Mike Schorah

Mountain rescue teams express concern at ill-prepared groups entering the wilds with just a phone and no map or compass, unprepared for the technology to let them down when out of cell tower range. And incapable of independent thought. As my daughter's team prepared for a Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme expedition over the weekend I became aware of a rule that they could only take one mobile phone, which had to be kept in a sealed bag for emergency use only. I don't think a single expedition group kept to the rule: pressure came from kids who've grown up always connected, permanently entertained, able to deal with difficulty by withdrawing for a season into a world dominated by input from headphones and screen; or by making a Google search; or an SMS for an SOS. But rebellion came, too, from parents - so used to the potential for contact at any time for any reason. When the kids were small we let them toddle along in a harness, attached to us by reins: a deft flick ...

Problem: Network Attached Storage (NAS) is great for keeping backup copies of vital data, or sharing files and folders between users. But how do you secure it, especially if (like me) you want access to your company server over the Internet, while keeping the bad guys out? Solution: Use operating system capabilities to make your life easier. The options are pretty well hidden, but here's what worked for me: Use the control panel software that comes with your NAS to secure a user's folder with a username and password combination. You can probably set a quota for how much disk space each user gets; and set up sharing groups so departments have shared storage; and more... NAS devices like the World Book Series II from Western Digital or similar devices from Iomega are aimed at the SoHo market, but are actually mini-servers. They probably run a version of Linux, but hopefully your supplier has hidden that complexity from you! I'm using a Windows 7 Pro. computer to acc...

Some fascinating statistics in the Schumpeter column from this week's edition of The Economist . The columnist is drawing on research from the McKinsey Global Institute that I also came across earlier this week. Schumpeter writes: In 2010 the world stored enough data to fill 60,000 Libraries of Congress.  There are more than 4 billion mobile-phone users (12% of them smartphones). YouTube claims to receive 24 hours of video every minute.  Manufacturers have embedded 30m sensors into their products, converting passive objects into data-generating nodes in the internet of things.  The number of smartphones is increasing by 20% a year and the number of sensors by 30%. Tesco, a British retailer, collects 1.5 billion nuggets of data every month and uses them to adjust prices and promotions.  Williams-Sonoma, an American retailer, uses its knowledge of its 60m customers (which includes such details as their income and the value of their houses) to produce di...

We've been thinking this week about  how to make life easier for our customers. The bottom line, for us, is what I believe they call 'empathy' which I take to mean putting myself in another's shoes. By thinking through the experience from the other's perspective, we hope to design what makes sense to a user rather than to the engineer who built it! In practice, this means a number of things: No one likes reading manuals, for anything. So we're recording bit-size, function-specific videos. Engineers hate having to re-work stuff so our product design and implementation makes it easy to change the Help content without requiring any time or input from the engineers. As business manager I hate anything that increases costs, so a solution that enables self-service and community support is great! With strategies like these we can adopt and adapt to the increasing pace of change in the world while giving great service! Get more like this

The British media is filled with news over this weekend about the 'stupid' laws that allow the wealthy and influential to obtain a 'super-injunction' to guard their privacy in public media outlets such as newpaper, radio and TV; while new media such as Twitter seem to get away with breaking/leaking news items with impunity... In an update of the 'Streisand effect ' one footballer's attempts to use legal force to extract information about Twitter users re-publishing information of his alleged affair, seems to have had the predictable outcome of raising the visibility of his situation with many who might not have known, or cared, before... But, in other news (as they say), the Washington Post  is warning that proposed data protection laws in India may be 'too strict for some US companies .' The article makes the point that requirements such as obtaining written consent from each customer before collecting and using personal data will make it hard ...

