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Loading ...5 Canadians who make this a great country to work in IT
With Canada Day coming up tomorrow, I thought it’s an appropriate time to celebrate some of the individuals that I see making a difference in this sector. Yes, I’m leaving lots of people out and this list could probably have been a lot longer, but how many role models do you need anyway? Aspire to match the achievements of this handful of all-stars and you’ll be far ahead of anyone else in your field:
1. Reuven Cohen: Cloud computing has been the biggest trend of the last two years, and Reuven has been at the forefront of developing standards, community and a greater understanding of both the technology and the business issues.
2. Catherine Boivie: She helped found the CIO Association of Canada, she’s formed alliances with European IT organizations and continues to contribute her experiences as a front-line technology decision-maker to her peers whenever possible.
3. Rick Claus: He works for Microsoft, but the IT Pro advisor (and my Ignite Your Career Webcast series co-host) avoids the hard-sell approach in favour of identifying opportunities to help developers and IT managers educate each other about software, business best practices and career-building.
4. Mark Kuznicki: ChangeCamp has been the most influential event among public sector employees in years, creating an ongoing dialogue about what the idea of “open government” really means. We were thrilled to have him take part in Lac Carling this year.
5. CATA’s John Reid and ITAC’s Bernard Courtois: This is a tie because while they compete as association leaders, they share an agenda that’s consultative, policy-driven and collaborative with the federal government. If it’s a national issue that affects the well-being of Canadian high-tech organizations, John and Bernard are there.
Wishing everyone a great holiday. I’ll be taking a few days off but will be back on Monday.
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(3 votes, average: 6.33 out of 10) Loading ...Why Nortel’s death is a bigger deal than Michael Jackson’s
In an age of e-mail, comments, wikis and forums, it’s kind of a shock when someone actually takes the time to call us by telephone. It’s even more surprising when they call to complain about a story that may or may not concern them personally.
The call in question was about Nortel, and in particular IT World Canada’s coverage of it. Why, the reader asked us, are we not more up in arms about the company’s demise, and why the company was not saved. Why, he wondered, is the mainstream media in Canada more focused on Michael Jackson’s death at 50 than the collapse of a Canadian technology icon that stood for some 114 years?
This isn’t something I’m prepared to dismiss easily, even though we published at least 4,000 words on the Nortel situation a week ago, launched our interactive timeline and blogged regularly about it. Without putting words in this particular reader’s mouth (I didn’t talk to him directly, but his feedback was passed onto me), I think it hints at our attitude as an organization towards Nortel. Yes, we’re presenting the facts, and we’re trying to cover all the angles of interest to our communities, but perhaps we aren’t doing enough to mourn what Nortel meant to the Canadian IT industry as a whole.
From a strictly business standpoint, our focus at the moment is on Nortel’s enterprise customers, who are probably spending time right now going over contingency plans and second-guessing their decisions not to go with Cisco, Avaya or some other provider of telecommunications equipment. But there’s more to this than a business story. There’s a human story about the thousands of people Nortel employed. These professionals, in some cases, moved in and out of the company to found new startups of their own, to become internal IT managers at corporate enterprises, or contributed to a host of non-IT industries.
Nearly everyone I spoke to about this story over the last week knows someone who once worked at Nortel, or is related to someone who once worked at Nortel. Several people had stories to share about how the company’s misfortunes affected their friends and family’s personal finances. Having seen the ups and downs of corporate restructuring several times in my career, I’m amazed at the Nortel staff who stayed on through one scandal or round of downsizing after another, still committed to the technology roadmap and their clients’ success.
With Nortel as we know it probably coming to an end, there’s a sense that we’ll never see a technology giant of this size in Canada again, and that includes Research In Motion. Though this may be true, I believe in the talent pool of Canadian technology professionals who occupied Nortel’s offices over the last century. Even if the corporation which served as an organizing principle for that talent base disappears, I believe the talent will find another home. Perhaps the government could have done more to save it, but with GM already on its plate I question its ability to deal with all the governance and managerial issues.
Nortel is a part of Canadian history but that does not mean it is now a part of our past. We at IT World Canada regret the job losses, the customer problems and the tainted image of Canada’s technology reputation its ruin creates. We don’t want Nortel to rest in peace. If nothing else, we want it to live on in pieces.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: IT cost management in about five minutes
No idea who this guy works for, or the context of his presentation, but it strikes me as a useful model that could be adapted by other IT managers faced with making a similar set of arguments. Also not sure about the person referenced at the start of the clip, but I love the intro and outro music.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...A picture of Nortel that tells thousands of words
As we’ve been chasing the impact and implications of the Nortel asset sale sell-off, you can’t help but look back at what the company has been doing over the last 100-odd years. To get a little more focused in scope, we recently created an integrated Nortel timeline that looks at financial results since the late 1990s and linked them to the stories we wrote during that period. This image isn’t clickable, so to see the real thing visit our new Nortel section and bookmark it as we continue to develop our coverage of this story.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...SAP chief customer officer Ed Lange offers reflections to ITAC
Last night I joined a hoard of technology executives at ITAC’s Annual Chairs’ Dinner, which caps off a lot of the activities the vendor association conducts over the course of the year. They celebrated the IT Hero Awards (I was there because I was a judge); they paid tribute to outgoing chair Bob Courteau of SAP; and they hosted SAP Americas chief customer officer Ed Lange as keynote speaker.
