Always on...sometimes
 
Broadband publications continue to land thick and fast. The latest is a freebie from the New Statesman, to which colleagues Simon Roberts and James Crabtree have contributed (both of whom were behind last year's iSociety report on broadband, Fat Pipes, Connected People). As Simon again states, the point about broadband is not so much speed, but more the capability for always there, always on.
 
Maybe that's what we expect from broadband, but so often that's still not the experience. I can have three or four weeks of 'always on', then the connection goes on the blink for a day or two (as happened yesterday and today) and I spend too much time recovering lost connections. The worst case is having to reboot the computer to get the connection back up.  Added to problems generated by the computer itself, this makes for some lost working time more weeks than not.
 
Last year, Nicholas Carr argued in the Harvard Business Review that IT was now a commodity like any other, and compared it to utilities such as electricity. If only broadband were so reliable. When was the last time my lights went out? Apart from spells living in Spain, where the lights tend to go out with alarming regularity, I can only remember two occasions I have experienced this since I was a child (one was the 1987 great storm that swept across southern England, felling thousands of trees). How often do I turn on my taps to find no water? The last time I can remember was in the 1980s, so not too often. These kinds of disruptions only occur with established utilities  under very exceptional conditions in this country. And when they do occur, we are not slow to complain.
 
Whenever I turn up at a research or client site, the enterprise network invariably goes down at some point during the day - and sometimes even stays that way all day - but I'm often assured by management that this is a one-off, a highly unusual occurrence. They look at me quizzically, as if to say: 'This has only happened because you turned up'.  Is this a rationalisation for bad decisions taken (e.g. lack of spending to create reliable systems and networks) , or can we really not do any better?  Meanwhile, employees abandon or put aside work, or do it by hand, only to do it all over again when the system recovers.
 
While my main issue with Carr is his position that the use of information technology is just a technical issue to be addressed by commoditzation, rather than a people issue, I really don't think we're there yet with many of the hardware and software components in the technology chain either.