The Calmsea Enquirer

A really interesting post from Ewan on teleworking. I “work from home” - I’m just not at home very often. I don’t have to contend with time differences but I do have geography against me. Covering the whole of Scotland and now having some responsibilities in the North of England (thats north as in north of Oxford!) the challenges of being in all the places I need to be while having a meaningful family life are getting tougher. Ewan is making the most of the remote working tools available to him and taking advantage of the time zones. I’m conscious that I, and my colleagues, need to make more use of these tools. Do we always have to be there in person? Is a Yugma conference or a Skype call good enough? I think it will all come down to the quality of the experience for the end user. If our customers don’t have a good experience then I’ll be in the car driving all over the country and while I’m behind the wheel I’m not productive. So there’s a bit of a quandary. There’s a compelling commercial argument for me to do three remote meetings in a day rather than doing a six hour round trip for one meeting. But if the experience for the customer is not flawless then they won’t accept it.

I’d love to spend less time in the car, hopefully I’ll be able to harness some of this technology to help achieve this. I think I’ll be returning to this over the coming months.

I’m here with Andrew Roland and George Hannah at Teachmeet 08. We’re going to do a bit of a thing on the RM Asus miniBook.

We snapped this picture of Bob Geldof at BETT08 today. He was giving a key note at an event hosted by Integris and Groupcall.

It always seems to creep up on you - right after the New Year. No doubt this one will be bigger and better than previous ones although how it could be any busier than last year I don’t know. The RM stand will be the same but different. No green goblins, this year we’re in black and white. There’s going to be some interesting stuff to see and I’m sure my feet will be very sore by Saturday night. Swing past the stand and say hello - I’ll be in a black polo shirt.

The dust has settled and SLF07 is behind us. I had a great time. Our Educational Update session on Wednesday was well received and the stand was really busy. On Thursday I had the unprecedented opportunity to take in a couple of seminars and a keynote. The highlight had to be Mick Waters keynote, it was truly inspirational. Ewan McIntosh’s Why Scotland’s been blogging for Five Million Years was really good fun. Thanks for the intro to cup stacking. It was great to catch up with Ewan for a beer later as well.

Back to reality this week. Roll on SLF08.