Thanks to @MarkDansie for drawing my attention to a further concern about storing our business data in the cloud: Mark Dansie    Should IT managers be concerned about DC security in the UK following theft at O2 yesterday  http://tinyurl.com/3348627 I was already attuned to the need to protect against software intrusions: news of the recent loss of personal details of approaching 100m Sony Playstation Network users is a wake-up call to many businesses trusting their operational data to cloud computing. But the article Mark referred to lists a catalogue of physical break-ins to data centres across the western world ... the resultant theft of hardware has brought major disruption to Vodafone and O2 cell phone networks; high profile and mundane web sites alike and more... The bottom line is that we shouldn't trust all our eggs to any one basket. Just as I keep a spare PC in case my main one fails, and I have multiple copies of key files on various backup media, so we n...

Increasingly it seems that users are concerned about the safety and privacy of their data stored online in "the cloud." The recent widely-publicised leak of name, address and possibly credit card details for around 100m users of Sony's Playstation Network is just the latest in a series of data breaches. Multi-national companies and governments on both sides of the Atlantic are just as vulnerable as small companies and individuals. But what to do about it? As a matter of principle, we have set out to put user data under user control, stored safely in an encrypted database that can be securely backed up. We let the user choose what to share, and with whom; and we know only the absolute number of users, not who they are - the link between their 200-digit UserID number and their real name is made only on their local machine... Our goal is to make user data anonymous. But this is harder said than done and it's almost impossible to ensure that all user data is utterl...

How terribly hard it is to get any real work done as I try to move files from my old laptop to the new one; and get a clean backup of everything to the RAID Network Attached Storage in the process. The thing is, I know that one day I'll be glad of the backup copies, if they work. That means I'll have to make time to test the Restore process also... I can understand why most computer users just don't bother: it feels like I'm wasting days of my time, just watching files copy from one place to another. But I've been around computers long enough to know that trusting to good luck is not good enough. Sooner or later everyone loses something, for one cause or another. It's when that happens to me that I'll be glad I took time out now. So how? Software like Norton 360 comes with a limited amount of cloud-based storage, with more available on subscription. And there are cloud solutions such as DropBox, though they've got significant security concerns . A...

I've had cause again this week to think of my early business training over seven years working for IBM in the UK. Before starting work all employees had to agree to work according to the company's ethical principles outlined in Business Conduct Guidelines ;  and we all had to sign to say we'd read them and would continue to abide by them regularly thereafter. I saw a quite senior manager lose his job when he was found to have operated against the Guideline  principles. One of the IBM principles that stood out and stuck with me was a quaintly-worded "don't disparage the competition." As I recall, it was something along the lines of "We won't sell IBM products and services by knocking those of our competitors." That was in the 1980s and I don't see quite the same wording in Section 4 of the current edition of Business Conduct Guidelines. There, the company speaks of competing vigorously for business, but 'fairly' and 'ethically...

One of my favourite childhood books was Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies  which had a couple of memorably puzzling characters including Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid. I thought of them again as my own daughter is reading the book, and as I met a couple of business associates today: In a local network of small businesses, redRockIT is typical in forming alliances and strengthening the company's offering by sub-contracting work and referring others. Mark Scarborough , the proprietor, explained to me how he'd brought in another company to recover a client's computer after a hard disk failure when the problem extended beyond his own company's capacity, for example. And how he's able to extend his geographical reach through alliances with other similar businesses who act under the same brand. It reminded me of a business model I used to be involved in where a dozen separately owned and managed businesses around the UK agreed to operate und...

I've been reflecting on the draft publication of research by danah boyd (sic) and Alice Marwick, two researchers from Microsoft, into  Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies Their suggestion is that teenagers still hold to a strong notion of privacy, but that they lack the power to enforce their expectations because 'Those who have power over them – their parents and the police – can use their power to violate teens’ norms, using accessibility as their justification' (p6). This last point about 'accessibility' is just simply the argument that because what's written on the Internet is essentially public information, those publishing it can have no expectation of privacy. The suggestion from the research, though, is that teens still expect much of what they publish to be private - 'just because teens are socializing in a public setting doesn't mean that they want to be public figures' - but that the tools a...

your data: gain control Each time I re-read The Starfish and the Spider  I gain new insights, often from seemingly throw-away comments that turn out to have profound implications. If you've not read the book, read the first chapter and buy it! Explaining their metaphor, the authors note " If you cut off a spider's head, it dies; but if you cut off a starfish's leg, it grows a new one, and that leg can grow into an early new starfish. Traditional top-down organizations are like spiders, but now starfish organizations are changing the face of business and the world. " There are links to some of my old blog posts on the key topics below. And here's a useful tool from the book. Analyze your organisation and see where on the scale of spider vs. starfish you fit: Spider Starfish Someone is in charge No one is in charge Headquarters exist There are no headquarters Thump its head, then it dies Th...

