(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...YouTube Fridays: An early look at ‘Aurora’
I’m intrigued by Mozilla’s plans to work with Adaptive Path on a next-generation browser and desktop user interface, especially its call for submissions from everyday people who would actually end up grappling with the final product.
This clip, the first of four parts, shows the direction in which they’re heading. I see a Max OS X influence near the bottom of the screen, but there’s a part of me that thinks elements of Aurora would be even better if paired with some of the surface computing concepts Microsoft has hinted at in its sneak peek at Windows 7.
Add to: del.icio.us | Digg IT | Furl | Google | magnolia | StumbleIT | Wink | Yahoo! | Technorati
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...BI plus BPM plus business rules equals a new kind of IT system
One of my overworked colleagues was recently asked about a project that hadn’t yet gotten off the ground. He replied, “That’s a strategic issue, and right now we only have time for operational issues.” PricewaterhouseCoopers is convinced we won’t be able to separate the two for much longer.
In the consulting firm’s latest Technology Forecast (once a book-length publication which has morphed into an online quarterly), the most intriguing comment on the industry’s future is PricewaterhouseCooper’s concept of an “intelligent business performance platform,” or IBPP. Such a system would combine both business intelligence software (the strategic) with business process management and business rules management (the operational), all integrated and running on top of a company’s IT infrastructure. It’s not going out on too much of a limb to suggest disparate enterprise business applications might one day consolidate into something more cohesive, but PwC is drawing the big picture that the rest of us can use as a blueprint.
“Fortunately, BPM and BI technologies can be implemented slowly,” the report adds. “They are not rip-and-replace solutions but approaches that can be added incrementally to an IT infrastructure and serve as targets for the migration of existing business processes at a pace determined by the company’s need for business process efficiency.”
The IBPP could help explain, for starters, where the next wave of software mergers and acquisitions might lead. It makes sense, for example, that the major BI players have all been gobbled up by the companies that are also dipping their toes or own a piece of the BPM and business rules space, like SAP and IBM. For those that remain – companies like Appian, Workpoint, Idiom and Informavores, to name a few – their destiny is probably to follow in the footsteps of business rules firm Ilog, which was bought by Big Blue last week.
IBPPs could also provide the justification for a service-oriented architecture. According to PwC’s Technology Forecast, you could create such a system without one, but it certainly helps. “(It) works best when rigid, proprietary, command-and-control workflows are migrated to flexible, open, standards-based Web services,” the report says.
At the risk of getting a little carried away, PwC goes on to suggest IBPPs may need their own specific operator, which it has chosen to call a chief performance officer (CPO). No, I don’t think the title will catch on, but read the job description: “The CPO is in charge of consolidating, analyzing, and presenting analyses to senior management and to the board regarding the current state of companywide operations and identifying where performance deviates from expectations and from industry benchmarks. In addition, the CPO has responsibility for designing and helping implement key performance indicators for a given business within the context of a specific industry.”
Does this sound like a glorified business analyst, or is it what IT managers and CIOs are supposed to want to be once they grow up? I’m not really in the business of forecasting, but I’d say that if your company ever runs on something that looks like a IBPP, the IT department had better be the one driving it.
Add to: del.icio.us | Digg IT | Furl | Google | magnolia | StumbleIT | Wink | Yahoo! | Technorati
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Even home users of Microsoft Office need to be well ‘Equipt’
If I’d just waited a few more weeks I might not have had to spend so much buying Office.
Thanks a lot, Microsoft, for only announcing your subscription-based plan for users of your productivity suite after I just put money down on a brand-new notebook. Office was part of the bundle they offered us at Future Shop, but it still tacked down an extra couple of hundred dollars to the purchase price. Under the Equipt program, Microsoft will charge users for programs like Word, PowerPoint and Excel in much the same way that corporate customers are acquiring new software, and in some cases it could be a lot cheaper.
It will not, however, be free, which is why Equipt is unlikely to stem the tide of free software from Google and other companies. The boxed version of Office was never really in short-term jeopardy anyway. Those downloading OpenOffice and the like are probably more savvy than the average Future Shop customer, and probably not Microsoft fans anyway. For the rest of us, it will take more time before even Google’s productivity tools enjoy the kind of mind share that, for example, Word does. But as long as Equipt costs money, it won’t be able to compete with free, and eventually the features might be even more attractive than the price point. What Google et. al are offering aren’t simply loss leaders; they are market leaders-in-waiting.
IT managers could probably safely ignore Equipt were it not for the fact that home computing software is likely to be used for after-hours work tasks as well. Their choice of productivity tools could have a direct bearing on their acceptance and adoption of the tools that are given to them by their IT department, affecting the level of training required and even the kind of processes that are set up. Google Apps and OpenOffice work a lot like Microsoft Office, but there are some things they do better or worse, and several things they do a little bit differently. That can affect things when you’re working with distributed teams, some of whom are working off-site at home or in the field on their personal laptop.
