Archive for November, 2010

Like Nick Carr, I read the NYTimes piece on focus this morning with interest. Loved how he distilled the issue down:

It has recently become fashionable (as we swing to the sway of our new technologies) to denigrate solitary, deeply attentive thinking, the kind celebrated and symbolized by Rodin’s The Thinker. Ideas and inventions, we’re urged to believe, leap not from the head of the self-communing genius but from the whirl of "the network." In fact, you need both – the lonely wizard and the teeming bazaar – as Edison’s life so clearly demonstrates. Edison certainly drew on the work and ideas of his predecessors and contemporaries, and his Menlo Park laboratory was by all accounts a noisy orgy room of intellectual cross-fertilization. But, like other deep thinkers, Edison had the ability to screen out the noise and focus his mind – and that capacity, half innate and half hard-won, was also essential to his creativity.

My post on IT is up over at The Huffington Post. One in a series I will be doing for them.

What We Expect

For the last 25 years of the computer industry we have been subservient. Less than five years ago, we gladly accepted whatever computer our employer handed us. We grimaced but hit delete when our mailboxes and hard drives ran out of storage. Our personal email and chat rarely made it into the workplace. We did what our IT departments told us to do.

For some companies the status quo still prevails due to tight regulation and security — and might continue for some time — but for everyone else, change is afoot as we’ve all turned into super-consumers of everything digital. Smart phones got smart. Really smart. Super-sized applications got micro-sized and shopped at a price point to match. The cloud unleashed infinite storage accessible with the swipe of a credit card. Universal broadband connectivity meant work, well, didn’t happen "at work" anymore. Email has taken a backseat to Twitter, Chatter and Facebook. The PC shifted from being a productivity tool to a life tool. And it wasn’t just that our PC at home was better than the office-issued system, it was cooler to. It was personal.
Some call this "consumerization," which is a bit like calling the French Revolution a "political event." The phrase masks all the emotion and determination the average employee has today for overcoming and outmaneuvering any IT department impeding on their ability to participate and produce. The barriers to the revolution are low. As mobile broadband penetrates every device it will get even lower.

For years Blackberrys have been the staple diet of any corporate IT consumer. So, when I started using a larger tablet device powered by Android I was unsure what to expect. To say I was "blown away," would be an understatement. Because I quickly discovered it isn’t the size or form factor of the device that made it indispensible. It was how it enabled my work and personal life to move seamlessly across all of the devices I use–from my car Bluetooth-enabled infotainment unit to my laptop to my tablet to my multiple smart phones–thanks to cloud-enabled applications that are available to me at the push of a button. Some of my favorites include:Evernote, DropBox, Seesmic, TripIit, SlideIT.

Rather than restricting my ability to get productive in the way I see as best, our IT team is enabling it. Virtualization means all the apps I need stream through the cloud to me. Business email arrives in an app that is managed through the cloud. If I lost my device, my IT department could kill the work data with the touch of a button. I scale storage up and down as I need it. My "lifestream" merges seamlessly with business.

The "I" in IT always stood for information. Not infrastructure. And the smart IT teams are getting back to delivering the services that allow information to flow. To do this, they’re challenging the status quo. Rather than erecting barriers they are taking them down by shifting IT dollars to innovation.

As a result, new ideas are emerging. BYOD — or Bring Your Own Device — is enabling many to make the most of their personal compute power, at work. Cloud applications like Salesforce.com and Yammer enable businesses to select and deploy apps with very little IT resources and no infrastructure investments. Businesses using Microsoft Azure and other cloud platforms can quickly move workloads into the cloud – realizing new levels of agility for marginal cost.

That’s the kind of IT we want. It’s the kind of IT that every digital native entering the workforce is going to demand. It’s what we expect.

Spiro remains the greatest reporter on Rugby we’ve got. Great to see him also embracing stats and data. Amazing shifts going on in the game:

Real rugby has been documented by the IRB (which is pushing this vision hard, thankfully) in its recently published statistical and match analysis of this year’s Tri Nations tournament. Some of the statistics compare what is happening now on the field with the game in the 1980s. The findings provide the evidence that ”rugby football” has evolved into ”rugby”. The ball is now in play 50 per cent longer. Rucks and mauls are up 400 per cent. Passing is up 400 per cent. Kicks each game are down 50 per cent, with the Wallabies averaging only 15 a match. Scrums are down 50 per cent, to an average of 14 a match. Lineouts are down 58 per cent from 52 to 22.

With the ruck and maul now being refereed to give the runner all the placing rights, teams are retaining the ball for longer periods of play. One consequence of this more handling and more ball-in-play game is that 57 tries were scored in this year’s Tri Nations compared with 27 last year. We saw the impact of these changes in the approach of Wales, England and Ireland towards the end of their Tests as they tried desperately to score enough points through tries, not penalties, to snatch unlikely victories.

