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Loading ...YouTube Fridays: Fake Larry Ellison discusses ‘Coexistence’
I have no idea where this clip came from or who was behind it, but it’s a send-up of Oracle Corp.’s Fusion strategy that’s almost worth of Saturday Night Live — if SNL writers had any idea what middleware is, that is.
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(4 votes, average: 7.25 out of 10) Loading ...The sweet logic behind SugarCRM’s Tracker feature
All it took was one new feature to see that SugerCRM has a handle on the future of enterprise business applications.
The company this week launched version 5.1 of its flagship open source customer relationship management system. This includes Tracker, which allows IT managers to review who in a company is actually making use of the product, and what specific features they are using most often. This information can be compiled statistically and presented to senior management so that the strategy, or perhaps the training, surrounding the technology can be fine-tuned.
It’s possible there are many other software platforms which have this kind of capability, but no vendor I know of has really bragged about it. Instead, they invest millions in marketing fancy extras to already-functional products that get ignored. A cynic might suggest this happens on purpose, because by not paying to new features users tend to have difficulty adjusting to system upgrades, which leads to more help desk issues, which leads (in many cases) to additional revenue to the vendor through support services.
If companies really see their employees as “assets,” however, it makes sense to provide the same kind of monitoring that you would to your inventory or the performance of your corporate network. Not only would such information make it easier to evaluate the return on your IT investments, it would possibly provide a useful guide to likely adoption of future applications, whether packaged or custom-built.
Although we’re talking about CRM here, the idea of monitoring usage is really like providing business intelligence about your internal software business. We all have such businesses, whether we are in the banking or grocery sectors. What it may not offer is the necessary analytics. SugerCRM might be able tell you how many salespeople pressed a particular button, but it might be harder to figure out why they bypassed others.
This brings up the question of who should be in charge of looking at this data and acting on it. Although IT would probably be interested, this is an example of where it might make more sense for the business owner of a particular department or process powered by an application – in this case, the director of sales – to take responsibility for studying usage patterns. Of course, in the end, sales people should be spending their time selling, not redesigning software, but only actual users will have the day-to-day understanding of what influences on-the-job behaviours.
We tend to say a software deployment is successful if no one complained about it, and provided it functions as it should. Forgotten features, however, can be as debilitating to achieving business objectives as any bugs. I really hope we’ll start to see more features like SugerCRM Tracker. If you’re not actively tracking, you’re losing track.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...How Mozilla’s Ubiquity could make developers of us all
When I was a kid, cutting and pasting was something you did in kindergarten. It’s possible that, 10 years from now, no one will remember it was once something you did on a computer, too.
Microsoft made the biggest splash this week with its announcement of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, but Mozilla nearly stole its thunder with the announcement of Ubiquity, an add-on that allows you to insert data into an e-mail or pull information from various Web pages without a lot of navigating around.
The example Mozilla offered involved a user e-mailing a friend to get together for coffee. Using Ubiquity, they could easily add a map to their message. Or, if they were searching for an apartment on Craiglist, potential buildings could be highlighted and a route plotted out by simply asking Ubquity to map them. The technology both mashes information into applications and pulls them information out (Wikipedia entries, e-mail addresses). It’s a great concept and a great name.
It’s just not really the way anyone works today. Some behaviours, like cutting and pasting URLs, is so ingrained that to really get users accustomed to its features Ubiquity would have to be, well, ubiquitous across nearly every major online service. Unless Mozilla took a different approach.
Think about all the data entry that happens in the enterprise every day. Now think about how many of those traditional, client-based processes have been migrating over to browser-based applications. The shift has made things a lot easier on the back end, processing side of companies, but grunt work is still largely grunt work.
Ubiquity could change that by creating easier ways to graph out sales opportunities in a memo, for example, or create a more flexible way for employees to bring up CRM data inside an internal portal where marketing strategies are developed. Over time, information workers would develop new habits, to the point where toggling back and forth between browser tabs or cutting and pasting would seem as onerous as simply writing and sending notes by hand.
