Innovative Visions

It is coming this weekend… are you ready? IT consultants have been scrambling for the past two weeks to complete the necessary transitions in this “mini-Y2K” and no doubt will be burning the midnight oil this weekend, thanks to the usual last-minute customer calls. Here is a quick list of valuable links to educate yourself on how this will affect your organization (whether or not you’ve already made the necessary updates). Please let us know if you need assistance on these, but scheduling is tighter than ever across the country right now. Yesterday a customer had an emergency for an onsite router configuration and it took quite some time to track down a partner with the available time to do this quick job.

What will this upgrade cost? http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4609

Microsoft charging for “older” patches? http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=288

List of affected Microsoft products: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_prodlist

General info on the upgrade: http://blogs.zdnet.com/topic/Daylight+Saving+Time.html

More useful information: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2096765,00.asp

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Of all the things to come out of “Web2.0” (some useful and some entirely useless), I think one of my favorites is NetVibes. For organizing your RSS feeds from across the web (i.e. blogosphere, news sites, product reviews, email, weather, etc.), NetVibes is a wonderful tool I’ve been using for about 10 months. I have a total of close to 60 RSS feeds in seven tabs on my page (which acts as my home page) and it has become a great way of organizing my reading. Needless to say, I was very happy today when I discovered NetVibes2Go. As the title alludes to, point your phone’s browser to: http://m.netvibes.com and you’ll get your login screen with your saved NetVibes settings on the go. Only one recommendation I have for right now and that is to make your first NetVibes tab a “mobile” tab containing all the things you might like to browse on your phone (email, weather, headlines, etc.). You’ll find browsing to be easier and more efficient this way.

Let me know what you think and if you have any other tips and tricks I’d love to hear about them.

While many companies will often look at the direct costs associated with a technology upgrade (hardware, software, telecommunications), they rarely take into account the “soft” costs associated with training their employees on a new system. Even more important, companies are just starting to realize the real benefits and increased revenue from training their employees on a new system. However, what about making an investment in training your employees to more efficiently use your existing systems?

A new study conducted by researchers at MIT and Boston University (both in my fair city), analyzed how IT makes people more productive. (Keep in mind the study was funded by major technology companies Cisco and Intel, among others. However, it has been recognized by the International Conference on Information Systems as the best paper of late.)

The study comprised 125,000 email messages, five years of project data and survey responses from a cross section of respondents. You can read a decent ComputerWorld interview with Co-Author Marshall Van Alstyne here and abstracts from the study here and here. While it is most certainly a good idea to train your employees on any new systems you have, think about doing so for your current systems as well. Alstyne summarizes:

“Invest in IT skills. High IT skill levels reduce the perception of information overload and facilitate multitasking, which is directly associated with increases in revenue. But don’t necessarily expect high IT users to be faster in project completions. The real impact is that they’re doing so much more. It’s total projects completed, not time per project.”

Although there is a tipping point where productivity starts to decrease due to too much multitasking, I couldn’t have said it better than Alstyne does here. How many of your users really know how to effectively multitask with your existing systems? Start with training them on the current systems a bit more and see what results they produce… I’m curious to hear about the results.

ComputerWorld.com released a special report last July discussing the future of IT jobs and what we can expect in 2010. I recently came across the various articles produced by the results of this study and want to share some relevant insight. The researchers’ primary focus concentrated on how to keep up with the outsourcing trend and the increased need for continual training in raw IT skills. While it draws some good conclusions (and is certainly worth reading), it fails to discuss what is really at the core of this issue and where we can all help to ensure proper industry growth with shared profitability AND responsibility.

IT careers, whether now or in 2010, are about more then just raw skills and “keeping up” with the India’s and China’s of our expanding world. While I have yet to read Thomas Friedman’s new book, “The World is Flat: The Expanded Edition” it is on top of my crowded list. From an initial look, his discussion focuses more on information, knowledge and cultural understanding than it does on ensuring your people have the latest XML skills. I believe most changes in the IT job market can be tracked, corrected and taken advantage of by understanding the cultural shifts affecting us.

