money on how to use Social Media but neglecting to tell you that what is critical for your success is an organised address book.

I’m afraid the days of the paper based address book have gone because it is not easily searchable and it’s not linked to background information.

It should take no more than a few keystrokes for you to bring up the information on anyone that you have contacted and the history of your communications with them.

Unfortunately there is an initial lump of data entry to get your existing mess of contacts and business cards organized.

BOFConsultants can get this done for you quickly and securely.

Then you can enjoy the benefits of

A single list of all your contacts
Training and procedures to keep it up to date
The same list on your phone as well as your computers
A format that allows you to address an email or a letter to anyone with a few clicks

The key to being successful in social media is the same as in real social interactions – Remember their names!

Twitter – how to find someone to follow

Mike — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 11:56:01 +0000

So you have set up your twitter account and now have absolutely no idea how to get started.

Here is a simple first step that will find people living locally who are using twitter.

Type this into your browser window in the space you use for entering the name of websites that you want to see

http://search.twitter.com

Next click on the link Advanced Search

Now put the location you want into “Near this place” and you will see a live listing of who has just tweeted. Because this is live you will get very different results if you search during the day or late on a Friday night, so be aware that you might come across some strong language.

If you have a web address you can just put that in as a simple search term

Here I’ve searched for “househandlers” , their website is www.househandlers.co.uk.

If I place the mouse over the link a window shows the detail. If I click on @househandlers a new window opens telling me all about Gillian’s company

Once you have checked her out you can click the “follow” button. She will receive an email saying that you are following her and you will see her tweets in your “timeline” when you are logged into twitter

Productivity Technology versus Information Technology

Michael fitzGerald — Fri, 21 May 2010 07:04:00 +0000

David Pogue writes in his latest Personal Tech article "Online, How Much Security Is Too Much? " about IT professionals who give security a higher priority than convenience or productivity. He concludes

"Maybe companies need to hire a PT person as well (Productivity Technology), somebody who's a counterweight to the IT person. Somebody whose job it is to argue: "Oh, come on. Is this really necessary?"

There is no need for a new breed of professional 'The Productivity Technologist" In the short term effective senior managers will stop IT getting in the way of company productivity ; ineffective senior managers will encourage another layer of control. In the long term the upcoming generation show every sign of attaching no importance to security or privacy so it's a temporary inconvenience. How soon will you be able to log into your bank account with your Facebook login?

Saving lives with sticky labels – UK NHS initiative

Michael fitzGerald — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 17:59:51 +0000

The British Medical Journal reports a study by Elizabeth Robb et al BMJ 2010;340:c1234 which showed that if staff followed "care bundles" which are reminder/checklists of simple but important steps in managing treatment, signing off when steps had been completed, death rates can be reduced.

Whilst less dramatic than rushing around and shouting this approach helps medical staff, who may be both inexperienced and exhausted, to remember to follow the correct sequence of actions for dealing with serious and fast moving clinical events.

The authors report that

"The main expenditure was the small cost of printingthese checklist sheets (about £300 for each batch of 100sheets)."

Sometimes the answer isn't more computers

Why you don’t need to back up your data

Michael fitzGerald — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:29:42 +0000

In keeping with my “largely harmless” persona I offer advice on computing for grown-ups. This is a balancing act between their impatience and the fear of technology. So I was pleased with this suggestion

“I will never be able to persuade you to use an effective backup
regime.Humans aren’t easily motivated by routine – however the power of
ritual has controlled whole societies. So set up a new birthday ritual
- export a copy of your address book and contacts list to a text file
and copy it to removable media. This is the absolute minimum level of
backup and because it is associated with a regular event that you wont
forget, there is a good chance that you might do it!”

Wise words said my contemporaries. The youngsters laughed. I was prepared for this and prepared to deliver a sermon on discipline,tidying up, neatly labelling and keeping things. One comment made all the certainty of a lifetime in the computer industry disappear “But, my address book just fixes itself” “Losing my address book is no big deal. I just wait for friends to contact me and I get their numbers again”. The difference between the generations is the frequency of phone calls. To us boring old farts a phone call is still an event. To youngsters it is a constant background and their telephone book would be repaired within hours. My spluttered comments on what about street addresses and email addreess were met by that special look of contempt and sympathy reserved for the senile.

So, I’m sitting here like a saddlemaker in a car dealership. My re-evaluation of how to look after data will produce some interesting future posts.

