derek abdinor

I reckon that technology-ignorant clients are a double-edged sword. The Law states that whatever sophisticated concept you manage to run by them with no resistance, thou shalt be smitten with much rebuking about low-end things, eg:

• this content management tool doesn’t accept my MS Word tabs and indents! Shriek!
• I just want to print one piece of paper off this website page, not all 20! Rant!
• Search on my site doesn’t find the document I put up on the intranet last week! Rail!

An essential point about client education was made by Dominic Jones in a different forum: XBRL. I quote:

Most US investor relations officers (IROs) are not directly involved in disclosure technology and have a very poor understanding of it. This is mostly because about 75% of investor relations sections on US corporate websites are outsourced to hosting services. IROs have generally been entirely hands off when it comes to these sites so they’ve lost out on a lot of important learning over the years. They don’t understand what HTML is, so XBRL is even more alien to them.

As much as we think of expediency and taking problems out of the clients’ hands (or outsourcing those to us in these times), it makes us party to them not knowing more about the technology issues. The cycle continues.

Taking a leaf out of the “teach a man to fish” parable, I’m going to escalate the training of clients. Not just in terms of social knick-knacks, but along the lines of: What Every IRO Should Know.

This was always going to be a big thing: presence, alerts, IM, groups and whiteboarding.

It seems its coming to pass with the ESME project, through SAP labs.

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Jack Dorsey Presents Twitter from biz stone on Vimeo. Found via Jayz.

A year ago saw me trying to explain microblogging (when the Twitter Fail Whale was but a guppy), after having got the blogging presentation finally right. The Twenty20 Cricket World Cup was the rage, and I simply joined the dots: Twenty20 cricket is to 50-over cricket as Twitter is to blogging. It’s shorter, more intense and has engagement value. Not to mention the constant innovation required to get over the limitations — all the inventive shots come out of the bag.

To extrapolate, Test cricket is like web publishing. By this I mean a non-blog, static page where you are simply disclosing, informing, reporting and presenting. More traditional skills come into play here, namely proofreading, supporting diagrams and possibly running it by the organisation’s legal beagles or the human remorses officer.

After the IPL and the constant ineptitude of cricket’s governors, one may think that all must be abandoned and channelled into T20. Witness the recent Test, South Africa against England at Lord’s: five days’ batting and no result.

In this instance, I think Test cricket comes to the fore. Few other sports demand the mental endurance to bat for two days to save a Test. I used to be bored stiff by the format, but as I get older I appreciate the weighs and balances of battles within battles.

Think of the ICC as the board of a company, or the marketing department. Old-fashioned web publishing (we publish, you consume) may seem dead compared with the sexiness of microblogging, Qik, Seesmic. These guys were only recently introduced to blogging and now you’ve given them a 140-character text field, no supporting images and TinyURL. An example of a knee-jerk reaction was the creation of an annual report blog. You really oughtn’t to create dialogue around a historic document that, by definition, cannot change.

Just as Test cricket brings out various strengths and delights, static web pages do too. Microblogging is a different tool for, sometimes, a different audience. I think we’ve just scraped the surface of presence and microblogging being used in the workplace.

| this article originally published July 2008, Techleader