Whether your company is domestic, international or multinational there are certain job functions best performed by certain people. If you are worried about your job being outsourced, it is just as likely that it will be outsourced domestically as it will internationally so let’s instead concentrate on what you can do to prepare and continue on with your career. Instead of trying to keep up on your certifications, learn the latest and greatest ERP packages and spend weeks in classes to further develop your integration skills, try a different approach… who knows, it might actually work!

No matter where a company conducts its business, there are certain cultural issues prevalent in every environment. Concentrate your efforts instead on furthering your knowledge of various cultures so that you are a resource in demand to facilitate and bridge the cultural gaps when outsourcing of basic and key IT functions does happen; and it will happen sooner or later. I’m not telling you to abandon your quest for greater IT knowledge, but make it relevant and useful! In other words, instead of concentrating on IT management, systems administration or storage configuration, concentrate instead on knowledge management and how you can bring the most value to your company; therefore securing your position through at least 2010. It is becoming more and more of a balancing act between those raw skills and business understanding. Why do you think “Business Analysts” are in such demand?

More on this later…

As I’ve discussed before, IV uses Google to host its email and it works like a charm. In addition, I have been using Google’s set of “Apps” for collaborative word processing, excel and calendar functions for the past eight months or so (perhaps closer to a year).

This morning, Google announced the official release of Google Apps Premier for the corporate user and for the first time, you have to pay for it. Is it worth it? Well, you can see a great summary of features and a comparison with Microsoft’s Window’s Live at WebWorkerDaily.com.

However, there was another, less publicized announcement made by Avaya today which will pit Google against Microsoft in yet another area… Avaya plans on integrating its voice and data services with Google Apps Premier in the near future, thereby directly competing with a similar agreement between Microsoft and Nortel. This should bring some interesting things to come in the enormous (and enormously underserved) small business market. I love this stuff!!

How to really “Get Your Communications Off Life Support”

It seems that in the past couple of years, there has been a noticeable slowdown in innovative thinking within companies as it relates to IT. I realize that this is a strong statement and perhaps not everyone will agree with me. I’m OK with that, because I’m not the only one and I can see this becoming a growing concern in the near future.

Google’s General Manager and Vice President of Enterprise, Dave Girouard knows enterprise software architecture and he knows data management. Girouard heads up Google’s efforts to bring the simplicity and management of consumer software to the enterprise and is so far succeeding (at least in my eyes). His group has so far released the Google Apps “suite” of products and I’m sure there is more innovation on the way. Our team here at IV uses Google for email (at ivforbusiness.com), for shared spreadsheets, calendar and Google Talk for Instant Messaging. Because I don’t have to worry about managing an email server, Office applications and backing up and storing all of this information, I have the ability to concentrate my efforts instead on innovation for IV and more importantly for our clients.

Speaking at yesterday’s keynote address for the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s annual meeting, Girouard voiced his increasing concern with the limited innovation happening within corporations’ technology departments. He stated that “75% to 80% of IT budgets (are spent) simply maintaining the systems they have already,” according to Jon Brodkin at Network World. With such a heavy concentration of time and energy spent on maintaining existing infrastructure and the status quo, what percentage of a CIO’s time, energy and budget are left to create innovative processes and procedures for his or her organization? Has a CIO’s job description become “head fixer-upper” or is there anything left relating to “Information Management?”

Girouard went on to state that IT organizations and companies should, at a strategic level, take another look at the way they manage technology and consider outsourcing its day to day management, even if your internal departments are fully capable of handling the workload. The idea here is that hardware and software break-fix work, installs and the associated ongoing management is a commodity service in itself. Why use the majority of your internal resources to manage a commodity? Why spend all of that time and money on training your staff and keeping them up to date on the latest and greatest, if you can do so more cost-effectively by outsourcing these tasks?

‘“A lot of things that people think of as core IT functions need to disappear into the ether so that the IT organization can properly focus on the value-added [activities],” he said. “Information security, as critical as it is, needs to be taken care of by organizations who live and die by it, who invest the money, time, resources and staff. Why should every company in the world have to build up their own expertise and have to maintain servers and provide security?”’ (Jon Brodkin of Network World)

Instead they could be creating new and improved processes and strategically aligning your technology to your business. So, does innovation still exist within a corporate IT department? I hope so, but let’s help give it a jumpstart by creating the right conditions for this to happen. I guarantee it will pay off. For more on Dave Girouard and Google Apps, here is a pretty good CIO Insight interview with him.

