(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10)
Loading ...YouTube Fridays: When Seinfeld met Gates
A man best known for a TV show about nothing manages to make a Microsoft commercial about nothing. Perhaps this is a teaser for a more substantial campaign, but it makes Apple’s Mac vs. PC clip seem like Citizen Kane by comparison. Oh yeah, and they shouldn’t have waited until he retired to make Bill Gates seem like an Everyman. We already knew he was cheap — too bad Microsoft never seems to pass down the savings to its customers.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The IT performance metrics that don’t exist (yet)
Of all the ways we try to measure IT’s return on investment, “progress” seems a little too broad. And yet most of the other measures we use – improved productivity, operational efficiency, cost-effectiveness – are all signs of a company’s progress, if not progress on a world level. Everyone always assumes that such progress is a good thing, and often hope that countries can collectively progress on a global scale. Everyone, that is, except Edgar Morin.
A French philosopher whose work touches on both politics and economics, Morin has become known in his home country for highly controversial views on capitalism and consumption, which have nonetheless attracted the attention of president Nicholas Sarkozy. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Morin put things very succinctly:
“We are hypnotised by economic growth. But we should consider both economic growth and contraction together: what must grow, what must contract and what must remain stationary,” Morin said, citing technology as one of the forces that demand greater analysis. “Technological and economic development has brought capitalism and individualism. But if you take the effects of individualism, for example, it gives a lot of autonomy and responsibility to a person, but is also accompanied by a degradation of an essential social solidarity, of the family, the village, the district, or the workplace.”
Even philosophers, therefore, are starting to recognize that if you use your BlackBerry too much, you may end up ignoring your kids. But I was more interested in his first statement. If you take what Morin is saying about national or international economic growth, the engine of that growth is in part made up of IT. But probably the biggest quandries facing IT managers is not only how they will build up their infrastructure but precisely “what must contract and what must remain stationary.”
In some cases, what must contract is determined by the budget an IT manager has to work with, as does that which remains stationary. In the grand scheme of things, however, senior management typically charges the IT department to empower users with more data, more access to compute resources, additional tools for collaboration and communication. Only in the interests of security or the bottom line do those things contract or remain stationary.
Growth requires investment – not only of money but time and talent. And you don’t get the investment unless you can measure the results. But Morin is suspicious of efforts to explain everything away by numbers alone.
“Even if you have better measurements you will still not be able to quantify happiness,” he told FT. “All efforts to quantify love, for example, by creating a new measure – called the Cupidon, say – will never work. How can a young man in love with a woman say I feel a thousand Cupidon? It’s not possible.”
It’s easy for business, you might argue. You can use sales, or expenses, or customer churn. Not always, though. If customer (or employee) satisfaction wasn’t so hard to measure, we wouldn’t still be using survey tools. Emerging areas of interest, such as corporate social responsibility and business reputation, may be even harder to evaluate.
Morin offers no easy answers, but thinks it’s up to the public intellectuals to come up with them. “We live in a world of specialists, who have precise knowledge in distinct fields. But because of their limited knowledge they can never confront the fundamental and global problems that are really shaking society.” Can’t they? Specialized knowledge shouldn’t mean you operate with blinders on. Even if IT managers can’t come up with all the solutions, surely they can offer some of the components.
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(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Barack Obama is the iPhone of politicians
I don’t know why it took me so long to make the connection. Even for a political figure, Barack Obama generates an extraordinary level of attention, and probably hundreds of news articles a day. He represents (for many people, at least), hope for an enormous change, almost a transformative revolution. And, like Apple’s most famous product, you won’t find him in Canada.
Pundits and everyday voters in the United States are doing the same thing the IT industry was doing when the iPhone was first launched more than a year ago: trying to anticipate what everyday life will be like with Senator Obama, and how they should prepare themselves for that change. In a journey that almost matches research firm Gartner Inc.’s famous “hype cycle,” Obama and the iPhone have rejuvenated interest in areas once thought stagnant (politics and mobile communications, respectively), and seem to followed a similar trajectory of crazed anticipation and premature backlash.
Obama’s attempt to win the Democratic nomination was presaged by the publication of his second book, The Audacity of Hope, which almost sounds like an Apple marketing slogan, just as “Think Different,” could be easily associated with his brand of political discourse. The iPhone=sleek, stylish and sophisticated, appealing to an upper-class elite. Obama=sleek, stylish and sophisticated, appealing to an upper-class elite. Has Steve Jobs sent him a free handset yet or what?