For companies that have basically standardized on Microsoft, it might make sense to recommend Equipt, giving employees the chance to stay as up-to-date on the home versions of their software as the ones on their office desktops. For others, it might be irrelevant. It all depends on whether these software products remain simple productivity tools, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest they aren’t. As word processing documents, spreadsheets and similar applications get integrated with enterprise business functionality (including analytics), what users deploy at home should be consistent with their corporate settings unless management decides productivity should be confined to corporate headquarters.
Although we still refer to “professional edition” and “home edition” for a lot of people, Microsoft Office is just “Office.” Equipt will be one of the ways the industry learns whether the distinction still has a lot of meaning for the consumers that get a lot of work done outside of “work.”
Add to: del.icio.us | Digg IT | Furl | Google | magnolia | StumbleIT | Wink | Yahoo! | Technorati
(1 votes, average: 8 out of 10) Loading ...LinkedIn guilt: The new social networking disease
“LinkedIn,” the CIO said. “That thing drives me nuts.”
I was in a meeting today with one of our editorial advisory boards when the above statement was made. These are not really public discussions, so I won’t mention names, but suffice it to say this is a really likeable guy who’s running a major technology operation for a well-known Canadian company. We were talking about the whole social networking thing, and whether he was really a part of it.
“I get these invites (to LinkedIn) from someone I worked with more than 10 years ago,” he went on. “I barely remember their name. And then it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, you worked at . . .” Suffice it to say he probably didn’t accept the invitation.
Another senior manager I know recently told me LinkedIn has become less of a way to keep in touch than an ongoing chore. “I constantly have CIOs and people like that asking me to ‘recommend’ them,” she said, referring to a feature on the site that allows you to become an online (and alarmingly permanent) reference of sorts. “They all want to get consulting jobs, so I’m spending all my time trying to think of these nice things to say.”
First came Facebook fatigue. Now we have LinkedIn guilt.
The whole thing reminds me of an episode from season two of The Office (U.S. version) where narcissistic boss Michael Scott eventually wearies of the toady who keeps trying to make his way into Scott’s good graces. By the time the episode ends, he offers a reflection to the camera: “I don’t like people who suck up to me just because I might be able to help them in their career,” he muses. “I want people to suck up to me because they like me.”
Maybe IT industry folk are more likely to lay on the LinkedIn guilt because they have a hard time being liked by their coworkers in the first place. If they’ve been so inundated with other projects that they couldn’t reset someone’s password or had to install an employee monitoring tool, it might be that much harder to get that LinkedIn recommendation. Or maybe, given their reputation for poor soft skills, technology professionals prefer to hide behind LinkedIn rather than asking in-person for a reference or recommendation.
Much as Wikipedia had to experience some growing pains around accuracy, LinkedIn’s recommendations feature will probably face skepticism over its sincerity. Not that I would ever hire or not hire someone based solely on their LinkedIn profile, but as a way of measuring those intangible qualities of a job candidate (especially one whose skills and role you only partially understand), nothing beats the power of peer testimonials.
Perhaps IT managers and consultants using LinkedIn should approach their profile the same way they would scale a physical network: slowly, based on what’s appropriate, and never without considering the drain it might put on other resources. In this case, those resources include the time and patience of those whose loyalty you might really need one day. Now who’s feeling the guilt?
Add to: del.icio.us | Digg IT | Furl | Google | magnolia | StumbleIT | Wink | Yahoo! | Technorati
(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.
Add to: del.icio.us | Digg IT | Furl | Google | magnolia | StumbleIT | Wink | Yahoo! | Technorati
(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.
Add to: del.icio.us | Digg IT | Furl | Google | magnolia | StumbleIT | Wink | Yahoo! | Technorati
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Yahoo! A social networking strategy that makes sense
There’s a reason you don’t often see someone compile a top-10 list of the coolest Yahoo applications. Yahoo isn’t cool enough to attract cool applications, and until this week it wasn’t that easy to build on top of them. Now that it is promising to remove the first barrier, it might be possible for Yahoo to overcome user inertia, too.
At the Web 2.0 Expo this week in San Francisco the portal player’s CTO, Ari Balogh, announced a plan by which Yahoo will build on its existing open API strategy and streamline the process by which developers create tools on its various platforms. It will also bring all its user profiles – a Yahoo visitor’s e-mail account, instant messaging, Flickr albums and so on – under one virtual roof.
Though it is being touted as a radical depature, Balogh’s strategy is very much in keeping with Yahoo’s traditional modus operendi. While Google pushes visitors out to other sites through its search engine, Yahoo was more concerned with keeping visitors within its borders, whether it was to read news or look at photos. It took a wrong turn with Yahoo 360, which would have been a great social networking service if it hadn’t lagged so far behind MySpace and Facebook.
