(3 votes, average: 10 out of 10)
Loading ...YouTube Fridays: Bill Gates lookalike explains cloud computing
If you don’t have the time (or patience) to explain to a CFO or CEO how hosted data and applications over the Internet works, this five-minute overview by Christopher Barnatt, author of ExplainingComputers.com, gives a pretty thorough look at the key services, benefits and issues associated with this concept. Includes discussions of software- and hardware-as-a-service, too. But seriously: Am I the only one that sees the resemblance to a certain software CEO here? Take away the British accent and this guy could be running the show at Redmond.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The ins and outs of Google’s I/O 2008 event
It usually takes a long time for a developer conference to attract a critical mass of interest and talent, but Google, in the first year of its I/O event, has managed to create a must-do item on every ISV’s calendar.
What Google brings to the table, of course, is not necessarily its product portfolio (although it has that) but a massive audience which it has built up through its search engine. If its products were already as successful as its search engine promoting the developer tools could be unnecessary. But I/O 2008 marks an important juncture in the Web firm’s history: this is the moment when it becomes less of a consumer resource and more of an axis around which the entire IT industry would orbit.
Google would never put it this way. The most revealing thing about I/O is not the black-and-binary dot T-shirts, the iPhone-like Android prototype or the marquee customer, MySpace. It’s the transition away from branded offerings to standalone names: Gears instead of Google Gears, OpenSocial instead Google OpenSocial. This is a posture meant to facilitate a more community-oriented mindset among developers, but don’t kid yourself. Google will be ultimately responsible for the success or failure of these tools as application enablers.
In some ways I/O 2008 reminds me of JavaOne, but despite Sun Microsystems’ partnership with Google there are some obvious differences. With Google, for one, the network is not only the computer; the browser is the operating system. And when you’re primarily focused on hosting applications online via cloud computing, there’s no need to invite Intel and HP (or Sun) to talk about their hardware. Instead, I/O is more like a second-line launch for Gears, Android, OpenSocial and AppEngine. For ISVs, the conference is the equivalent of Google’s grand opening for business partners and customers.
While the Android demo got a lot of the initial attention, it won’t mean much to the outside world until OEMs start producing some actual handsets. Gears is important, because it’s in the running with Adobe’s AIR as a way of creating apps that run offline as well as on. OpenSocial’s new REST (representational state transfer) API is interesting, but will be more interesting once social networking becomes a more mobile activity. The big deal is the opening up (and pricing details) of AppEngine, which will be yardstick by which other cloud computing efforts (including Amazon’s EC2/S3) are measured in the long term. For Google, the cloud is its zone. If it can’t own the market there, its other tools will be merely nice add-ons in someone else’s zone.
IT managers will start paying more attention to events like I/O once they have decided whether they want their applications and infrastructure to live in the cloud, which may also have a bearing on whether more developers do, too. Right now you’ve got many ISVs who are still rooted in the traditional Microsoft world of desktop-oriented programming of traditional productivity and other business software. Google is painting a different picture, of an ISV that focuses on mobility, social networking and working outside the OS. Showing up at future I/O conferences could end up saying a lot about the kind of developer you want to be.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Windows 7’s touch-screen features may not grab office users
It was a relief to hear Microsoft execs say that touch-screen computing, which they demonstrated as part of a sneak peek of Windows 7 this week, will be an alternative to keyboards and mice. Because when you try to replace them, it just doesn’t work.
I say this after a recent evening spent trying to help my wife register for her baby shower at Sears. We only had a few minutes before the store closed, but the salesperson insisted it would be better if we set up our account ourselves, via their handy-dandy kiosk. We duly stood before a screen which had an image of a keyboard on it, and tried to walk through the seven or eight necessary steps to start registering. Each time we tried to press the “keys,” however, we often found our fingers connected with the wrong letters, and the melodic sounds it made with each point of contact led me to wonder if this kind of interface would be better for our future child than ourselves.
In the video of the Windows 7 posted on Microsoft’s Vista Team Blog, however, the experience looks a lot more smooth. It shows a pair of human hands gliding effortlessly over a laptop screen resizing or moving around photos, scrolling through a digital map and even tapping out a tune on an image of piano keys. As a way of priming the market, it’s a nice little performance.
Consider, however, the idea of introducing such an interface to Windows users, who have shown such a resistance to change in connection with their operating system that thousands have signed petitions to save the XP version. In fact, navigation and unfamiliarity with the UI are among the biggest complaints surrounding Vista. Is this really a road Microsoft is prepared to walk down?
The other knock against touch-screen Windows is the relative failure of tablet computing, which would have been a natural hardware platform on which to run such capabilities. Despite some truly ingenious designs by OEMs, these devices have failed to grab much market share, and they’ve done nothing to displace laptops as the mobile computer of choice. For a device without a keyboard, the argument for multi-touch becomes easier, but asking users to choose between two different UIs is more complicated than it’s worth.