Even the criticisms Obama receives – that he’s all surface, no substance, that he lacks a track record, that he won’t mesh well with the established groups and processes that keep America running – sound a lot like the worries around the iPhone in the enterprise. Obama’s success has been attributed, in part, to his strategy of approaching the Democratic nomination as an outsider who can bring fresh improvements. Apple’s entrance to cellular telephony was similarly brazen, risky and somehow terribly compelling. As I write these words, Obama has been working the House floor, described by some reporters as doing a victory lap. Didn’t Apple’s launch – despite the lack of details around pricing plans, software compatibility and security – seem a little self-assured too?
Of course, no one had to hold a vote (apart from Apple’s board of directors, perhaps) to get the iPhone to the market, and even if Obama wins the nomination he’ll still have John McCain and the Republican Party to fight in a federal election later this Fall. The iPhone is probably here to stay, although consumers will constantly voting with their wallets. That’s the difference between a politician and a product. What really matters is whether the great speaker and the tool for speaking can create a real dialogue – whether, after the mania has died down, we can use them to our best advantage.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The maestro and the IT manager
It doesn’t matter how old you are: boring classes are always a little better when you get to watch a video.
A few years ago I was trapped in an industrial park somewhere in Brampton, with a bunch of other managers I barely knew for an all-day training session. This was No. 2 of a projected six, if I recall correctly (thankfully, my group was acquired by my current employer before I could complete the course). Amid the idiotic role-playing games, the snooze-inducing lectures and out-of-touch management techniques, the instructor played a five-minute clip of Benjamin Zander that gave me an instant snapshot of the kind of leader all IT professionals should strive to become.
I recalled that video this weekend when my wife and I attended a concert given by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Zander, who has spent years leading the Boston Philharmonic, was the guest-conductor. As a sort of sideline to his musical career Zander has also become a sought-after name on the corporate speaker circuit, delivering motivational talks to all kinds of companies. It doesn’t take long to see why. Funny, learned and nearly bubbling over with enthusiasm, he commands a room as surely as he does a stage. For this particular concert he offered a pre-show chat, and I wasn’t about to let the opportunity slip by.
Of course I’m aware that the CIO-as-maestro metaphor is now a well-worn cliché, pitched by vendors as an easy way of capturing the kind of interconnectedness of technology and people that needs to happen in order for enterprise IT infrastructure to function. It’s not a metaphor I’m particularly interested in revisiting, but I think Zander is a good example of a leader, period, and his skills are not only transferable to the management of IT, I think they could become essential.
Zander explained that Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which is divided into five parts, is also divided in tone and theme. The first two parts are about darkness, he said. The last two parts are about light. In preparing the TSO for during rehearsal, he identified some of the players whose instruments tended to dominate various movements. The trumpet player, for instance, opens the piece with a series of short notes. He probably knew they were supposed to sound sad, but Zander took it a step further. “I told him to imagine he was playing amid a battlefield strewn with corpses,” he told us. “As you could imagine, he started to play the piece much differently.”
In a later movement, the cellists come to the fore, and Zander told them to play their notes as though they were long-held prisoners from a concentration camp were being set free. “They come out, spindly and hungry, blinking uncertainly in the light,” he said, encouraging us, the audience, to use our own images to help flesh out the stories behind the music. Mahler, he reminded us, lived a tragic life, losing seven brothers and sisters to horrible fates, not to mention the anti-Semitism he encountered personally. But the point was not to read the Fifth as Mahler’s life. “The symphony contains all of life,” he said. “And the more experienced you are with life, the more it will mean to you.”
The lesson here is that Zander, a musician, does not restrict himself to the sense of hearing. Instead he uses his imagination to invest himself and those he’s working with emotionally in a piece. He takes the time to work with individuals, seeing in them possibilities for creation and not merely the players of a musical instrument. This is the same thing IT managers need to do – establish the human connections behind the systems they create and maintain, to see not data but information (or better yet, stories) that matter to someone. It’s also important not to leave anyone out, to recognize that all users play a role in making technology-based business processes a success. Zander acknowledged this notion as it relates to music at the end of his talk. “You really need to listen, as well as you possibly can,” he urged us. “But most importantly, you need to listen with your heart.”
Zander has tried to distil his teachings in a book, The Art of Possibility, which might be a good way of describing what technology professionals endeavour to realize with their hardware, software and skills. There is more to music, and to IT, than its orchestration. It’s the spirit in which you play it, too.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Use a fog index to clear up enterprise content confusion
If the word processor I’m using to write this has a fog index, I can’t find it.
A colleague recently asked me about fox indexes, believing that it used to be a feature embedded in an early version of Corel’s WordPerfect. For the uninitiated, a fog index refers to a way to measure the reading level required to understand a piece of written content. Developed by American businessman Robert Gunning in the 1950s, it usually relates to the comprehension of grade school students. A newspaper like the Globe and Mail, for example, is probably written for someone with a grade 10 education. A supermarket tabloid is probably aimed several notches lower. You can probably already guess the implications for content management in the enterprise.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Me and my digital shadow
IT managers are about as eager to hear future data growth projections as Canadians are to hear about another snowfall.