Are you experiencing information overload when trying to research a particular subject or project? What sort of information management system do you use to organize and direct your search towards the most appropriate result? There are times when I will put the direction of my search in the very capable hands of Google, however if I want specific, relevant links which the “tech community” perceives as such, I use Del.icio.us. If you haven’t yet experienced this form of search and management, I suggest you give it a try. Start by going to our tags at: del.icio.us/IVforBusiness and let me know what you think. Now, I must warn you that you too may become enthralled in the various island living arrangements or great dog training facilities that I have also tagged on this site, however the majority of our tags will open you to a dynamic way of searching for the references which matter most to you and your company.

I’d like to follow up on a point from yesterday’s post where I mention that the US now has the ability to perhaps lead the charge into Web2.0 with fully integrated and customized content and services.

“Many imply (including Malik) that, like many other technology innovations (such cellular services), Europe and Asia will probably be at the forefront of this wave.”

As with cellular services of yesterday, our future success depends on government involvement today. Normally I’m not one to promote the idea of government officials tampering with technology, because they generally don’t have a clue what their talking about (i.e. Bush referring to such things as “The Google” and stating that he doesn’t “trust email”). But, let me give you an example of how this has helped in the past.

In the 90’s as cell phone services were coming into broader use around the world, the French government decided to do something interesting. It went around France and purchased all of the cellular companies, standardized them all on one technology and then released them back to the private sector. What did this do? Well, it ensured that all R&D from then on would be done on ONE technology.

As much as I love US capitalism, it is the primary reason why we can’t have mobile video conferencing features in the palm of our hand. Imagine what we could have done if Sprint, Verizon, AT&T and all of the other cell companies in the country were working on the same technology this whole time?!?

In the same fashion, I believe it’s time for the US government to take a stand and ensure that every single household and business in this country has broadband access to the Internet; and soon! Without this access our economy will continue to fall behind those of developing nations. As Michael J. Copps, a member of the Federal Communication Commission wrote in Wednesday’s Washington Post, “America’s record in expanding broadband communication is so poor that it should be viewed as an outrage by every consumer and businessperson in the country. Too few of us have broadband connections, and those who do pay too much for service that is too slow. It’s hurting our economy, and things are only going to get worse if we don’t do something about it.”

Amen, Mr. Copps. He goes on to state how this can be done in this great op-ed piece. First, the FCC has to redefine what it calls “broadband.” Our “broadband” is 20 times slower than the rest of the world and we’re paying 3 times as much for it. Hopefully, we can listen to him and do something about our world ranking of 15^th in broadband penetration. 15^th!!!

In my daily work with clients, I routinely discuss the process and strategy for giving employees remote access to files, systems, email, phone, etc. There are many complex issues involved, such as security, monitoring capabilities, maintaining a centralized data policy, etc. This can be rather intimidating, especially for small businesses.

It used to be that you would give your employees a large computer to take home with them and they could connect the green dots on the screen to view a couple of things on the network; sometimes. Now that the technology has caught up with our needs (or is it the other way around?) the complexity of managing such a system starts to show its teeth.

Are we paying too much? Are we paying enough? Is it secure? Is it reliable? The list of questions and concerns can go on… Well, there are some fundamental things to keep in mind when reviewing your “remote” strategy. Some of them are discussed here, which hold true in most scenarios, however be sure to contact us for a specific analysis tailored to your situation.

Many small businesses use an online service such as GoToMyPC.com, but how does this address the issues mentioned above? It may be cheaper than other options up front, but what is the cost to your business of losing confidential customer information? Are they liable? Do they take adequate measures to prevent security intrusions? Are they using SSL encryption or give you a dedicated tunnel through the Internet?

What about performance issues? When you try and login to check your email and perhaps check on a supplier’s delivery date, does the roof on your house start to shake in anticipation? In addition, simplicity and technology need to go hand in hand. Without a simple IT environment to manage, more time and money is wasted trying to figure it all out. You have better things to do with you time, that’s for sure… Make sure that whatever solution you’re looking at (either now or in the future) is easy to manage!

I would love to hear about some of your experiences in this area… Let’s discuss.