Although it would undoubtedly simplify some processes, Ubiquity might also force users to think about content in a different way. A lot of the e-mail messages and other documents we create electronically today are pretty messy. Most people have a hard enough time just inserting an extra row into an Excel spreadsheet. Ubiquity, by opening up all kinds of possibilities for elegant confluences of data and applications, subtly encourages us to think more like developers. In a great Web site, for example, navigation should be so intuitive as to be effortless, but that effortlessness takes a lot of pre-planning and thought. Once you can add maps, reviews, or other disparate pieces of information, you are immediately becoming more involved in the user experience of the recipient of that e-mail message or Web page.
We don’t really “design” information right now because we have never been given the proper tools. Ubiquity may be among the first of those tools, which means form will be as important in its relationship to content as ever.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The silent death of killer apps
Several months ago Canadian social networking observer Jevon McDonald wrote a post I can’t quite get out of my head.
Titled *cide, he discussed a trend on his SocialWrite blog about the tendency to abandon popular applications that end up taking too much time to manage. These included declaring “e-mail bankruptcy,” and abandoning all attempts to respond to messages, or deleting your Facebook account (which, as Mark Evans pointed out, is not that easy to do).
Jevon came up with a name for this tendency: friendive-compulsive disorder, which is caused by adding too many people as your friend early on in a social network. I love this concept, because it may offer some clues as to why so few companies have really integrated social networking and Web 2.0 into their business processes, and why even more traditional applications don’t deliver.
Social networks are opt-in by their nature. That means they are also opt-out as well, and companies may be reluctant to harness their business processes to software platforms that may stretch their users’ time commitments to the breaking point. Information glut was bad enough. No one wants to deal with the response glut of so many social networking services.
On the other hand, many social networking services are free (or so near-free) that they require almost none of the capital investment that businesses once funnelled into so-called knowledge management systems, which also depended on a certain threshold of employee participation to be truly useful. Many of these systems were also poorly designed compared to many social networks, and the friendive-compulsive disorder is the kind of problem many CIOs (or CKOs, if they still exist) wish they’d had. Just as Twitter may not have imagined there would one day be users committing Twittercide, however, companies routinely fail to anticipate the level of attention a successful application will demand of their users.
In most cases, acceptance of a particular application isn’t an option. No one is allowed to declare sales force automation bankruptcy, or CRMicide. Closing the online accounts you use to submit reports or conduct transactions on behalf of your company usually means you are leaving that company. The more closely aligned with business objectives a piece of software is, the less it looks like a social networking service.
And yet we all know of applications that are used improperly, or used at a minimum to spare the time it takes to properly fill out forms, check off boxes or save a file into the appropriate area. The only thing worse for businesses than an application users can opt out of is an under-used application, one which the company blindly continues to upgrade and support despite the shortfall in its potential value. The death of a Facebook account isn’t much of a loss. The half-life of many other business applications is a much greater tragedy.
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(1 votes, average: 8 out of 10) Loading ...The 5 worst IT-related entries on Wikipedia
It’s considered one of the Web’s most common resources, and yet technology professionals should be appalled by the information about their industry on Wikipedia.
No doubt there are few IT managers or CIOs spending their time using Wikipedia for research purposes, but if user education is at all a part of their mandate (and it should be), it’s worth checking out the main ways – besides, say, reading ComputerWorld Canada – that they learn more about the systems that drive their business processes.
It has occurred to me, of course, that I could improve some of these entries myself, and I intend to, but a crowdsourced product like Wikipedia only gets better if more than one person champions it. To wit, here are a handful of bad apples to get you started.
1. Service oriented architecture: Wikipedia has taken the severe step of disabling the ability of new or unregistered users from editing the entry until Sept. 7. The reason? Linkspam! But that’s just the beginning. The site notes that the entry needs to be cleaned up to meet its quality standards, be “wikified” with the appropriate style and verifiable sources. Maybe once the hype around SOA dies down, its Wikipedia page won’t attract the same kind of biased (or just plain lazy) editors.