EMC this week published the results of an IDC study it commissioned that says the so-called digital universe grew to 281 exabytes last year, with an expected 117 trillion GBs of information over the next three years. It’s too much to wrap your head around, so the company came up with a better, more visual analogy: more data exists now than there are stars in the sky. And you can blame it on what IDC calls our “digital shadows.”
Those digital shadows might also be called our digital exhaust – they are the byproducts of all our Web surfing, online shopping, social networking and monitoring of individuals. Just as we used to Google ourselves to find out how many results our names generated, we can now Flickr ourselves, or find references to ourselves on Facebook. The amount of personal shadows that fall within the billing systems and other databases inside companies is probably much more immense.
All this helps EMC prove the need for more storage and content management technology, and the study does little to suggest that the lengthening digital shadows are really a problem. They are, after all, part of the electronic paper trial we all need in order to ensure companies are accountable for our transactions with them. If, like some sort of digital vampire, we were unable to see our shadows, we would be highly alarmed that, in one very important sense, we had ceased to exist.
If you dig a little deeper into the IDC report, you’ll see that the data growth is largely fuelled by the rise of consumer technology. Data from financial services, for example, makes up only six per cent of the digital universe, while entertainment, communications and (ahem) media account for 10 times their share of IT spending. What will be harder for the IDCs of the world to track, of course, is the extent to which consumer technology is used for business purposes, and how that affects the growth of a user’s digital shadow.
As data continues to proliferate, the next boom in enterprise software almost certainly seems centered around the monitoring and management of digital shadows – helping organizations to pull out elements of a digital shadow as part of an e-discovery process, for example, or maybe just to look into a customer service issue as part of a master data management strategy. These monitoring systems, in turn, may create digital shadows of their own. If we call data about data metadata, there will likely be digital shadows about digital shadows, or digital metashadows.
Compelling though the term may be, perhaps calling these digital shadows isn’t all that appropriate, because it suggests something that trials off in our wake, something less important than the transactions themselves. Time will prove, however, that the record of where we moved in the digital world will be an important part of learning about who we are as people. If you really want to identify someone, looking into their digital shadow will be one of the best ways to shed some light.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...What literary fiction has to tell us about the IT industry
It’s taken the better part of eight months, but I’ve finally finished reading War and Peace. Given that a new translation came out during that period, sparking yet another round of critical assessment, there’s not much left to say about the book. Except that every IT manager could benefit from perusing its approximately 1,400 pages.
This conclusion came to me following an interview I did recently with Peter Ryan, a doctoral candidate in the York/Ryerson Universities Joint Programme in Communication and Culture, and an instructor in Ryerson University’s Department of Politics and Public Administration. In this case, I was the one being interviewed, as part of a doctoral thesis Ryan is pursuing that explores whether literary fiction affects IT research and development. So far, he’s talked with 10 authors (including Greg Bear, Cory Doctorow, and Robert J. Sawyer) and 10 IT industry execs (including Sun CTO Hal Stern and Google’s Mark Donnor). He hopes his work might inspire a change in mind set among those who help fund the study of great writing.
“Governments have tossed money into think tanks,” he says, “but people see literature as entertainment.”
I didn’t expect Ryan’s questions to stump me, but when he asked for specific books that may have influenced technology R&D, I struggled. My first thought was I, Robot, the collection of stories by the late Isaac Asimov. In them he coined the three “Laws of Robotics” which govern how the non-human characters interact with their masters. This, I suggested, was not unlike the policy and rules-driven processes that are being automated by IT managers in enterprises today, and reflects a similar kind of thinking. But that seemed too easy.
As Ryan suggested, people have been exploring the link between science fiction and IT for years, principally on sites like Technovelgy. William Gibson’s Neuromancer, for example, has often been cited as a precursor to our Web-driven world. “People read that book and said, ‘I can make that,’” Ryan says, adding that he interviewed all kinds of authors. “The sci-fi community came out in full force. The more literary authors didn’t want to be branded.”
But then I’m reminded of a favourite quote by Joan Didion, who opened up her famous essay “The White Album” with the line, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Storytelling – especially that captured in much of the literature of the past 200 years – informs our ideas of what’s right and wrong, how we should act, and what we value within our communities. Surely that has to have an impact on the kind of thinking that goes on in the minds of IT managers, whether they realize it consciously or not.
War and Peace is a great example. Its battleground scenes are full of real-time decision making, allocation of resources and making the most of the information you can manage. Its main storylines are even more important, dealing with the complexities of relationships between parents and children, lovers and friends. When we talk about the need to teach IT professionals soft skills, Leo Tolstoy may have written the perfect textbook.