You could argue that every employee in an organization like SAP should be a chief customer officer – particularly after a series of maintenance fee decisions that created an uproar – but Lange (who is also considered an executive vice-president) impressed me by talking more like a genuine advocate than the usual corporate sales guy. Like anyone who gives a keynote speech in 2009, he started out by commenting on the bleak IT spending landscape, the global economic troubles and the dire feelings of uncertainty and frustration among the Fortune 500. He followed up, however, with a couple of interesting conclusions I think are worth sharing.
“No matter what customer you go to talk to day, the No. 1 issue they cite is the cost. The cost, the cost, the cost, the cost, the cost,” Lange said. “The other thing they say is, ‘We’re looking for leadership from you. We want to partner with you.”
To Lange, that means not just thinking of customers on a sales-quarter-end basis but keeping in mind their long-term needs and issues. “They’re questioning the fundamental model on which we’ve operated for decades,” he said.
The second thing Lange said he’s learned is not to be put off by customers who cry poor. “Cost and innovation are not mutually exclusive,” he said. “When someone tells me it’s too expensive, they’re asking me to innovate around cost.” Maybe that means offering a deeper discount until the recession rebounds, or offering more products on an on-demand basis. Maybe it means unbundling something that could be more affordable as a point product.
Finally, Lange looked around the room and said, “I see all kinds of companies here tonight. We’ve got Intel, Microsoft, HP, and so on. All of us like to talk to the customer as if we’re the only ones they’re dealing with,” he said. “We need to work better with other vendors.” He didn’t use the words integration or interoperability, but that’s surely what he meant. And he’s right.
My only criticism of Lange’s speech is that he didn’t take the next step and offer any suggestions on how those in the audience could put these principles into action. Maybe the job of a chief customer officer is to simply provide a feedback mechanism. Maybe the IT managers he’s talking to aren’t spelling out how they want things to change. Or maybe this is a conversation that is only beginning. I hope those at the ITAC event last night, and all those who didn’t – will join in.
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(4 votes, average: 7.75 out of 10) Loading ...Three questions for John Swainson, CEO, Computer Associates (CA)
Last week I had the opportunity sit down with John Swainson, CEO of CA Inc., to discuss pretty much anything related to enterprise IT. I’ll be publishing a more in-depth version of our interview soon on ComputerWorld Canada, but here’s a sneak peak at some of the highlights:
ComputerWorld Canada: CA has put a big focus on enterprise clients for its software, but as a Canadian you know that this country is largely made up of small and medium enterprises. How well does your strategy translate?
John Swainson: To some degree, smaller or medium-sized businesses are going to outsource a lot of this capability to others. Network management is a good case in point. Large enterprises may choose to aggregate bandwidth and do their own network management. In other cases, people are going to turn to Bell and Telus and say, “I want you to manage this for me, and this is the service level I expect.” I actually see that more of the demand for smaller and medium business will go on the service providers than businesses themselves. And that’s our approach. We’re not trying to sell complex or sophisticated tools to companies that don’t want complex or sophisticated tools. We would sell it more to Rogers, Bell, whatever and let them provide the service levels. And frankly, that’s how I think utility will evolve over time. I think that for small businesses and perhaps medium-sized businesses too, they will see service providers provide more and more of the IT infrastructure for them. And it will be the largest computing users – the banks, the government agencies, people like that — who will retain their large IT departments, because they are doing things that are unique and different and need to be customized to their service model.
CWC: You came to CA when the company was in turmoil. To what extent have you managed to turn things around?
JS: I think we’ve done a good job of stabilizing the business and restoring our credibility with customers. My dialogue with customers now is very different than it was four and half years ago when I joined the firm. I think we have the same challenges now that any other company has in our space – not unique and different ones, but those challenges are being relevant in a rapidly evolving marketplace and making sure we can add value at a time when people place a premium on a fast payback. We have all the same issues that everyone else has, but the good news is we don’t’ have any unique issues of our own.
CWC: How would you describe the culture you have at CA today?
JS: Cultures are something that take a logn time to change. I’m not sure how to answer that, except to say that the organization that we’ve build and are building at CA is a very different organization than what we had five years ago. It’s an organization that I hope is based on trust, that’s based on performance, that’s based on people that all want to be focused on this set of customers and set of customer problems, and that believe in what the company is doing. We’ve had dramatic change in terms of the management ranks and personnel ranks of the company, and we now have a position where we have low attrition, high morale, high focus on what we’re doing. And we have to keep that going.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The unanswered questions from Lac Carling 2009
We were worried no one would tweet. But they did.
