Crispbread, Meatballs and erm, Chaos.

Sundsvall A.M. by Peter Johnson

I'm sat in a busy hotel in Sundsvall. I've just finished a series of four talks in different parts on this country which were organised by the lovely people from itSMF Sweden (special big shoutout to Daniel Billing).

I was of course here to flog my Control-Chaos-Values approach to the workplace. What I love about doing this in public is the range of responses that one receives. There are still too many of the folded-arms, rigid expression variety, which generally tell me that I'm either being boring (sorry if that was the case), or that these individuals are simply not prepared to countenance such radical change to the way things are currently done.

Getting Used to This

Typically Langdocien (Peter Johnson)

It's very hot.

I'm sat on a large, typically Languedocian balcony high above a typically Langdocian street, drinking a glass of the local rosé, while Mrs J. is watching a French quiz show on TV inside the flat, as she does each night to improve her already excellent language skills.

I'm just chilling out. It's the last week of this southern chaleur as, on Saturday, we'll be heading northwards. It's been a great vacation. The temperature has been lovely - in the mid-thirties throughout our time on the Italian and French riverias, and during the first week in Montpellier. This week it's mainly been high twenties but that'll do! It seems like ages since we were in Yorkshire.

Travels, Things Quantum and Work Psychology

Villa in Riva del Garda, Italy. (Peter Johnson)

I'm starting to feel a little like a character in a 1960s euro-movie. I'm sat in bed in a hotel on the Italian riviera, auburn-haired woman asleep by my side (ok, it's the wife but let's not spoil the simile). We have driven here from Sheffield, via Operation Stack on the M20, delayed Eurotunnel trains and illegal immigrants in Calais. We stopped for a night in Troyes in  the Champagne department of France, and the next day drove to wonderful Geneva, Switzerland where we spent a lovely evening.

After queuing for ages to get through the Mont Blanc tunnel the following day, we made it into Italy and were presented with the challenge of the busy (and a little scary!) Friday afternoon A4 Autostrada traffic around Milan, Bergamo and Bresica. By early evening we had made it to our little hotel on the edge of Lake Garda.

It's Complicated

Does politics fit into the techno(logy), psycho(logy) and socio(logy) brief of this blog? Yes of course it does - especially in the latter category.

So I guess you are now appraised of the fact that I'm going to bang on about politics for the next few hundred words. If that's an unpleasant thought, you'd better click away now.

Isn't it funny that, especially during and since the recent UK general election, everyone thinks that their punditry matters. That'll be the democratising power of the internet I suppose - even if this supposed pluralism is largely an illusion. Power exists even here.

So to politics and the future.

Still Here

Christ Church Meadows, Oxford. Peter Johnson

Oh, hello!

I've been away from this space for a little while, and I thought I'd pop in to see how things are in the worlds of ITSM and work psychology.

I typed in #ITSM in Twitter and noted that the sector is chugging along as usual; front line service desk types still looking for deterministic and formulaic solutions to complex fuzzy people problems.

Hmm.

Freedom Now - Or how to stifle business innovation via corporate IT

For around fifteen years I worked on the other side of that veil of separation that is known in corporate environments as the IT service desk. On the employee side of the service desk you have the ordinary 'business users'. Here be folk who are simply trying to do their jobs: customer service agents, pricing analysts, underwriters, engineers. Their drivers are the usual human things; to get the job done with the minimum of fuss, achieve business goals in order to help with their career ambitions, or keep their jobs, or to go home with the sense of a job well done.

All of this activity above involves (or at least should involve) contributing to the overall business objectives of profit and growth. The customer service agents do this by helping retain customers and to please them such that they recommend the firm to others, pricing analysts help to keep the organisation focused on selling profitable products, underwriters make risk decisions favourable to the bottom line and engineers build the infrastructure that the company's services run upon.

These various workers use tools to help in their travails, and these are myriad. However in the information age they will largely be IT based. This, then brings us to the other side of the curtain;  that shadowy authoritarian world behind the impenetrable boundary of the IT service desk.

Deep Thought: Existentialism, Lumiere and IT service

Jean-Paul Sartre addressing students at La Sorbonne, May 1968 Claude Dityvon

Today I'll be mainly blogging about philosophy. It’s a viscous subject, especially for those who don’t roll that way naturally, but it’s the method by which we get to the deepest understanding of things and I guess it is for that reason that it will always be there, behind the scenes; at the back of things . Anyway, in this piece I hope to use philosophy to arrive at insights about my work approach Lumiere, and a little bit about work in the IT service industry. We love a bit of diversity here!