I’m not sure what Ryan’s project will prove, but if nothing else I hope it starts a conversation that may not have happened otherwise. Which, of course, is exactly what the best fiction does, too.
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(2 votes, average: 9.5 out of 10) Loading ...The top 10 ballads never heard at IT product launches
Every time I go to a product launch of user conference keynote I think the same thing: Why does that devil music have to be so damn loud?
You never know what’s going to happen once an executive takes the stage and a demo gets underway, but you can pretty much guarantee the soundtrack beforehand will be fast-paced yet impossible to dance to, repetitive and played at full volume. In some cases they play actual songs, which makes you feel you’re walking into a hip club rather than a faceless convention centre. A lot of the time it’s the aural equivalent of stock art: synthesized drumbeats and a tune that sounds like it was designed for some sort of corporate version of a rave. Microsoft’s launch of Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio 2008 was no different.
Hearing this stuff first thing in the morning is presumably supposed to get everyone excited, energized about buying the products and putting them to good use, but the effect once the music dies and the event actually begins is pretty deflating. Then, when the music picks up again once the event’s over, you kind of feel like you’ve reached the end of a game show, except that no one is rolling the credits.
As I waited for Microsoft to walk through its enterprise software lineup today I imagined how much better the world (or at least the IT industry) would be if some innovative company were to take the opposite tactic. That is, what if they used ballads, instead of dance music, to introduce their breakthrough products? Sure, a lot of IT guys are metalheads, but even the heaviest thrash-rockers have been known to take it down a notch or two occasionally.
I tend to have the musical tastes of a pre-teen girl, but the following is a list of suggestions that could help set the tone for a new kind of relationship between vendors and the kind of IT managers they hope to woo.
“Wish You Were Here” (Pink Floyd) – the yearning in the chorus would be a perfect fit for remote access technologies connecting branch offices to corporate headquarters, or even mobile workers operating somewhere in the field.
“All By Myself” (Eric Carmen) – Yes, it’s a little dreary, but can you think of a better way to pitch collaboration software to siloed enterprise users?
“I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” (Aerosmith) – systems management and application monitoring tools have never had the anthem they deserved. Until now.
“Inspiration” (Chicago) – The whole point of business intelligence is sifting through data to come up with great ideas. Peter Cetera probably never realized the real context of this tune.
“Imagine” (John Lennon) – Sounds so much like something Apple would use to unveil a personal computing device I’m surprised they haven’t yet (as far as I know). Would also fit for application development tools.
“I’ll Stand By You” (The Pretenders) – Network vulnerabilities can give you a lonely feeling. Here’s the jingle Symantec, McAfee and other security specialists should use.
“I need you now” (Alias) – Outsourcers only wish their customers felt this way.
“Hello (Is it me you’re looking for)” (Lionel Ritchie) – enterprise search is a journey, not a destination.
“Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” – Okay, it would only be good for Sun Microsystems, but at least they’d be able to tell a story about how mission-critical their infrastructure is.
“Fallin’” (Alicia Keys) – It’s about a roller-coaster relationship. Just like the one Microsoft has with its customers.
I’m open to other suggestions, of course. The point is that vendors aren’t necessarily conveying the right message with their fast-paced musical numbers. They should be aiming for the slow dance – the one where you really get to know each other.
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(1 votes, average: 9 out of 10) Loading ...Meet Canada’s newest small-screen IT stereotype
Everybody keeps telling me I have to watch it. But I just can’t.
CBC Television, Canada’s national public broadcaster, may have a rare hit on its hands with The Border, which follows the espionage and drama associated with policing our gateway to the United States. I’ve been told it’s as close as we’ve got to 24. I’ve been told that people are surprised by how gripping the storylines are. All I can focus on, though, are the images I’ve seen of a character called Heironymous Slade, who manages to capture every cliché you’ve ever deplored about the IT industry.
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(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...There’s more to Gossip Girl than the gadgets
She says she’ll never tell us who she really is, but there’s no question that the narrator of TV’s Gossip Girl is a sophisticated Web 2.0 user.
One of the benefits of the ongoing writer’s strike is that people like me get to catch up on reruns of all the shows we’ve missed, and for reasons I won’t bother to explain I found myself glued to several episodes of Gossip Girl’s first season. Much has already been made about the fact that the program, which resolves around the lives of a group of wealthy Upper East Side teenagers, is told through the voice of a blogger whose identity is not revealed. Observers have also noted the plethora of cell phones, laptops and other IT gadgetry that is showcased in scene after scene. What may have been overlooked is the profile of the people carrying those gadgets. Perhaps unintentionally, the producers of Gossip Girl may be giving IT managers an early glimpse of what their user base will look like in a few years.