Last week’s Lac Carling Congress marked a departure for the 13-year-old event in many ways, but the greatest innovation this year was our decision to make use of Twitter during the live Q&A portion of the sessions. Flanking either side of the main stage we set up giant screens where the Twitter feed for Lac Carling would show up, and guests were allowed to “tweet” their thoughts in addition to the usual method of simply raising their hand and asking for a microphone.
“At last, you get to turn on your BlackBerry and cell phones!” I joked to the crowd, adding “if we don’t get a lot of posts, that’s okay. Lac Carling isn’t about changing government overnight. It’s about creating a new kind of dialogue in the public sector.”
Over the next three days we did see people trying this model out. The biggest challenge turned out to be how often we could go to the Twitter questions and how often we should respond to people who raised their hands. Inevitably, not everything was answered.
With that in mind, I thought I’d publish some of the questions that are still on the table, which might help inform the direction of Lac Carling 2010. In the meantime, I’d also be interested in any comments that address the issues below – either at the bottom of this post or, yes, on Twitter.
@david_tallan Props for Toronto’s 211 service. Can it be rolled out nationally?
@davidjonah can the BC model for ID be incorporated with Open ID and cannot Canada set the lead in this ASAP?
@peterdcowan Are gov civil servants being authorized to use web20 tools in their daily work?
@dankei International Panel; some progress made. What is biggest barrier to going much wider?
@alex_butler How do you get the top tier to take this (Web 2.0) seriously?
@MsAlexandraB How do we create common value-based social media performance objectives and outputs for the public service?
@MarjAkerley What is the biggest risk you are afraid of for full external engagement (with Web 2.0 tools)?
@peterdcowan What are some of the key barriers to government as a participatory platform?
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: A Euro bank’s IT director explains his mission
Not sure why the audio was so poor on this clip that it required the use of subtitles, but as an interview with a senior technology executive it provides some interesting points on the strategic use of a dashboard, which is commonly discussed in Canada but not often implemented, as far as I can tell.
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(5 votes, average: 7 out of 10) Loading ...The one part of eHealth Ontario worth saving
Smart Systems for Health was a failure. eHealth Ontario has been a fiasco. Perhaps one more rebranding will do the trick – Ontario HealthTech, anyone?
I’ve been reluctant to touch on this topic, in part because I feel guilty for not following it more carefully. Three years ago, I attended a conference here in Toronto where Michael Connolly, then the president of Smart Systems for Health Agency (SSHA), outlined changes in governance that were supposed to give the agency more freedom to do its work.
“Nobody was in charge,” explained Michael Connolly, SSHA’s CEO. “(Health and Long-Term Care Minister George Smitherman) wanted to know who to talk to about e-health, but there was no one person.”
The framework will see the creation of a formal e-health program in Ontario led by an e-health council composed of industry practitioners, Connolly said. The council will have a secretariat within the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care which will be responsible for policies, planning, developing a business architecture for e-health projects and setting standards. E-health system development and maintenance work will move out of the ministry and into the SSHA, which will have more flexibilty than it has enjoyed in the past, Connolly said.
Why this didn’t prove viable I can’t say, but later that same year the Toronto Star, which has continued to provide the closest scrutiny around Ontario’s e-health challenges, published a highly critical report that suggested Smart Systems was more or less doomed. Someone in the provincial government must have been reading the paper that day, because eventually the whole thing was quietly shut down. eHealth Ontario was to be the phoenix that rose out of Smart Systems’ ashes.
Now that Premier Dalton McGuinty has replaced Dr. Alan Hudson as chair of eHealth Ontario, it’s hard to imagine a new team getting the kind of political and public support necessary to advance that remains an important agenda. In any other kind of organization or industry, the lack of integration and manual processes in health care would be considered highly unproductive, not to mention detrimental to quality service. Of all the issues facing Ontarians, nothing resonates more powerfully than health care, and if statisticians are to be believed, nothing is going to become more expensive. Some estimates have indicated that some 70 per cent of public sector spending will be focused on health care by 2017. Ontario will likely represent a large chunk of that money.
Amid all the clamour about untendered contracts for highly paid consultants and gossip about tea and Choco Bites, it’s critical that someone come forward with a vision for e-health in Ontario. Yes, those responsible for fiscal mismanagement and corruption need to be punished, but the work to improve patient outcomes should not be among the casualties of this scandal. Technology won’t solve all the problems in our hospitals and clinics, but it promises to ease information flow that could make for better decisions from the doctor’s office to the ER. If the word “eHealth” is now tainted in Ontario, that’s fine. Stop calling it eHealth. Instead, just call it health care done right.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Microsoft resorts to big, bad, Bing bribes!
The following arrived at my office today. I must say it’s a first. Google hasn’t sent me anything, not even a bunch of chocolates — unless you count the thousands of successful search results.