I've been reflecting on Kashmir Hill's article in Forbes  about "Six Key Privacy Moments" in Steven Lev's 'biography' of Google In the Plex : Even Google executives can be unhappy with the information revealed about them in a Google search CEO Larry Page thinks there are greater privacy concerns people should react to Google face recognition exists, but is held back as being 'radioactive' Google's "Privacy Council" didn't see the hatred of Buzz coming Google's purchase of user-tracking DoubleClick enables it to track user activity "to every corner on the Web" The Wi-Spy WiFi tracking scandal was a Google privacy policy disaster If you want more on the detail of these six, read Hill's article . For me, the important bottom line was the quotation on which her article ended: “There’s so much Google has in terms of information about people that they have to be super careful,” says Levy. “Any mistake they make ...

It's always a good idea in business to bring in more than you let out of the door! Recently I've been putting enthusiastic effort into  business start-up on a budget . This week's experiences include: Hiring in the services of an ex-BBC man to advise on the right way to capture video and edit it in the way we need to for the final cut, losing minimal quality along the way ... It's cheaper, and better, to buy in that expertise as we need it, but retain the core skills in-house so that we can produce material in a rush when necessary. That's not to say that we won't use professional media productions teams in future, but only when the scale of the projects warrant it. My next task this week was renting additional office space to use as a video 'studio.' There's a lot of snobbery in business, aspiration to be using 'quality' materials to project something other than what you are. I'd love to have hired a plush room in the first impressive...

Read Siobhain Butterworth in today's Guardian bit.ly/lNrFgE Last week I changed Internet Explorer settings, to require my confirmation of cookies. That makes the Internet experience slow and frustrating to the point of unusability so I absolutely do not recommend it. But for me it was a (temporary) and useful experiment and a shocking revelation of just how impossible it is to visit any modern website without many, many statistics about your visit and browsing history being compiled and stored. But the choice is stark: there really is no alternative but to accept the tracking. The alternative effectively means a loss of service usefulness.

It can't be a surprise that the business environment is especially tough in most industries in many economies. Last night I enjoyed watching the BBC's latest edition of " Britain's Next Big Thing " (It's so  much more positive, encouraging, practical and informative than the gladiatorial Dragons' Den ). I'm sympathetic to the enthusiasm that causes entrepreneurs to invest money as well as time in their projects; but mystified as to why you'd build up large quantities of inventory (stock) without having firm orders to turn the goods into cash quickly... I'm about to view possible additional office venues: the space will be nice, but we've held off on any decision until the lack of facilities has begun to hamper business operations. It's still not a given that we'll commit to additional rent unless we can be convinced that what we spend will add positively to the bottom line in short order. It's the same with staff: common s...

Yet more bad news for the 'cloud computing' marketplace today as Sony warns that a further 25 million gaming users may have had their details hacked, in addition to the 77 million last week! As a reminder, names, home addresses, e-mail addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and gender information were taken and most people find that shocking and scary. Last week there were reports that un-encrypted credit card information was also stolen. And this comes hot on the heels of Amazon's very embarrassing failure of its cloud data centre hosting which brought a number of high-profile web services such as Foursquare down, too. The Economist is far from alone in warning businesses of the hidden costs of cloud computing that must be factored in to the headline cost reductions that make the services seem so attractive in the first place. Further, last week also saw concerns about unexplained location tracking being compiled automatically by Apple and Google through the use ...