Now, what's the first thing you notice in that picture?

Like me, I suspect you might have thought, 'What is that hair doing? It looks like he's got a bald patch!'

And indeed it does. I'd been on an early shift and not washed my hair that morning. Had I seen a photo like this before leaving the house, I'd have revised that decision. As it was I went the whole day before this issue came to light in the photograph.

But if you're particularly eagled eyed, there are other things to spot. For example, you might have twigged that the calendar still says 'January 2007'. Having tied it to an overhanging cable I cannot now untie it again, so it remains stuck in its own little timewarp.

Or you might have very cleverly deduced that my desk is next to a fire escape, since the corner of the door is visible in the shot, as is a fire alarm braille notice.

You may even have realised my PC monitor has its own rear-view mirror, donated by David Sheppard, with which I can see the entire newsroom behind me.

But David, the man who had come to visit me, spotted this:

CMS is the software we use to update our BBC website, and David works for the team which designs and builds it. He'd turned up in our newsroom to find out more about how we use his technology - what the working relationship is between user and software, and what we'd like to see changed or improved. Naturally, the very presence of a big sign questioning the software's reliability was going to draw his attention. I only realised it was still there once he'd sat down next to me, and didn't have the chance to create a distraction and destroy it.

David spent three hours with me, asking me to create a web feature from start to finish (this one) and getting me to describe my every move. In the process it became very clear that I use all sorts of workarounds and tricks that the designers don't even know exist, and are surprised to discover we have cause to use.

It seemed like David learnt a lot of stuff and he went away apparently a very happy man having done his research. But I'd picked up a thing or two as well, during our lunch break and the walk we'd taken around the grounds.

It is well known that within our various online teams there exist at least five or six competing bits of software for building BBC web pages. For example while we use CMS, News and Sport Online use CPS, some radio station and music websites use FLIP, and still others with sillier acronyms can be found elsewhere. At Reading Festival we built pages using a piece of software called HomeSite, and some sites still use the relatively archaic Dreamweaver.

But what amazed me was the discovery that the teams behind each of these are actively working to conquer the market. In other words, they're improving their product with a view to rolling it out to other BBC websites. In yet other words, they're direct rivals with each other!

So we've got teams of BBC technologists huddled in their various corners of London, trying to outdo each other in the quest to be Top Dog. David and his CMS team can claim all the Where I Live websites and parts of CBBC as their kingdom, but David insists CMS has the capability to attract all the other websites, even News and Sport Online.

For the latter, CPS remains king, but David reckons CPS is less flexible and requires more coding by the user. For David and CMS, user-friendliness and ease of use are the priorities, so much so that his latest research is all to do with creating a dead simple interface for the most basic of users. Our newsrooms are littered with radio and TV journalists for whom the web is a frightening monstrosity, so they need gently coercing to get them to contribute to our websites. That is the CMS plan.

But when I pressed David on this, it became clear that he's just one of many Davids all trumpeting their chosen piece of software to us BBC online folk. He admitted that whenever he comes into contact with designers from the other teams, it's all a bit uncomfortable. "It's like, 'Get out of here or I'll set my ferret on you,' when I sit next to them," he said, pulling a wry smile.

Now I don't know what to make of this. Part of me thinks it's brilliant that the BBC has competing teams, each striving to make their web tools the finest in the land, each pushing the boundaries of what we can do. After all, look at most BBC websites and they're smashing - the software is clearly doing pretty well for itself.

But can it really be right that BBC members of staff are having to go up against each other and, ultimately, fight with the goal of putting some of the other lot out of their jobs? If CMS got the nod across the board, one can only assume the CPS, FLIP and other design teams would be handed their P45s. It's the equivalent of BBC Radio Solent deciding to move into our patch, and their web journalists putting me out of a job once everyone goes to their website instead of ours.

Is it better to have five small teams working on five solutions, or one big team working on one solution?