Do users pay lip service to Collaboration?

It is late at night again.

I have just finished doing some coding for a work project, which is a nice little collaborative app that should make life easier for the end users that will use it. It is not a Web 2.0 "wunderkind" it is just one of those 1,000's of apps we Domino/Noterati developers make live daily. It will trundle away doing what it does quickly and easily and after a brief period of interita fuelled "do we have to?" Users will get used to it and it will fade into the background noise of everyday work.

But will it be really collaborative?

What do I mean by collaborative?

Do end users know collaboration from a hole in the head?

And that is where this post started forming in my mind. I have I suppose a vision of "collaborative" that is viewed through my Black and Yellow tinted evangelist's glasses and I suppose there is nothing wrong with that.

In the wonderful Domi-No-Yes-Maybe world, Engineers are happy to share their expertise with Sales, Marketing will get moist at the idea of having closer links with Production and of course everyone will just LOVE the auditors. Sadly this is not often the case.

There are loads of examples where we in the geek community try our damnedest to light fires of enthusiasm. Marybeth and her team (bless their collective cotton socks!) are excelling in their goal of making the user's experience of the client the best that it can be. Chris Blatnick and his unbounded enthusiasm for the "Cool Interface", joined now by Tom Duff and his Plumber to Painter Damasene conversion to designing both the functional AND cool, to name but a few.

I am not dissing any of the above nor any of my geek readers who daily suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous project creep in an effort to make our end users happy. The target of my vented spleen on this occasion are the fecking end-users! There are days when I could see the whole end-user community impaled on a sharp stick and roasted slowly over a ligthly smouldering heap of now defunct project specifications.

Why if they can see the benefits of collaborating (or so they tell me) do they insist on sticking to the comfy and secure modality of departmental, regional or customer/client demarcation?
It just doesn't make a whole heap of sense ....

~sigh~ well that's now off my chest tomorrow I will put on my smiley face and get back to the job in hand and start re-coding an old app so that less people have access to the data ...

The Chums that share my workspace

I am sure we all have little friends that live on our desks were we work. So here in a "grumpy old man" annex to the "this-is-where-I-work-picture" meme here are my desk dwelling chums.This is "Pus Bucket" he is my coding geek teddy to whom I swear and cuss when I forget the "new" in Dim Session as NotesUIWorkspace. He can swear fluently in 5 languages (not including teddy bear) and doubles as a ICBM (Inter Cubicle Ballistic Missile) and a guard bear should the need arise and the proles in operations get to frisky and try to steal my highlighters!!

And this chap is iDjDog who chooses my listening for the day. If you wind him up he leaps in the air and lands with sufficient force to ping the iPlod. His personal music preference is "New-Wave -Death-Happy-Acid-Metal-Funk-TexMex-Fusion" so sometimes I do smack him on the arse and rub his nose in some Marilyn Manson.

A bit of a dampness problem @ the office

Today it rained. Now not the normal "norn iron" rain this was teenager in a major strop rain. It lasted for about an hour and was the cause of much comment as I and my geeky colleagues looked worriedly out of the window and the car park became a swimming pool. Un-beknownst to us there was a hidden manhole cover under the carpet of the office and as the volume of water increased the capacity of the storm drain below the self same manhole cover to drain became decreased.

One of my colleagues called me from the other side of the room "Steve you had better look around" Now I was deep in concentration bug hunting in a new application and gave my stock reply for occasions such as these "huh???????". My colleague continued "No Steve I really think you should look around now!" Something in his tone made me look around and there in the middle of the floor coming through the carpet were 4 small fountains of water around 6-7 inches high.

There then followed 5 minutes of a mad scramble to get as much off the floor as possible starting with electrical stuff and ending with my spare dry socks that I keep under the desk (I am a motorcyclist and dry socks in the office are a must-have!) . We managed to get everything lifted in time. The water got to a depth of about an inch and then gradually drained away, leaving my office rather... damp .. Hey ho! Such things brighten up the day!

The forecast is not good for tomorrow either so I have dug out my old wetsuit and I will be prepared tomorrow .... for those of a sensitive disposition I have hidden the picture of me wetsuited.

Hmmmmm I think the 4 tins of beans for tea may have been a mistake