Any dinosaurs out there still willing to fight? Your comments would be appreciated

UK National Proramme for IT – Fail

Michael fitzGerald — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:06:01 +0000

This may come as a shock to people in the IT industry but sometimes the answer isn't bright,shiny and made by them. In a rare foray into the real world IT Consultants have come across a client base that seems to be more interested in saving peoples lives than slick user interfaces into relational databases. IT companies are used to presenting their half-arsed projects made from the computing equivalent of toilet roll centres and sticky backed plastic to rapturous applause from adoring, over-indulgent parents so dont know how to deal with underpaid, over worked health care professionals.
We are a long way from an agreed user requirement for a computer system for the UK National Health Service – but wait, we have already spent £12 billion on it. It has now become a political issue. I assume that a Conservative Party junior research took my ranting on this topic, packaged it for his masters who are now barking about simple, sponsored by advertising, google solutions to accessing information. Ah well.
The surprising thing about this sad episode is pointed out by the Financial Times which states that we can't afford to stop the contracts. Still paying billions to IT companies to do nothing keeps them out of mischief.
But where can these companies redeploy their hyperactive, unstructured clowns (sorry, I mean IT professionals) the circus tent of National Identity card is already full and taking money with an almost embarrassing efficiency.
I know – a real time database of every single banking and retail transaction. It's obvious that we need to profile those people who buy ethnic food with cash. We could have links into the local authority databases to check whether they have a record of their dogs fouling the footpaths. I had better stop there I have an uneasy feeling that I might be taken seriously

Broadband doubleplusgood!

Michael fitzGerald — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:17:14 +0000

I spent the weekend trying to get my cheap pay-as-you-go broadband to get above morse code speed. Soon I won't have to bother. Once there is broadband in every home with wireless networking to every child's bedroom I will be bathed in a rich soup of bandwidth and able to connect to any access point from across the street. I can guarantee that the majority of access points will still have the default password.
I can also guarantee that people who use obscure passwords will find 20 armed policemen knocking on their door with a battering ram with full media coverage.

I'm still waiting to see how broadband in every home is going to power the economic recovery, solve childhood obesity and decrease our reliance on imported food – to name just a few real priorities

If they called twitter a chat room nobody would use it

Michael fitzGerald — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:08:47 +0000

In olden times if you wanted to exchange snippets of information
on-line you signed up for a bulletin board or forum or chatroom. This
was a self selected group of people with a common interest. In the
quaint way of old fashioned computing there was a complex hierarchy of
topics and sub-topics and an administrator. Conversations ambled along
at the speed of a dial up modem and people spent the night sleeping so
conversations across timezones were even more leisurely. Joining the
community required access to exotic equipment and technical knowledge
so the major topic of discussion was computing or science fiction.

Inside
all of this structure you would find short abbreviated comments from
people with funny pseudonyms – yes it was just like twitter!

Calling
twitter a chat room would immediately cause most users to abandon it.
Twitter is way cooler than that, twitterers would cry.

Quite simply, twitter has abandoned structure. It is a free form playground of excitable toddlers all jammed on transmit.

The
intriguing thing about it is that it has become subject to evoultionary
pressure and primitive structures are beginning to appear.

All very philosophical but "What's in it for me? you chorus

My advice for those whose curiosity has been piqued by their broadsheet twittering on about twitter is

- Only sign up if you know someone already using it
-
Use twitter advanced search to select an area of 10 miles from where
you live. You can then quickly find out if there is anybody interesting
out there
- Treat it like an item of fashion clothing – fun for the moment.
- Don't use it for important things, it can be unreliable

You will of course find the bof on twitter mixing it wiv his mates, wicked

Citizens as digital denizens

Michael fitzGerald — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 04:30:16 +0000

You can tell that Daniel Toole is a consultant, not a journalist. The full title of his article in the Financial Times is “Citizens as digital denizens – the digerati’s answer to the economy” . Don’t they have sub-editors on the FT? Anyway if you are not put off by the title you will be put off by the content. Another attempt to breath life into the Carter report on “Digital Britain”. This is an interim report with all the substance of an undergraduate essay plan. Let’s hope the final report includes clear goals, a timescale and a budget.Gone are the days when organisations or individuals would uncritically fund technology “visions”

Teach your Granny to use twitter

Michael fitzGerald — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 06:13:24 +0000

It’s easier than you think.
Show her an immediate, practical and continuing benefit. (this may help decide whether you should be using twitter too!)
Although Stephen Fry is everyones favourite grandson being able to follow his every movement is probably not sufficient justification for your Granny. Still hundreds of thousands of followers hang on his every tweet.

I’m looking forward to Stephen following Charles Dickens example and producing novels in instalments, but using twitter. One hundred and forty characters per chapter now there’s a challenge!