Like a lot of other startups that flame out (but which receive far less attention), Yahoo was forcing asking users to create yet another profile, when few of them have time to do any of that. Instead, the company has realized it can mine its installed base and the information they have already entered into its database. This is, effectively, a master data management project, one that recognizes how much easier it is to get more business out of an existing customer than it is to find new ones.
What a difference a couple of years make. Not long ago Yahoo was behaving like enterprises in the early days of the Internet, who would announce a Web site redesign as though they had created a new model of automobile. Now the company has realized it can get a lot more mileage out of simply following the lead of the social networking services which have sped by it. If Yahoo doesn’t get swallowed up by Microsoft – which may have its own API strategy for a combined entity – it might become a much more interesting player. That’s not to say Yahoo entirely gets this market.
“We don’t think of social as a destination. We think of social as a dimension. It infuses every element of the consumer’s experience on the Web,” Balogh told IDG News Service. Wrong. Social is not just a destination but a series of destinations, which is why more developers are thinking about Facebook than MySpace, and why they’re probably thinking more about both MySpace and Facebook than they are Yahoo. There’s no point in creating, say, the next Scrabulous if you put it on a platform where no one’s going to play it. Social networking is about real estate. Yahoo’s three biggest priorities right now are to prove it is an choice location, location, location.
Add to: del.icio.us | Digg IT | Furl | Google | magnolia | StumbleIT | Wink | Yahoo! | Technorati
(1 votes, average: 6 out of 10) Loading ...Microsoft’s Live Mesh: The IT department implications
Even though it seems to signal a shift from its PC-centric corporate philosophy, I wouldn’t call Microsoft’s Live Mesh offering a disruptive technology. If anything, it’s an accommodating technology.
Released this week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Live Mesh allows users to share data folders across different PCs and devices, storing information both on the hardware and on the Web. It’s not pure cloud computing. It’s kinda-cloud computing. Which may give cloud holdouts the peace of mind they need.
Much like Adobe’s Apollo project (which morphed into AIR last year), Live Mesh is about moving data between the online and offline worlds, which is the real “last mile” of mobile computing. As much as vendor promised anytime/anywhere/any device access, Internet connectivity is not ubiquitous and probably never will be. Nor would all users necessarily want everything stored in a single place. Live Mesh would avoid that problem by synchronizing changes made to information in folders and updating them every time the user downloads them to a client device or links back to a portal. Good for customers, good for developers. Not necessarily good for businesses.
So far Live Mesh has been restricted to a private group of beta testers, and in the earliest iterations Microsoft seems to be targeting consumers. There have been vague mentions of security features to be offered to corporate users, but nothing of any substance. And that kind of thing was fine in a world where businesses took their sweet time migrating to new platforms and environments, but not in a world where consumers buy their own devices. Microsoft suggests this doesn’t matter.
The issue is not the technology – sharing folders between devices and the Internet is undoubtedly useful. The issue is the data, or more precisely, the information that might make its way through Live Mesh. If we’re talking about sharing and synchronizing your recipes, no problem. It gets trickier when we’re talking about sales data, expense reports, marketing materials or other content that may be more vulnerable when it’s moving back and forth from a Web site to a cell phone.
Microsoft is also, oddly enough, behaving with Live Mesh as though it were a dot-com startup in the late 1990s, in that it has not revealed any ideas around the business model it will use to support the service. We can assume that users will be stuck looking at ads in their folders and businesses will be charged subscriptions, but the details are as important as the technology itself in determining how well Live Mesh will be accepted.
Online file storage, file sharing and remote desktop technologies are not new, but a combination of them in a package from the world’s largest software firm make for an important launch. I don’t think it’s a question anymore of whether Redmond “gets” the Internet. The task now is to prove it gets how customer adoption patterns and the subsequent IT management headaches are changing, too.
Add to: del.icio.us | Digg IT | Furl | Google | magnolia | StumbleIT | Wink | Yahoo! | Technorati
(1 votes, average: 7 out of 10) Loading ...Dave DeWalt and the mission for McAfee
You didn’t have to know that Dave DeWalt is the CEO of McAfee to realize he is an American visiting Toronto this week. No one up here is quite so tanned in April. But that wasn’t the only way DeWalt stood out to me as a leader of the world’s second-largest security software firm.
I was invited to a customer-only briefing session at a posh downtown club called the Fifth, where I discussed the state of the CIO in Canada and tried to put some of DeWalt’s keynote remarks in context. Not that he was unpopular with the crowd. Tall, handsome and highly approachable, he was surrounded shortly before the event like a debutante out at her first ball. His message to attendees was pretty simple: there are a lot of threats out there, and McAfee has a number of its own products or ones it has gained through acquisition to deal with them. The most memorable image in his slide presentation, which he repeated a couple of times, was a picture of a man’s feet, standing on the ledge of a building, followed by an animated Batman-style “Splat!” that filled the screen.