Incredibly frustrating to see the Mealamu facing a disciplinary hearing and yet nothing for the English. Spiro points this out well:

French referee Romain Poite (but not the Australian assistant referee Stu Dickinson) officiated like an intimidated man in the England-New Zealand Test. England got penalties for collapsing the scrum on their own feed. Dylan Hartley’s ”try” involved two obvious breaches of the laws. It is astonishing, too, that Hartley, a serial offender, wasn’t sin-binned and then cited for his intentional elbow into the head of Richie McCaw.

The All Blacks have had a mediocre few weeks.

The Australians caught them sleeping in Hong Kong. They looked lethargic for much of the game and the subs bungled it. Stephen Donald continued his All Black form, bungling a series of plays and handing the game to the Australians.

But its not just the play on the field that needs attention. Sitting from a armchair in Austin, TX two things stand out that might not be too apparent to fans down under.

First, how rugby coverage is going backward in the US. Expensive, pay-to-view coverage via Setanta is all but dead for the year-end tours. And Rugbyzone is all but Rugby free. I’m not sure what Rugby’s marketers are thinking about the global expansion of the game but its time to wake up. It’s game over and that’s not good for the game. You aren’t going to grow it in the US without TV.

Second, the difference between American football coverage and Rugby coverage comes down to one simple thing. Stats. Any commentator here seems to be pulling from a fast array of data. Opinion tends to be well informed. Ok, American Football is pretty much the triumph of project management over sport but then the data brings real tight commentary to the game.

What struck me about this story from the NZ Herald was the stats – I can’t remember reading a piece founded on hardcore data in some time.

Having headed down to the pub at 9.30 on Saturday morning and paid my $20 to watch NZ vs. England over a good Irish breakfast, it was a repeat of the prior week. Rokocoko looked busy but ineffective. McCaw looked inspired. And now we have the data to support it. This is the kind of reporting we need more of.

Not only did he (McCaw) have the second best arrival rate at the breakdown (behind Brad Thorn this week) but he was top equal ball carrier with Kieran Read on nine. Sam Whitelock had a dream debut winning all three of his lineout throws and stealing one from England, while his overall workrate at the breakdown saw him come in third behind Thorn and McCaw. Isaia Toeava gets a mention for his try-saving tackle in the corner.

With the data, you wonder what Henry has been thinking.

Great job Tracy. Keep the data coming.

I remember the first day I saw a Blackberry. It was love at first sight. Standing in Roger McNamee’s office at Integral, he blew me a way with a demo of a two-lined screen beta unit. About six months later I got my first and don’t think one has left my side since.

That was until about eight weeks ago. Now, I’ve been carrying 2-3 mobile devices for sometime – all with a keen eye to dumping one or more. I just couldn’t imagine abandoning the utility of the Blackberry keyboard. I needed a personal smart phone so I could leave my MP3 player at home and keep by private business affairs separate. We didn’t have an iPhone equivalent so an iPhone it was. Then I got a Dell Streak. So which one to drop into my tech museum?

The Blackberry it is – and its for a simple reason. The Blackberry has just got progressively worse for the past 2-5 years. Worse performance. More crashes. A spinning black dial that just seems to take longer and longer to stop spinning. A lousy App store. A little screen that just never seemed to get bigger.

It is a great technology that hasn’t progressed. Its not going to die a slow death either. This is an industry in which brand loyalty wanes fast (anyone rushing to buy their next Palm?).

There’s lots I love about the Streak. I can live on it all day long. And carry it in my pocket. The screen is gorgeous and perfect for PowerPoint and .pdf files. The keyboard rocks with SlideIt installed. And it bridges my personal and business needs well.

I’ve found that apps ranging from Evernote through DropBox have made the screen matter more and more to me. I’m just reading more rich and dense docs while on the move. With a Streak I get the benefits of an iPhone, amplified, and none of the downside of a Blackberry.

Now we’ve made it official. As a company we’re rolling out Win 7 devices – the Dell Venue Pro — and Streaks powered by Android. It’s going to save us money.

The switch begins next week and will save the company about 25% in mobile communication costs, primarily by eliminating the need for BlackBerry servers, Mr. Gladden said. Dell will begin marketing a service to its business clients within two weeks aimed at helping them make a similar switch.

The company is also talking with T-Mobile USA about purchasing voice minutes and monthly data in bulk, rather than individual employee plans. Minutes and data that go unused by the company would carryover, Mr. Gladden said.

I’m looking forward to taking the Venue for a longer spin having played with one for a bit in Hong Kong last week. It was fast. Really fast. And the interface beautifully simple.

Either way, its bye bye Blackberry.