As it stands now, the touch-screen capabilities of Windows 7 seems strictly confined to fun, consumer types of activities. For a business audience – where Microsoft and desktop vendors could really use a lift – the applications aren’t obvious. One interesting concept might be a way for users to rearrange by hand the menus of the programs they use every day. Think of a dashboard, for example, where you could shove up the sales leads above the “orders received” area. Imagine a content management tool that synched with Windows 7 which allowed you to manipulate elements of a Web site, or a database that displayed results and imput field according to where you dragged them.
It would be a mistake to write off Windows 7’s touch-screen capabilities before the product ever emerges, but Microsoft will have to do more thinking about why people will move to this kind of interface. I don’t know how long that might take, but I’m sure eventually someone will put their finger on it.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...How much IT education does an MBA student need?
M.S. Krishnan knows all about the IT-business disconnect.
I recently had a conversation with the professor and co-author of the recently published New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-Created Value Through Global Networks. At the end of our interview, he asked me what I thought of the book’s premise – which is that companies must change their business models to source what they need from suppliers around the world and to treat all customers as individuals, not a segment. I told him I kept coming back to a reference he and C.K. Prahalad make in a chapter about the IT impediments to growth, which looked at the root cause of the conflicts between technology managers and their departmental colleagues.
“The problem starts right from the business schools where these senior business executives are groomed,” they write. “Less than 15 per cent of the top business schools in the United States mandate a course in the role of information technology in enabling business processes and fuelling business innovation and efficiency as part of their core MBA curriculum . . . in some cases, the business schools also end up offering courses that are so totally focused on technology that MBA students do not find them relevant.”
I don’t know which schools those might be, but I can’t imagine they would be all that relevant to computer science students, either. As the next round of future IT managers, CIOs and developers graduate this spring, they no doubt have it drilled into them that an understanding of business objectives is key to their career success. What is far less certain is how much MBA grads need to know about technology, and whether their degree program gave them the grounding in it they need.
Let’s start with a few assumptions here: most MBA grads probably have a BlackBerry, smart phone or other mobile computing device. They understand and appreciate the power of information access IT brings them. Over the course of their education they have probably had to connect with each other online, whether through tutorials or in chat rooms. A great deal of the business processes that facilitated their registration and course selection might have happened through the kind of Web-based interface that will greet them when they take on their first job in an enterprise. So far, so good.
What MBA students may not have experienced is the disruptive nature of a technological change to an existing process or the introduction of a new process. This is where being a power user makes little difference. If the underlying platforms aren’t providing what you need, your actual equipment is secondary. This is when you get pulled into meetings with technical staff you’ve avoided previously, and where the nuts and bolts of putting together a piece of software seem like minor steps towards an overall profitability or efficiency goal.
The balance that Krishnan and Prahalad hint at in their book around IT education for business managers comes down to this: MBA students need to learn how to clearly define and request what they need to move a company forward. They need to understand enough about technology to know what kind of timeline, scope and resources to expect when they make their request. And they need empathy towards the technology professionals who act upon those requests. Attaining this might not get them on the honour roll, but it will absolutely put them in their future IT department’s hall of fame.
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(2 votes, average: 7 out of 10) Loading ...Facebook offers a primer in effective site redesign planning
Drop-down menus. Tabbed browsing. A content management tool. Come on, people: it’s not like Facebook is reinventing the wheel here.
As the social networking service prepares more than 70 million users for a site redesign, many people are bracing for a backlash. What the outcome of such a backlash will be is less certain. Will users delete their accounts? Not likely. Will they move over to a more cluttered competitor, like MySpace? Doubtful, since they have that option already. Although the redesign will no doubt inspire many complaints, Facebook should be smart enough to use such feedback as an opportunity to further fine-tune its product offering.
I have been involved in Web site designs for portals that attract far less than .05 per cent of Facebook’s install base, and I can tell you that people can become particularly vehement about the placement of a navigation bar, a logo or even a copyright notice. In Facebook’s case, it is dealing with the kind of problem a lot of IT managers would like to have: it has come up with a Web-based application that people actually love, and the trick now is to increase its functionality while making it easier to use.
For developers, obviously, there is a chance the redesign will mean reduced exposure of their applications on member’s main pages. Boo-hoo! Talk to the many ISVs who wonder why customers don’t take better advantage of the tools they get for free in packaged software applications. (I don’t think IDC or Gartner has ever bothered, but it would be interesting to how the percentage of unused features in a program like, say, Microsoft Word compares to the percentage of unused applications on Facebook.) The key to Facebook’s redesign will be whether it offers users an easier way to search or be alerted to the applications that would be most appropriate to them, rather than inundating them with options.