This was standard stuff, but I was intrigued by some of the questions from the crowd, which were perhaps more sophisticated than DeWalt had bargained for. One guest was interested in learning more about security as a service – ways in which protecting data can be offered in a utility fashion similar to other compute infrastructure. Another attendee pointed out the absence of wireless threats in his keynote, which Dewalt admitted he wished he’d had more time to discuss.
DeWalt, meanwhile, surprised me by mentioning Symantec by name as its greatest competitor. Usually vendors in McAfee’s position like to pretend that they’re the only game in town, as though mentioning the other leading brand will make customers more predisposed to consider their alternatives. He also said he speaks to about 40 CIOs a month – an approach that, based on the data I presented, might not be the right move.
According to IT World Canada’s annual CIO survey, for example, only six per cent said they see security planning as an important job activity, and only 14 per cent suggested they spend much of their time there. Instead, 64 per cent focus on interacting with other CXOs and developing strategy, leaving the more tactical work to their IT department staff. DeWalt, in other words, may find it increasingly difficult to get CIOs’ attention, at least here in Canada.
DeWalt was an intriguing choice for McAfee. He came from Documentum, a constant management firm that was taken over by EMC. Content, obviously, is one of the assets that firms like McAfee are trying to protect, which is probably why EMC branched out last year into the space with its purchase of RSA. Symantec, meanwhile, moved into storage with Veritas but has left the content hole unfilled. It would be interesting if DeWalt were to shake McAfee up by taking on a content management firm – Waterloo’s Open Text, perhaps? – that would make it a more pivotal player in the overall handling of information, as well as making it safe.
I told the crowd that as much as CIOs want to become more strategic, they shouldn’t limit themselves by thinking of security as tactical. If you’re really innovating, I said, you’re probably taking some risks by opening up new ways to communicate with customers, partners or employees. That in turn opens up new avenues of attack or vulnerabilities. Security needs to be as strategic as all the other elements of IT which CIOs oversee. If he wants McAfee to gain traction over Symantec, DeWalt is going to have to tell his customers the same thing.
Add to: del.icio.us | Digg IT | Furl | Google | magnolia | StumbleIT | Wink | Yahoo! | Technorati
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Why computer memory can’t fully compete with human brains
If we could all think more like Google, maybe we wouldn’t need Google.
This week’s issue of the New York Times Magazine features an article by Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University and the author of “Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.” As part of the magazine’s regular “Idea Lab” feature, he explores the concept of neural implants that could behave more like search engines, significantly boosting the performance of our short-term memory by adding another layer to our thought processes.
As Marcus points out, humans tend to rely on cue-based memories – we think about what we were doing when we met someone in order to recall their name, for example – while computers retrieve information based on the location of that information.
“However difficult the practicalities, there’s no reason in principle why a future generation of neural prostheticists couldn’t pick up where nature left off, incorporating Google-like master maps into neural implants,” Marcus writes. “This in turn would allow us to search our own memories — not just those on the Web — with something like the efficiency and reliability of a computer search engine.”
Well, maybe. In part this notion presupposes that computers and search engines do a great job of both location mapping and associating with the right clues. For the most part, technology’s success with the latter is rather limited. Keywords are probably the easiest example of cue-based memory structures making their way into computers, but as semantics evolve they’re hardly the best option. Marcus, in contrast, notes the much more idiosyncratic – and therefore dynamic – approach taken by human beings.
“Our mood, our environment, even our posture can all influence our delicate memories. To take but one example, studies suggest that if you learn a word while you happen to be slouching, you’ll be better able to remember that word at a later time if you are slouching than if you happen to be standing upright,” he says.
Of course, if we’re merely adding Google-type master maps to our already sophisticated natural cue-based memories, there shouldn’t be any issues. It’s just that search tends to follow a fairly consistent pattern: once we understand how search works, everyone tries to find a workaround to serve their own interests. That’s why search engine optimization is becoming such a growth industry, and why Google keeps having to rewrite the algorithms that choose where results end up.
I’m not suggesting advertisers would somehow try to take over our brains to influence our cue-based memories. They’d simply pay whatever they needed to pay to get a good understanding of how the artificial side of our intelligence worked, then tweak their messaging accordingly. We might remember better or more reliably, but some memories may take precedence over others. Bad enough that we have to think about page rank today. Does anyone want to worry about “memory rank” tomorrow?
Intelligence is not just a matter of recall. It’s about filtering through memories, adding context and using mysterious forces of intuition to make decisions. Computers are great tools, but despite all the advancements we’ve made, there are parts of us that contain the kind of search engine Google only wishes it could build.
