I have been arguing already a few times before why I think now is exactly the right time for a more careful, considerate approach to information technology. There are many arguments, many pros and cons, lots of items to write on this blog. But every now and then, you bump into a devastating demonstration that renders all discussion obsolete. Fed up with e-mail overflow? Blaming e-mail for managing a 1000 issues in that same, shallow way? Using a tone in your e-mails that you would never use when talking person-to-person? Responding a bit too quickly to e-mails without taking the right time to formulate your answers?

Your worries are over.

Now there is Real Snail Mail, the worlds first webmail service using live snails. The good people at boredomresearch, Bournemouth University, take care of a well-trained staff of 8 snails that each carry a 20mm RFID tag on their shell. Incoming messages are collected at the dispatch centre at one end of their closure. Once a message is loaded on the chip, it will be carried around by the assigned snail until it happens to reach the drop off point. Here the message is collected and forwarded to its final destination. The fastest average delivery time is currently achieved by Francis, a gorgeous brunette snail that only needs 2.22 days to bring the message across. This is in sharp contrast to the pathetic 10.43 days of her macho colleague Sean (codename ‘Agent 007’, guess his glory days are a bit over indeed).

As I said, further discussion is useless. Just think about Real Snail Mail the next time you start up your e-mail program, and it may already help you to approach things just a little bit differently. Then again, you could consider to actually use this brilliant, very contemporary service (after all, it’s RFID, it’s cloud and it’s definitely green) in real life. Send yourself and your team members the project plan, IT strategy outline, specifications document or design through Real Snail Mail and take the time in between to contemplate your results. The results can only improve, because you have injected the right dose of ‘slow’ to take some distance and look into the matter from different perspectives.

I sure hope that the success won’t put too much pressure on those poor snails. Already, their bosses are thinking about scaling up. This will no doubt introduce the concept of industralised snail farms and before we know it management consultants will be applying Lean Six Sigma to eliminate even the last minute of waste in the tank. For now, champion snails like Agatha (agent 006) and Reginald (agent 012) couldn’t care less. One of them may be carrying my e-mail right now, but that freshly placed marigold looks so much more tasteful. Could be another hour of just bites, rather than bytes.

Slow IT is not only about a renewed, careful approach to creating technology solutions. It is also about our own, personal challenges in using technology, in dealing with the distractions and temptations of ubiquitous information. Thanks to the Internet, Blackberries and Smart Phones, we are always online, always in touch with the high pulse of the connected world.

And it is addictive too. If you happen to have teenagers in the house, you know what it means to be discomgoogolated. If I would ask my 18 year old daughter to choose between MSN and oxygen, no doubt she would go for MSN. Just to be one the safe side, after all, breathing in and breathing out is more like a theoretical concept, isn’t it?

When practicing ZEN meditation, many people find it very difficult to spend an hour thinking about nothing. But practice – sooner or later – pays off and an empty, slowed-down mind is a prerequisite to become enlightened.  In the same way, we will need a lot of tough training exercise before we can disconnect ourselves from the madness on the web, anytime, anywhere we want it. But there is no alternative, except when we think that being permanently discomgoogolated is something that cannot be avoided. A bit like breathing in and breathing out (although my daughter would diagree).

I received an excellent link from Jon Mulholland, pointing to Getting Real, a book published by Chicago-based web development company 37signals. Interesting company this is (thank God they did not call themselves 42signals, think we all got that message by now). They strive to create ‘the best web-based software products possible with the least number of features necessary’ and also they are proud to announce that their products ‘do less than the competition ‘.

Quite a big thing, simplification.

And no doubt one of the most difficult qualities to create. Especially in Information Technology, where we are easily overwhelmed by all the features, triggers, widgets, gadgets and information flows that we potentially could include in our solutions. And they are tempting too, all these bells and whistles, especially if we did not really take the time to contemplate what the solution really needs. So we turn to eye candy to satisfy our short-term reflexes and soon we find ourselves absorbed in nitty gritty details and challenges that just don’t make any difference.

These guys from 37signals, they certainly drink their own champagne.  Browse around a bit at their website and you start to get the picture of what they mean with simple. And furthermore, read the book. If you want it, you can get it delivered as a good old-fashioned paperback and go through it start to finish. And I although I know you don’t mind spending quality time at all, some of you may be happy to hear that the book consists of small chapters. Indeed a great airplane book (their words, not mine…).

Alternatively, you can read the book online for free. This gives me the opportunity to be back on some crucial subjects in the forthcoming weeks. Build less. Ignore Details Early On. Race to Running Software. Rinse and Repeat:  just a few examples of the principles in Getting Real that are interesting in the context of Slow IT. If only because many of them seem to contradict with the slow approach.

This will be a crucial question that I will try to address together with you in future blog-items: in the era of Web 2.0 we are seeing more and more software that is available at a very early stage of development, never seems to be finished, and always continues to evolve. There is some overrated heroism in the idea of the perpetual beta.  But is it really a sign of rushed sloppiness, the inability to commit to agreed results and an alibi for not thinking before you start? Or is it the only way to really understand the requirements of the business and produce systems that are more robust and better tested? Or could both be true?