What Facebook really provides is the consumer equivalent of an executive dashboard – status updates, the ability to add or peruse new information and to organize and communicate with their network. Instead of business intelligence, it’s social intelligence, but dashboards aren’t effective if they can’t be browsed at a glance. Facebook will never have the stark simplicity of Google, but it needs to make decisions about how people prefer to manage their data, just as those involved in a corporate portal project have to adjust their templates accordingly.
The great thing about Facebook’s redesign is that it’s so public, and the company is making a wise move by keeping the redesign as open and transparent as possible. It has created a group on its own platform to discuss the changes, and will be giving users the ability to toggle back and forth between the old version and the new one once it debuts. That’s a lot better than what most office employees are offered, which is a forced-fed redesign of their Web sites or applications without consultation and little preparation for the transition. As case studies go, this should be a valuable one. Facebook became successful by connecting us to our friends. Now it needs to do an even better job of it – without making too many enemies.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: An IT pro applies for work on camera
I’m sure it’s not the first time it’s been done, but Jeffrey White’s approach to finding his next job is certainly a little more unusual than the traditional method of spamming corporations with your resume. You could nit-pick over some points — the pointless globe in the right side of the screen, the fact that he’s obviously reading off a page — but his overall tone is forthright and professional. The question is whether potential employers would see marketing yourself on YouTube as savvy or desparate. My advice would be to offer something more specific about your background — maybe a quick anecdote about a recent successful project — rather than a standard commercial-style script. If you’re going to put yourself on YouTube, give us something to see.
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(1 votes, average: 8 out of 10) Loading ...Curse of the data centre drones
You can’t really blame people for not wanting to work in a data centre. They’re often cold, full of malfunctioning equipment and thisclose to being outsourced anyway. No wonder staffing costs are such a bitch.
I was talking earlier today with Venkat S. Devraj, CTO of run-book automation firm Stratavia in Denver, Col., which recently released the results of a survey conducted on its behalf by Enterprise Management Associates about problems in the data centre. Staffing was the biggest issue, followed by low skill sets, the burden of manual tasks and lots of errors.
According to Devraj, good data centre help is hard to find because running such facilities well often depends on so-called “tribal knowledge” that wouldn’t be available to someone new coming in.
“If you have 10 admins in a group and say, ‘How to do you do task ABC,’ you get 10 different answers,” he says. “What we do is help standardize that. Maybe there should only be three ways of doing these things.”
It’s not that the admins have personal preferences around IT infrastructure configuration (though some do, of course). It’s that patching a HP-UX machine can be a lot different than patching a Windows of Solaris box. Stratavia’s product includes a metadata layer which abstracts all the hardware platforms from the physical servers and is designed to make it easier to patch across the entire data centre without a lot of fiddling around. There’s a certain amount of integration involved – Devraj points out that the software won’t know which systems are production servers or test servers, for example – but there are a number of auto-discovery capabilities.
Like Toronto’s Opalis, Stratavia is trying to take advantage of the surging market for data centre automation even as firms like BladeLogic and Opsware get scooped up by larger players (BMC and HP, respectively). Devraj says run-book automation firms traditionally focused on what he calls simple process orchestration – checking what’s going on, issuing a service ticket to the right team, etc. – and providing a glue to enable technologies from Opsware or BladeLogic.
“The way we differ is by offering intelligent process automation, or decision automation,” he says. “We’re offering an expert engine that leverages that metadata layer to automate more complex tasks. These are not just help desk tasks. These are tier 2, tier 3 problems like systems administration, database administration. Those are the areas that are a huge greenfield.”
This is no doubt true, but whether an expert engine is enough to keep Stratavia from being swept up in the industry consolidation is another story. For now, its products and those of similar firms might make enterprise data centres a bit less stressful work environment. Now if someone could just take the next step to make them into a fun environment. After all the data centre automation is over, we could use a little data centre inspiration, too.
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(3 votes, average: 7 out of 10) Loading ...HP-EDS and the effect on Canada’s CGI
I was out of town and off-duty when HP bought EDS for US$13 billion last week, and the first person I thought of was Serge Godin.
The chairman of CGI, along with his longtime associate Michael Roach, has built up Canada’s most successful technology outsourcing and services firms. After about three decades of focusing on the local market, Godin and Roach have taken CGI Stateside, buying up smaller firms and creating niches in insurance and other vertical markets. They keep racking up new customers and renewal agreements, and what they may lack in name recognition is made up for by revenues. In short, CGI is doing almost everything a company in IT services should be doing if it wants to be a major player.
And then HP changes the game completely.
The EDS acquisition was an admission by HP that you can’t compete with IBM’s Global Services by organic growth alone. It’s also a message to customers who have been watching it buy data centre automation firms and enterprise business application providers that it is bringing on board the kind of expertise to ensure smooth deployments of its expanded product line. For a company like CGI, however, it may be a signal of a bigger shakeout in the services space that could drastically affect its future business plans.