2. Utility computing: You would think this would simply redirect to the entry on cloud computing by now, but for some reason the editors have chosen to keep it live, despite the fact, under a sub-section called “history,” someone has posted a notice saying, “this section or article is written like an advertisement.” Actually, it was probably cut and pasted from some vendor’s marketing collateral, but no matter. It’s been sitting there untouched since December of last year.
3. Virtualization: You want an online resource like this to provide in-depth information, but there comes a point where comprehensive just becomes confounding. The entry is simply a list of links to other entries, grouped under the headings platform, resource, application and desktop. That’s well organized enough, but do we really need separate entries on “partial virtualization” and “hardware-assisted virtualization?” I’m all for disambiguation, but this is getting a little ridiculous.
4. Social network service: Awkwardly titled so as not to be confused with the scientific social networking model, the page looks fine until you get to the part that would be most important to technology professionals. Under “business applications,” a Wikipedia editor has noted it does not “cite any references or sources.” With all the reputed online activity taking place on Facebook and MySpace, you think someone would have cleaned this up since it was pointed out in March.
5. Chief Information Officer (CIO): Not the worst description, overall, but only three actual citations. True, they are from my international IDG counterparts, but there should be some other sources. I like the last line: “Many CIOs head the enterprise’s efforts to integrate the Internet and the World Wide Web into both its long-term strategy and its immediate business plans.” If they manage to do that, maybe they’re smart enough to fix Wikipedia, too.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: Meet the MIDs at Intel Developer Forum ‘08
I’ve had mixed feelings about what Intel is calling Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), as well as the promise of speech recognition. It’s interesting to see the two come together, however. This clip, taken from the show floor, puts the spotlight on a company called One Voice that allows voice activation of many portable computing features. And he’s right about one thing: If the machine can pick up what you’re saying during a busy day in San Francisco’s Moscone centre, it can pick up anything.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Shooting consultants in a barrel
Everybody makes lawyer jokes, but I don’t know of anyone who makes consulting jokes.
More common is the approach taken by this month’s issue of GQ magazine, which features a story (unavailable online) about outside experts graced with a photo of large-domed, bug-eyed monsters out of a 1940s horror movie. It is a story about “the most terrifying corporate plague imaginable,” featuring evildoers who “will suck the lifeblood out of your organization and leave nothing but corpes in their wake.”
The author, a former consultant himself, is careful to distinguish between the good consultants and the bad. “I’m not talking about the various genuinely useful outsiders we’d come in and help us do, like, actual work – creating specific new products hat might wind up being used by real live consumers,” he writes, referring to them as vendors. He means the real strategic pointy-heads. “Management spends the equivalent of an entire department’s paycheque to fund outside experts who replicate information that’s readily available from internal sources . . . know that they are not there to make your job better. They aren’t there to make anything better.”
There was something at once familiar and vaguely weary about the entire piece, as though it could have been written 10 years ago, and offered little more than the rub that those who find themselves forced out of a gig could also take up consulting. Such jobs are the business equivalent of movie criticism – something everyone thinks they could do, and perhaps even enjoy.
Consultants have become so easy to hate that it’s getting more difficult to recognize the value they bring to the table. This includes a fresh, outsider’s perspective on what are sometimes long-standing problems in an entrenched culture; a knowledge of industry best practices, technologies or techniques that can propel a range of stalled corporate objectives; and, an ability to focus squarely on strategic thinking without overly disrupting those charged with day-to-day operations. At their best, engaging a consultant should be like a CEO or department head turning to an experienced colleague or friend and asking, “How do other people do this? How did you do it?”