Let’s try to find out. Follow this blog.

In the meantime, I would like to point you to one specific chapter in the book that contains an important slow message. In ‘Alone Time’ the authors argue that interrupts are the natural enemy of effective work. It resonates with my own, earlier experiences as a software engineer: I could produce huge piles of quality code, as long as I could work uninterrupted for a longer period of time. As soon as I was sitting at the office and people would walk in and out, asking questions, starting discussions, even bringing coffee, my productivity went down the drain. Eventually I preferred to work early in the morning or – much better for me – late in the evening.

Interesting enough, this is probably why open source software is often produced so effectively : typically the team consists of members that don’t share the same location or time zone. The team may be distributed across the world and only use the Internet to communicate and synchronise results.  There is an unexpected advantage to that: the team members will have a lot of alone time, much more than they would have when working at the same offices.

And in many cases indeed, some decent alone time is all you need to create real progress.

Of course, if you are at the same offices, you can still agree to be complete incommunicado – for example between 10 AM and 2 PM. No coffee rounds, no meetings, no phone calls, no emails, no mobile phones.

Because somewhere, sometime, somebody needs to do the work.

Probably like many of you, I was touched when I first learned of Carl’s now famous example of speed-parenting. A few years ago, he was so obsessed with speed and efficiency that he initially liked the idea of One-Minute bedtime stories. Carl read about it in a newspaper, impatiently standing in line at an airport gate. While figuring out how to get the complete series as fast as possible through Amazon, he suddenly realised that things had gone way too far. Being a father of a two-year-old son, he already found himself involved in nightly confrontations, his son fancying long, carefully told stories and Carl trying to find the shortest stories and the most efficient way to tell them (you know, why not have Snow White and the 3 Dwarfs…?). All because emails were waiting, calls had to be made, decisions had to be taken and every minute seemed to count.

The experience changed his life and since then, Carl has been one of the proponents of the Slow Movement: people that believe that the important things in life need to be done at the right pace, with careful dedication and a genuine love for foundation and quality. Where this is already having a profound influence on cooking and dining (Slow Food actually started the whole movement), industrial design, travel and parenting, I believe that the world of Information Technology (IT) is now very, very ready for a proper dose of slow. I am convinced that 2009 will be the year of Slow IT.

Here’s why.

Businesses depend on technology. Actually, nowadays no business transformations exist without the crucial, enabling role of information technology. But to many people, technology is difficult to understand and evolving at an intimidating speed. No industry has produced so many buzzwords and nowhere else, trends come and go so easily. Nevertheless, you don’t need to be a professional to see the potential of technology: especially now, solutions are readily available through the Internet and in our private lives – buying things, communicating with others, being at leisure – we know all too well what technology can do for us.

It makes us even more impatient in applying information technology to address our business challenges. On the other hand, we don’t have the time. Many IT departments are kicked around by the circumstances: fighting fires wherever they appear, dealing with botched-up, antiquated systems, heterogeneous infrastructures, incompatible interfaces, undocumented specifications and shattered, often overlapping applications. Between two breaths, business and IT people may find a few moments to discuss requirements, ideas, plans (speed-dating, really). Then it is back to the usual.

Some may turn to workarounds to deal with the situation. The business side may create its own, isolated solutions. And they are likely to add to the un-integrated mess that needs to be dealt with tomorrow.

For all the wrong reasons, organisations may start to practice agile development. Not because they want a better understanding of the real business needs and a more intimate alignment between business and IT, but because they think the approach delivers fast results without the need to carefully understand, plan and design. Put it in a time-box and all your worries will be over.

It is just a matter of time before we will have the One-Minute IT-strategy.

Especially in 2009, where on one hand the budget for IT is under pressure and on the other hand technology provides the tools to address the downturn, the need is greater than ever to slow down. Not in terms of doing everything at a snail’s pace (thank you, SlowPlanet home page). Much more in terms of striking the right balance between a well-architected, carefully crafted technology platform and ad-hoc, opportunistic solutions that solve the business issues of today.

Among many other things, first of all it is about really sitting together to discuss the IT strategy of the organisation. Not in a rushed workshop of just a few hours in which half of the participants does not show up – there is always an emergency somewhere – and the other half is checking Blackberries or running in and out to answer phone calls (the latter being one of the most saddening examples of the way we let ourselves being ruled by technology). Strategy is crucial to the future of the company. It deserves the proper amount of dedication, also in the preparation and the finishing process.

This is the world of Slow IT, the art of careful technology. And as 2009 is bound to be a transformational year anyway, I am convinced that a renewed respect for properly timed and crafted technology solutions will be the unmistakable trend.

There is much more to tell about Slow IT. So much more that I thought it would be a good idea to write a book about it. And although I cannot already tell when the book will be finished (it’s ready when it’s ready, remember), I will be most happy to share some developing insights with you through this blog.

And thank you for reading this item, even if you got it through your Blackberry on a late Saturday evening.