Like IBM, CGI could enjoy a honeymoon period while the HP-EDS merger plays out, offering a more stable (and less distracted) choice of provider to enterprise customers that want to farm out work. In the longer term, though, CGI may find itself increasingly going head to head with competitors who can not only match its competency in IT service delivery but who actually own the products that customers want. Its success or failure will be a measure of how healthy the market for a pure-play outsourcer/service company remains.
Of course, CGI’s not the only one. For some time now I’ve been waiting for Dell, which needs to boost its own enterprise services business, to buy out Computer Science Corp. (CSC), or someone of that ilk. CSC, however, has been mired in the kind of legal muck that once plagued EDS a few years ago, recently settling a case alleging kickbacks to the U.S. government. There’s also Accenture and PricewaterhouseCoopers, but those are more consulting firms than the kind of outsourcing service providers that EDS and CGI have become.
Godin’s entrepreneurial approach makes me sceptical CGI will entertain any takeovers by a major vendor, and its corporate culture is so deeply entrenched it would be difficult to imagine an appropriate match. What it might do, short of developing its own line of servers and software, is to consider a different kind of service offering. IBM is vying with Google and others to dominate the emerging cloud computing market, and so far HP, Dell and the other major outsourcers have stayed out of it. But perhaps a CGI-run cloud would be a compelling extension of the company’s reputation for managing enterprise IT infrastructure, creating a more neutral territory for on-demand type of services. Sure, it would mean building out a lot more data centres. But that would be a lot easier for CGI to do than to build a company that can go up against HP and EDS combined.
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(6 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...A woman who made her way in a computer world
I can count on one hand the number of times my mother accessed the Internet, and I’d still have a few fingers left over. It was among my failures as her son that I never set her up with a decent computer, let alone a broadband connection. Not that she complained, mind you. As far as she was concerned, I was her personal ISP.
“There’s a craft show going on in Toronto next month,” she’d say over the phone. “WWW that for me, will ya?” Google would be relieved that she used the entire World Wide Web, and not just its search engine, as a verb.
It occurs to me that my mother was among the last of her kind in terms of users applying technology to business processes. Yes, she was a Baby Boomer, but she was also among that sizeable portion of the installed base who had never really installed, if you know what I mean. She was afraid of technology and – unlike laters generations who pretend we know what we’re doing with any application or device – was unafraid to voice her concerns about it.
Although she considered raising children her primary mission in life, after my brother and I had been in school for a few years she decided to re-enter the work force. She got a job with a rental office as a bookkeeper, where she was primarily responsible for accounts payable and receivable. It wasn’t long, however, before computers entered the office, and manual ways of doing things were on their way out. Like so many users before (and after) her, my mother resisted the transition.
“I don’t want to use them. I don’t want to learn,” she told me at the time. “I just can’t get this stuff, Shane.” I tried to assure her she could, but it was too late. Her immediate supervisor (whom she disliked) took the requisite computer training and therefore took over some of her favourite duties. She was left with the grunt work, and she resented the technology as much as the staffer who shut her out.
Later, she took a job at a call centre near my hometown, selling everything from books to pantyhose using a customer relationship management system that sounded a lot like Pivotal. “I don’t think I’m going to last a week,” she said, before going on to work there for the better part of seven years. “I don’t think I can do the computer.” By “do the computer,” she meant learn the applications and the operating system. This was someone who had never seen Microsoft Windows, someone who had never even used a word processor, by the year 1999. Her boss (a great one this time) promised her she would not only get the hang of it, but that she would be showing others before too long. He was right.
Susan Lorraine Schick died last week at the age of 59, leaving behind an army of friends and co-workers who were grateful to her for helping them get adjusted to their job. “She didn’t just teach me the computer, she showed me how to sell,” many of them told me at her funeral. Mom never really saw technology as an end in itself. She recognized it for the tool it was and her pride in mastering it was something that few IT managers, unfortunately, will likely experience in the future.
Mom’s success with the computer gave her self-confidence, the respect of her peers and the ability to generate considerable revenue for her company. For all the talk about IT failures being caused by people problems, we seldom look at the people who overcome those problems. To my mother’s great and enduring surprise, she was one of them.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: Neil Young’s JavaOne jam session
I was originally scheduled to attend JavaOne this year, but had to back out due to a family emergency (which will also keep me on light blogging over the next while). Instead, we sent the talented Kathleen Lau, who covered the update on Open Solaris, a development platform called Project Hydrazine and more. There was one other particularly Canadian angle, however: a special guest appearance by Neil Young, who discussed the impact of IT on music. Talk about a case study for the ages.