IT departments are increasingly being looked at much like consulting organizations, which means they are saddled with all the negative connotations associated with them. They are brought in to projects or to help align processes late in the game, with insufficient knowledge of the players and their histories. They are not always acting like the “vendors” of the GQ article, providing a quick-fix custom application but often fine-tuning or making better use of existing equipment or software to deal with problems. They possess specialist knowledge available to no one else in the organization, yet compared with real consultants they are limited in their ability to make recommendations beyond what happens to the corporate network. And unlike real consultants, they are still dealing with all those day-to-day operations.
I think GQ is right in that consultants often spend their days on safari, unearthing the tribal knowledge that shouldn’t be hard to find in the average company. But all enterprises could improve the way they can communicate. There are a lot of tools to do this, and even a few that the IT department could set up and manage for the organization’s benefit. But there has to be a commitment across the employee base to use those tools and really share what they know. That’s the real challenge. Which means it may be time to call in the consultants.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The verdict on Privacy Commish Stoddart’s appeal to lawyers
Roe vs. Wade would never have become Roe vs. Wade if it was simply known as R. vs. W.
In a speech to Canadian Bar Association, federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart suggested that the traditional “open court” principle of disclosing information about those involved with the courts should be reconsidered. She also hinted that using an individuals’ initials may be sufficient to educate the public about legal decisions and keep the system accountable to Canadians.
“In law school, we all learned cases by individuals’ names,” said Stoddart, according to a transcript of the speech. “When these cases were accessible only in specialized legal texts, or search engines accessible to legal professionals only, or copies could be picked up by making a trip to the basement records room of a court or tribunal, the concept of practical obscurity always operated in favour of privacy protection and the need-to-know principle.”
Later, the Globe and Mail r eported a press conference in which Stoddart said search engines “distort” the open court rule, implying that all of us will be stuck with a digital paper trail that may be impossible to hide from employers or business associates.
“They will go to social network sites; see what they can find about your past,” she said. “Something may come up there that is irrelevant and doesn’t really need to be known by the world at large. Perhaps something about a family member … That really wasn’t the original purpose.”
Courts do not operate to serve the law, however, but to serve people. And obscuring the identities of those who appear before them does not necessarily serve the need-to-know principle. Who we are determines what we do, and what we do determines when and why we get involved in tribunals or in other cases involving a judge. That doesn’t mean every health-care case and human rights case deserves a front page headline, but not all of those cases would receive much attention anyway.
As for social networking sites, the onus there is on the user to manage their personal settings if they don’t want employers to find anything unsavoury. Whether legal or court-related information winds up in the wrong hands will also depend in part on the evolution of the semantic Web, as well as the semantic capabilities that are integrated into information-retrieval applications developed and deployed by corporate enterprises. Would it also be too naïve to suggest that companies outside the legal profession apply some reasonable judgement as they search for information? Perhaps if Stoddart is right and the need to know principle is fading, we need to apply a need to protect principle.
Stoddart is legitimately trying to maximize the protection available to people whose information can be channelled across the Internet, and for that she is to be applauded. At the same time, we have to determine whether individual privacy necessarily means public anonymity, and whether availability online automatically means unnecessary exposure.
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(1 votes, average: 6 out of 10) Loading ...Microsoft: Why we changed our virtualization licensing policy
It was kind of like the three month probationary period you give to a new employee, except in Microsoft’s case it applied to servers.
Until today, Microsoft prohibited customers to move a virtual machine from one physical box to another, which it called a “licence transfer” within 90 days of the last time it was moved. Not a great way to encourage the kind of free-flowing intelligent allocation of compute resources promised by virtualization software such as VMware, Citrix and, most recently, Microsoft.
The company has now announced it will waive the licensing restriction on 41 of its server applications. If you browse the full list and don’t see the recently-released Windows Server 2008 don’t worry: its licensing agreement was drafted from the get-go to take virtualization into account. The only applications that might not apply, according to Microsoft, are older or outdated products, probably dating before 2005.
I chatted for a few minutes with Microsoft Canada’s Bruce Cowper, who told me the changes reflect the way virtualization is being used across corporate enterprises. In the early days, he explained, customers were mostly using virtual instances of a server in test and development environments. Not now.
“We’re starting to see disaster recovery scenarios have come to the fore where if I get an issue on the host server, I have to move machines across to other boxes, or (I have to move instances) in the interest of dong restoration and load balancing across my organization,” he says. “We needed some controls in place prior that.”
The timing of the announcement is interesting, however. Although Cowper notes that VMware signed up to Microsoft’s Virtual Validation Program just yesterday – thereby making life easier for Microsoft customers who also use its VMotion product – the relaxed licensing terms come fast on the heels of Microsoft’s own Hyper-V virtualization technology. Now that it has a real virtualization offering for users, perhaps, Microsoft is prepared to appease early adopters.
“As our customers are deploying virtualized technologies, they’re really starting to place demands on their suppliers and as part of their selection criteria, they’re asking, ‘Are you virtualization-friendly?’” he says. “I’ve had a number of conversations with customers in the last six months who say they’re asking, ‘how does this apply with our licensing in a virtual world,’ or ‘how does this apply to our support in a virtual world?’”
That’s another possible reason for the timing. Microsoft also announced expanded support services for 31 of its server applications. Not the complete list, but enough to get some time-to-market advantage over rivals with similar consulting capabilities.
“If you were running a system and you were losing transactions, that often reflected hardware problems,” he says. “Adding the virtualization layer into the equation gave another question mark.” The support services are intended to remove those question marks, but as the licensing changes show, there are plenty more questions about virtualization where those came from.
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(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...What I learned about business process optimization at Woodbine
It sounded like a great IT industry name, but I just couldn’t put my money down on “Redeploy,” one of horses competing at Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto last week. Instead, I kept looking for one that might be called “Virtual Machine.”
I was there with my company, which had rented out a tent as part of an employee social event. There was a group of tables set up just outside the tent, which sat right on the edge of the track where all the action took place. Inside the tent was the food, a booth to make our bets, and a handful of monitors that gave us updates on race times and the latest odds. On each table was a collection of racing forms, which offered even more background about the individual horses and their past performance. As a mix of paper and electronic steps, Woodbine’s races seem like they’re crying out for business process optimization, but an afternoon there convinced me they’re probably best to leave it alone.
In any other kind of organization, you could see plenty of opportunity for increased digitization of the betting process, for example. People tended to flip through the racing forms, scan the monitors, make up their minds, line up to place their bets and occasionally change their minds while they were up there. Sometimes people at the front of the line took so long that those at the end didn’t have a chance to place their bets. Then, when the races were over, there was a mad dash as people flocked back to the monitors to see the full results, including not only the winner but who “placed” and “showed.”
With the right mix of hardware and software, a lot of these cumbersome and unnecessary steps could be eliminated. The monitors could be placed outdoors, just near where we stood to watch. Better yet would be handhelds distributed to the audience where they could see updates and place bets in real-time, without ever having to leave their place (this would require e-payments, but that wouldn’t be hard to do). The racing forms seem almost entirely redundant – the type of thing best served up on a Web page that could be accessed through the handheld, and hyper-linked to the day’s roster of competing horses.
And yet . . . I looked around at my coworkers. The reason this whole thing was fun (and it really was) came down to the level of interactivity and collaboration the process encouraged. They were talking as they looked through those racing forms, and the paper format got them to make their decision more slowly than they might have by clicking through a series of pages, like search results. They kept the conversation up while they stood in line, and they were really buzzing by the time they were rushing to see who won what, and how much.
Woodbine’s desired outcome of this process, of course, is to maximize the amounts the audience bets on each race. Automation would allow for greater throughput (and no doubt does in off-track or online wagering) but the social networking that took place last week far outweighed what you could replicate on Facebook or similar Web sites. The process as it stands today creates a community which is assisted by IT but is not necessarily driven by it. The people are the horses that pull the processes along, like a cart filled with IT equipment. You have to be careful which one you put in front of the other.
